Fall 2012 Edition of Visibility Magazine by Visibility Magazine

THE MAGAZINE FOR ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGIES

Visibility www.visibilitymagazine.com

Fall 2012 | $9.95

By Rob Laporte

Getting the Most Out of Demographic Targeting By Janet Driscoll Miller

An Integrated Approach to Internet Marketing By Solomon Thimothy

A Guide to Understand App Tracking in the Mobile Space - Part 2 By Michael Dewhirst

features

departments

06 Editor’s Note

12 Search, Retargeting and Social Advertising: Getting the Most Out of Demographic Targeting

Read all about the latest happenings with this growing magazine.

Janet Driscoll Miller provides a step by step guide to maximizing the strength of social advertising.

08 Featured CEO: Stefano Brighenti

Stefano Brighenti shares how Pro Web Consulting was formed and how they continue to be a successful firm in the ever-changing world of internet marketing.

11 Quarterly Round-Up

27 An Integrated Approach to Internet Marketing: Components of a Well Oiled Online Marketing Campaign

20 Legal Corner

39 A Guide to Understand App Tracking in the Mobile Space Part Two: Tracking conversions and solving download lag

Snapshots of all that is happening in the world of internet marketing. Get the scoop on all the news and views in the world of internet marketing. Latest news related to products, tools and strategies being unveiled.

Travis Crabtree looks into the different legal issues to do with the ever-changing world of online marketing.

30 Visi Book Club

Featuring upcoming and newly released books from the internet marketing industry.

35 Product Review: eConnect

eConnect is an enterprise-level solution which has something new to offer its customers at every stage of the email marketing cycle.

Solomon Timothy discusses how to integrate digital campaigns and align them with your goals.

Michael Dewhirst explains the workings of app tracking and what it would mean to the mobile advertising world.

42 PageRank Sculpting: Why and How to Do It

Rob Laporte explores PageRank sculpting tools and the importance of choosing the best ones for your website.

50 Understanding the True Value of Your Customers

Josh Dalton explains how just some common sense can produce additional revenues and help you with “Customer Value Maximization”.

46 Vendor Spotlight: Netmark

A look at the world-class interactive marketing agency, Netmark, and how they have grown since being founded in 2007 by Chad Heath.

61 Upcoming Conferences

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61 Visibility

David Murphy leaves no stone unturned in this comprehensive article about the use of mobiles as a powerful marketing tool.

A guide to upcoming internet marketing related conferences around the globe. At these conferences, you can listen to the insightful experiences of the leading names from the internet marketing industry.

58 Top Tips for Mobile Marketing, Want to go mobile? Here’s how

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editor ’ s note Hi Readers, Let me state the buzz in the digital space right at the outset – Mobile Advertising! New technologies have always brought forth exciting new possibilities and many unforeseen challenges. In keeping with the times, we have decided to get some of the best minds in the mobile advertising world to put on their thinking caps and talk mobile! From designing to handling privacy and optimization, there are many challenges that are in the mobile space. A range of articles are in store in this edition – from the basics of understanding the fundamentals of mobile as a marketing tool to the more technical aspects of mobile app tracking. Some of the articles you can look forward to in this edition of Visibility are Solomon Timothy’s article, An Integrated Approach to Internet Marketing, David Murphy’s Top Tips for Mobile Marketing and Rob Laporte’s article, PageRank Sculpting: Why and How to Do It. Also not to be missed are our regular features - CEO Spotlight, Tommaso Bulfon, and Vendor Spotlight, Netmark. Each issue of Visibility delivers the latest and most exciting aspects of the internet marketing world. As in the past, we hope that you will appreciate our efforts to keep pace with the developments in the ever changing world of internet marketing. As always, we would love to hear from you—your suggestions and contributions have always helped us improve Visibility.

Visibility EDITOR Julie Lynn EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jeev Trika SENIOR PROJECT EDITOR Neeraj Kumar ASSISTANT EDITOR Cameron Kriss STAFF WRITER Ajay Govind SENIOR DESIGNER Armando Rangel

Enjoy!

Josh Dalton | Netmark

Julie Lynn, Editor

Michael Dewhirst | StrikeAd Ken Dobell | DAC Group Duane Edwards | Globys Chris Goward | WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization Jeffrey Herzog | ZOG Digital Rob Laporte | DISC Seth Lieberman | Pangea Media Janet Driscoll Miller | Searchmojo David Murphy | Mobile Marketing Solomon Thimothy | OneIMS Visit us at WWW.VISIBILITYMAGAZINE.COM Mailing Address: P.O Box 1073, Plymouth, IN 46563 Editorial Department Phone: 800-380-4165 Editorial Department Fax: 888-559-8909 Letters to the Editor: editor@visibilitymagazine.com Visibility Magazine, LLC SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INDIRECT DAMAGES RESULTING FROM YOUR ACCESS TO, OR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE THE MAGAZINE AND THE MAGAZINE CONTENT, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE) OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY. Visibility Magazine, LLC WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY MISPRINTS.

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featured ceo

Stefano Brighenti, CEO

can be such unless he can rely on a trusted and capable team with whom to share the problems and successes that have to be faced with the daily work, but above all with whom to grow up together, not only in a professional way but also as a way of life. We are all very young and whilst there is much more that we have to learn, unlike many other agencies we love what we do and it is precisely this passion that drives us every day to improve ourselves in order to compete with the best.

What are your main services?

was born in a small village called Cantalupa, in Turin’s province, so removed from the rest of the world that for many years there was not even a connection to the internet. As a boy I was never very social and that is why I preferred spending my days reading all kinds of books and magazines and playing with the most disparate PC games. My love for computers and technology in general further intensified during high school, which was later followed by a brief period at law school that my parents had heartily recommended me to attend. Obviously, for a young technology enthusiast with a passion for computer programming, the subjects studied at law

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school were no other than boring and repetitive to the point that I decided to interrupt my studies to launch myself into more interesting projects.

a particular niche of the financial market that I was able to position extremely well on various search engines.

At the age of 20, in fact, I created an online forum aimed at technology enthusiasts, which quickly became the national reference forum in terms of visits and usage and allowed me to earn my first real money after having sold it to a private company interested in the leading position it had gained.

Shortly afterwards, this huge visibility was also noted by many brokers in the financial market who started placing ads within my network. Needless to say, those ads began producing an allied income that allowed me to self-finance my activities. Then one day I was contacted by an Israeli multinational corporation determined to buy part of the network for independently planning their own ads, as it considered the network that I had created one of the best available at that time in Europe. That was the turning point. In 2009, I set up Pro Web Consulting and even today I continue to dedicate part of my time to study and create new in-house projects that will allow the market to evolve in terms of visibility and innovation.

This event definitely sets the foundation of my passion and marks my involvement with the web world. Thanks to this bit of luck I was able to entirely dedicate myself to my passion that was slowly turning into an occupation and, consequently, I furthered my professional education by attending specialization courses on web related activities, SEO optimization and Management at the B occoni University of Milan. Thanks to my acquired SEO skills, I next created a network consisting of 5 between websites and forums dedicated at

The result achieved was fantastic: through all the main search keywords directly related to the market, my network appeared in the top positions.

Tell us about your background and your role in the company.

Different to most of the brilliant minds that this market can claim, I have never followed an actual academic pattern but I have studied with zeal and determination anything that I considered useful for myself and for my work, while at the same time adopting a consistent and maniacal method. To date, I cover the position of CEO of Pro Web Consulting and I believe that the success of this firm, even if initial, is largely due to the highly technical and skilled team that I was able to slowly put together over these years. I do not believe that a good CEO

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We are a web agency specializing in prime visibility and in managing the online reputation of international companies requiring an attentive and structured planning for the different countries. Over the years we have developed specific skills and know-hows which have brought us significant results thanks to some important SEO projects purposely developed for companies operating in highly competitive online markets such as finance, gambling, etc.; all projects that have resultantly allowed Pro Web to receive important international recognitions. We also have an internal department solely dedicated to the design and creation of digital products, which is fundamental in wanting to offer our clients a bespoke and comprehensive service.

contacted by a multinational corporation wanting to buy part of the network to use it as a media planning platform for itself and its own clients. It goes without saying that this operation allowed Pro Web Consulting to organize its structure and to invest on a very challenging case history in highly competitive markets where only few agencies can promise and achieve concrete results.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like you?

There are several activities characterizing a web marketing project studied for a client, but I believe that the SEO activity is without doubt the one setting the standard as the most qualifying and exacting. Thus, if I were a client, the one and most important question to ask for correctly choosing a partner would be: “Are you able to position me in the TOP 5 results for the related keywords?” How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment? I continually try to keep myself updated by studying and attending training and specialized courses. Our market is an industry where everything is constantly and rapidly evolving and the only secret representing a real competitive advantage for your clients is the continuous innovation and updating.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?

The only and true content value that exists in the web world is represented by the information. In the same way as Google has globally and literally changed the search and utilization methods for the information, I believe it is possible that someone one day will further refine this tool; perhaps through completely different logics that today no one is able to conceive. At this point the activities for promoting the online visibility of a company could no longer have a sense for the way we know them and, while this need would continue to subsist even though the satisfying dynamics could be entirely redesigned, the only suppliers able to survive could be those capable of adapting to such change. Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally? I do not honestly know what will happen within the next 5 years, especially when considering the speed with which today’s trends are changing; events and situations take place and the dynamics change. The only thing I know is that I will continue to improve and refine our work in order to always represent a certainty for our clients; namely a professional and reliable partner capable of providing the support needed in an ever increasingly faster world. n

What makes your firm different from other companies competing in your industry? Results, just plain results; obviously verifiable and indisputable. Thanks to the skilled professionalism and expertise of our team we can confidently meet the requirements and terms agreed with the client. This I believe it to be a fundamental and distinguishing quality since by working closely with the client and his associates we can add a constant and tangible value to his business.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.

I created a network of websites, blogs and forums pertaining to a specific financial market niche and had them positioned as prime organic search results on some search engines. In other words, if you were searching with any keyword associated to the market segment, among the first results always appeared one of the websites belonging to my network. Soon after I was

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quarterly round up iGoogle – till 2013 Google has announced the decision to shut down a few its products. iGoogle, Google’s personalized home page which was launched in 2005 is among the products that are going to be retired. Not surprisingly, the 5 products that are going to be put to rest more or less remain obscure even though they have been around for a while. Apart from iGoogle the search engine Giant has also decided to down Google Mini, the Symbian Search App, Google Talk, Chatback and Google Video. Google Video had already stopped taking uploads since May 2009 and all the user content is now being migrated to YouTube. Users will have to do the same with their content, i.e migrate, delete or download their content

Mobile Competition – Literally Does a world without mobile apps seem plausible today? And wasn’t the exact opposite true say about five years back when the idea of mobile apps did not exist in the minds of the common internet user. This was a time when the internet was accessed only on a Mac or a PC. However, these 5 years have brought about a lot of change and mobile landscape has changed things. As many as 21 manufacturers make hundreds of smartphones that run on four

different operating systems. Mobile innovation is literally playing a great role in helping power the economic recovery of the United States. This economic growth is a direct result of the enthusiasm seen from consumers and businesses alike for the endless line of products, services and choices that are going to be offered thanks to the innovations in the mobile industry.

The World Wide Web – more mobile than ever The rise of smart phones was imminent, but what many people would not have anticipated is the growing preference for mobile phones as a source for accessing the internet. At a recent conference held by the Beijing Communication Industry Association, experts spoke of mobile internet as playing a major role in driving the internet’s popularity in China. Where there are opinions, facts can’t be too far behind. The Vice Director of the Telecom Development Department in China was quoted as saying that “Mobile app downloads in the country last year accounted for 11% of the world’s total.” This was second only to the US.

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Other noteworthy statistics include the fact that more than half of the country’s netizens use internet on their cell phones, each person spending over 100 minutes online on an average per day. Being able to shop, book tickets, pay bills and take care of many other such things online thanks to many apps that are available (and are cheap) will only mean these numbers are going to grow rapidly. This boom in mobile internet comes as great news for internet marketing companies and it is anybody’s guess what new developments are in store for the growing mobile internet users in the virtual world.

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Search, Retargeting and Social Advertising:

Getting the Most Out of Demographic Targeting By Janet Driscoll Miller

very week there’s a new study coming out about the high or low return on investment from social media advertising. As a standalone tactic, social media advertising has its proponents and detractors. Proponents often cite increased engagement and possible long ROI, while detractors refer to the lack of immediate tracking on ROI. So what’s the answer? Is social media helpful for ROI, or not? The flaw of many of these studies is that they fail to look at social media advertising as a tactic in a fully integrated marketing program. While search advertising has been proven highly effective at driving ROI, it has long lacked something that social media channels have innately: highly specific demographics. If you want to target certain age groups or industries using search engine advertising today, it can be very challenging to do so.

us. By reading that cookie when the search ad respondent visits the landing page, you’re then able to customize the offer and look of the page to that user. If you know the person is marked as a “dog lover”, the page should lead with offers for dog supplies and have images of dogs and dog supplies.

Next Steps: Lead Nurturing To take the persona targeting even further, once an visitor responds to an offer, you can nurture them with similar, future offers. Using marketing automation software, such as Marketo or Eloqua, when an ad respondent fills out a form for an offer, capture the persona cookie via a hidden field. This allows you to place the prospect into a specific targeted persona list, such as “dog lovers”, for future retargeting efforts.

place on the landing page in addition to the retargeting campaign code. By having your own cookie for tracking, you can begin to personalize other interactions with the persona group, such as other landing page information and offers and the information they see on your website. Once your campaigns are in place and your landing pages are created, it’s time to turn them on. First turn on the social media ads, which will begin to help you build up your retargeting list. Once a retargeting list reaches the 100 member threshold, it can also be activated.

The first step to a highly effective social media ad campaign is to determine the personality traits of your personas – the individual demographics of each type of prospect you’re trying to attract. If your company sells pet supplies, for instance, create a campaign for dog supplies on Facebook, targeted at individuals who selfidentify as dog lovers. Create ad copy and offers targeted directly to this demographic.

Using your personas as your guide, develop retargeting campaigns for each demographic persona type. To continue with the aforementioned example, create a “dog lovers” retargeting group. Each campaign will provide unique retargeting code.

Step Three: Create Landing Pages Next you’ll need to create landing pages for the campaigns. Make the copy, design and offer custom to the persona group. This page will also house the retargeting code for the retargeting campaign. Additionally, if we add our own cookie to the landing page, we can track the person beyond conversion and nurture the prospect further. Ideally, it’s also helpful to create your own persona group cookie to

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Retargeting Membership Duration Lastly, be sure to consider if and when the ad respondents should be removed from retargeting, if ever. Some marketers remove retargeting group members once an initial conversion occurs. But you may want to continue retargeting for the long term. In the case of a pet food supply company, success is measured over time through multiple sales, not just an initial sale. n

This is the ultimate event for decision makers and suppliers in the digital industry.

Step One: Create Your Personas and Their Social Ad Campaigns

Step Two: Create Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting Frequency Be sure to give serious thought to how frequently you want members of a retargeting campaign to see your retargeting ads. More than three times a day may be too much, but testing is the best way to determine the best retargeting ad frequency. If you turn it up and begin to see significant drops in conversion or clicks, you may have dialed the frequency too high. However, a low frequency might also affect your success. Test to find your sweet spot.

Janet Driscoll Miller is the President and CEO of Search Mojo, a full-service search engine marketing firm headquartered in Charlottesville, Va. You can read more from Janet at Search Mojo’s blog, Search Marketing Sage, at http:// blog.search-mojo.com or follow her on Twitter at @janetdmiller.

Putting It All Together

But what if you could harness the strength of social advertising (the demographics) and combine it with the strength of search engine advertising?

Be careful not to target on too granular a level. Retargeting campaigns with Google AdWords require at least 100 members to be activated. If your persona targeting is too granular, it will take longer to achieve the 100 member goal and delay your retargeting efforts further.

Final Tips

22nd-23rd October 2012 Hilton Brighton Metropole Hotel

Digital professionals will be able to meet new suppliers covering all products and services, plus attend high profile, interactive seminars covering key topics chaired by leading industry experts. *Limited delegate places available* Suppliers to the digital industry will have the opportunity to meet with pre-qualified decision makers and discuss current and future digital requirements in a private meeting booth.

One of the greatest benefits from harnessing retargeting for social ads is that it allows you to “recycle” your clicks. Even if the ad respondent doesn’t convert on the first click, the respondent is at least “captured” through retargeting to allow for future campaigns, even outside of the social ad network itself.

Next Steps: Search Keyword Advertising Now that your retargeting campaigns are continuing to reach out to your demographic personas, it’s time to take another step – applying your knowledge of the personas to your landing pages in paid keyword search campaigns.

“The 30 minute buzz sessions with suppliers have been effective introductions for areas of the business where new opportunities lie” ESPN

Many times, keywords can be ambiguous and don’t always tell the full story of the intent of the searcher. Continuing with our example, if a searcher enters a query for “pet supplies”, what type of supplies are of greatest interest to that respondent? What message should we lead with on the landing page? The additional persona cookie we set on the social ad landing page will tell

“ My first time attendance at the event, great meetings, social event and gained new clients, will definitely be booking for next year” Click Consult

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The event includes: • • • • • • •

A Personalised Itinerary Pre-agreed face to face meetings Unlimited networking opportunities Seminars lead by industry experts All meals and refreshments Overnight accomodation Gala Dinner plus evening entertainment

Delegate Contact: Terrance French

Tel: 01992 374099

Email: t.french@forumevents.co.uk

Supplier Contact: Karl McLean

Tel: 01992 374055

Email: k.mclean@forumevents.co.uk Fall 2012 | Visibility | 13

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marketing In order to stay ahead of the data tsunami and identify “unknown unknowns”, it’s paramount that companies take necessary steps to organize and implement data tracking and management solutions for multi-channel attribution. Some will be able to tackle this on their own, but most companies will need help.

Five Questions Brands Must Address To Succeed In Performance Marketing

magine you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, and the executive team is discussing digital marketing. Your CIO tells you, “We’re swimming in tons of new data, but we don’t know if any of it helps create business value.” Your CMO adds, “That’s okay. We don’t plan to use online marketing to drive sales; we’re just going to talk and hope people listen.” This seemingly absurd scenario becomes more of a reality for brands that lack a strategy to properly manage their performance-based marketing campaigns.

4. When does data need to be analyzed to maximize effectiveness?

Many large global brands are just starting to adopt modern performancemarketing technology needed to handle “big data.” Large performancemarketing data sets make it increasingly important to bridge the CMO/ CIO gap in order to implement and manage the technology needed to execute a successful performance-marketing strategy.

2. What data is relevant and provides better business insight and strategy, and what data (if any) can you ignore?

Companies that span verticals from consumer technology to travel continue to increase their online marketing budgets. According to Forrester Research, digital ads will comprise 35 percent of total ad spend and reach $77 billion by 2016. With this shift comes massive amounts of data from multiple marketing channels. This in turn presents an urgent challenge for marketing and IT managers to effectively track and measure this data in an effort to optimize and justify resources.

The answer to this ultimately varies from company to company and needs to be brand driven. In order to understand what data is relevant, you need familiarize yourself with each data set and work to indentify if the data improves the legitimacy of your information as a whole. If a data point adds value to another, then it also adds value to the overall information. For example, knowing when you sent an email drop or Tweet as compared to when you generated revenue could add legitimacy to trend analysis.

Some of today’s largest brands got ahead in the market by identifying previously unknown correlations between distinct data points. As digital marketing becomes increasingly performance based, key decision makers at brands must address and answer five important questions about data to succeed in the performance-marketing arena.

“Big data” can be daunting but just because data exists doesn’t mean all of it’s important. What’s important is having the right tools to find the “needles in the haystack” from a wide variety of data types and be able to quickly and easily analyze it within the context of your business or specific performance marketing campaign.

1. Who needs to be involved with your company’s performance marketing data?

3. Where does data come from, and what channels drive important data today?

As a discipline, marketing has always had two sides—creative and analytical. By definition, performance-based marketing leans heavily toward the analytical, as pay-per-performance is data driven (regardless of pricing model, e.g., CPC, CPM, CPL). While CMOs, brand managers and digital marketers constantly work to influence those who manage information and technology; organizations must continue to break down silos between marketing and IT.

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The ability to track performance marketing data and view reports in real time is increasingly important for brands to stay competitive. Many data analysts and marketers at large global companies still generate and view data reports on Excel spreadsheets, which is inefficient in today’s fast-moving world. Old technologies and processes don’t maximize your ability to make quick decisions about their performance marketing campaigns that help drive business value.

5. Why does ROI measurement for social media marketing campaigns need to move beyond soft metrics?

Although social media marketing has exploded, brands still face the challenge of how to effectively measure the value of sales from social media. In a March 2012 Financial Times Special Report, Ann Lewnes, CMO at Adobe said: “A lot of people are just measuring their fans and followers. But what’s important are the insights you can glean from the data.” Metrics such as Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers aren’t

sufficient and fail to tell the complete story. To really understand and measure social media marketing ROI, you need to know where ‘likes’ and @follows come from, track these all the way down to point of sale and identify subsequent referral trees and purchases that result from these social media activities. Only with a technology solution that provides these deeper insights can uncover if social media marketing campaigns are driving business value. The answers to all of these questions will differ for every company and individual campaign, but all brands engaged in performance marketing should examine these issues carefully. “Big data” can seem daunting, but it’s important to remember that the data itself isn’t what’s important – it’s what you can discern from your data and use to make timely, intelligent decisions. In the end, with the right tools, data from new and emerging sources will provide greater insight about your business than was ever possible before. n

Malcolm Cowley is CEO and co-founder of Performance Horizon Group (PHG), a leading provider of real-time performance marketing technology to some of the world’s biggest brands. Prior to PHG, Malcolm co-founded the highly successful buy.at affiliate marketing network, which AOL acquired in 2008. As CEO of PHG, Malcolm oversees all aspects of PHG’s global growth.

Brands must manage data coming from channels including social, mobile (SMS), paid search and apps. Each new platform— from location-based sites like Foursquare to the image curation behemoth Pinterest— presents opportunities for you to engage with consumers, but they also widen an already large gap between the “front end” of marketing and “back end” of data analysis. While brands are still struggling to master (and measure) social and mobile marketing, there’s no question that campaigns driven through these channels will continue to grow and subsequently generate lots of important data. According to recent industry projections, 88 percent of local online advertising will be delivered on mobile devices by 2016, with revenues approaching $24 billion.

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mobile apps

What Analytics Can Do for Your Mobile App

ompanies that span verticals from consumer across the mobile ecosystem, the majority of brands – both consumer and B2B – are putting in place their 2012 mobile strategies. Retailers, car manufacturers, banks, pharmaceuticals, hotels – it seems that every business is focused on how to use mobile to more effectively engage with their customers and for many; a mobile app is a key piece to this strategy. With everyone jumping on the app train, it’s no surprise that as of last quarter, 91% of the top 100 brands have a presence in at least one of the major app stores. Or that there are more than 300,000 mobile apps on the market, with more than 30 million downloaded last year. But does launching an app and having downloads really equal success?

“What is the goal of your app?”

If asked “What’s the goal of your app?” do you have a clear, measurable response? What specific behaviors do you want your app to drive? For some companies, it’s monetization by driving in-app purchases or in store traffic. For others, it’s driving self-care or gathering input and reviews. When you are trusted enough to be downloaded on a personal device, you have a unique opportunity – which means you need a goal.

Understanding what drives behaviors

Once you have your goal defined, ask yourself if your app is delivering a user experience that influences behaviors aligned to this goal. It’s a matter of understanding – not guessing – what drives those behaviors or desired actions. Most companies are using customer data and analytics to some extent but few are able to automatically determine how best to engage with users and the right time and place for doing so. Your app is a two-way street. You provide information, entertainment, or services, and the customer provides data in the form of interaction. The way to make the most of your app is to apply analytics to the data culled from interaction with the app, and then use it to influence or “nudge” certain behaviors.

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From downloads to engagement

With capabilities around advanced analytics that incorporate machine learning technology to identify the right context for engaging with a customer, companies not only drive app downloads but also app usage: • Telecom provider: Keep prepaid customers topped up by encouraging the precise behavior that causes them to spend. Don’t just send top up incentives when the prepaid balance reaches a threshold; predict the rate at which your subscriber will reach expiry and analyze how they consume data, then proactively engage with your customer to stimulate usage. • Pharmaceutical company: Study context to determine how and when to encourage diabetes patients to input blood sugar levels, identify patterns, and manage supply levels. Identify optimal care, then use the app to nudge the patient to follow the best plan and continue to enter information; even rewarding compliance with retailer discounts on supplies. • Bank: Increase transfers to savings accounts by understanding the contexts associated

with that behavior. When a customer makes a one-time deposit in to a checking account, for example, or their balance reaches a certain level, take action by delivering the right information or alert at the right time. By understanding when customers are making internal transfers, you can identify how and when to prompt the desired action. • Although applying analytics to a wealth of behavioral data may sound daunting, context-aware computing technologies are allowing companies to automate this process and leverage the unique opportunity that the mobile channel presents – engaging their users in new ways. Smart, cloud-based solutions gather, analyze, and even act on the massive amounts of data available to mobile players. This means going far beyond understanding someone’s demographics to determine how best to engage with them through a mobile device but recognizing the best time and place for proactively doing so.

Putting your app to work

Think about your mobile presence, think about your customers, and think about how your app can deliver the results you want; whether customer monetization, customer trust, customer loyalty or customer advocacy. If you have an app then you have data. The question is – what are you doing with it? Now it’s time to apply modern analytics to the data for the benefit of you and your customers. n

Duane Edwards is co-founder and SVP of Product Development for Globys (www.globys.com), a leading provider of customer experience solutions for the worldwide market. Globys provides some of the world’s leading service providers with solutions that help them leverage their rich customer data to deliver a better customer experience. A spin off from VeriSign Inc., one of the world’s leading providers of infrastructure services, Globys offers a suite of products and services that have helped meet the needs of providers for more than 15 years. Headquartered in Seattle, Globys has offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and partners with the leading software and services vendors to deliver its solutions worldwide. Additional information can be found at www.globys.com.

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local search

When it Comes to Online Business Search: Local is Social is Mobile

ears ago, business owners focused on a few select channels to communicate to their customers. Spreading the word about their products, services, hours of operation and contact details, including their name, address and phone number (NAP), was based on word-of-mouth, their physical storefront and likely local print advertising, often a Yellow Pages ad. Now, business owners have a wider variety of options for promoting their business. However, so many options can create additional challenges and likely misrepresentations if a business does not manage their online identity properly.

Online Local Search

Today, a business’ online local search information is critical, as consumers search for local business details on search engines, social sites, mobile apps and directories. While it is important that business listings are found in search results, it is even more imperative for their NAP to be consistent and accurate so it can permeate the local search ecosystem. Otherwise, consumers will not be able to connect and find the details they need when they want to visit a local restaurant or need a car repair and so on. Local search listings have long been the most important search result, as consumers see them as the most-trustworthy results. In fact they are the search result

with the least advertising bias and consumers are taking notice. The recent Localeze-15miles Local Search Usage Study showed that 61 percent of online searchers consider local search results to be the most relevant of all search results. This is in comparison to paid and/or sponsored search results. Businesses need to ensure their local search results, or NAP, is up-to-date, consistent and a complete representation of their offerings since they are the go-to result for local searchers. To achieve maximum online exposure, business owners must submit and manage their online local listings to business listings managers, search engines and other local sites. They can do this one by one on multiple search platforms themselves or they can work with a firm that can handle it for them.

and businesses optimize their presence via local, mobile and social platforms.

Mobile Search

What does this mean for businesses? Their core business listing needs to be correct in the local ecosystem as those NAP details cross into social territory. Online business listings serve as a digital anchor within social search, tethering Facebook check-ins, Yelp reviews, YouTube videos and more to a business. So it is important that businesses make sure their core local search business listing is correct, so that customers can consume all content available about them online and also contribute to their brand equity through ratings and recommendations.

Local-mobile search is on the rise as consumers are so often looking for local results on their devices via mobile browsers and apps. The growth of the mobile market has actually propelled the local search industry forward. Consumer demand is forcing the industry to make technology better, offer more location-based features and optimize search results for mobile devices so users can quickly find and navigate local information on their phones or tablets. Now businesses need to solidify their presence across mobile apps beginning with their local business listings. The Localeze-15miles Local Search Usage Study demonstrated that the explosion of tablets and mobile devices is shaping buying behaviors. In fact, 64 percent of tablet users indicate at least weekly local searches on their tablet device and 61 percent of smartphone users conduct local searches from their devices weekly. Not only is searching activity high on tablets, purchasing habits are accelerating as 86 percent of tablet users made a purchase from their most recent tablet local search. And when it comes specifically to mobile apps, 49 percent of mobile and tablet users utilize apps for local business searches. These percentages will increase as smartphone adoption grows, more local-mobile apps hit the market

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Fall 2012

Social Search

Today, people collect information about local businesses through their social graph, including their Facebook, Twitter and Google+ connections as well as those they follow on Pinterest, Foodspotting, Instagram and other social apps. Consumers are learning more about merchants from their friends but they are also conducting local searches within social apps or looking for a business’ social presence more often before they make a purchase. Further proving this point, the recent Local Search Usage Study showed a 67 percent increase in social network local business search usage from 2010 to 2011.

Local is Social is Mobile

With rapidly evolving technology, it is clear that local is mobile is social today. Although businesses have more on their plates when it comes to communicating their brand and offerings, if managed correctly they can successfully promote their offerings to customers. The key starting point is to ensure their online business listings are correct and continually managed and include the details necessary for a customer to connect, whether from home, on the go or via a social channel. n

Jeff Beard serves as president of Localeze, a service of Neustar. Leading Localeze’s strategic vision, including product innovation and business development, Jeff has successfully grown Localeze into a trusted local search business listings management provider.

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analytics

legal corner

Why Fake Online Reviews Are a Bad Idea Sure, it’s “black hat.”

It can also cost you in a lawsuit

Written by: Travis Crabtree

opefully, you’ve decided to read on because you believe you may be victim to a fake competitor review and you are not looking for advice on how to get away with it. If you are looking for advice on how to get away with it, you’ll have to look somewhere else. If you are looking for some information on what happens when you are victim or need to persuade a client not to do it, then read on.

argument the company failed to present evidence of one actual customer who relied upon the fake online review. Instead, in addition to the owner’s testimony and a consultant who talked about the importance of online reviews, two competitors in the same industry testified they read the reviews and that they opined it had to have had a negative impact on the company’s business which, prior to this, had a good reputation.

A Missouri court recently awarded a company $150,001 as the victim of three fake online reviews. In the case of The Fireworks Restoration Company v. Hosto, two gentlemen formed two companies together. As often happens when you mix business with friendship, the relationship went downhill and the parties split their businesses. Mr. Hosto, apparently, was not happy with the result.

Aware of the difficulty of finding actual customers who were turned off by the review, the court wrote:

To invoke his revenge, Mr. Hosto pretended to be former customers of the business, The Fireworks Restoration Company, and left negative reviews on Google and Yahoo. In the review, Mr. Hosto, using the name of an actual former customer, wrote, “dealing with these people was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my whole life.” He continued, “It was a miserable experience and the job was done so poorly we decided to sell the house. They were great salesman [sic] but their workman [sic] were idiots and the owner was not willing to help in any way . . . I was so happy just to get them out of my life I paid them much more than I should have because their law firm threatened to lien my house if I disagree[d] with any part of their bill. . . Do yourself a favor and call your insurance company and get a referal [sic] for legitimate business people.” The review stayed on Yahoo for two months and on Google for two years. Suspecting foul play, the company filed a John Doe lawsuit. The suit allowed the company to subpoena information from Yahoo that provided enough information to confirm the suspicion that Mr. Hosto was the true author—a fact Mr. Hosto admitted when he was called out on the postings. The company then sued Mr. Hosto for defamation. As we have discussed before, the Communications Decency Act makes it difficult to sue Google or Yahoo for user generated content. It was easy for the company to prove Mr. Hosto said false things about the company with malice with the intention to harm. But, The Fireworks Restoration Company had difficulty proving it was damaged by the negative review resulting in a $1 award from the jury for lost profits. The jury, however, decided to punish Mr. Hosto granting $150,000 in punitive damages. The court of appeals upheld the jury’s award rejecting Mr. Hosto’s

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We reject Defendant’s contention that Plaintiff needed to produce testimony from potential customers who opted to turn elsewhere due to the web reviews. With the internet, consumers are able to compare businesses and their wares with unprecedented speed. Interpersonal contact is characteristically absent, so if a consumer declines to engage a business it encounters on the internet, that consumer continues his or her search and the business has no knowledge it has been passed by. As such, it would be unreasonably burdensome to impose upon a business plaintiff the requirement that it locate potential customers that it never knew in order to successfully demonstrate actual damage to its reputation. The deleterious impact of such a constraint far outweighs any benefits it would have in proving reputational harm.

Affirming the punitive damage award, the court wrote: From the outset, Defendant’s conduct evinced a calculated desire to seriously damage Plaintiff ’s business reputation and, in doing so, deliver, in Defendant’s words, “the knock-[out] punch [he] had looked forward to delivering for so long.” Defendant admitted that he was “bitter and wanted revenge.”...Even after having time to consider his actions, Defendant did not cease his conduct. Instead, he testified that he went online to post an additional fictitious review because he “felt something satisfying in” posting the initial derogatory reviews. Not until he received notification of Plaintiff ’s suit did Defendant demonstrate any contrition, and even then his apologies were couched in a desire to forego litigation.

Trends Toward Google Secure Search Affects Google Analytics Results

ow Google Analytics is used is subject to change, due to a new trend of more frequent secure and private search experience, thanks to Google search over SSL. The same way that users’ are ensured their credit card and other personal details are protected, a distinct move towards SSL searches will ensure that all search data is protected and made secure too. This secured channel (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for web browsing, as well as e-mail and instant messaging. As you may know, SSL allows search queries and traffic to be encrypted in order to prevent other parties from having access to search results and terms. While this feature provides the knowledge of a safe and protected search each and every time, the user may be negatively affected by a slightly slower search experience, due to the time it takes to establish a secure connection with Google. However, because it is only very slightly slower, it should not influence a user’s experience too much. How this affects Internet Marketing Specialists is that Google Analytics may not be entirely accurate or relevant when determining which key terms to use for a particular business. This is because, quite simply, while the results themselves are displayed, the organic search terms and queries are hidden.

Many online reputation management gurus would explain that a few negative reviews actually give credence to the surrounding positive reviews, assuming the positive greatly outweighs the negative. Nevertheless, there is no good reason to anonymously write a fake negative review of your competitor. While ethics should be sufficient discouragement, with enough resources, a victim of the fake review can unmask your identity and take you to court. As shown by the jury in Missouri, they don’t take too kindly to people seeking vengeance online with fake reviews. Even if you don’t cause actual damages, they will make you pay. n

Do you have a legal question you want answered in the next column? Send your questions to legalcorner@visibilitymagazine.com.

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This is problematic because it prevents Internet Marketing Specialists and business owners from determining the best keywords to use for their business or for a more specific purpose. The trend toward SSL Search is growing, with rumour mills rife that Firefox has just included built-in SSL searches that activate by default as of Firefox 14. Internet Marketing Specialists who are concerned about the lack of search information readily made available are aware of filters that can be created in Google Analytics, to allow a little more information to be displayed. These filters can show detail such as which page users are “landing” on, which may provide insight into the sorts of keywords used to take them there. From another perspective, the good news is that AdWords data is not protected and is displayed in its entirety. My opinion is that SSL actually heightens the effects and benefits of using AdWords to draw in visitors, simply because you can more accurately determine which keywords really work. Here are my tips for effectively analysing what results you are given, and turning them to your best advantage. • Your number of clicks are provided by Google Analytics, but your search terms are not. Study what page/s most of your traffic is landing on. What are the words that are most commonly used on that page? You can make some pretty good educated guesses that these words were used in the search terms. • As mentioned earlier, take a good look at your AdWords results. What is the data showing you? Use this data to indentify your best keywords. Don’t have any Google AdWords set up yet? Well, this would be a very good reason to get behind it. Imagine the dividends you will receive. • Be specific to get results. Don’t underestimate the amount of people who will link to you. Being specific on your website will get you the results you

need to grow your business. • Set up filters to negate the situation as much as you can. These filters can be created in Google Analytics, to allow a little more information to be displayed. These filters can show detail such as which page users are “landing” on, which may provide insight into the sorts of keywords used to take them there. I would like to conclude by recognising that it’s easy to get caught up in Google Analytics and spend a great deal of time agonising over it and double-guessing your choices. However, I will bring you back to the one aspect that Google values above everything else, even advertising spend – that is, relevancy. If users don’t readily receive the information they are looking for, Google will lose all of its traffic. Therefore, it’s in Google’s interests to ensure that all users are satisfied with the results they receive from a search. In turn, it is in a business owner’s best interests to receive traffic that will buy from them. After all, if you sell wheelchairs, it won’t be in your favour only receiving traffic from mothers looking for prams and strollers. You won’t sell anything! With this in mind, be specific and use your common sense. What do you sell? What does your business do? Use those keywords, as well as your location. You should have a sense of the terminology people use when referring to your business, products or services by now, and if you don’t, ask friends or family members not in your industry. When it comes to Google Analytics, it has a specific purpose so use it the way it was intended. n

Ben Bradshaw is one of Australia’s most established and renowned online marketing and Google AdWords pioneers. He is the founder and CEO of Australia’s largest Australian owned, multi-award winning AdWords Management Company. Ben is one of Australia’s most soughtafter and respected speakers and trainers on Internet marketing and entrepreneurship.

Fall 2012

Visibility

mobile design

Why Your Organization Needs an Adaptive Website

e are currently in the midst of one the biggest software and hardware revolutions we’ve ever witnessed. With processing power, storage, and bandwidth increasing exponentially, smart phones and smart tablets are quickly becoming our main personal and business computer. Customers, employees, and other stakeholders are bringing and using their smart phones and tablets everywhere, and that definitely impacts how they see and interact with your company online. For organizations of all sizes, this means it’s time to take a good look at your website. Sure, your site might look great on a desktop or laptop computer screen. But how does it look on all of the different sizes of screens found on today’s wide variety of tablets and smart phones? Chances are the answer is “not good.” That’s why at this point in time all companies need to make their site adaptive and design their websites for mobile first.

Today’s Mobile Web Sites

To address the mobile revolution, many companies have created a second mobile version of their website so their content can be viewed on smart phones without a problem. But there are big problems! First, you have

to design, maintain, and pay for two separate websites. When you update one, the other is in most cases not automatically updated. Additionally, the mobile site is designed for a specific mobile screen size. If your user does not have that phone model, they will still have to scroll around to see your mobile site version.

The New Adaptive Website Imperative

To get a better idea of why a traditionally designed website doesn’t work for mobile devices, try this little experiment. Using a laptop or desktop, go to your company’s website. Depending on the size of your screen, the website will either fill the entire screen or there will be a border on the right and left side. Using your mouse arrow, grab the bottom right corner of the browser window for your website. Drag it from the right to the left diagonally up and start making the window smaller. If your website is not adaptive, you’ll see that all you’re really doing is covering things up. And as soon as the window gets smaller than the pre-defined width of the site, you’ll see scrollbars appear on the right and bottom. Now the only

way to move around on the page is to scroll. Keep making the window smaller until it’s about the size of a smart phone screen. How does it look? You’ll see that it doesn’t look good at all. As a matter of fact, it’s probably not useful either. If your website was adaptive, as you move that window and make it smaller, the text would automatically reformat and the pictures would move accordingly to fit the smaller screen size. The menu would also adapt and change so your website and content would work on any device. That last point is important, because, as I mentioned earlier, not all smart phones have the same size screen. An Android screen is different from an iPhone screen, which is different from a Blackberry screen. Even tablets have different size screens. So if you don’t have an adaptive site, the person viewing your site on their tablet or smart phone will end up having to scroll somehow, somewhere, because of the wide variety of screen sizes.

When you design for mobile first, you have to re-evaluate all your content. Business owners as well as website designers are still in laptop and desktop design mode. And because they’re thinking in terms of large screens that need to be filled, they put a lot of content online—often way too much. As a result, the vast majority of websites are bloated with way too much information. It’s time to throw all that non-essential stuff out. The best way to help you make those tough decisions of which content to cut is to think in terms of mobile first. After all, if your main design is optimized for a small screen that adapts by getting bigger when viewed on a laptop screen (as opposed to shrinking when it gets viewed on a smaller screen), it will be easier to take out all the content and graphics that are not really necessary. If you think that all the content on your current site is necessary, you’re only fooling yourself. Most companies have websites that are way too busy. And while the website may look nice and be “cool” or “trendy,” it’s not getting to the essence of what people need to make decisions

So the message is clear: The time to create an adaptive site is now! That means you have two choices. You can go back to whoever designed your current site and have them take your current look and make it adaptive, or you can start over and design a new website.

Visibility

Fall 2012

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The same concept applies for your website. You have a big screen to fill, so you fill it. Now put your website on a small screen and decide what your prospects and customers really need to make a buying decision.

The Future of Website Design

Make no mistake: It’s a hard trend (a certainty) that tablets and smart phones are rapidly becoming people’s main computer.

Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients better understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous, untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books, including the national bestseller Flash Foresight: How To See the Invisible and Do the Impossible as well as the highly acclaimed Technotrends (Sydney, Australia’s most overdue library book).

Conversion Conference and AM Days are co-located to leverage best in class education and address real issues, threats and opportunities.

Design for Mobile First

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Designing for mobile first forces you to make the hard decisions of what should stay and what should go. It’s similar to when someone moves from a large house to a small condo. When you have the big house, you fill it with a lot of furniture you don’t use, a lot of artwork you don’t look at, and a lot of “must have” gadgets you don’t need. Once you downsize your space, you realize you really don’t need all that stuff. Even though letting go is painful at first, it gradually gets easier once you realize how free and uncluttered you feel.

Therefore, you want your website to be seen well on these devices and to be useful. If you don’t want the added expense and hassle of two websites, then step one is to make your current site adaptive. When it’s time to redo the site entirely, design it for mobile first. These two steps will put you light years ahead of your competition and boost your online presence and sales immensely. n

Increase ROI & Conversion Results

To see a real example of how an adaptive site would look, go to my website at www. burrus.com. Other site examples include: calebogden.com, owltastic.com, and thinkvitamin.com. Visit any of those sites and give them a try. View them on your laptop first and shrink the browser window as described earlier and notice how the site changes to fit any size screen. Now try them on your tablet or smart phone. Regardless of screen size, they will all look great. The good news is that any website developer can do this once they understand the concept!

If you decide it’s time to design a new website, an important key to success is to design it for mobile first.

or to buy your products. This gives you a strategic reason to get rid of the clutter.

OCTOBER 9-10, 2012

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Fall 2012

Visibility

seo

Stop the Panda-monium!

Why SEOs need to lighten up and trust the algorithm

or the past year, the search engine marketing conference circuit has been awash in alarmist rhetoric, running the gamut from advice on warding off penguins and instructions on how to recover from a panda attack, all the way to doomsday predictions about terminally sub-optimal content and the demise of SEO. Obviously, the practice of Search Engine Optimization is not dead – in fact, the professional punditry surrounding it has arguably never been more vigorous. Yet at the same time, the fundamentals of SEO have dramatically and irrevocably shifted, with respect not just to how

some guidance on new and informed best practices. Specifically, I will challenge the popular notion that SEOs must be on guard and ready to engage in tactical warfare against a growing army of (hitherto benign and appealing) exotic animals, in the form of Google’s algorithmic adjustments (aka Panda, Penguin, etc.). I will offer a practical definition of ‘quality’ content, as well as a recipe for its successful creation, deployment and promotion in the search engines. To begin, let us consider the plight of the

say yes, mostly so (see chart). The research study implies a generalized and progressive enlightenment: as more and better content is produced, and information retrieval mechanisms continue to improve, satisfaction with our worlds of data is on the rise. What is troubling about that interpretation is twofold: 1) it fails to take into account the mitigating influence of searchers’ developing acumen (in other words, even though people are getting better at doing search and know more than ever before how to quickly prompt the best, most relevant results they are looking for, fewer than 60% find that their experience is improving); and 2) over 40% of respondents say results are no better today than in the past. That evidence aligns starkly with another set of statistics quoted by Google and tweeted by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand in March 2011, namely that, while 43% of all searches consist of four or more words (a startling fact in and of itself, since it translates to over a billion searches a day qualifying as specific in nature), 64% of these searches return zero exact matches. So: I do a search, it’s not for fun, I get back an entire page full of links; not one of those links reflects all the words I just used. The demand for relevant content is outstripping supply by thirty percent.

Clearly, optimizing (creating appropriate keyword density) for broad matches does not constitute quality content. Yet neither is simply avoiding falling victim to the algorithm or, worse, penalties in the form of a ‘manual action’.

Of course eHow has since recovered somewhat and made many changes, but the point remains. Simply answering the skeletal question is no longer enough. Furthermore, Google is showing that it is not interested in companies brokering content solely for purposes of generating organic traffic and serving ads. The Penguin update (aka the over-optimization penalty) was, in part, about penalizing sites with too many ads above the fold. It was also Google ordering SEOs to stop trying so hard – particularly with the link-building nonsense. (Fact: If your main tactic as an SEO consultant is standard-issue link building, the future is not bright for you.)

Google has taken to talking about the importance of creating ‘great’ content, but it must be recognized that the definition of a satisfying search result is rapidly evolving. By no means is it any longer adequate to create a

So what is going on here? As always, we can do worse than follow the money. As a public company, Google has an obligation to post a profit. It would appear, as evidenced by the shift to Local+ and the push on search verticals (flights,

Meanwhile, what is SEO all about, if not striving to rank number one, two or three in Google results for our five, fifteen or fifty favorite keywords – which are by definition broad keyword terms? Problem number one: people don’t search that way (see graph), so why do we act as though they do?

it should be accomplished, but also to what we are trying to accomplish and indeed to why – in a world seemingly characterized by increasingly random cruelty on the part of search engines – we should even bother at all. In this article, I will attempt to address the apparent controversy, and provide

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modern citizens who, as part of a global Internet usage community, contribute to, on average, over two-and-a-half billion searches daily, on Google alone. If one were to ask a representative sample of them, as the Pew Research Center recently did, whether the quality and relevance of search results were improving over time, a slim majority would

page, achieve the right tags and keyword density, acquire a few links, etc. Today’s game is far more complex, albeit in the spirit of simplicity. Relevance is no longer enough. Even Relevance plus Trust is less than the whole story. Consider eHow.com. No one could seriously argue that the content on that site is not relevant to the search queries for which it has tried and successfully ranked over time, yet Panda took a damaging swipe at its market share.

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hotels, etc.) that more and more of the home page real estate is being reserved for paid-inclusion models or experiments, along with the more familiar universal results (local info, definitions, weather). It is hardly reckless speculation to suggest that in the future there may not be space for ten blue earned organic links on the homepage. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there are, the day after tomorrow, only three organic results. If Google’s goal remains, logically and as so often stated, to create virtuous search cycles and encourage more numerous and frequent searches by ensuring ‘glorious user experiences’, then the stakes surrounding which top three results to put forward will have just gone up exponentially. Which would explain today’s concerted movement from strings to things. It has to be about more than just answering the question; it must lead to a place of gratification. Google can’t take any chances that the algorithm may have been duped into offering less than the best available results, especially given it has so few kicks at the can. Therefore ‘quality’ content means something that is truly useful, fulfilling. And Google is clearly signaling already that it will no longer direct users to other sites for simple answers to questions. Ask Google when the sun will set in your location and the answer will be provided without intermediation. Moreover, through the introduction of knowledge graphs, Google is now showing that, as long as it has a

pretty good idea (based on search history, gmail correspondence, social signals, geo-location, etc.) of what you might be looking for, it will go ahead and take that educated guess – which is the beginning of semantic search. Sites such as Wikipedia and IMDB may be not be overjoyed with the outcome of these changes. The goal is a deeper, more personal engagement, which is why social signals will only grow in importance. Search Plus Your World (miserable failure though it has been) is Google feverishly trying to master this usefulness/fulfillment quotient – the assumption being that, if people in your network found something remarkable enough to share or +1, then it is probably good for you. Currently, Google stinks at this, but it will almost certainly improve fast. For instance, search history already makes personalization more intense: urbane residents of Athens searching for restaurants probably desire different results than a middle-aged couple from Kansas researching their upcoming tourist holiday. This dynamic will become much more subtle and pervasive in the near term. The bottom line, short of finding a new search engine to seek representation from, is inescapable: stop thinking like an SEO (tactical, paranoid, underground supervillain) and start

Fall 2012

Visibility

thinking like a marketer. SEO is one, albeit critical, trickle-down aspect of the brand and business strategy. Make your data relevant, ready and right: • Relevant for each target audience (even if that target demo will never overtly selfidentify through queries; more and more, Google knows how old they are, where they are, what their friends say about them, etc.) through useful content and compelling calls to engagement/ action; • Ready for search engines through highly scaled non-duplicate, keyword-focused, quality content infrastructures; and • Right for every channel (local listings, video, images, social), platform and device through intelligent responsive design. • Above all, stop doing link-building; instead, promote your content in ways that result in actual links.

There is no easy answer and, certainly, the algorithm remains a moving target; however, content should no longer be built to ‘rank’ in the traditional SEO sense. It should be built to satisfy – to be highly sharable (and likely to be shared). It should take into account that merely providing an answer simply does not cut it anymore. Being the kid in the classroom eagerly jabbing your hand into the air is not going to get you called on. People have to actually like you, and that’s a lot harder. n

An Integrated Approach to Internet Marketing: Components of a Well Oiled Online Marketing Campaign By Solomon Thimothy

Ken Dobell is the president of Digital – DAC Group. With over twenty years’ experience in integrated marketing communications strategies and an award-winning creative background, Ken has specialized in online brand-building, marketing and lead generation since the advent of the Internet. Prior to joining DAC Group, he held a progression of senior leadership roles within the global interactive function of Monster Worldwide, both in North America and Europe. He also spearheaded a range of innovative online initiatives as vice-president of marketing with a major global franchisor. Ken is the creative mind behind DAC’s powerful multi-channel approach to digital marketing, which delivers measured high performance from top to bottom and out the long tail.

f you’re keeping up with the latest trends in marketing, you already know the importance of an Internet marketing campaign. You have also probably tried one or more Internet marketing channels as a way to stay relevant and increase traffic to your web site. This is a good start, but having a disjointed online marketing campaign can only go so far. To maximize your marketing potential and really achieve success, your marketing campaign has to be holistic and integrate all players of online marketing. An integrated online marketing campaign will allow you to tap into all areas of the digital sphere. From organic searches to social networks, a wellintegrated marketing campaign will result in higher traffic, increased brand awareness, customer loyalty and more! If you’re looking to succeed in this digital era, it’s time to integrate your marketing. Develop and implement a strategic campaign that works symbiotically with your other marketing initiatives to achieve your goals.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO), is an essential part of building your online presence and

leaving your mark. By being found organically for highly relevant keywords, you are claiming valuable online real estate. Not only does it mean that you attract more traffic with a solid top position on search engine results pages (SERPs), it also means that you don’t have to rely solely on paid search to land prominent visibility online. By actively coordinating efforts to increase your organic ranking on search engines with your other marketing activities, you gain top visibility and maintain consistency in your marketing message. A solid SEO campaign should be focused and continuously refined. Intelligent keyword research and constant monitoring of your rankings will help define the next steps in optimizing your website and online content for better placement on search engines. From adding keyword-rich content onto your site to posting frequent and relevant blog posts, SEO is your long-term strategy for not only reaching but also maintaining optimal visibility on search engines. Beware though, SEO is not a stop and go strategy. It requires continuous effort and dedication or else you may see your hard-earned work take a dive along with your SERP rankings.

PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an ideal way to actively increase qualified traffic to your website. Unlike SEO, a PPC campaign allows you to tailor your online marketing efforts to exactly the audience you want. From restricting your campaign scope to a certain geographic area or precisely scheduling when your ads show, a PPC campaign puts you in control. Successfully built PPC campaigns can get you the right type of leads that can be easily turned into conversions. By setting up a strategic campaign with well-planned ad structure and settings, as well as defining an offer relevant to your target audience, you can easily convert a simple online surfer into a customer. Using custom conversion optimized landing pages with content that is highly related to the search terms, you can further increase

Previous Session Speakers Include: Peter Lubbers - Kaazing & founder of the San Francisco HTML5 User Group Paul Trani - Adobe Joel Evans - Mobiquity David Kaneda - Sencha Imram Malek - MocoSpace Marc Grabanski - Talent Evangelist & UI/UX Developer Lauren Hasson - RIM Jeff & Steve Fulton - 8bitrocket.com Tyler Smith - appMobi Bill Walker - Mozilla Labs

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Visibility

your chances of turning visitors into customers. A PPC campaign can bring you much needed traffic while your SEO climbs in page rank; furthermore, PPC can attract attention to particular offers or promotions as well as ensure top placement on search engines for maximum visibility.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is perhaps the newest player in the online marketing scene. In fact, most business owners are still confused about social media and its power. True, it may not be a direct way to land sales or more traffic, but it has a major impact on your overall online visibility and your ability to reach and connect online.

current customers and prospects about new products, events, promotions or recognitions. Keeping in touch with your clients is made easy through email marketing. From offering useful tips, helpful advice or new information, email marketing can be an effective client communication portal. By offering valuable information, tips or promotions, you can keep your company topof-mind for repeat business while giving you an instant spike in website traffic.

CONTENT MARKETING

In recognition of the growing importance of social media, Google updated its ranking algorithm in 2012 to include social signals. That means that the more active you are on social media platforms, the better page rank your website will have in organic search.

Content marketing—the process of creating valuable, relevant content for the purpose of sharing—plays an important role in building your authority online. By producing and sharing valuable content through various channels and platforms, you effectively strengthen branding and increase overall brand awareness. This is crucial to establishing your company as an authority in your industry and your executives as experts in their field.

When it comes to creating your social media strategy, it’s important to embrace the various platforms and still keep your focus around your brand and overall goals. So go ahead and tweet, add posts to your Facebook page and join discussions on LinkedIn!

Case studies, eBooks, infographics, blogs, whitepapers and videos are just a few of the various content marketing assets that can engage and attract potential customers as well as help maintain your current customer base by increasing customer loyalty.

MEDIA BUYING

Content is a driving force behind the Internet and social media. The more shareable content you can produce, the more visibility and

The Internet is the fastest growing outlet for advertising all around. While traditional advertising outlets are still effective, we can’t ignore the need to advertise online. With the number of online searches and purchases growing day by day, media buying increases brand awareness and can help recapture lost leads. From display advertising on preferred websites to retargeting campaigns targeting your recent site visitors, it’s important to include media buying in your overall online marketing strategy. Combined, display advertising and retargeting can reinforce branding and grow your overall visibility on the web.

EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing is an undervalued tool when it comes to online marketing. However, email marketing is still one of the most cost-effective marketing solutions and should not be dismissed. A regularly scheduled email newsletter can work wonders for alerting

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visitor interest, engagement and much more. It’s also an unbiased way to grade your marketing efforts. This collection of valuable data gives you the competitive edge and is the best tool to drive the decisionmaking process for maximum results. Recent updates to analytics have resulted in added sophistication and are a clear sign of the growing importance of analytics in marketing decisions.

authority you can build for your business.

MOBILE MARKETING

According to recent research from ComScore, smartphone users account for 42% of all mobile web visitors. In fact, the number of mobile web users is expected to surpass the 1.7 billion mark by 2013. With statistics like this, it’s hard to ignore the growing importance of mobile marketing. As mobile technology becomes more sophisticated and the number of smartphone users grows, it’s crucial for businesses to enter the mobile marketing world before it’s too late. Equipped with a mobile website, you can improve user experience for better overall interactions. You can even go further and integrate your other marketing campaigns to your mobile presence such as targeting your pay-per-click campaigns to mobile devices.

Analytics is the brain for any Internet marketing strategy. Understanding and using this information actively can result in maximum results.

Mobile technology is here to stay. Not integrating a mobile strategy in your overall marketing scheme would be a huge missed opportunity that leads to declining overall visibility and market share.

ANALYTICS

One of the most important tools for any business owner is web analytics. Regardless of what your marketing plan includes, web analytics offers a wealth of marketing intelligence that can help guide your overall marketing efforts. Web analytics can provide you with raw data that can help you understand visitors’ behavior to help you fine-tune your website and campaigns for maximum ROI. Whether it’s a PPC campaign, a new product or another marketing effort, analytics can provide you with valuable data to help you make intelligent decisions about your marketing strategy. Recent updated in analytics means even more data to digest for a comprehensive view of your online presence and strength.

An integrated approach to Internet marketing is the most intelligent way to achieve success. Just like a body can’t function without all body parts working simultaneously, a marketing campaign is handicapped when only certain parts are active. Creating a holistic marketing strategy that includes SEO, PPC, social media, media buying, email marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing and analytics is the most efficient way to structure and drive your marketing efforts. An integrated online marketing strategy is also the simplest way to maximize the impact of all your marketing efforts. By having each and every different medium push out a cohesive message, you gain from the added visibility on multiple channels, growth in authority and overall reach both on and off the web. Intelligent marketing begins not with one single idea but many ideas working together

to produce the desired results. Likewise, a cohesive integrated marketing approach to Internet marketing can make every moving part of your marketing campaign more successful. Keeping up with the latest trends and understanding the various roles different marketing tools play is essential for staying atop of the game and ahead of your competitors. When planned correctly and skillfully, a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy that combines the biggest players in Internet marketing has an exponential impact on your marketing and business goals. n

Solomon Thimothy is the founder and CEO of OneIMS, a leader in integrated marketing. Thimothy has over a decade of experience helping businesses reach their potential through innovative integrated marketing strategies. Based out of Chicago, Illinois, OneIMS and its sister company, ClickXPosure have been top ranked nationally for quality and performance. Founded on the principles of helping clients achieve marketing milestones, OneIMS works with clients of all sizes in all industries.

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David Murfitt, Global Mobile Services Director, Unilever

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Fall 2012

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Is Your Business Ready for the Mobile Web?

An Excerpt from Deltina Hay’s new book The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web By Deltina Hay

here is a lot of hype today about how many people own mobile devices and how much time people spend on them. One survey found that “one third of Americans are more willing to give up sex than their mobile phones.” While this is a great quote for shock value, all it really tells us is that people are pretty darned fond of their smartphones. Indeed, look at some overall numbers: • There are presently 5.3 billion mobile device subscribers. • There will be nearly as many mobile devices as there are people in the world by 2015. • SMS (text messaging) traffic is expected to break 8 trillion in 2011. So everyone has or will have a mobile device. What’s the big deal? Everyone needs a phone, right? What does this matter to our website optimization or online marketing efforts? The following numbers reveal the business impact of an increasingly mobile world more clearly: • • • • •

Almost all mobile devices produced today are able to access the Internet. There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015. By 2014, mobile Internet browsing will surpass desktop browsing. Mobile ad revenue will sky rocket to $20.6 billion by 2015. Shopping on the mobile web will reach a staggering $119 billion in 2015.

The issue is not that everyone has a mobile device, but that they all have Internet access via that device—and that many of them access the web only through their mobile device. More importantly, they are taking advantage of that access by searching, purchasing, and clicking through on mobile ads at unprecedented rates. This is great news for those of us who market on the Internet. But it can be equally bad news for those who are not prepared for this mobile opportunity. Imagine that someone visits your conventional website from their mobile device and your site loads so slowly the user just moves on to the next site in their search results. Or perhaps your site eventually loads, but with no images and with a gaping hole where that spiffy piece of Flash you paid so much for is supposed to play. These are very possible scenarios for a website that is not mobile-ready.

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Focus on Conversion: Easy Action Recall that users are not browsing your mobile site—make it easy for them to do the things they are most likely wanting to do, like find store locations, buy or review products, review menu items, place calls to your business, or request additional information.

Take Advantage of Mobile Features: Location, location, location Like the click-to-call button, there are features specific to mobile devices that can be used to improve your site user experience. The most useful of these features is location, both yours and the customer’s. By accessing user location information, you can offer a more personable experience.

• • • •

Do not clutter your site with paid ads or unnecessary elements. Use CSS to organize content on your mobile site. Do not use HTML tables. Use plenty of white space on your site, and use lighter colored backgrounds. Single column layouts are the best choice for mobile websites.

Proprietary Technologies: Beware Be careful when choosing proprietary software to use on your mobile site. Many smartphones and tablets will not render Flash or Silverlight, which are programs that help create animation and other multimedia for the web. You may run into issues with third-party scripts as well.

Page Size: Smaller Is Better

Design your site’s buttons, navigation items, and links for touch screens, not for a mouse. This will improve the user experience and prevent accidental navigation away from your site. Do not use hover-over features on your mobile site. A thumb cannot “hover” over an item on a mobile site.

Page load time (how fast a page renders in a mobile browser) plays a major role in how well a site places in mobile search engines, and can also determine if someone stays on your site or not. A website designed for desktop browsers can take up to 40 seconds to load on a mobile device, a far cry from an optimized mobile site that should take around four seconds.

Navigation: Go Vertical

Images: Crunch ’Em

Think “Tap-able” not “Clickable:” Oops free You have invested a lot of time, effort, and money into creating and optimizing your web presence. Now is not the time to let that go to waste as your customers transition to using their mobile devices to access your company!

How People Use the Mobile Web: I want it NOW! • • • •

People don’t “surf ” the mobile web. They know what they want and act on it. They want location, news, social media, and products. They recommend, buy, and follow up more than desktop users do.

Mobile Website Solutions Luckily, you have a host of solutions available to get your web presence mobile-ready, with many of them taking very little time, effort, or money to implement. If you have HTML experience, you can use responsive web design to create separate style sheets without the need to alter your existing website code, or use new web standards found in HTML5 and CSS3 to create your site from scratch. But don’t despair if you do not have web programming experience. There are many tools and services you can use to create a successful mobile web presence. Many of these solutions require very little time or money. There are specific mobile solutions available for those of you who use CMS solutions like WordPress as well.

Mobile Website Best Practices Regardless of the specifics of your strategy or the solution you choose to create your site, there are some best practices that should be applied to all mobile websites.

Keep It Simple: Simple=Good In general, keeping your site simple means eliminating most images; simplifying navigation, layout, and design elements; eliminating Flash and other proprietary software; keeping your site free of clutter; and breaking up text and other content.

Prioritize Content: 1, 2, 3 Space is in high demand on a mobile site and site visitors are on the go, so you need to anticipate what content users will most likely want to access. Choose the three most important content items and make those items easy for users to find and act upon.

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Pay special attention to the navigation on your mobile website. Keep in mind the “tap-able” issues discussed above, as well as scrolling and readability issues. Your navigation menu should not scroll left or right. If your menu items are too long to fit horizontally, create a vertical navigation structure.

Recall that fast load times are essential to an optimized mobile site, and images tend to take a long time to load. Also recall that mobile users are content motivated— they are not necessarily “browsing” or “admiring” your mobile site, rather, they are there for a purpose.

Scrolling: Minimize It

This doesn’t mean you should avoid images altogether, just rethink whether they are necessary to the goals of the site. A few images are fine, but excessive use will degrade your site’s efficiency. Use an image cruncher like crunch4Free to cut

Mobile users prefer to scroll from top to bottom, so design your site so that left to right scrolling is eliminated. You should keep the need for scrolling—even top to bottom scrolling—to a minimum.

Formatting Content: Be Concise Content is still king, even on the mobile web, and there are plenty of ways to keep your valuable content available to your visitors while still maintaining a simple, readable, and error-free mobile site: • Make headers prominent and concise. • Text should be readable at arm’s length, and broken up with “read more” links or collapsible navigation. • Use bulleted lists when formatting your text, and avoid the use of images wherever possible. • Avoid placing too many links within the body of your text, especially if the links are close together.

Overall Site Design: Simple Usability Your mobile website design should focus on simplicity and usability. Designing for a smaller screen can be challenging, and requires eliminating many elements we take for granted on desktop sites. The following best practices can help:

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back on image size.

Video: Use YouTube and HTML5 to Render Just as for images, including video on your mobile site can affect load times and usability. And even though smartphones and tablets handle audio and video very efficiently, the mobile browser rendering your mobile website may not do such a good job. Rather than streaming the video yourself or relying on other proprietary software, consider using YouTube to place video on your mobile site. HTML5 has a video tag that renders video efficiency as well. n

Deltina Hay is a veteran web developer, publisher, and a pioneer of social media, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0, especially as it applies to small business and the publishing industry. Her latest book, The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web, covers every aspect of mobile web development for entrepreneurs and small business, including mobile websites, mobile app development, webapp development, location-based marketing, QR codes, augmented reality, and more. The book is the first of a new series of guides to Internet marketing for small business published by Quill Driver Books. Learn more about the series at TheBootstrappersGuide.com. Follow Deltina on Twitter @deltina.

Fall 2012

Visibility

mobile privacy

Privacy in Apps – How will the Mobile World Overcome Privacy Challenges?

have spent many years as a senior executive in the mobile space and am often asked to draw parallels between the mobile world and the online world because “basically mobile is going to follow the online rules/regulations.” There are, of course, numerous parallels but also distinct differences that industry organizations, government agencies and big businesses are trying to tackle. First is the fact that mobile is always on…always there….in your hands. Consumers feel a far greater sense of privacy with their phones than their computers – our mobile devices carry most of the important information about our lives. Most of us would let their friend/significant other share a computer but are not willing to let anyone borrow our phone. Secondly, phones are the ultimate multi-tasking devices and have created shortened attention spans .The development of apps started a process that allows users to have immediate (and expert) answers to most questions, store very personal details and have allowed for content consumption during every second of the day. This “need for speed” has made consumers more likely to overlook privacy or security concerns in the quest for “instant gratification”. Lastly, mobile apps and the rise of m-Commerce have created a “one-click” mentality where people buy quickly and feel that if there is a problem, their mobile network will protect them by crediting their account or their credit card company will protect them by reimbursing them for any issues.

The real question is: how safe is that app in your hand? We have all experienced the situations where we innocently download something from our phone (or computer) only to be spammed and phished. We thought we read the privacy policy (if there even was one ?) but we clicked past it to get the information we wanted without really understanding or knowing what third parties could potentially have access to this information or how this information would be used. The development of simple and comprehensive Privacy Policies are a significant issue in furthering making us feel safe in using apps. The Federal Trade Commission is working to protect consumers and promoting greater transparency to protect consumer privacy.

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Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz has advocated that technology companies design privacy policies with the end consumers in mind. He has suggested that policies be simple to understand, promote consumer choice and allow users to control how their data is used. The FTC is also promoting the concept of “Do Not Track” for third party cookies and “opt-in” policies (see http://business.ftc.gov/ as a part of their privacy initiatives). A range of global industry organizations, such as MEF have recently launched global Privacy initiatives to address some of these issues. They are striving to assist the industry to create their own best practices standards and develop policies that protect consumers and support the growth of the mobile industry as a whole. Consumers need to have informed consent, transparent solutions and actually know where their information will be utilized – and all of these things need to take place at the speed of consumer consumption of apps (which is over 350 apps per second). MEF’s recent initiative, which promotes global industry self-regulation, is led by industry leaders such as Vodafone, InMobi, mBlox, Impact Mobile and SNR Denton (see http://www.mefmobile.org).

has been misused. A recent example was a lawsuit filed against Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Apple, Foursquare and 13 other prominent social media firms accusing them of supplying mobile applications that invade users’ privacy. The lawsuit was sparked by the controversial New York Times article: “Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission”, which indicated that individual’s address books in are “free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner’s knowledge”. (http:// bits.blogs.nytimes.com). The more complex issues arise in situations where a consumer’s information is used by a third party and when that information is used in a way that may benefit a consumer or that a consumer wants shared (such as shopping apps or friend finding apps). For example, a consumer uses an app that allows them to buy a product – the current thinking is “wouldn’t that consumer want advertisements for complementary products or a discount on their next purchase?” For advertisers and mobile marketers, these are the big issues that need to be addressed as the playing ground must be fair for both consumers and businesses in these spaces. As these issues get tackled on numerous fronts, app creators should follow these three rules: • When creating a privacy policy, keep it concise and simple. If an average 10 year old doesn’t understand it - you need to rethink your policy. If it takes more than 2 clicks to get through it – you need to rethink your policy. If even you wouldn’t agree to it - definitely rethink your policy (and maybe your business model too). • Make it transparent – if you are planning to use a consumer’s

information for advertising or future marketing purposes, let people know – you will be surprised how many of us will be fine with it. Consumers watch television commercials every day as a swap for free content. • Don’t get overwhelmed by the process and opt for status quo. There are a lot of rules, pending legislation, case law and industry standards to look at and understand. At the end of the day, the goal is to inform and protect your customers. So, review your existing privacy policies, ensure that your company is working towards creating the best policies it can for your end users and reach out to industry experts who are working to make implementation “privacy in apps” policies that are fair to all and easier for business owners. n

For over 15 years, Ms. Marjorie DeHey Daleo has held high-level positions in marketing, business development and corporate strategy for a number of small and large firms, including the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), MediaMojos, the Irish government, LexisNexis and MGM Studios. Ms. DeHey was recently named one of “The 25 Women to Watch in 2012” by Mobile Marketer Magazine (http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/lib/13484.pdf ). She currently serves as the General Manager for the Mobile Entertainment Forum and as an executive consultant for MediaMojos, a mobile and entertainment consulting firm. She has spoken nationally and internationally on branding, strategic acquisitions and emerging new media technologies.

Clever businesses have recognized that consumers want their apps quickly and they have created interesting products to help solve these issues. Lookout, for example, has developed Privacy tools such as: Privacy Scans (which scan every app a consumer downloads to determine who can access your information) and Privacy Advisor (a consolidated list of apps that can access a consumer’s private information, such as: Contacts, Location, Text messages and Identity info. These consumerfriendly and real-time tools are examples of how technology can be used effectively to help ensure consumer trust in the mobile space.

Lookout’s Privacy Advisor Dashboard The great concern is who will have to deal with the fall-out when a consumer’s privacy is breached. Consumers will look to operators as a “big brother” who will protect them if something happens on their device and will also look to their financial institutions to protect them if their credit card/bank account information is misused. These are numerous examples of situations where a consumer’s feel their private information

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Fall 2012

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Digital marketing with a difference... An agency driven by ROI and a passion for service excellence

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eConnect EDITOR RATING

Very Good

mails have become an integral part of any business—big and small. Companies are aware that effective email marketing goes way beyond sending out an email to a select mailing list.

There is a strong need to first build a stylish and customized campaign, then successfully send it and finally track the results in real time. One of the challenges with email marketing is to cater to a diverse audience while keeping the campaigns time and cost efficient, i.e automated.

Click Consult are a specialist multi-lingual digital marketing agency with over one hundred in-house experts within SEO, PPC, Social Media, Reputation Management, Web Development and Mobile Web.

That is where a product like eConnect comes in. eConnect has all the essential functionalities that allow users to store subscriber lists, send out emails and track the status of the email sent to each member on an address list.

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But this enterprise-level solution comes with many other useful features that would allow businesses to customize their campaign in more ways than one. In other words, it does all the groundwork needed for a successful e-mail campaign in order to help you increase your sales or brand visibility or have a new plan executed. Unlike other players in the field of ESPs, eConnect has something new to offer for its customers at every stage of the email marketing cycle. To start off, it allows businesses to select whether they want to take up a monthly plan or a pay-as-you-send plan. The pricing in these plans is based on volumes of emails sent and not based on the number of subscribers.

Website: www.clickconsult.com

When it comes to designing the email template, eConnect offers a wide range of templates to choose from but also allows the option for a custom based template option. With this option, you can get your own template designed which would be perfectly in-sync with your existing branding (colors, logos etc).

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Features • • • •

Personalized customize campaigns Google analytics integration Full Feature API View campaign’s success rate

Pros • Two payment plans – pay-as-you-send and monthly pricing • Making emails custom for the end user, automated for you • Custom designed templates

Pricing • Free 30 Day Trial • Monthly plan starts at $19.95 to send 1,000 per month • Pay as you like starts with a minimum of 1000 email credits (without expiration date) at $35

eConnect also offers great options for list segmentation, custom fields and automated responses that would allow you to send emails that are designed with a specific audience in mind. This gives you an edge as far building great customer loyalty is concerned because your campaign will be customized for each user while still being automated for you. The customization isn’t just limited for the end user. Another critical differentiation is that your interactions at eConnect will be directly with designers and experts who have helped you launch your campaign instead of a call center. This creates space for a far more effective communication and relationship. In spite of this support, these are time-consuming processes and keeping this in mind eConnect provides Agency Managed Services. This means that the entire email marketing program – from development to deployment – is taken care of by eConnect. The bottom line is that eConnect is an ideal product for businesses that want to create the right kind of impact with their email marketing campaign. The features and services being provided go a long way in making the process simpler and viable. n

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Fall 2012

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seo

Does Google’s Search Plus Your World Update Change How Internet Marketing Agencies Now Operate?

he influence of social media on search engine optimisation and internet marketing has grown exponentially in recent years, and our industry has undoubtedly had to evolve to account for that growth. This evolution we have undergone simply doesn’t mean informing clients about how social media engagement might influence rankings in the SERPs, but we have had to apply some fundamental changes to the way we operate as an agency. If we don’t acutely understand how social media can be leveraged for inbound marketing purposes, or reputation management, or how the search engines are using this information to personalise search results, then we risk being left behind in the rapidly changing searchable web ecosystem. This need to understand the impact of social and personalisation was exemplified earlier this year when Google rolled out their Search Plus Your World (SPYW) update for users of Google.com. SPYW utilised the social graph of the Google Plus network to integrate personal results, Google Plus profiles and ‘People and Page’ suggestions directly into the SERPs. The personalised results enable signed-in users to find information, which Google deemed to be relevant specifically to them, by using posts or pictures that have been shared by their connections on Google Plus. The ‘Profiles’ now appearing in the SERPs suggest accounts on Google Plus that they might be interested in following based on their search query. The ‘People and Pages’ suggestions are similar, helping users find the profiles of influential people, brands or companies on G+ who are related to a certain topic or area of interest. This blend of personalised and social search is something that Google seem completely committed to, and it really serves to

highlight the importance of offering integrated web marketing services. It’s not just the organic SERPs that are affected by the Universal search results that Google now shows, PPC is also impacted. For example, the space to the right of the organic results that was once reserved for PPC ads is now given to the Google Plus ‘Suggested People and Pages’ results. SPYW also means that G+ brand pages can be connected with their AdWords accounts, meaning that all the +1s that have been accrued by the AdWords account will be accredited to the corresponding Google Plus page. There is even the possibility to blend SEO and PPC efforts in campaigns by using natural search to rank for certain products and services, then utilising the PPC adverts to highlight reasons why shoppers should click and convert. Again, the signs point to integrated web services, and a holistic internet marketing campaign, rather than focusing purely on SEO, PPC, or social media marketing individually. The principles that Google’s +1 button, G+ and SPYW are founded on are solid. Content recommended or shared by people we know or trust is likely to be more relevant to us than content shared by strangers. I think this summarises the importance of social media marketing for search marketing campaigns – the most successful online businesses aren’t strangers to their customers. We can trust them. We know the content they share is relevant and therefore valuable. We can rely on them to be trustworthy. These are the values that internet marketing agencies need to strive to implement into campaigns for their clients.

For example, we have known for some time now that Google and Bing are both influenced by social media activity. Google’s Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, has confirmed this in the past, as well as stating that Google also look at the quality of a social user. In this way then, social media engagement is comparable to link building in that the quality of the users (how many followers they have and how much they usefully contribute etc.) who share a piece of content is just as important as the quantity of users that share it. Also, like link building, social media marketing is reliant upon building relationships, both with industry influencers and with potential customers or clients. If we can use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the other social networks to display passion and knowledge for an industry, we can build trust and make it more likely they positively endorse us or our clients via their social accounts. Encouraging people to share your content, or recommend a business through one of their social media accounts is a concept central to SMM success. At Click Consult we recently ran a test where we monitored the percentage of users visiting our clients’ sites who were also signed into Facebook at the time. We monitored traffic to both B2B targeted websites and B2C targeted sites from a range of different industries, so the results we generated were as natural as possible. The results made for interesting reading, and we found that on average nearly a third of traffic coming to our client websites was signed into a Facebook account. If we were able to get even half of that traffic to ‘Like’ a page, or Tweet about the services on offer, then that would increase the social outreach of our clients vastly, and it could make a huge difference to

Visibility

Fall 2012

This leaves one question – where does social go from here? I think agencies need to treat social engagement like we would treat any other form of conversion, be it a product purchase or a newsletter. From the moment a visitor enters a website, we need to be giving them reasons why they should endorse that site, on their social media profiles. The influence of social media on the search rankings is only likely to increase in the coming years, and it’s something search marketing agencies need to factor in to all the strategies they build. So, review your existing privacy policies, ensure that your company is working towards creating the best policies it can for your end users and reach out to industry experts who are working to make implementation “privacy in apps” policies that are fair to all and easier for business owners.

Matt Bullas is the founder and managing director of Click Consult, a leading UK-based search marketing agency and its specialist search engine optimisation division, SEO Consult. Established in 2003, Click Consult employs 95 internet marketing professionals and has over 350 SEO and PPC clients across every major industry, providing a comprehensive range of search marketing services. Click Consult’s brands include optimization.co.uk, searchengineoptimisation.co.uk, searchengineoptimization.co.uk, linkbuilding. co.uk, content.co.uk and seoconsult.com.au.

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However, the importance of embracing social media and result personalisation extends beyond SPYW.

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Blog: www.socialaxcess.com Fall 2012 | Visibility | 37

A Guide to Understand App Tracking in

the Mobile Space

Part Two: Tracking conversions and solving download lag

By Michael Dewhirst

In his last piece, Michael Dewhirst, CTO at StrikeAd, discussed numerous problems which need to be addressed in the mobile advertising world, looking particularly at the shift away from UDIDs, and back towards the old veteran, the cookie, for tracking mobile app downloads. But here he takes it one step further, and examines the benefits of using cookies as opposed to UDIDs, particularly regarding the download lag often encountered with apps, and how cookies can address this issue. As well as being able to track downloads, advertisers also want to know what happens afterwards. Just think – if a user goes to a website, do the developers of that website want to know which parts of the site the user uses most and how? Of course they do! That way they can work out which parts of the web site are most useful, make them better, add to them and so on. It’s the same situation with the app developers, except that often this information is not collected and those installed apps out there are in a ‘black box’. But app developers do want to know which parts of the app are most used and make them better.

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The solution is to use the same code inside the app that is used for tracking the download, to also record various events such as registrations, game level play starts, completions, etc. This ability is a reality and a solution now and the StrikeAd app tracking SDK does all this and more. The StrikeAd app reporting solution can even pass data into third party analytics packages such as Omniture so it can be examined and analyzed there, together with other tracking data, allowing all reporting to be viewed in one place. As well as collecting and reporting this data, the other challenge is collecting huge volumes of it and aggregating it into reports, which can be viewed in many different combinations. For example, you could pull out a report that would tell you “how many iPhone users in London during lunch time on Sunday completed a level” or “how many new issues of the magazine were purchased in the app in New York during a particular week” and so on. All in real time. Imagine the data that needs to be processed for this, bearing in mind that Angry Birds, for example, has been downloaded more than 500M times across the globe.

This sort of data is pretty standard on the web, but in the app world it’s actually quite new.

Dealing with the Download Lag The other thing to bear in mind is that downloads are just like other conversion events and can happen sometimes days after the click.

Picture this: You see a banner for some exciting new app. You click on it and this event is recorded. You end up in the app store, download the app and then turn your phone off as you get on a plane before you get a chance to launch the app.

You then forget about the app. You get off the plane, go about your business, and days pass. Finally – days later – you see the app and launch it. Since many current solutions on the market will not try and sift through days of UDID data – as there could be billions of records to process – the above situation will not be

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accounted for, and whichever media buyer ran the ad will not be attributed to having driven the download. On first look this is good for the agency and advertiser, since it means fewer downloads you have to pay for. However, if you look deeper, all it means is that the statistics will be incomplete. Potentially productive inventory is not being re-targeted, there are fewer downloads than there could be in the long run, and CPD stays relatively high, due to the long lag between the click on the banner and the launch of the app. Until you’ve launched it – nobody knows you have it Don’t forget, the app only “wakes up” for the first time and starts to do anything when it is first launched after the download on the device. Until you’ve started it at least once, it is asleep on your phone, like a new Sky Box you just bought that’s still in its cardboard box that hasn’t yet been unwrapped or plugged in. With a cookie approach it doesn’t matter how many days the app lays dormant, as the information is kept in the cookie – on the users’ device – and you can attribute downloads which may have happened days ago extremely easily. There is no need to sift through data on the servers, trying to match up UDIDs, since the cookie and the tracking data is stored on the device.

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The ‘Post-View’ Download Post-view conversions are an extremely common approach in online advertising and the process has been around for years. It consists of attributing a conversion such as a purchase, form fill – to a banner view, rather than a click. In mobile, however, this is still not very common, even in mobile web campaigns. In fact, for the mobile app industry it is a quantum leap in the future. With an app, the post view experience would be something like: You see an ad for some exciting new app a few times (and a cookie is set to record this). You never click on the banner but you decide to have a look at the app later on. You go to the app store or Android Market, find the app, read the overview, download it.

However, it is actually in the advertisers’ direct interest to take those post view conversions into account, since the media buyer would then be able to optimize them. The result to the advertiser would be lower CPA/CPD and more downloads – all very worthwhile benefits! In turn it would allow for lower CPA/CPD to be commanded in the market, perhaps $0.20 - $0.30 cents instead of the current $1.00-$2.00.

Adoption from all Parties As I stressed in my first piece about mobile app tracking, it’s clear that there are in fact many solutions out there which can make mobile app advertising much more successful and cost effective, but it will take the triumvirate of the advertiser, agency and media to adopt them. Without all three of these parties understanding the options available and deciding to utilize them, the industry will not move forward – or at least not easily and not quickly.

The app starts, pops up a browser, the cookie in step one is read and the attribution occurs. The trouble is, even though the above solution is technically feasible right now, many advertisers and agencies will not currently consider such a download attribution process. When downloads are sold and bought on a cost per download basis, it is in the interest of the person fitting the bill to pay for as few as possible, whilst getting the supplier to generate as many as possible, arguing that they did not truly do so.

Michael Dewhirst is a veteran senior IT professional, entrepreneur and a pioneer in the mobile industry having worked in the sector since the early WAP days of 2000. Michael began his career in high tech development roles with British Aerospace, Deutschebank and JP Morgan, and worked on the launch of Vodafone Live! in 2002. Prior to joining StrikeAd, Michael was CTO of The Daily Mail Digital Property Group, driving the development of their real estate portals and apps, including an augmented reality property search mobile app. In 2003 Michael founded DevzeroG, a global advertising software company with clients such as News International, The Guardian and NTT and was sold to Adstream Pty in 2007. At StrikeAd Michael is responsible for all products, systems and integration with third parties.

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By Rob Laporte

Executive Summary

The Nofollow Meta-Tags Debacle

PageRank sculpting is the channeling of search engine spiders, indexing, PageRank, and other trust and authority assignations. It usually pertains to tactics within a single website domain, but some tactics can apply to a family of domains or sub-domains. SEO pros have been doing it successfully throughout the 2000s. It is much more than the justly discredited nofollow meta-tag sculpting. The emergence of the canonical tag in 2009 changed best practices for synchronizing PageRank sculpting tools. PageRank sculpting is essential in SEO management of large, dynamic websites, and can be helpful in smaller websites undergoing redesigns. This article clarifies which tools and combination of tools channel spidering and indexing and circulate PageRank and “TrustRank.” Seasoned SEO pros can skip to “PageRank Sculpting Tools” below.

Around 2007, SEO pros debated the effectiveness of applying nofollow tags to links within a single website in order to funnel PageRank to the best content. Many SEO pros adopted the practice, but then in 2009 Google’s Matt Cutts dropped the bomb that the tactic does not work – and did not work for about a year prior to Matt’s announcement. The nofollow tactic and the debate about it diverted attention from several other crucial ways to channel PageRank effectively. Mr. Cutts himself noted this importance, being sure to distinguish PageRank sculpting from the bogus nofollow sculpting. (For more on this, see http:// searchengineland.com/pagerank-sculpting-isdead-long-live-pagerank-sculpting-21102.)

Envision PageRank Sculpting The selection and sequence of PageRank sculpting tools varies according to each website’s technology, information architecture, and budget, so a general understanding will help you to arrive at solutions specific to your website.

Let’s use the metaphors of liquid gold and a genealogical chart. Picture your website’s organization in the form of a family genealogical chart where a single page is a breeding couple and children are connected by horizontal lines and some breed more pages as you go down the vertical lines. Every connecting line is a little pipe, and the home page has a bucket into which the liquid gold of PageRank is poured. Some of the families and individuals in this tree are brilliant and beautiful--the hope and promise of your bloodlines and nation--and are worth investing in so that they can return benefit to everyone. Sadly, some of the offspring are loafing crack addicts with little (content) to offer. Sure, we should and someday we will put those individuals in rehab (add good content to those “thin” pages), but right now

we have to distribute that liquid gold to the most productive people in the family tree so that overall prosperity is maximized. With the returns on those investments, we can help the weaker members.

(For an overview of CMS-SEO, see VisibilityMagazine.com/internet_marketing_ magazine/previous_issues/html/december-2007 and VisibilityMagazine.com/disc-inc/ rob-laporte/cms-and-database-seo-guide).

So, PageRank sculpting directs the flow of that liquid gold by using tools to open and close valves in the pipes of your website’s hierarchy.

It’s crucial to know, and frankly difficult to remember, which of the tools block or redirect spidering, keyword indexing, and PageRank. The rest of this article serves as a quick reference to help your team choose and coordinate PageRank sculpting tools.

By “spidering,” I refer to the search engine’s inclusion of a page in its SERPs (search engine results pages), whereas indexing goes further to include the page’s words in the keyword index. If a page is spidered but not indexed, the SERP has no text snippet and is unlikely to appear for keyword searches as opposed to “site:” searches. Henceforth, I use “PageRank” to also encompass trust and authority signals. I focus on Google. Bing, Yahoo and others may treat some of the tools a little differently, but because the tools can only be aimed at all search engines, you should deploy the tools for Google.

PageRank Sculpting Tools All search marketing tools are like the tools of wood sculpting: without the experience and talent of the artist, even the best tools are worthless. Likewise, the most talented and inspired artist lacking tools will produce one ugly duck. PageRank sculpting uses standard tools in a combination and sequence that varies according to each website’s technology, information architecture, and budget. These tools are: 1. The robots.txt file 2. 301 redirects 3. Canonical meta-tags 4. Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” 5. The noindex meta-tag 6. X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directive 7. XML sitemaps 8. The nofollow meta-tag 9. Advanced and less essential tools (perhaps for a future article here) include cache controls, last-modified headers, the unavailable_after X-robotstag, and a few others. In addition to these tools, many of the standard rules of CMS-SEO apply to PageRank sculpting.

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The robots.txt File • Excluded pages are often spidered (not always excluded from the SERPs). • Excluded pages are not indexed. • PageRank may “leak” to excluded pages. • PageRank does not pass through excluded pages. Although this simple and imperfect tool is generally not recommended for PageRank sculpting now, it can be used alone to make big improvements quickly. If your time or budget is very constrained, or you need to show

quick results before getting funding for more improvements, you can often begin with the robots.txt file. Remember that if a section or page is the only one with links to content that you do want placed well in the search engines, then don’t exclude that page or section via the robots.txt file. Sample application: A website has multiple directory paths and URLs to end pages. In the robots.txt file, exclude all but the most important directory path or two. True, PageRank may leak to the first page of every excluded directory path, but you avoid vast PageRank dilution via many differing URL paths to end pages.

301 Redirects • Source pages are not spidered (are always excluded from the SERPs). • Indexing of the source page is replaced by indexing of the destination page. • PageRank is passed to destination pages, though if the source page is on an external website, then probably not 100% is passed (I estimate 85% as a rule of thumb). Only rare and special situations merit using other redirects, like 302, JavaScript, and the deprecated and very risky meta-refresh. These other redirects are beyond the scope of this article. It is unclear whether 301s pass 100% of PageRank even when source and destination are within the same website, but I assume that over 95% is (this topic could occupy an entire article). Suffice it all to say that 301s are usually the best way to do redirects, and several common situations require them, like site redesigns with URL changes, and domain and sub-domain changes.

The Canonical Meta-tag • Source pages are spidered and are not always excluded from the SERPs, but of course destination pages get much more preference. • Indexing of the source page is usually replaced by indexing of destination page, though Google does compare content and reserves the right to not honor this directive if, for example, the source page is too different from the destination page. • My research reveals that nobody really knows to what extent PageRank is passed from source to destination, and Google does

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Google prefers that you have a viewall page, while appreciating cases where a view-all page is poor usability, as when too many items slow download.

not make this clear either. • PageRank is generally consolidated from the source page(s), as in product pages that are identical except for size or color, into the destination page, though a little PageRank may stay with source pages rather than pass to destination pages, certainly if Google disregards this directive. • If the source page has enough PageRank, the page’s links are followed by the spiders. • Whereas neither search engines nor humans see the source page of a 301 redirect, humans continue to see the source page of a canonical “redirect.” The canonical meta-tag is sometimes called the “soft 301 redirect”; it works like a 301 but less absolutely. Given that the search engines see and assess both the source and the destination pages, one wonders whether the source page may keep a little PageRank or at least appear in search results when the search pertains to the small part of the source page that is unique relative to its destination page. That is, if pages about a gold-plated pen with various colors of ink have canonical tags pointing to the black ink page, would a search for that pen’s exact name and the phrase “blue ink” produce a top ranking for the blue ink pen, even though the canonical tag points to the black ink pen? I would think so, given all of the above. If so, one gets the dual benefit of consolidating PageRank on the destination or “canonical” page, while still allowing the source page to appear for searches highly specific to it. Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” and View-All Pages

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• Where a view-all page does not exist, all previous-next pages are spidered and included in the SERPs, with the first page most likely to appear in the SERPs. • Where a view-all page exists, previous-next pages are spidered but are much less likely than the view-all page to appear in the SERPs. • Where a view-all page does not exist, all previous-next pages are indexed and can appear in the SERPs for searches relevant to each page, with preference on the first page of the series. • Where a view-all page exists, all previousnext pages are indexed, but the view-all page is much more likely to appear in the SERPs. • Where a view-all page does not exist, PageRank of previous-next pages is averaged and applied equally to all pages. • Where a view-all page exists, PageRank is consolidated from the previous-next pages into the view-all page. • In all cases, all pages’ links for spidering are consolidated as though all pages are one, and PageRank is passed accordingly (if there’s enough initial PageRank to encourage more spidering and indexing). For more about this important topic, begin with http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-andrelprev.html.

The noindex Meta-tag • Spidering is not blocked, but over time the page should disappear from SERPs, despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary (probably due to timing of implementation relative to indexing). • Indexing is blocked of course. • Links will pass PageRank to the excluded page, wasting PageRank that is kept to that excluded page, but most of that PageRank can pass to pages linked from the excluded page, and the “follow” tag may help this pass-through. The above synopsis averages the uncertain and contradictory views among even the best SEO minds. However, opinion is quite unanimous that this tag is preferable to the robots.txt exclusion in most cases. Google seems to concur: “To entirely prevent a page’s contents

from being listed in the Google web index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag. As long as Googlebot fetches the page, it will see the noindex meta tag and prevent that page from showing up in the web index (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/ answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710).

X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header Directive This tag behaves like the noindex tag above. It is best for non-HTML content, like images or pdfs, which of course can’t have the noindex tag put in them. However, this can be used for HTML pages, and one major advantage is that you can program regular expressions in the .htaccess file in order to create site-wide exclusion rules efficiently. For example, to exclude all pdf files: <Files ~ “\.pdf$”> Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow” </Files> For more about this tag, see https://developers. google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/ docs/robots_meta_tag

The nofollow Meta-tag • Pages linked to by a nofollow page or link are not spidered, unless, as is very often the case, the pages are linked to from any other pages or links without the nofollow tag. • Pages linked to by a nofollow page or link are indexed, unless the only link to the page – from anywhere on the web, in your website, or in your XML sitemap – is in the page containing your nofollow tag. • PageRank is not passed through nofollow pages or links. But again, if any other links without the

nofollow tag link to the destination page, that page will receive PageRank from those links. • The PageRank of a page with nofollow tags is “leaked” as though the nofollow tag did not exist. That is, PageRank to be passed on is divided by the number of outbound links, regardless of whether some of the links have nofollow tags. This fact was Matt Cutts’ bomb I referred to at the beginning of this article. The above four bullet points show just how weak this tool is for PageRank sculpting. Generally, this tool is useful only if coordinated with one or more of the other tools.

Orchestrating PageRank Sculpting Instruments Choosing and coordinating the best PageRank sculpting tools for your particular website, and avoiding conflicts among the tools, is probably the most demanding and brainy job in SEO. There’s a need for an article or ebook that

shows various implementation scenarios and pitfalls. Meanwhile, a good primer on avoiding conflicts is seomoz.org/blog/ robot-access-indexation-restrictiontechniques-avoiding-conflicts. The search engines may change some rules or become better at dealing with sites that have weak or faulty PageRank sculpting, but usually such changes will be backward compatible. Therefore, PageRank sculpting, like its parent categories of CMS-SEO and technical SEO, is an investment where you “write once, and profit in perpetuity.” n

Rob Laporte is founder and President of DISC, Inc., which has specialized in SEO and SEM since 1997. Rigorously focused on ROI, DISC has clients worldwide, of all types and sizes. DISC offers SEO, PPC and trusted feed management, social media consulting, conversion rate optimization, SEO’d site design and build, and SEO training. www.2disc.com, rob@2disc.com, 413-584-6500.

XML Sitemaps • Included pages are spidered, and so too are pages not in the sitemap (if CMS-SEO is healthy). • Of course pages are indexed, and so too are ones not listed in the sitemap. • XML sitemaps do not pass PageRank, so if they are the only means of Google discovering your pages, those pages likely will rank poorly. This is why it is wrong to consider XML sitemaps a means by which to avoid having to produce good CMS-SEO. • XML sitemaps at best reinforce the deployment of the other PageRank sculpting tools; in itself this is a very weak tool. For example, be sure to exclude from the XML sitemap the source pages in canonical redirects. XML sitemaps merely suggest to search engines what pages to index. In large websites that don’t have enough PageRank to convince a search engine to devote the resources to index the entire website, the XML sitemap can guide spidering and indexing to the most important (content-rich, profitable) pages. Many CMSs and ecommerce systems come with an automatic XML sitemap generator which you can click on to activate, but many of these generators don’t obey your robots.txt file and few if any will incorporate your implementation of the other PageRank sculpting tools. In such cases, you have to manually edit your XML sitemap.

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conversion optimization

vendor spotlight Company Owners Josh Dalton and Chad Heath

Contact Information

alue Creation Strategies. Many marketing agencies struggle bridging the gap between the implementation of a client’s internet marketing strategy and the realization the client’s financial goals. This usually stems from a fundamental business misunderstanding, or a not so obvious misconception of a problem the client hopes the internet marketer will help solve. The reality is that outside agencies sometimes confuse a legitimate problem with one of its symptoms. The unfortunate truth is that a lot of time spent solving the symptoms of a problem rarely ever helps solve the client’s real problems. At Netmark, our marketing teams work seamlessly with our clients to ensure both their website and business goals are progressing. We know it’s up to us to earn our client’s business each month. That is why we don’t narrowly limit our focus to the common, but sometimes less meaningful metrics, like a client’s search engine rankings or monthly website traffic (we consider these symptoms of an underlying problem). We know and understand the “real reasons” a company seeks out the services a firm like ours, even if the client doesn’t fully understand it at the time. It’s on this end that we make sure each of our marketers is business savvy, goal oriented, and ROI driven. Agile Marketing Techniques. Today’s consumer is evolving more rapidly than ever before in recorded history. This alone doesn’t usually create lot of concern, but coupled with the constantly changing search algorithms, advanced internet marketing strategies can really get petty tricky, even for a top notch agency. It’s for this reason our marketers create strategies that help our clients to be nimble, no matter how big they are. This helps them to better meet the needs and demands of those they call customers, or soon hope to call customers. Those that don’t understand this concept often get left behind wondering where everyone else went. n

Corporate Offices Netmark, LLC 1930 Woodruff Avenue Idaho Falls, ID 83401 Local Number: 208-522-1016 Toll Free Number: 800-935-5133

Services Offered Netmark is an interactive marketing agency with specialties that include: search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, conversion rate optimization, customer value maximization, social media marketing, and reputation management. Netmark also provides website development, specialty programming, and complex designs.

Customer Profile What we at Netmark refer to as a traditional customer has changed a lot over the past three years. In 2009 our team began developing several technologies that allowed us to collect and save internet marketing related data from around the web. These technologies have since spawned two different types of customers for Netmark: (1) subscribers; and (2) data buyers. Despite these new customer categories, our traditional customers, organizations that hire Netmark to provide fullservice interactive marketing, still make up more than 50% of our business income.

Mission Statement Netmark endeavors to help organizations world-wide create value through the use of science, information and technology, strategic marketing, business acumen, and common sense strategies.

Client List • • • • • • • • • • •

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Superior Threads Headsets Direct Patios USA (Fire House Casual Living) Puritan Life Select Quotes HMHO Law Sugar Hill Nursery Dayspring Famco Look Love Send Rubbish Works

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Conversion Optimization Delivers Big in a Results-Driven World

n today’s competitive online environment, results matter. Here’s how digital marketers are boosting conversion rates by up to 91.4% - and that’s just the beginning.

The online marketing landscape has changed significantly. Only 5 years ago, e-mail marketing was in its heyday, PPC was all the rage, the behemoth that would be social media was just emerging, SEO was reaching its climax, and case studies and whitepapers were as good as gold. Today, the online marketing landscape is vastly different and, like many marketers, you might be asking yourself whether you’ve maxed out your current marketing strategies.

Online Media Is Getting Old, Fast It’s becoming more difficult to get positive returns from today’s common tactics. Consider this: • E-mail response rates are down • PPC costs continue to rise • SEO is backfiring (think Panda and Penguin) • Facebook has lost its luster • Content marketing is burdened by high cost and reader fatigue

The landing page was considered to be good at converting visitors into leads, but Trafford knew it must be possible to get more conversions out of their client’s paid search investments to demonstrate the power of online marketing. In order to improve the conversion rate, Trafford decided to embark on a testing and optimization strategy, which included some of the following tactics:

Conversion Optimization Requires Controlled A/B/n Split Testing A controlled test is set up to include a “control” sample that is tested against a variety of “challenger” samples in order to find the best performing “champion.” It can also be called the “championchallenger” approach. It is used as a strategy to continuously improve all online marketing assets such as banner ads, emails, landing pages and even entire websites. Organizations using this strategic approach are achieving significant and continuous improvements in their conversion rates for lead generation, subscriptions, sales and revenue.

As these channels have matured and the novelty worn-off, marketers are left asking, “What’s next?” Regardless of which tactics you use to drive traffic, to remain competitive, you need to get the most value out of your marketing investment. You need to do more with the traffic you’re already attracting to your website and landing pages.

Conversion Optimization Creates Marketing Effectiveness That’s where conversion optimization comes into play. At its core, conversion optimization is about maximizing revenuegenerating engagement from all of your marketing touchpoints. That is why it’s gaining so much attention today. It allows marketers to get more return from all of their current investments in both inbound and outbound marketing. Not only that, with controlled conversion testing, you gain insights into your customer behavior, which can be applied to other marketing activities for even greater benefit. Take the example of Trafford Consulting (working on behalf of Green Tech Investments), a consumer lead generation company providing ethical investment advice. For years, they had been successfully driving traffic through traditional marketing tactics: PR, tradeshows and advertising in industry publications. They had also supplemented these offline efforts with paid search campaigns that directed traffic to a purpose-built landing page for “The Green Guide”, a free ethical investment report.

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seo Even more exciting is that companies that do the most testing are discovering hidden insights into customer behavior. They understand, with statistical confidence, how to motivate and facilitate their customer actions.

Conversion Optimization Challenges Initially, when Trafford began their conversion optimization testing, they tested for button colors, headlines and copy tweaks, but the changes in conversion rate were not significant. They had reached a plateau in the improvement they could make. They needed a reliable approach to understand what to test and why. They found that getting a big conversion rate lift required more than just tweaking and tuning – it required a conversion optimization strategy.

Utilizing a Structured Approach Econsultancy’s 2011 Conversion Rate Optimization report found that companies who used a structured approach to conversion optimization were twice as likely to experience large improvements in conversion rates than those using less structured testing. A structured conversion optimization strategy defines how to prioritize website test opportunities, how to identify what to test, how to create hypotheses for each element being tested, how to structure tests for insight-generation, what technology to use, how to monitor and analyze the results, and how to resource and coordinate all these activities. It starts by developing a conversion optimization strategy to ensure: • Business goals are aligned with conversion goals • Web analytics insights are evaluated • Traffic-building strategies and tactics are coordinated • Advertised offers and calls-to-action are considered • Appropriate traffic volumes are in place for testing • Prospect segmentation is addressed • Conversion strategists, designers and copywriters are in place • Selected testing software is appropriate for the strategy Trafford worked with conversion rate experts at WiderFunnel to develop their conversion optimization strategy and run full-service tests for their landing pages.

Implementing a Strategy-Driven Test Plan The WiderFunnel team developed and fulfilled the test plan for each landing page including hypothesis development, wireframing, graphic design, copywriting and technical development. The WiderFunnel strategists used the LIFT Model to analyze the landing page and develop effective test hypotheses. In one test, the WiderFunnel team developed and tested 3 dramatically redesigned variations of The Green Guide landing page, which included wholesale changes to the design and copywriting approach. The strategists had determined in the conversion optimization strategy that beginning with a dramatic redesign A/B/n test, also called a “variable cluster” test, would be used in the initial round of testing, leading to multivariate testing in future test rounds. With a variable cluster test, where many variables are changed within each variation, significant conversion rate improvements could be realized faster.

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The Result: 91% Lead Generation Conversion Rate Lift The test results showed that the new Green Guide landing page converted 91% more visitors into leads. That meant that the company generated nearly double the number of sales leads from the same inbound and outbound marketing tactics, without spending more on advertising! What’s more, the insights gained during the initial testing projects were applied to other landing pages producing similar results.

Making Data-Driven Decisions When it comes to creative marketing assets such as landing pages, emails and websites, marketers are still making decisions based on gut-feeling alone. “If it looks good to me, then it must work for our customers,” is often the flawed perspective when it comes to creative. As Trafford and others are finding, however, is that putting creative to the test and making informed decisions about all elements on a webpage is the more reliable strategy. For example, the rotating home page, which seems to be the current status quo for “good website design” has actually be found to statistically reduce conversions. What about that “hero-shot” with smiling attractive people? Our research has found that it can reduce revenue compared with high-relevance copywriting in the same area. Many of these commonly held “best practices” are being disproven through testing.

Gaining Marketing Insights Gaining insights into your target audience is akin to finding a matching puzzle piece. Whether you’re just beginning to piece the picture together or have a comprehensive understanding of your audience, marketing insights derived from testing can add significant value to your overall digital marketing. Through ongoing testing, marketing teams are seeing patterns and trends with different colors, layouts, design, images and key value proposition messages. These findings can then be used over and over again throughout an organization’s marketing mix for effective results.

Tapping Into Expertise If your company is new to conversion optimization testing or have tried it and were disappointed with the results, find an external resource to give you a kick-start. Experienced conversion optimization strategists can help you avoid mistakes as well as develop the best testing structure for conversion rate improvements. So, review your existing privacy policies, ensure that your company is working towards creating the best policies it can for your end users and reach out to industry experts who are working to make implementation “privacy in apps” policies that are fair to all and easier for business owners. n

4 Tips to Keep Your Digital Marketing Ahead of the Curve

igital marketing is an increasingly more complex and competitive arena. With frequent changes to the space, confusion and a general lack of knowhow are common problems. Here are 4 tips to help you stay in front:

1. Know the metrics that matter. Every day there are millions of conversations happening online about your industry, your company, your competitors and general consumer themes and trends that influence consumer purchasing decisions. While specific success metrics may vary; in a B2C world, sales and revenue are most often the bottom line, and understanding the social pathway to purchase decisions has become a business necessity. ROI is always the million-dollar question, as Facebook and other social networks become increasingly important to a brand’s visibility. It is imperative that the company or agency understands how social media (the larger conversation or stories) and search can be converted into business drivers, and how connections can be quantified. Companies and brands must not only be able to monitor this data, but derive meaning and insight from it. This type of consumer intelligence is the reason why companies like Google and Facebook are so highly valued, because at the core, the more you as a marketer understand about your customer, the more likely you will be to communicate with them at the right time, with the right message - and ultimately drive sales. As online consumer behavior and technology evolve, the fundamentals remain the same.

2. Build Quality / Valuable Content Chris Goward is Co-Founder and CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization. His methods have helped clients improve their website lead generation and sales rates by up to 290% for clients such as Ebay, Epson, BabyAge.com, ColonialCandle.com, SAP, Alfresco, Outrigger Hotels, Google and many more. His WiderFunnel LIFT Model is taught at the Unversity of Eastern Michigan Conversion Optimization program. He is a regular speaker at conferences like PubCon, SMX, IMC, and Conversion Conference. His work has been published in Marketing Sherpa, Search Engine Watch, the Google blog, Search Engine Marketing Journal and DM News.

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You’ve heard it over and over since the dawn of digital, and for good reason; content is king. As search becomes more sophisticated for social algorithms, we must continue to adjust our content strategies. When we as marketers think about the content we push through social media

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platforms, we need to always consider how the consumer will connect with it. What timely keywords can you align your brand with? What keyword groups that you “own” can you insert into seasonal conversations? It’s important to create content that can facilitate connections between qualified leads and your products and services. So now you have relevant content. What next? Inserting your brand into the right conversations not only depends on having targeted content, but on presenting this content to the consumers in a way that is useful and easily actionable. Does your content link back to a specific landing page? Is it optimized for social sharing? 27 million pieces of online content are shared everyday;* make sure your content is among them. With an average industry target of 25% of all incoming traffic to your website being driven by social media, it’s paramount that your content strategy link all of your elements together. New product? Blog about it, create video content around it and syndicate all of this information.

3. Pay attention to cool things being done digitally by companies you respect Even if you have a premier internal marketing, public relations and tech team, it’s important to remember to take an occasional step back. An effective way to do this can be accomplished by looking at what other leaders are doing. Often times, adapting ideas from other industries, competitors and other digital marketing pros, can help push your brand ahead of the curve. If a brand can closely listen to others online and drill down to why they are seeing success, it can be a winning strategy to incorporate some of those fundamentals into your next “big digital idea.” Brands should also never underestimate leveraging what’s currently popular online. Campaign ideas like this need to be capitalized on quickly, but can be highly effective in seeing vastly increased online visibility.

4. Be early and relentless with Social Media Optimization (SMO) When people interact with your brand online, they do it on their terms, not yours. That’s why we not only have to identify the right content, but make it as visible as possible to a target audience, in order to generate qualified leads. The more your brand appears within your audience’s networks, the more likely they will “like,” trust, and do business with your brand. Bottom line, if you’re not visible, a competitor is sure to seize the opportunity. Social Media Optimization is a process to improve the effectiveness and visibility of your content – ensuring you are seen when your prospects and customers are interested in your product or service. By optimizing for technical and popularity components within each content element, brands typically see increased traffic referrals from social networks, higher engagement, and obtain valuable consumer data in the process. A new digital paradigm has emerged, with social now driving a significant percentage of referral website traffic, as well as impacting 30%+ of search ranking factors, making SMO a new business requirement. Much like the advent of search engine optimization, social media optimization can transform the online visibility of early adopters, and it’s important to embrace this new digital opportunity. An opportunity that, when executed correctly, can provide a competitive edge. n *AOL with Nielsen; April 28th, 2011; http:// corp.aol.com/2011/04/28/aol-researchcontent-is-the-fuel-of-the-social-web/

Jeffrey Herzog is CEO of ZOG Digital, a search & social marketing technology company in Scottsdale, AZ. Herzog is an award winning entrepreneur, and also founded iCrossing, the world’s largest independent digital agency, which was sold to Hearst Media in 2010.

Fall 2012

Visibility

Understanding the True Value

of Your Customers

WARNING! We’re going 100% geek now. We’ll now include time value of money theory into our LTV formula. Netmark has never before shared these formulas with the general public. You should STOP reading if your brain is already fried! (4) If you know your desired rate of return, you can calculate the net present value of a customer’s LTV:

Let’s say we form a company that sells widgets with the following information provided: • Contribution Margin per Purchase: $60.00 • Customer Repurchase Rate: 20% • Customer Referral Rate: 10% • Website Conversion Rate: 2.5%

By Josh Dalton

op executives are under an increasing amount of pressure from demanding shareholders to take company profits to new heights. In a desperate search for additional revenue opportunities, most executives dismiss their website as practical solution for increasing company sales and a vital tool for increasing their customer’s lifetime value (LTV). Even worse, those that do understand this opportunity often leave the planning and strategizing to designers, developers, and search engine optimizers, who rarely come with the expertise necessary to manage these types of projects. Because of the depth of knowledge these campaigns require, they’re best left to individuals with a lot of experience, plenty of business acumen, and a reasonable amount of common sense. These individuals have to understand how to increase the percentage of customers who make repurchases and refer other individuals, how to de-commoditize the company’s products and services, and how to effectively implement concurrent cross selling and up selling strategies. This can leave even the smartest executives scratching their heads, wondering why the website’s not performing as expected. This article outlines a process to incorporate “Conversion Value Maximization” techniques into your website and marketing strategy that will ultimately (1) generate more value from every customer interaction; (2) increase both the number and frequency of customer repurchases; and (3) incentivize customers to mention your products and services to others (aka: word-of-mouth advertising) “A Rose By Any Other Name…” In William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Romeo states, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare includes this line to suggest that more than one word or phrase can be used to describe the same thing without changing its nature. This is also true of the words and phrases used to describe the process of increasing customer LTV. At Netmark, you’ll hear us refer to this process as “Conversion Value Maximization,” or sometimes “CVM” for short. Regardless of the name we use, we’re referring to the processes and techniques we use to generate additional value from visitors that make certain, predefined commitments while visiting a website.

number to know in 2012. We will explain why it’s so important that C-Level executives know this number in just a minute. But first, if you don’t know your customer’s LTV, Netmark has created five formulas you can use to calculate this important number: (1) The quick and dirty formula (requires minimal information, and is the most conservative estimate of your customer’s LTV):

(5) And finally, if you know your customer’s referral frequency (as measured by the average number of annual customer referrals), you can calculate an even more accurate customer LTV:

CVM Requires a Change in Mindset

The variation of formula #5 provided above assumes the customer’s referral frequency = the customer’s repurchase frequency. • Formula Key: • CM: Contribution Margin Per Customer Purchase • RPR: Customer Repurchase Rate • RR: Customer Referral Rate • AP: Annual Customer Purchases • CL: Customer Lifespan (measured in months) • DRR: Desired Annual Rate of Return • LTV: Lifetime Value It should be clear that the more you know, the more accurate your LTV estimate will be. Please note that these formulas make certain broad assumptions about your customers and their buying behavior. It’s important that you adapt these formulas to your own company in order to get an accurate customer LTV. It’s also important to consider your cash flow timing when forecasting a customer’s acquisition cost against LTV.

Don’t Know Your Customer’s LTV? Next to your website’s conversion rate, your customer’s LTV may be the second most important

Using this information, and formula #2 from above, we estimate a customer LTV of $83.33. Now let’s go one step further and calculate a website visitor’s LTV. To solve for this number, multiply the customer’s LTV ($83.33) by the website’s conversion rate (2.5%). We now have an estimated visitor LTV of $2.08. We’ve just established our spending limits for new customers and website visitors, $83.33 and $2.08 respectively. This means we can’t spend more than $2.08 to attract a website visitor and $83.33 to attract a customer. This is pretty important stuff to know, right? Now here’s the catch: In order to your spending limits, you will either need to improve your website’s conversion rate or increase your customer’s LTV, or both. In this article we’ll stay focused on customer LTV. For conversion rate strategies, refer back to the article we wrote for the summer 2012 edition of Visibility Magazine.

(2) If you know your customer’s repurchase rate (the % of customers who repurchase from your company) and referral rate (the % of customers who refer others to your company that make purchases), you can incorporate these values into your customer’s LTV:

(3) If you know your customer’s lifespan (as measured in months) and purchase frequency (as measured by the average number of annual customer purchases), you can calculate an even more precise customer LTV:

Why is Customer LTV So Important? So why is customer LTV so important? For starters, it establishes a company’s break-even amount for acquiring a single new customer. Coupled with a website’s conversion rate, it also establishes a company’s break-even amount for acquiring a single new website visitor. Let’s do an example to illustrate this point.

Conversion value maximization (CVM) strategies are not so much about getting the first sale, as they are about maximizing the value of a website visitor after making a certain, predefined commitment. For this article, we’ll refer to this commitment as a “sale” and those making this commitment as “customers.” It’s important to note that some CVM strategies can have an immediately impact on a customer’s value, while others can have an impact well into the future. Most companies we see today seem to have a culture that celebrates the first sale as a onetime victory. Once the sale is “closed” it’s onto the next person. This type of thinking can severally limit a company’s potential revenue and shows a lack of understanding of how revenue is generated for most companies. The first sale is really just the beginning. It’s a means to an end, but not the end itself—not even close. The first sale is an informationgathering opportunity to help you better position your products or services for future engagements with your customer. You’ve probably seen several e-commerce websites do this in order to make purchase recommendations during checkout. By leveraging the information collected during a visit to their website, these company’s are able to make smart recommendations to customers in hopes of increasing their website’s revenue-per-transaction. Are you using the information you collect from visitors to create value in a similar way? Are you gathering the right information during a visitor’s first engagement to ensure you are better positioned in the future? If not, we recommend you first create a process to collect this information before moving on to the following CVM strategies.

The Ten “R’s” of CVM Once you have the right information gathered, you’ll need a strategy to increase your customer’s LTV. Below are 10 techniques we use to generate

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Fall 2012

Visibility

more value from customers. We recommend you seriously consider each point if your company hasn’t already implemented a similar strategy. #1: Develop a Remarketing Strategy Meet with you top salesperson, your fulfillment department, and your front line customer service teams. Determine which techniques most effectively bring customers back to your website. #2: Increase the Amount of Revenue-Per-Transaction “Cross selling” (proactively selling complimentary products or accessories in conjunction with an initial purchase) and “up selling” (persuading customers to spend more for a higher valued product or service) are two effective ways to do this. #3: Incentivize Customer Repurchases There are several ways to incentivize customers to purchase again. As shown in the formulas above, we measure two specific repurchase metrics: • The percentage of overall customers that repurchase products or services. • The total number, or frequency, of purchases made by those same customers. • Repurchases naturally increase by reinforcing the customer’s reasoning behind their initial purchase and by reigniting the emotion created during the initial purchase. #4: Increase Customer Referrals Everyone knows that customer referrals are the highest qualified leads you can get. Why not incentivize customers to refer individuals back to your company as well as increase the frequency they do so, both online and offline? #5: Improve Customer Retention Rates Globalization has turned most products and services into commodities. No company is free of competition or price comparisons. So how do you combat this issue if you’re not the low cost leader? Without a patent, you can’t normally “de-commoditize” a product or service very effectively. By comparison, it’s easy to “de-commoditize” a customer RELATIONSHIP. This is usually done by increasing the value you offer customers by providing customized “relationship builders” that set your company apart. #6: Remove Purchasing Barriers Avoid tying the hands of your customers at all costs. Here are a couple of words to think about: OPTIONS, CHOICES, FLEXIBILITY, and VARIETY. Do you offer multiple solutions to help solve a customer’s problem, or does your company think everyone else should adapt to the one solution you offer? What about purchasing terms? These are just a few things to think about.

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#7: Increase Requests for Information A lot of companies don’t know how to collect information from their customers. We’ve found that this can be most effectively accomplished through customer engagement. Do you regularly communicate with your customers? Are you able to collect meaningful information as a result of those communications? Are you using that information to improve your customer’s LTV? #8: Reaffirm Original Decision to Buy Make your customers glad they purchased from your company. Has your company been honored with an industry award recently? Has an employee been interviewed or spotlighted in the news? Sharing this type of information reaffirms your customer’s original “buy decision” and builds trust for the future. #9: Reevaluate Price Points A different price point for a particular product or service can have either a positive or negative effect on company profits. Have you tried different price points on your products and services? If so, did you measure the overall impact on your company’s profits? #10: Reassess Your Conversion Value Maximization Strategy As they say, “There is nothing as constant as change”. Your industry, products, or services might cause you to reassess your CVM strategy regularly. Reviewing what you’re doing, how it’s working, making changes, and tracking the effect of those changes will ensure that your company continues to thrive and grow.

With Awareness Comes Change Most executives don’t have the luxury of coasting along without worrying about increasing profits and shareholder value. On the contrary, many executives are under more pressure now than ever before to keep these numbers rising. We’d like to encourage everyone not to underestimate the impact of conversion rate optimization and conversion value maximization. These two marketing methods can have a big impact on profits and shareholder value. By treating the first sale as an opportunity to collect information from your customer, you can begin formulating a strategy that leads to additional revenue and profits through future engagements. This is a paradigm shift for most companies. It requires the IT staff to quit thinking like an IT staff, and start thinking like the company owners. If you can successfully change this mindset, it will help your company to create and follow what we think are very common sense strategies that regularly lead a lot of companies to be very successful. n

Josh Dalton and Terry Hansen consult with companies all over the world to improve customer lifetime value. They are partners in Netmark.com, a top ranking internet marketing agency located in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

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interactive content

5 Ways Interactive Content Helps Publishers Pump Up Web Revenues

re you searching for ways to increase site traffic, time on site, unique visitors, and subscribers all with the goal of boosting site revenue? As you know, the way to do this is with great content—lots of it-- and interactive content is some of the best.

• Twitter users send 55 million Tweets per day, or 640 per second • Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months • Interactive content is shared 11 times more often than static content

But how exactly does this work? By moving people from passively consuming site content to actively engaging in a rich, interactive experience, you encourage them to spend more time on your site. And the longer they are on your site, the more likely they are to share their information; subscribe or register, refer others to your site, and return to your site on a regular basis. This in turn provides you with a great story- and the supporting data- to share with your advertisers.

Sources: Socialnomics.com, Digital Buzz, Website Monitoring.com, Pangea Media SnapApp

Here are five ways interactive content can increase your site revenue:

1. Interactive Content Can Increase Web Traffic Interactive content is one of the best ways to increase website traffic. Why is that? Because interactive content is the most likely to be consumed and enjoyed, bringing your audience back for more. And it is the most likely to be shared among social media channels… which are the most visited, fastest growing channels on the web. Consider these facts: • Over 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook…daily • Approximately one in every 13 people on earth are active Facebook users • The number of Twitter users increases by 300,000 every day

In a nutshell, social media networks are driving more web traffic than ever. The challenge for publishers, therefore, is to engage effectively on social sites and then drive fans and followers back to their websites. CRM specialists Get Satisfaction provides a clue on how to go about that: according to their research approximately 60 percent of consumers followed a brand for special offers or for interesting/ entertaining content and that 70 percent of those followers participated in a contest or sweepstakes.

2. Interactive Content Increases Time on Site According to research compiled from AOL, Nielsen and Marketing Profs, 53 percent of time spent on the Internet is directly attributable to content consumption – and 96 percent of what is consumed and shared does not link to a static website page. In other words, consumers are demanding interactive, digital content. To drive interactions and make your site “sticky,” you need to offer the content that today’s consumers are drawn to and enjoy sharing with others. Think humorous videos, entertaining games, and interactive quizzes or other applications. By offering consumers a reason to visit – and stay – on your site, you increase the likelihood of ad clicks. In fact, studies from the Journal of Advertising research show that the longer someone engages with site content, the more likely they are to click on ads or recall brands adjacent to that content. Cisco Systems made its PC World content interactive by incorporating quizzes about network

Consider a sweepstakes or contest for your social audience and use it to capture their information and drive them to your site. Media publisher powerhouse Martha Stewart used a sweepstakes to encourage 77% registration for its opt-in email list and a free print issue of Martha Stewart Living.

management. In general, interactive trivia quizzes have been shown to increase time on site by an average of 1:46 minutes. Compare this to research by CBS News which shows the average time of engagement/viewership for ads on a media site is only 15 seconds! 3. Drive On-Site Conversions Even though the online world offers unique opportunities to attract, engage, and interact with consumers, some basics hold firm. Precisely targeting an audience with a highly relevant offer is the best way to convert them from a browser to someone who is willing to exchange contact information. Sweepstakes and trivia quizzes, where people need to register to win or get their results, are one proven way to draw people in and get them to provide their information. And once you’ve got their attention, you can further qualify and cross-promote to them. For example, Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia ran a sweepstakes to drive web visitors and social traffic to the site of the NFL team, The Philadelphia Eagles. On the entry form, consumers could also opt-in to receive emails and special text messages from the Eagles. • 65 percent of the Eagles fans who entered the sweeps also opted-in for one or both of the additional communication channels. • For every person who shared the sweepstakes via social channels, the Eagles saw 38 new site visitors! • Philadelphia Eagles Facebook fans increased by 25 percent after running a sweepstakes. 4. Get Repeat Visits Businesses spend over $12 billion dollars a year to create digital and custom content that they can distribute online and through mobile channels. Even with that spending power, according to research by Marketing Profs, 45 percent of marketers surveyed feel they need to update their content more frequently.

And they’re right. Stale content leads to boredom and site abandonment. But fresh content encourages more consumption and longer visits. And the value is clear. Consider these ¬findings from Scout Analytics: • Occasional visitors to a publisher’s site (those that visit two to three times per month) have an average revenue potential of 5:1 compared to those who visit once (i.e., fl y-bys). • Regular visitors to a site (one to two times per week) have an average revenue potential of 10:1 compared to fl y-bys. • Subscribers or fans (visit the site more than two times per week) have an average revenue potential of 50:1 compared to fl y-bys.

Visibility

Fall 2012

Source: Marketing Profs with IAB & PW Publishers that can deliver the most predictable and targeted ad performance by virtue of superior traffic, rich user profiles and high ad conversions rates will command the highest ad premiums.

Hollywood Life – a publishing & entertainment company – creates three to five new quizzes per month and sees 70 percent visitor engagement on pages where a quiz is posted. Figment, an online community for teens and young adults interested in writing, uses dozens of Facebook quizzes to drive interaction and return visits.

A major news publisher embedded a series of trivia quizzes in an ad-unit promoting various Broadway shows. These interactive ads had the highest engagement of any ad they had ever run in that space-- by a whopping 448 percent!

5. Offer Your Advertisers Something Different In addition to all the data that you are now armed with when you pitch potential advertisers, including: a larger audience (reach), a more loyal audience

As a publisher, you know better than just about any other business how vital it is to engage your audience and keep them coming back for more. The beauty of the online world is that it offers a growing number of innovative ways to do just that –these five ways that interactive content can boost your revenues and the stories that I have shared with you here are proven methods for growing site traffic, boosting time spent on your site, and ultimately pumping up the revenues you drive through advertising. Give interactive content a try and see what it can do for your site. Visit snapapp.com to learn more about what customer engagement including Facebook sweepstakes and Facebook quizzes can do for your site. n

(subscribers and repeat visitors), a more understood audience (you have lots of insights and data on individual visitors), and more time on site, there is something else you can offer advertisers to ultimately boost your revenues. That is the chance to use the exact same types of interactive content that have been so effective for you.

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First the background: Advertiser dollars are being spent with increased scrutiny. Makes sense, advertisers want to know what they are getting for their money. No wonder there’s a trend toward pay-for-performance pricing (see chart below). This shows 62 percent of ad revenues in 2010 were performance-based deals.

Worried about coming up with fresh content? Polls and surveys are not only a terrific way to encourage interaction on your site, they also provide you with a wealth of insights that you can publish as original content – and remarket to your existing leads.

By providing advertisers with

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the tools and strategy to insert their messages in sponsored sections of your site that host interactive content, or by providing them with the opportunity to run quizzes, surveys and contests in ad units, you are providing them with higher value advertising opportunities. And the more they get out of the ad, the more they can justify spending on it.

Grow Your Ad Revenue with Interactive content

Seth Lieberman is the CEO of Pangea Media, developer of the SnapApp Marketing Platform. The SnapApp platform empowers brands, publishers and agencies to foster conversations across the web, social and mobile, that build brand affinity, connect, educate, entertain and drive sales. Under Seth’s leadership Pangea Media’s platforms have facilitated more than 300 million customer engagements.

Fall 2012

Visibility

seo

4 Keys to Achieving a Unified Approach to Content and SEO Strategies

uccessful search engine optimization (SEO) strategies increasingly require a complex array of specialized qualitative and quantitative skills. That means a one-size fits all approach to tackling big SEO problems is doomed to fail. The best SEO strategies evolve from intimate collaboration between content strategists and SEO practitioners and are built on a solid technical foundation. Before we look at the key ways to unify your content and SEO into one strategy, it helps to remember that, back in its infancy, SEO was very much a standalone, band-aid type discipline. In fact, it was just another thing you did to your Web presence, often as an afterthought. Now, SEO is a fully integrated part of your design and content strategy, and a consideration from the very beginning.

Optimize keyword discovery

At the beginning of a project, an SEO expert should run a keyword discovery process using a tool like WordTrackr and work with the content strategist to ensure the most appropriate and efficient keywords and phrases are used on each page. However, you don’t just want the words and phrases that people are using for search. You also want ones that have the least competition. Once a list of potential keywords is generated, it is important to judge them against the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). The KEI measures the popularity of the words and terms and the amount of competition you’ll have from other people using that term for optimization. Choose the words and terms with high KEI to get the best bang for your buck. The SEO expert and content strategist then should go through the list together and choose the terms that have high KEI. The terms are the most appropriate in describing the topic at hand, easiest for the writer to incorporate into the copy, and the most relevant. This means they will drive users to the content where those keywords and terms are used. Words and terms with highest KEI are typically used on highly-detailed pages. More generic and therefore slightly lower KEI words and terms are used at the landing page level. The goal around this strategy is to drive people from search engines to pages that are more content-heavy and detailed. Long-tail keywords often have a higher KEI

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because they are more focused and detailed. They can be highly effective from an SEO perspective since people are using them more frequently during search. For example, instead of typing in “nearest CVS,” they will type in “Where is my nearest CVS?” From a content perspective, you’ve got to be very selective when using long-tail keywords and phrases. Using these keywords and phrases affects your content style and therefore has to be consistent with not only the overall brand, but the messaging and tone of that page. The content strategist and SEO expert again will go through the list together and decide what makes sense. If a search term posed as a question gets high KEI, it is a good idea to replicate that question on the page.

Embrace user-generated content

Believe it or not, user-generated content is the holy grail of content strategy. Because people will naturally use the language to write words or phrases that they would use in search, it is automatically optimized for search engines. Discovering this can prove to be big a-ha moment, significantly expanding the scope of your content strategy. Users are very willing to provide additional context and content around a subject. Look for the places users are more likely to have a two-way conversation, whether it’s your blog, a forum, feedback, or comments to start adding user-generated content to your own content. Pay attention to the conversations they are having elsewhere, and replicate that on your site. You can also mine your social feed and highlight items from your Facebook page, Twitter stream, Google+ account, etc. on your website to get the SEO benefit.

wins, the copy won’t be as optimized as it can be. If SEO wins, the copy will be compromised because it might not be on-strategy with voice, tone, and overall brand. The obvious benefit of this approach is better content that adheres to tone and messaging and is appropriate to the content strategy. A secondary benefit involves developing professionals who gain insight into both sides of the coin. SEO experts become good content strategists and vice versa. Each group then has a deep understanding of the core requirements of both content and SEO.

Achieve superior results with tools and techniques

A content matrix is the most effective technique we use at Siteworx. When used together with WordTrackr, they help our clients achieve superior search results. A content matrix is a page-level strategy that maps content and keywords for each page. The content specialist feeds the SEO expert with the context of each page. Then the SEO expert adds the appropriate keywords and phrases. The SEO expert will usually consult on headings to ensure they are optimized as well. Once the matrix is complete, the SEO expert reviews it for best SEO practices, and the content specialist then has an outline for writing copy for each page. Some Web content management (WCM) systems allow you to customize the content that is delivered based on keywords or terms that are used in in-bound search queries. That customized content delivery based on search is typically underutilized on most sites and can prove to be incredibly effective at driving key metrics like time on site, number of conversions, page views, etc. n

Emphasize collaborative teams

A collaborative Web team is a must for a unified strategy. At Siteworx, SEO, content, user experience design, and visual design specialists all work together to ensure best practices from each discipline are represented. Nothing happens in a silo, and that collaboration provides huge benefits for your users. When you don’t use this approach, you end up with parallel word streams and content creation, resulting in a conflict or override. If content

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Giovanni Calabro has over 13 years of experience leading interactive research and design efforts for a wide range of business sectors. At Siteworx, Giovanni leads the design team responsible for user experience strategy, brand analysis, search engine optimization (SEO), search and analytics integration. With clients as diverse as MTV Networks, NPR, and JPMorgan Chase, Giovanni provides expert strategy and advice in the areas of stakeholder and staff alignment and new publishing models for emerging platforms such as social media and mobile channels.

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urphy By David M

ny business that keeps half an eye on advances in technology to find out how it might help, or indeed harm, their business, has probably heard, or read, someone, somewhere, urging them to go mobile. The problem for many businesses, however, is understanding exactly what going mobile entails. As a marketing tool, the mobile phone is an incredibly versatile device. Unlike your PC, the modern smartphone knows not only where you are, but in which direction you are facing. It can take photos and videos, and send them anywhere in the world, instantly. It can help you find the nearest branch of your favourite shop or restaurant chain. It can enable you to respond to marketing messages you see in other channels, such as print, TV or outdoor. It can even enable you to compare the price of something you’re interested in buying in one store with the price elsewhere, simply by scanning the barcode on the packaging. So here are a few tips to help you get started on your mobile journey…

Seek Permission When you consider how personal a device the mobile phone is, it’s easy to see how powerful

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despite the slightly older, more female demographic of its core customer, at the last count, it had over 1m people opted in to receive marketing messages on their mobile phones. In fact, Marks & Spencer recently stated that its mobile CRM programme and mobileoptimised site had helped it increase its sales via the mobile channel by 300 per cent over the past two years.

Start with the Strategy could be as a oneto-one marketing tool. But also, how much damage you could do to your brand if you abuse that power. So the watchword for anything you do on mobile, particularly in terms of messaging to customers and prospects, is permission. If you have access to customers’ mobile phone numbers through their dealings with you and suddenly start sending them messages, you’ll have a lot of unhappy customers. If, on the other hand, you remind those customers that you have their mobile number, or ask them to give it to you, and ask their permission to use it to send them relevant, targeted marketing messages, you will be pleasantly surprised at how many of them say yes. This is a strategy that the retailer, Marks & Spencer, has adopted. And

Augmented Reality, Near Field Communications, location-based services – if there’s one thing mobile isn’t, it’s boring. But you should resist the temptation to get carried away with the technology and all the whizz-bang things you can do in the mobile channel. Start the same way you would if you were evaluating anything else, by identifying your objectives. Are you looking to win new customers, keep your existing ones happy and loyal. Or do you see mobile as a transactional channel, making it easier for your customers to buy form you on the go? Ask yourself these questions, then look at the different ways, if any, in which mobile might be able to help you achieve them. That way, you’ll end up with something of real value to your

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customers, rather than a fancy app that does some amazing things, but is no use to anyone. That said, let’s look at some of the ways you can use mobile, if they fit your strategy.

Build a Mobile Website If you have an analytics package on your website, it should be able to tell you the proportion of visitors arriving at your site on a mobile device. For the average UK retail brand, 12 months ago, that figure was around 6 – 7 per cent. Currently, it’s running at around 15 – 20 per cent and growing, and the trend is not confined to retail brands. In fact, according to the research firm, comScore, 8 million people in the UK access the internet from their smartphone every day. If you haven’t yet built a mobile version of your website, take a look at it on your mobile phone. No matter how smart your phone, you’ll find it’s not a particularly pleasant experience. Now try newlook.com, marksandspencer.com or debenhams.com on your phone to see the difference for yourself. A mobile-optimised site enables your customers or prospects to engage with your brand when they have a few minutes to kill. If they’re not engaging with you because the experience is not a good one, chances are, they will engage with a competitor instead. As Jay Altschuler, director of global media innovation at Unilever puts it, when asked why he has put so many of Unilever’s brands on mobile: “We just go where our customers are.” Google estimates that by next year, there will be more web traffic via mobile, than via PCs. Yet despite this, only 15 per cent of companies currently have a mobile-optimised site.

The Power of Apps Apps are wonderful things, or at least they can be. But with almost a million apps in the two major app stores (iTunes for Apple and Google Play for Android), the world doesn’t really need too many more. And while consumers may download a lot of apps, the vast majority of them are ignored after the first few uses. In fact, the analyst firm, Flurry, says that 75 per cent of apps lose their audience after three months, and 96 per cent after 12 months. It also reports that 85 per cent of apps are only used once. The key to building a successful app that customers will use and go back to and value, is to create something that offers real value, in the form of information, entertainment, or utility.

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So if you decide an app is for you, talk to your customers to ask them what they would like to see in it. Be led by this, but not blindly. They may not have done the research you have done into what you can do with a mobile app, using the phone’s unique capabilities. So let your customer research inform the design of the app, but don’t be afraid to go beyond their expectations and give them something they didn’t know you could deliver. Like the Tesco shopping app that lets customers add an item to their shopping basket simply by scanning its barcode. Or the FindaProperty app that brings up details of the houses for sale in the neighbourhood simply by holding the phone up and pointing it in the direction you are interested in. An app can be an incredibly valuable marketing and loyalty tool. The trick is in the thought and the planning that goes into it, and the rationale behind the use of any of the whizz-bang technology.

And the very precise location targeting that’s possible on mobile advertising makes it a highly effective medium for local businesses such as shops and restaurants, trying to drum up business, especially since most mobile advertising is sold on a cost-per-click basis, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can make your advertising as simple or as sophisticated as you want, incorporating video, links to social media pages or money-off coupons, delivered direct to the mobile phone. You can also advertise in mobile apps too. This is a great way to target your ads at people with specific interests. Of course, if you advertise on mobile, you need somewhere to send people when they click on the ad. If you don’t have a mobile

Mobile Advertising Mobile advertising is one of the marketing world’s best kept secrets. You may not have a mobileoptimised site yet, but thousands of publishers have, from national newspapers to hobbyist magazines. So in those few minutes of downtime, when you see the people around you staring at their phone, they may well be catching up on the news and gossip on whatever interests them, on mobile sites devoted to football, rugby, ballroom dancing, tropical fish, and hundreds of other subjects. These sites are more often than not funded by advertising. A year or two ago, the advertisers were primarily companies selling mobile content, such as ringtones and wallpapers for mobile phones, but that has all changed, as mainstream brands have seen the opportunity to reach consumers on their mobile phones. Advertising on mobile phones is simple. Mobile ad networks such as InMobi, Mojiva and Millennial Media run self-service platforms that enable advertisers to choose the types of mobile publications they want to advertise on, create the ad, then run it. You can target the advertising by a variety of factors such as age, gender, interests and location, and you can cap your spend in the same way you do with Google AdWords.

site, don’t despair. You can build a mobile landing page quickly for very little money. In fact, using Google’s Mobile Landing Page Builder solution, you can build a mobile landing page in a matter of minutes, at no cost.

Loyalty Tool Small and large businesses alike have found that mobile is an excellent loyalty and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. The trick is to collect customer and prospect mobile

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upcoming conferences phone numbers, and ask their permission to use the mobile as an ongoing communications channel. Usually, this is in the form of a simple text message. Companies such as Textlocal and Txtnation offer simple, self-service platforms that enable business owners to collect and manage their database of mobile phone numbers, then use them to create marketing campaigns. It could be a restaurant that finds itself unexpectedly quiet one night sending a text message that says. “Happy hour – visit us before 9pm tonight to get 2-for-1 on all main courses.” Or a dentist or hairdresser sending an automated message to customers a day, or an hour, before their next appointment. Or a text message to say that the engineer you are expecting today for the service visit is on his way, and will be with you in the next hour. Or that your order has been dispatched, and will be with you tomorrow. It’s hard to quantify how much customers value these types of message, but if you’ve ever received one yourself, you will appreciate their power.

Location-Based Services These are of particular interest to brands with retail outlets. They take advantage of the mobile phone’s ability to pinpoint the user’s current location, and even the direction in which they are facing. Knowing this, through an app or a mobile advertising campaign, you can target customers as they come within a few hundred metres of one of your outlets and tempt them in store with a money-off offer, or just a message about what’s on offer today.

So there, in a nutshell, are some of the many ways in which you can join the growing number of companies and brands that are going mobile. Not all of them will necessarily be right for your company, so work out your objectives, see where mobile fits the bill, go for it, and then get ready to reap the rewards.

Refer to this guide for upcoming internet marketing conferences from across the globe.

To find out more about mobile marketing, head for www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com and make a date to attend Mobile Marketing Live on 1 – 2 October at the Business Design Centre, London – www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/live

The Mobile Show is Europe’s only mobile conference dedicated exclusively to brands. All seeking to profit from mobile strategies and technologies. All looking to successfully deploy mobile across marketing, advertising and commerce.

Measure It Whatever you do in mobile, it is measurable, and should be measured. Whether it’s the number of people clicking on an ad, responding to a marketing text message, or downloading your app, the mobile marketing firms you work with should be able to provide you with detailed analytics that will help you refine your mobile marketing campaigns and make them work harder to deliver the maximum return on investment.

David Murphy is the founder and editor of Mobile Marketing, the leading magazine dedicated to the global mobile marketing industry. The magazine launched online in November 2005, and now attracts over 35,000 unique visitors per month. The site is updated several times each business day, and also comes in print, iPad and mobile versions. Mobile Marketing also runs webinars, conferences, the Mobile Masterclass series and the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. Mobile Marketing also runs the Mobile Training Academy, whose mission is to raise the standard of knowledge and best practice in the mobile marketing business.

Pubcon originally began in 2000 as an informal gathering of early Web search engine optimizers and webmasters at a London pub, giving birth to the pub conference.

October 17 - 18, 2012 | The Mobile Show Europe Aldersgate, St Pauls London, UK

November 06 - 8, 2012 | Social Media Strategies Summit London London, United Kingdom

This conference brings you face to face with hundreds of potential prospects from businesses hungry to profit from the boom in mobile services.

SMSS London is in the books! We hope everyone enjoyed their time at the event. The event was a great success and we hope attendees were able to take back information to their organization to use immediately as well as meet some great new people! Keep checking the SMSS website for the newest SMSS......

October 22 - 24, 2012 | WPDevCon

November 12 – 16, 2012 | SES Chicago

San Francisco, CA, USA

The first WPDevCon: Windows Phone Developer Conference is the independent conference for software developers, marketers and entrepreneurs building applications for Windows Phone-powered smartphones. Windows Phone is poised for take off with Microsoft putting the engines on full power in 2012. Projected attendance is 500+ from across the globe. Exhibits admission is free! Receive a $100 discount off the prevailing rate for the 3-day pass by inserting the code MEDIASPONSOR when prompted on the eRegistration page linked from www.wpdevcon.net

Hyatt Regency 151 E. Wacker Dr Chicago, IL

Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you’re at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king!

November 28 – 30, 2012 | World Innovation Convention World Innovation Convention, Cannes 2012

Where innovation visionaries & business leaders converge

OCTOBER 17 | NYC

October 15 - 19, 2012 | Pubcon Las Vegas 2012 Las Vegas Convention Center Nevada, USA

Pubcon, the premier search and social media conference, will hold its multi-track Las Vegas event on October 15 - 19, 2012 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

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Pubcon Las Vegas 2012, supported by the industry’s leading businesses, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors involved in social media, Internet marketing, search engines, and online advertising, offers an in-depth look at the future of technology presented by over 200 of the world’s top speakers in more than 100 provocative cutting-edge sessions.

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World Innovation Convention is the annual global networking event that innovation practitioners rely on to meet legendary innovators and discover emerging innovation trends from those who are setting them. World Innovation Convention is the international innovation conference of choice for CEO’s, managers, consultants, innovation enthusiasts, inventors, high-ranking government officials, media, academics, technology gurus, and designers. Offering the perfect blend of topics, speakers, location, format, and diversity, this event ranks first in its class.

December 04 - 07, 2012 | Android DevCon IV San Francisco (Burlingame), CA

Android DevCon IV continues the schedule of hosting the world’s top Android developer event every six months. It returns to the San Francisco Bay/Silicon Valley area. www.andevcon.com

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PubCon Las Vegas

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October 15-19, 2012 Las Vegas Convention Center Search * Social Media * Affiliates