Website Magazine March 2015

Quiz Time: Can You Keep a Visitor?

10 CELEBRATING

YEARS

THE MAGAZINE FOR WEBSITE SUCCESS MARCH 2015

Digital Influence &

ADVERTISING INSIDE THIS ISSUE...

Strengthening Your Relationship with Email Conversion-Killing Copy to Avoid The State of the New gTLDs

PLUS TOP 50

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WEBSITEMAGAZINE.COM

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Digital Influence &

ADVERTISING

There’s a significant shift occurring in the digital space today. Brands are no longer advertising for awareness (or clicks), but rather advertising for influence. They are creating messaging that not only calls attention to their products and services, but also how consumers view and experience the world - building content that is reflective of a user’s needs and sharing it at a moment in time when it’s most impactful.

THIS MONTH IN WEBSITE MAGAZINE

Explore Website Magazine’s

DEPARTMENTS

New gTLDs in Focus Few people predicted correctly which new gTLDs would be most popular today, but ‘Net pros would be wise to keep up with the trends.

Stat Watch: Digital Advertising’s Heyday

Enterprise Ready:

Conversion-Killing Copy to Avoid

Email Relationship Builders

Web copy is an essential element in ‘Net success.

Discover what writing styles could be costing your brand clicks and conversions.

Mobile Apps for Small Businesses

Small Business Lab: Quiz Time: Extending Session Time

The Rise of Social CRMs Customers now expect businesses to respond on social networks without delay and on-topic, and brands are exploring new CRMs to keep up.

Why Digital Rights Management Matters Companies usually don’t think twice before swiping a photo off the Web – until a claim for damages arrives from the licensee.

50 Top: Hosting Brands to Know

Mastering Search: Recent SEO Developments

E-Commerce Express: Choosing the Right Affiliate Network

Design & Development: Consulting Sales to Build a B2B Website

Web Commentary: Telecommuting Pros & Woes

Build a Digital Alert Machine If it can be measured, it can be managed.

Learn how to set up alerts for the most meaningful events occurring at a digital property.

Search and Social Ad Targeting To create relevant ad content, marketers must layer in behavioral, interest and demographic data when developing audience profiles.

GET THE DIGITAL SCOOP Check out Website Magazine’s email newsletters covering search, e-commerce, social, design and more at wsm.co/webscoop.

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From the

EDITOR The End of Advertising as You Know It? Advertising the products and services of a brand today can be a daunting (and sometimes wildly expensive) initiative – filled with more tactics, techniques and channels than most ‘Net professionals initially expect.

Find Website Magazine at these Internet industry tradeshows.

LeadsCon March 3-4 Las Vegas, NV IRCE Focus March 16-18 Los Angeles, CA Next Generation Customer Experience March 23-25 San Diego, CA

In many ways, over the past few years digital advertising has experienced a renaissance and has become far more sophisticated in the process; it’s faster (programmatic), more context-aware (mobile) and diverse (video, search, display, etc.), and as you might expect, more complex in every way, shape and form. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. Many brands are eschewing clicks for a more meaningful impression, moving beyond the practice of generating awareness to building genuine influence. While it’s not the digital advertising many may recognize, it’s not really the end of the road for this important promotional practice. Yet it’s definitely changing right before the eyes of Web advertisers.

In the feature story of this month’s Website Magazine, Managing Editor Amberly Dressler explores how the savviest online advertisers are creating messaging that not only calls attention to their brands, but also how consumers view and experience the world – developing content that is reflective of a user’s need and then promoting (advertising) it at a moment in time when it will prove to be most impactful. That, in essence, is the future of advertising.

While the primary focus of this edition’s feature story is on influence and advertising, readers will also discover many other articles designed to help accelerate their ‘Net success. This issue includes guidance on the new top-level domains, copywriting and conversion, social CRM, email, digital rights management and a whole lot more.

As always, we hope you enjoy this issue of Website Magazine and invite you to join us on the Web, where our editors and industry contributors explore the topics that matter CELEBRATING most to your digital success.

Best Web Wishes,

Digital Travel Summit April 27-29 Henderson, NV

Peter@WebsiteMagazine.com

10 YEARS

The Magazine for Website Success Reaching the largest audience of Web professionals of any Internet industry publication

999 E. Touhy Ave. Des Plaines, IL 60018 Toll Free: 1.800.817.1518 International: 1.773.628.2779 Fax: 1.773.272.0920

GENERAL MANAGER:

David Ruiz druiz@websitemagazine.com EDITOR-IN-CHIEF:

Peter Prestipino peter@websitemagazine.com MANAGING EDITOR:

Amberly Dressler adressler@websitemagazine.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS:

Allison Howen ahowen@websitemagazine.com Derek Schou dschou@websitemagazine.com *CONTRIBUTORS:

Michelle Wicmandy Jason Michaels Brian Lewis Scott Taback Jack McGannon Seth Norris GRAPHIC DESIGNER:

Shannon Rickson shannon@websitemagazine.com ADVERTISING:

Kelly Springer kspringer@websitemagazine.com Brian Wallace brian@websitemagazine.com Barry Cohen bcohen@websitemagazine.com SUBSCRIPTIONS:

Sandra Woods sandra@websitemagazine.com

CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES, COME ON! IT’S A CELEBRATION Continuing our year-long celebration of Website Magazine’s 10-year anniversary, join this month’s digital mission! Find the phrase “recovery campaign” (hint: it’s in blue and bold and in the first half of the magazine), open up the digital edition of Website Magazine (wsm.co/digitalwm15), and click that phrase. Participants will then be directed to a special landing page where they can enter to win a $500 prize. Website Magazine will be sending readers on these special missions throughout 2015, so keep a digital eye on this space in the months to come!

MARKETING:

Abdul Umer a.umer@websitemagazine.com Website Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 3, March 2015, (ISSN# 1942-0633) is published 12 times a year, January through December by Website Services, Inc., 999 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60018. Periodicals Postage Paid at Des Plaines, IL and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Website Magazine, 999 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60018.

Canada Post: Please send undeliverable items to: 2835 Kew Drive, Windsor ON, N8T 3B7 Copyright 2014 by Website Magazine. All rights reserved. Materials may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission. For reprints of any article, contact the editor. *The opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of Website Magazine.

www.WebsiteMagazine.com

10 YEARS

Resource Center FINELY FOCUSED INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY SPONSORS Scan to visit our Resource Center at www.WebsiteMagazine.com/resources

Website Magazine’s Resource Center presents whitepapers from our sponsors that provide information, specifics and metrics to help you make decisions for website success. Download free at www.WebsiteMagazine.com/resources.

The Master List Of DNS Terminology

Understanding Dynamic Imaging

5 Sales and Use Tax Tips (2015)

A Buyer’s Guide To Affiliate Management Software

Whether you are a seasoned expert or just beginning to look into how DNS can improve the performance of your businesses’ services, let this quick guide to DNS terminology be your comprehensive one-stop shop.

Sponsored by Dyn

Sales tax isn’t a high priority for many fast-growing businesses these days; yet just beyond their field of vision lay compliance challenges that can start small and become serious and expensive.

These five tips provide a roadmap for sales tax compliance in 2015.

Sponsored by Avalara

3 Tips To Boost Email Engagement With Customer Data Email marketing and CRM data allows marketers to identify timing preferences, effective promotions and even subject lines that are more likely to result in an open or click. With large customer data sets playing an important role in today’s multichannel world, this whitepaper provides tips to improve email engagement with customer data for today’s savvy marketers.

Sponsored by MessageGears

This whitepaper is an overview for e-commerce managers of the technology and applications of dynamic imaging, an online imaging method becoming essential for Internet retailers but often poorly understood even by those who need it the most.

Sponsored by LiquidPixels

Performance marketing is a cost-effective channel and provides online advertisers the ability to partner with companies on a cost-per-action basis and relies on accurate tracking. Hence, tracking technology and software to manage partners is essential to the success of performance-priced programs.

Sponsored by Impact Radius

Web Personalization 101: Create Personalized Marketing Experiences For Your Buyers

In this eBook, we’ll show you how real-time personalization tools allow you to craft highly relevant experiences for every type of buyer visiting your site.

Learn how these tools automatically identify visitor behaviors, demographics, and firmographics as well as present personalized messages to each segment of your audience.

Sponsored by Marketo

Download free at www.WebsiteMagazine.com/resources

Net

BRIEFS BING & YAHOO

REACH A 7-YEAR SEARCH HIGH Bing and Yahoo saw their highest combined percentage of U.S. search spend (26.3 percent versus Googles 72.7 percent) since 2008. On top of the strong search share, Bing also expanded its sitelinks feature to all advertisers on its platform. The feature enables advertisers to include additional lines of customizable, descriptive text to their listings.

LOST DATA? Check the Trash Can

Don’t panic if you accidentally delete some important information in your Google Analytics account, because a new feature is helping users recover their previously deleted data. The appropriately named Trash Can feature is essentially a safety net that allows users to reclaim lost or accidentally deleted data during a 35-day period (before it’s permanently deleted). + See what else is new in the world of digital measurement in Website Magazine’s Analytics Insider channel on the ‘Net at wsm.co/netanalytics.

SMALL IS

THE NEW

BIG

New data shows that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) ended 2014 on a high note. According to Bigcommerce, SMBs saw an average increase of 34 percent in sales from Oct. to Dec. 2014. The increase was fueled by the consumer electronics, beauty, bridal and fashion categories. Bigcommerce also found that shoppers buying from independent retailers completed 30 percent of their purchases from a mobile device during Q4 2014.

Getting to Know Joomla... Again.

The Web has an excess of solutions to help anyone build and manage a website. And now, there’s one more - and you may already know it. Popular open-source CMS Joomla unveiled a new service, similar to WordPress.com, that enables users to create hosted Joomla websites. The offering, operated in partnership with Web hosting company SiteGround, (don’t miss Website Magazine’s Top 50 list this month on page

14, featuring many of the ‘Net’s leading hosting companies) won’t be suited for the more serious Internet professional, but does provide a nice introduction to the powerful CMS for those who have not been exposed to the CMS platform.

10

Contact 773.628.2779 info@websitemagazine.com

YEARS

2015 Content NEWSLETTER

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

E-Commerce Express

Mastering Search

Social, Local, Mobile

Design & Development

Hot Trends

Feature

E-Commerce

Mastering Search

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Top 50

Stat Watch

Digital Power Players Awards

Replatforming Guide

Create an SEO Plan

The Best Designs of '14

Marketing Solutions

Email

Content Marketing Strategies

Loyalty Programs

12/2

Trends in E-Commerce Design

Everyday Content Development

Data Visualization

Digital Ad Networks

Personalization

Gamification Tactics

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1/1

Influence & Advertising

Affiliate Tactics for Online Retailers

Reducing Performance Hurdles

Security

Design Inspiration

Advertising

Big Brand Email Campaigns

Mobile Apps for Small Biz

2/3

Design & Usability Failures

Live Chat for Web Sellers

Modern Responsive Design

Affiliate Programs

Tech Spending

BI Solutions in Focus

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3/3

MAY

Get Rich Quick (Affiliate Marketing)

Acquiring Product Reviews

Current Search Trends

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CRM Related

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4/1

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Web Software Matchup

Payment Gateways in Focus

SEO Software Comparison

Advertising Design

WCMS Solutions

Collaboration & Productivity

Security Considerations

Usability Evaluation

5/1

JULY

The Local Web is Everywhere

Subscription Management Tips

The State of Structured Data

Frameworks in Focus

Domain Registrars

Web Customer Profiles

Mind Mapping

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6/2

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Essential & Edgy E-Commerce

Product Customization Tools

App Store Optimization

API Inspiration

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7/1

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8/4

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9/1

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Social Tricks & Media Magic

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What is Accessibility?

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Analytics for Everybody

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11/3

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MARCH

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Net

BRIEFS #WEBTECHWATCH

IMPROVING Promoted Tweets Enterprises will be able to promote tweets faster than ever thanks to a new Twitter feature, Quick Promote, that enables advertisers to amplify their best performing messages directly from the Activity Dashboard. It takes just a few clicks to promote a Tweet, and then the Tweet is automatically targeted to users who have interests similar to the company’s current followers. This update comes after Twitter’s introduction of Syndicated Promoted Tweets, which allow brands to extend the reach of their messages to larger audiences on third-party properties, such as Flipboard.

APACHE SPARK

ON THE RISE

Apache Spark, an open-source cluster computing framework, is gaining adoption among developers. A recent report from Typesafe reveals that 71 percent of respondents indicated they have at least evaluated or researched Apache Spark, while 35 percent were either currently using Spark or planned to in the near future. Respondents indicated that the most desirable feature of Spark is its improved processing power. See what else is trending in Website Magazine’s Design & Development Digest at wsm.co/desdevdigest.

MORE NEWS OF NOTE: Brands maximize participation on Instagram: wsm.co/gramtrend LinkedIn rolls out a new design: wsm.co/lides15 Google adds medical expertise to Knowledge Graph: wsm.co/kgmedical Luxury brands struggle with mobile: wsm.co/mobileprob 8

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MARCH 2015

See what has the ‘Net community all abuzz with Website Magazine’s #WebTechWatch series – a weekly roundup, available online, that profiles both emerging and established technologies and some of the most useful solutions for today’s Web workers. If you have a digital product or ‘Net service you think deserves a mention, tweet @WebsiteMagazine with the hashtag #WebTechWatch.

+ Uprise.io: A platform to discover and analyze the best performing content publishers in a vertical. + People Analytics: An analytics platform from GoSquared focused on understanding how users interact with websites and apps. + AppVirality: A plug-and-play growth hacking toolkit (referral and customer retention solutions) for mobile apps. + 6Q: An employee feedback app (six minutes, six questions), that enables enterprises to compare answers over time and analyze results visually. + Botify: A crawler and analysis tool for websites designed for search engine optimization. + Proposable: Proposal automation and intelligence platform for sales teams. + ZeroPush: Push notifications that optimize the request/ response cycle, offering persistent connections and automated retry logic. + Efographic: A Web application that turns an email newsletter into an infographic, ideal for social sharing or to embed on a website. + How Much to Make an App: Calculates the cost of building a mobile application for businesses.

Stat

WATCH

9.7%

The HEyday of Digital

Advertising

From Jan. to June 2014, Internet display ad spending increased 9.7 percent when compared to the same period in 2013.

(Kantar Media, Sept. 2014)

Advertising is one industry that the Internet has significantly and forever impacted. As technology becomes more sophisticated, so too have the ads that cover the Web – and it’s resulting in big profits.

Keeping an ever-watchful eye on the Internet advertising industry, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently released its latest interim report, revealing that Internet ads generated a historic high of $12.4 billion in Q3 2014 - just beating out the previous high of $12.1 billion in Q4 2013.

What is driving the current boom? Why is this the heyday of digital advertising? From display and search to social and mobile (video too), advertisers have never had more (or better) opportunities to reach consumers. And, the savviest advertisers are those changing up their approach and meeting consumers where they are.

During the 2014 holiday season, for example, advertisers directed 49 percent of their paid search budget to tablets and smartphones, according to Marin Software, and their efforts paid off. Mobile devices accounted for 39 percent of all clicks on paid search ads and the click-through rate of search ads on smartphones was 38 percent higher than on desktop ads.

Remarketing is another example of an advertising tactic that addresses the many devices and channels that consumers use/visit, from mobile and desktops to social and email. As consumers move from device to device and from channel to channel, remarketing keeps brands top-of-mind. So much so that Wishpond found that website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70 percent more likely to convert, proving today’s sophisticated advertising technology is doing its part.

52%

While Android devices dominated mobile ad traffic in Q4 2014 (63 percent), Apple was able to hold off Android in advertising revenue by obtaining 52 percent of mobile ad revenue compared to Android’s 41 percent.

(Opera Media Works, Feb. 2015)

91%

25%

Facebook videos accounted for 25 percent of all online Super Bowl ad views.

(Visible Measures, Feb. 2015)

Hanapin Marketing surveyed companies about their annual PPC marketing budgets and found that 91 percent have budgets of more than $500,000; 35 percent revealed their budgets are $2 million-plus.

(Hanapin Marketing, 2014)

76%

Mobile ad revenue increased 76 percent to $5.3 billion in the first half of 2014 compared to the same timeframe in 2013, in which mobile drove $3 billion.

Do You Plan on Spending More or Less in the Coming Year on Digital Advertising?

Take the Survey @ wsm.co/adspendqs

(IAB, Oct. 2014)

M A R CH 2015

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Enterprise

READY

STRENGTHENING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH EMAIL

By Allison Howen, Associate Editor

The relationships marketers have with different channels are similar to the relationships people have with different types of friends.

Social media, for example, is the new and cool bestie that marketers look forward to partying with and introducing to all of their other friends. Mobile on the other hand, is like a hipster friend that can be difficult to meet up with, yet always provides interesting and valuable experiences. Then there is email, which is a marketer’s most loyal and trusted confidant.

In fact, the relationship marketers have with email has stood the test of time and seems to only be getting stronger with every passing year. In 2014, for example, the number of emails sent to subscribers grew by more than 9 percent, while the number of opens for each active subscriber increased by 6 percent yearover-year, according to Yesmail. To build on this momentum and increase the return on investment from this channel, marketers need to re-energize their relationship with email, which can be done by considering the three trends below:

1. Email, Meet Mobile Sometimes it can be awkward to introduce your friends to one another, but this is not the case with email and mobile. In fact, emails should be optimized for mobile devices, and marketers who haven’t adopted responsive design for their campaigns are missing out on big revenue opportunities.

According to Listrak’s “2014 Research Report and Look Book,” more than half of all emails are opened

on mobile devices and $1 of every $10 spent on ecommerce comes from a mobile device. Yet Listrak’s data on top retailers’ email marketing strategies reveals that just 6.4 percent are using responsive design for their campaigns.

Fortunately, leveraging responsive design for email campaigns is becoming a much easier task, as a variety of email marketing service providers have added responsive templates to their offerings. The ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, for instance, offers mobile-optimized email templates that enable marketers to preview messages on both mobile devices and desktops with real-time rendering tools (see Image A).

While delivering messages that display correctly on all screen sizes is important, marketers can also improve their campaigns by adding a personal touch.

2. Get Personal with Remarketing Email empowers marketers to establish an ongoing relationship with their customers, and the best relationships are those that go beyond the surface. For marketers, this means delivering content personalized to their recipients.

In fact, research from Salesforce’s “Predictive Intelligence Benchmark” report reveals that 60 percent of shoppers who received personalized content after abandoning their shopping carts ultimately returned to make a purchase. This presents a huge opportunity for retailers to remarket to consumers, especially since Listrak found that 74 percent of online sales are abandoned before a customer completes a transaction.

ExactTarget MarketA. The ing Cloud enables users to preview emails on both mobile devices and desktops.

Fortunately, there are many solutions available that can help marketers recover information from consumers who abandon their shopping carts. UpSellit (a company Website Magazine has been covering for 10 years - read more at wsm.co/tbtupsellit), for example, offers email remarketing solutions that help marketers collect more leads. With the company’s PreCapture feature, businesses can obtain email addresses from consumers who filled out a form but abandoned it before advancing to the next page. Conversely, the company’s ExitCapture feature collects new leads at the moment of site abandonment. Marketers can then engage these visitors with targeted incentives that require an email address to redeem. Once the address is collected, the visitor is immediately sent a message containing an incentive.

When it comes to incentives, however, it is important for marketers to remember that they don’t always need to send a discount in their first recovery message.

3. Incentive Timing Incentives make it easy for marketers to close a sale and strengthen their relationship with consumers and are used frequently in remarketing campaigns to motivate consumers to revisit their abandoned carts and complete their purchases.

Marketers should keep in mind, however, that shoppers abandon their carts for a variety of reasons, and a discount isn’t always required to get consumers to convert. In fact, Listrak’s data shows that top retailers decreased the number of discounts being offered in their first remarketing message in 2014.

Take BarkBox as an example. This pet supply subscription service sent a recovery email the same day a prospective subscriber abandoned her checkout on the company’s website. The first message from BarkBox simply asked the pet owner to come back and

complete the order. When the user didn’t take action, BarkBox followed up the next day with a second message, which offered a 10 percent discount if she completed her order within 48 hours. After that deadline passed, the service provider tried one last attempt at conversion with a message offering an extra free box with any subscription plan.

This three-message recovery campaign works because it initially tries to win consumers with just a friendly reminder – what if the consumer got distracted and had to leave the computer for some reason? Then, the second and third messages try to win the consumer with incentives. Keep in mind that the consumer could have abandoned her cart to research other pet supply subscription services, and these email incentives could be the motivation a consumer needs to choose BarkBox over a competitor.

B.

BarkBox used a three-message recovery campaign to close the sale.

Best Friends Forever It is important that marketers don’t become too complacent with their email strategies. Even though email is a longtime friend, that doesn’t mean it’s not still evolving with new technologies and trends. Marketers who want to use this marketing channel to their advantage must keep up with these changes and optimize their own initiatives accordingly. After all, relationships – even old ones – require upkeep.

Better Communication for B2B Enterprises Learn how Tellwise is helping businesses take communication with prospects out of the inbox and onto the Web at wsm.co/b2bcomm

Small

BUSINESS LAB

Mobile Apps: Productivity, Performance & Profit

By Michelle M. Wicmandy

In today’s increasingly digital workplace, mobility is at the core of doing business.

BIG LIST OF PRODUCTIVITY APPS See which apps can help you get things done on the go at

wsm.co/blproapps

Smartphone applications are not only powerful tools helping employees juggle schedules, financial reporting and messaging, but mobile technologies are even helping small businesses save money. In fact, apps are responsible for saving companies upward of $15 billion annually, as well as nearly 600 million hours each year (AT&T/SBE Council Survey).

In short, it is now possible in a matter of clicks to manage the office and explore business opportunities on the go. The following are two common application types that today’s digital brands should consider if their goal is to operate better and faster: Banking and Finance: Business owners no longer need to write down purchases or pay from paper invoices thanks to real-time cashflow management apps. These apps automate payments, track expenses, keep receipts, manage bills and convert currencies. They can also forecast cash projections and remind employees of quickly approaching due dates. Finally, cashflow management apps can help business owners maximize tax deductions and returns to facilitate tax preparation. Popular apps in this category include Quick Books, Expensify, TurboTax, Small Business Workbench and more.

Retail and E-Commerce: Using these apps, retailers and e-commerce merchants can collect in-store analytics, sync inventory, manage shipments, track customers and purchases, process transactions remotely and more. These retail-focused apps also offer on-demand and location-based services that improve customer engagement. Popular apps for retailers include Lightspeed, Vend POS, RetailNext, Square and Paypal.

BUILD YOUR OWN While there is a seemingly endless array of applications to help companies support their mobile workforce

and increasingly mobile audience, many businesses are opting to build their own applications to maintain control of this now essential digital experience.

Before creating a mobile app, Jacob Voncannon, marketing manager for ChaiOne, suggests that business owners first determine what goal the app will help users accomplish (and what problem it will solve), who will be the targeted audience, what operating systems are necessary and the expected results (e.g. cost savings, greater revenue, etc.).

This process will not only help a company decide if an already-available app will do the trick, but will also help a developer design the right app, if the business decides to move forward.

To develop an app, tech-savvy entrepreneurs can use a do-it-yourself (DIY) app-building platform (more on that later), hire a freelance developer or turn to an agency – all of which have varying costs associated with them.

“Depending on functionality, an agency will charge about $50K-$100K to produce an entry-level app, and $100-$200 per month for maintenance fees,” said Voncannon. “This cost becomes affordable when scaling it across a mass market.”

For many, DIY platforms such as AppMakr or ShoutEm (or more sophisticated mobile backend-asa-service solutions such as EachScape) tend to be more affordable but cost business owners time (which is, of course, money). These tools provide drag-and-drop functionality (that may require some knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and other coding languages in some instances) for building basic apps that can, while absent of many of the bells and whistles, get the job done.

A mobile app is not a miracle worker and has limitations. It should work in synergy with other marketing and productivity tools. As with any medium, small business owners should devise a plan and set realistic expectations. Expecting perfection upon development is unrealistic. Understand the new app may have bugs, will require upgrades and may not work or render correctly in all environments.

THE BIGGER PICTURE When developing an app or selecting one from an app store, business owners should consider how the app will help the organization achieve its goals by doing more with less. After all, improving operations puts the organization on its way to saving time, cutting costs and boosting its bottom line.

Michelle M. Wicmandy is the CMO for Collective Changes and a marketing lecturer for the University of Houston Downtown.

Quiz

TIME 1. It is currently Google’s recommendation to design a website with: a. Responsive Web design b. Both a mobile-dedicated website and a desktop version c. A flat design d. Only search engines in mind

Read more at wsm.co/benefits6

EXTENDING

SESSION TIME Can You Keep a Visitor?

A lot can happen in 60 seconds – in life and on the Web. According to Monetate’s most recent E-Commerce Quarterly report, for example, it’s within the first minute of an online shopping session that brands lose 30 percent of their site visitors.

So how can your enterprise extend the session time of its clients and prospects? Focus in on usability.

Usability – how easily a user can interact with a digital presence – is key to reducing bounce rate and keeping a visitor engaged. Websites and applications, at the very least, must be responsive, provide descriptive, yet clear and concise navigation paths, and most importantly, be relevant to a person’s reason for being there. Websites and applications also need to be glitch-free, intuitive and add value to a user’s life in order to be deemed worthy of interaction. There’s a lot to understand about usability and the time to get started is now.

How much do you know about keeping a visitor?

Test your know-how in this month’s Website Magazine Quiz Time.

See how well you did on this month’s quiz by visiting wsm.co/qtmar15 or by scanning the QR code.

2. This Pennsylvania-based company had a 1.509 second average website response time on Super Bowl Sunday – the lowest of all 2015 Super Bowl advertisers: a. Pepsi b. Wix.com c. Subway d. Heinz

Read more at wsm.co/sbads15 3. What is the average bounce rate – visits in which a user left a site from the entrance page – of a retail website? a. 10-20 percent b. 20-40 percent c. 50-70 percent d. 90-99 percent

Read more at wsm.co/avgbrate 4. In the United States, a business must test on: a. 134 different devices to cover 80 percent of devices in use b. 20 different devices to cover 100 percent of devices in use c. 5 different devices to cover 80 percent of devices in use d. 177 different devices to cover 100 percent of devices in use

Read more at wsm.co/buildtest 5. Sixty percent of apps are only opened once. In order to avoid deletion, mobile apps must keep users engaged at least twice in... a. 7 days b. 1 day c. 14 days d. 120 days

Read more at wsm.co/stickyapps M A R CH 2015

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10 YEARS

| 13

Top

50

Hosting Brands to Know Every Internet business has one thing in common – they use some form of hosting for their websites, their applications and sometimes even their customers’ sensitive data. The hosting industry is huge with revenues exceeding $11 billion in 2014 alone (IBIS, Sept. 2014) and an average annual growth rate of 10.7 percent from 2009 to 2014.

Whether it’s in the cloud or on premise, there is no shortage of vendors offering technology, support and services to help customers deploy and maintain a competitive digital presence. Take a moment to look around, however, and it will quickly become apparent that the myriad available choices make determining the best option for the available resources (money), and the required technology, difficult. This month’s Website Magazine Top 50 hopes to change that with an overview of many of the leading hosting providers in business today. If you start anywhere in your quest for the optimal hosting provider, let it be here.

What readers may notice right away is that three somewhat non-traditional companies (at least in relation to the pure-play hosting companies most will be familiar with) top the list. Major technology players Google, Amazon and Microsoft secured the first three positions and for good reason – they’ve embraced the cloud in a big way (and the developer community initiating the demand) and have quickly become the vendors to beat in the hosting game. Google also took another major step recently to secure its lead with the release of Google Domains, which will likely boost the number of small and mid-size brands on its client roster.

Amazon, Azure and the Google Cloud (and other cloud-focused competitors, including #5 Rackspace and #11 SiteGround) may not be a perfect fit for every digital enterprise though. Fortunately, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of hosting companies – offering both shared and dedicated solutions – that are ready to cater the rest of the Web business population. Domain name registrars (like Google), of course, are in a unique position to upsell their hosting services and GoDaddy (#4), NetworkSolutions (#9) and others including Gandi.net (#26) make a strong showing on this month’s Top 50. There are also a variety of other hosting vendors that most Website Magazine readers will be familiar with and that have quickly earned a respectable position in the market.

This Top 50 list is, of course, a snapshot in time as the hosting industry moves along as fast as the rest of the ‘Net. To keep abreast of all the news that matters in this space, be sure to bookmark (and visit often) our Web Hosting channel at wsm.co/wmhosting.

Comparing Hosted E-Commerce Solutions See which features make one provider a better option than the other at wsm.co/hostecomm

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Mastering

SEARCH

You, Me and the Googlebot

3 Recent Developments to Know for Better SEO

By Peter Prestipino, Editor-In-Chief

If you have heard it once, you have heard it a million times – the speed of a website influences everything from the digital experience of users to the algorithmic rankings determined by search engines.

The speed of a website, how quickly it takes to fully load in the user’s browser, is only one variable among hundreds (likely thousands), however, that may be

Does Domain Name Choice Influence Ranking?

The SEO community has long debated whether domain names influence ranking. Find out if exact match domains, registration length and general transfer volatility matter to SEO today at wsm.co/dnchoice 16

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negatively impacting the efforts an enterprise makes in terms of search engine optimization and ultimately generating a positive response from an audience.

Performance from a truly technical perspective is far different than performance of a tactical nature, and technical performance may ultimately be more telling of SEO success in the long run than most ‘Net professionals may realize. There are many influencing factors that prevent one’s site from ranking above another and the more one knows about the reason, the closer he or she is to implementing a solution. The problem is, it’s not always easy to know what the triggers are for poorperforming SEO campaigns.

Let’s review three new Google-related developments that will matter to high placement on the search engine results and might even provide a quick fix to the performance problems of a company’s SEO initiatives.

+ LOCAL INDEXING: Google recently announced the introduction of local-aware crawl configurations for Googlebot on pages it detects may adapt content served based on the request’s language and perceived location. Currently, Googlebot requests pages without setting an Accept-Language HTTP request header and uses IP address that appear to be located in the U.S., so not all content variants of local-adaptive pages may be indexed completely.

The new crawling configurations are enabled for pages Google detects to be local-adaptive, so SEOs may notice changes in how Google crawls and displays a site in its search results. + DESIGN & SEO: Don’t believe that Web design plays a role in SEO? Think again. In late 2014, Google announced that its indexing system started rendering pages similar to a modern Web browser; that means with JavaScript and CSS turned on.

To ensure that a website is rendering correctly and being indexed properly, allow Googlebot (within the robots.txt file of a website) to access the designrelated files that are being used in the page. Google has warned that preventing (e.g. disallowing) Googlebot from crawling these files can result in suboptimal rankings as it impacts how the search engine’s algorithms render and index content. + SEMANTIC MARKUP: Semantic search is once again in the digital news, as Google expanded a feature that enables musical artists to add their events on the search results pages, to now show expanded answer cards with the on-sale date, the availability of tickets and a link to the preferred ticketing site.

Once again, there are countless variables that influence the position of a website’s SEO performance – both from a technical and tactical perspective. Let these three developments open your digital eyes to what may be preventing your enterprise from achieving higher rankings and serve as inspiration to look at the relationship a brand has with Googlebot and how it can be improved. What this means for SEOs is that Google is putting more virtual stock in its Knowledge Graph and providing Web workers with additional opportunities to refine and improve their listings.

The More SEO You Know…

Check out some recent articles from Website Magazine’s Mastering Search channel: + Use Deep Links for Better SEO & Social

wsm.co/deeplinkseo Roughly 60 percent of all time spent on social media is on smartphones and tablets and with nearly a half a billion mobile app users (as of last count) for Facebook alone, businesses would be wise to cater to that audience in every possible way. Deep linking is one option. In fact, there is speculation that Google may reward companies who use these hyperlinks in the mobile environment. + Content Marketing & the Knowledge Vault

wsm.co/seoknowvault Since 2013, Google has been keeping the SEO world on edge with discussions about Knowledge Vault. Now that the focus is on switching, marketers are scrambling to figure out if their websites are ready. + 20 Effective Link Building Strategies

wsm.co/20linkstrat Regardless of what you may have heard, inbound links are still one of the most important ranking factors. Earning links that your competition cannot easily recreate will give you a competitive edge and the types of link building mentioned here are going to be great for authority and traffic.

E-Commerce

EXPRESS

Compete Against Larger Retailers Choose the Right Affiliate Network

By Derek Schou, Associate Editor

Small and mid-sized retail businesses are at an inherent disadvantage in today’s marketplace.

Not only must these merchants compete against each other, but they also have to take on global enterprises with marketing and advertising budgets double, triple or perhaps even quadruple their total sales figures.

To compete in the crowded and competitive world of e-commerce, many merchants are turning to affiliate networks. In fact, Forrester Consulting projected that affiliate spending would top $4.5 billion in 2016.

To help merchants figure out which network is for them, below are a few tips on what to look for in a network, as well as what merchants can do to make themselves more attractive to affiliate publishers.

How Far Do Their Arms Reach?

Along with limited advertising budgets, smaller ecommerce businesses don’t have the manpower that large retailers have at their disposal – a significant disadvantage when it comes to extending a brand’s reach.

Many smaller e-commerce businesses make do with what could be as small as a one-person team. For this reason it is imperative that they leverage an affiliate network that can provide them with the proper scale that they require to compete with big brands.

One such affiliate network that can help to even the playing field is Affiliate by Conversant, formerly known as Commission Junction.

Affiliate by Conversant works with a wide range of affiliate publishers that are separated into a tiered category system depending on their promotional methods. Affiliates on this network specialize in a variety of advertisement methods including search as well as coupons and deals.

Tools to Help Monitor Performance While finding a network with an expansive list of affiliate publishers is important to improve merchants’ reach, it is also important that retailers can actively, as well as accurately, see how their publishers are performing.

In order to avoid deviant or false commission payments, merchants must ensure that they have access to analytic statistics on how each of their publishers is performing. One affiliate network that excels at delivering these tools to merchants is Affiliate Window.

Affiliate Window provides merchants with realtime reports where they can see statistics on critical key performance indicators (KPIs) such as clicks, transactions as well as average order values (AOVs) and conversion rates. Also, for those merchants who are looking to increase their performance and engagement on mobile devices, Affiliate Window provides statistics on KPIs for both smartphones and tables.

How to Become More Attractive to Affiliates After making the decision on which affiliate network to leverage, merchants must be careful to remember that their work is by no means complete.

While affiliate networks are excellent at connecting merchants with publishers, this does not mean that merchants will automatically be flooded with requests from publishers looking to advertise their products.

“Affiliates are attracted to products that they’re interested in and programs that have proven track records for success,” said Woo Song, director of product management for Cake, an SaaS-based platform that helps track digital marketing spend. “They’re looking for good conversion rates, payouts, and solid tracking and reporting so that they can monitor their performance. Additionally, they’re looking for an engaged merchant that’s responsive and provides fresh content and promotional materials (creatives).

“When you’re first starting your program, this can be difficult to show. So, one strategy is to recruit a subset of quality affiliates, run exclusives, perhaps even give higher payouts to help build your program’s reputation as you attract new affiliates.”

Don’t Be Hasty Selecting the right affiliate network with the right publishers can have an enormous impact on a small or mid-sized retailer’s website traffic, product conversions and overall sales. See what other merchants have to say about their current affiliate network at wsm.co/myaffnet.

10 YEARS

Resource Center FINELY FOCUSED INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY SPONSORS Scan to visit our Resource Center at www.WebsiteMagazine.com/resources

Website Magazine’s Resource Center presents white papers and webinars from our sponsors that provide information, specifics and metrics to help you make decisions for website success. www.WebsiteMagazine.com/resources.

The ABCs of A/B Testing – Optimizing Your Campaign Performance Tuesday, March 3, 2 p.m. EST/1 p.m. CT/11 a.m. PT

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M A R CH 2015

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Design and

DEVELOPMENT

DESIGNING A B2B WEBSITE?

Better Talk to Your Sales Team First

By Jason Michaels

When designing a business-to-business (B2B) website, gathering input from an enterprise’s sales team can make the difference between a website that’s attractive but ineffective, and a site that is a finely tuned delivery system for the kind of information that converts prospects into customers.

Business-to-business websites that get it right zero in on providing an effective and efficient user experience, speaking directly to potential clients about how the

3+ Useful Tools to Optimize Onboarding There’s a trend today among the Web’s experience optimization mavens - improving the way in which new users are introduced and exposed to the product or service - and it (onboarding) is yielding very positive results. Learn more at wsm.co/onboardtools

brand addresses their business objectives, and letting the company’s current customers do the selling.

Achieving this is easier said than done, and executing correctly will require a keen knowledge of a company’s target markets, the digital behaviors of potential clients, the competitive industry landscape and other related factors. At the heart of it, delivering a Web experience that wins clients requires seeing things from their perspective and empathizing with their needs during the decision-making process. Solid relationships with existing customers, as well as honest takes on the reasoning of past prospects, who did not select the brand, can provide the perspective needed to show new clients why a particular approach is optimal.

More so even than marketing teams – who are likely already involved in any website design discussion – sales teams have a unique relationship and a special depth to their understanding of current and

potential clients. The specific insights sales teams can offer are what make them a key voice to have in the room when discussing a B2B website design. Namely, veteran B2B sales people are able to look at the given brand and its competitors through the eyes of clients, something that designers, execs and even marketers can sometimes get wrong. They understand how potential clients digest vendor websites, the information they want provided and the level of detail they expect to see. Plus, sales teams know the questions that potential clients ask at each stage in the customer journey.

Research from Google and the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) indicates that customers are nearly 60 percent through the sales process before engaging a representative, so salespeople (the good ones) have a keen understanding of their role - and the role of marketing as part of customers’ self- and guided-evaluation. They know what answers to give, and can help determine where those answers belong on the website, whether in the flow of the landing page, offerings page, the About Us section or elsewhere. When the benefit of this input is leveraged correctly, potential clients are empowered to process a brand’s offerings efficiently and in a manner that speaks to their methods of evaluation, contributing to the feeling that a brand operates in sync with the client’s own business values.

The sales team is also familiar with holding twoway conversations with clients in a way marketing teams rarely do. A sales team has absorbed clients’ honest opinions and addressed issues throughout capabilities meetings, product demos, negotiations, implementations and product rollouts. The experience and knowledge a sales team holds is precisely the material that can address potential clients’ specific concerns and score points in their decision-making processes. Don’t miss the opportunity to transform that knowledge into website content, even using it to produce in-depth material such as webinars, whitepapers and blogs.

Customer testimonials also have a powerful impact on the decision-making of potential clients, verifying the value a brand offers from an independent perspective. In the end, a sales team owns the relationship with a company’s clients. The personal relationships a sales team nurtures with existing clients are a precious resource. Testimonials, requiring a high level of corporate sign-off, can be as complicated to secure as they are valuable. Aligning a sales team with Web content production efforts in order to achieve these influential testimonials makes for a prudent strategy.

Sales teams hold the wisdom it takes to help produce a successful B2B website. By seeing a brand as a client would, delivering meaningful content and le-

veraging existing relationships as testimonials, the sales team can help marketers and designers execute the kind of site that enables potential clients to thoroughly understand what they offer, and make vendor decisions favorable to both.

Jason Michaels is the chief strategy officer at Wire Stone, an independent digital marketing agency for global Fortune 1000 brands.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT NEWS OF NOTE: Internet professionals never miss an emerging trend or new technique thanks to Website Magazine’s Design & Development Digest on the Web at wsm.co/desdevdigest + Google: Google’s Cloud Trace, a tool that enables app developers to identify performance issues by displaying the latency distribution for an application, has entered the beta stage: wsm.co/googtrace + Netskope: Cloud security concerns are on the rise, as Netskope reveals that just one in ten cloud apps are secure enough for use within the enterprise: wsm.co/cloudservhack + Zend Technologies: The newest iteration of the PHP application server from Zend Technologies, which provides tools for deploying, monitoring and debugging PHP apps, has released a new version of their application platform for the AWS Marketplace: wsm.co/zendserveraws + Apache Spark: Apache Spark, an open-source cluster computing framework, which is often used as an alternative to Hadoop’s two-stage disk-based MapReduce approach, is gaining adoption among developers looking for faster processing speeds: wsm.co/apachespark

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Digital Influence &

ADVERTISING

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

Each Super Bowl, big brands reach into their deep pockets to call attention to their business for the purpose of selling products or services, and 2015 was no different. Everyone from T-Mobile to Wix.com showed they had access to the biggest stars and the best writers for their pricey commercials.

So pricey, in fact, that this year’s Super Bowl advertisers paid $4.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime. What could $4.5 million buy on the Web? Programmatic media buying platform RocketFuel found that for the same cost as a 30-second Super Bowl TV spot, digital advertisers could buy an 11-day takeover of the YouTube homepage, a nine-day takeover of Turner Networks’ affiliated Web pages (e.g. TNT.tv, CNN.com, NBA.com, Adult Swim, etc.), 45 days of standalone ads on Facebook’s logout page and more than 37 days of promoted trends on Twitter (paid positioning atop the network’s Trends feature). That’s a lot of potential influence, which big brands would be smart to explore.

What online advertising affords is more control over messaging and more control over how and when that messaging is delivered. Advertising today is no longer about the number of eyeballs on a screen (nor is it about the number of clicks from a display ad). Advertisers with sophisticated acquisition strategies understand the significant shift occurring today – that advertising for awareness (and clicks) is only a means to an end, but advertising for influence has the potential to create greater profits and lasting relationships.

To build influence, the savviest advertisers are creating messaging that not only calls attention to their products and

services, but also how consumers view the world – developing content that is reflective of a user’s needs and sharing it at a moment in time when it’s most impactful. In many ways, it’s the end of ‘Net advertising as you know it - as well as the beginning.

CONTENT ADVERTISING

In droves, ‘Net professionals are shying away from traditional brand-centric advertising, seeing the potential in marketing the content they’ve created, like videos, blogs, whitepapers, infographics and more. This is most commonly referred to as content marketing, “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action” (source: Content Marketing Institute). This approach is very popular - to say the least - among ‘Net professionals and is changing how companies are advertising today.

In fact, content is being created at such a rapid clip, that 70 percent of business-to-business (B2B) marketers are creating more content than they did one year ago (source: Content Marketing Institute, 2015). Content creation, however, can be time consuming when writers and designers aren’t at the ready, but online tools like free infographic builders are eliminating some of the resources needed to produce content. Popular online solutions like Canva and easel.ly (discover more content marketing tools at wsm.co/2015content) provide simple drag-and-drop features to create infographics, which is one of the most popular forms of content being created today. This is because brands have very limited time to capture and keep Internet users’ attention, and infographics provide plenty of information in an easy-to-consume way – large numbers, short

The Super Bowl’s Winners & Losers See which advertisers scored big (and which ones passed at the one-yard line) at

wsm.co/sbads15 M A R CH 2015

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copy, interesting images/themes. What’s more, the content that is included in infographics often reduce customer pain points, remove barriers to acquisition and quickly educate buyers to a brand’s way of thinking.

Content can be one of the most effective ways to build influence in both the short and long term. According to Yahoo, when people view content marketing across Yahoo and Tumblr, unaided brand awareness (consumers can recall a brand without any prompts, such as “name three luxury car brands” versus “are you familiar with Lexus?”) increases by 40 percent, brand consideration grows 31 percent and tagline recognition increases by 100 percent.

The reasons why brands are using content marketing are clear, but many companies have yet to explore the various advertising opportunities available to distribute said content to increase exposure and drive traffic back to their websites (where conversions can happen).

One of the most popular paid methods to advertise content is through content discovery tools, like Outbrain.

With its Amplify product, brands simply provide a link to their content and then Outbrain serves it to publisher sites like CNN.com and ESPN.com, where links to a brand’s content appear as recommendations or promoted stories.

Outbrain is a budget-friendly option to raise awareness of content, as it works on a pay-per-click model and lets advertisers control their budgets.

The Outbrain example (a recommendation widget) is a type of native advertising that is also provided by companies like Taboola, Disqus and Gravy, and is one of six native advertising units named by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). To see the other types of native advertising units (and examples), go to wsm.co/egnative.

By definition, native advertising is material that is

With Outbrain, brands can advertise their content marketing pieces (articles, videos, slideshows, infographics or even earned media) and it will appear as Promoted Stories on sites like CNN.com and ESPN.com.

created with the intent to resemble the platform on which it appears. Native advertising is yet another way brands are controlling the conversation – creating and promoting messaging that subtly addresses what their audience is talking about, or why they are or are not buying from them.

This was the case with global healthcare company Abbott.

Removing Barriers to Acquisition Moms are one of the most important demographics in the business-to-consumer world (a multitrillion dollar market), but for formula brands, they are everything. Today, however, there is a significant cultural shift where pediatricians, hospitals, influential bloggers and peer groups are strongly recommending against giving babies formula unless deemed medically necessary (opting to promote the alternative, natural method instead).

This, along with the fact that its own survey stated 95 percent of its target demographic feel judged or criticized for their parenting decisions, is clearly a barrier to acquisition for Similac, a formula brand by Abbott Nutrition.

What is Similac, a brand that relies on moms to buy its products, to do? They create a content piece – a roughly 2.5-minute online commercial housed on a landing page, YouTube page and Facebook page – that tells moms everything is going to be OK and very subtly tells them that despite the conversation that is currently taking place, it’s OK to buy formula.

The “Sisterhood of Motherhood” video (watch it at wsm.co/1CwUavf), is a fun but poignant video that brings to light how parents often judge each other. More so, the video, according to Lindsy Delco, director of public affairs at Abbott Nutrition, is a content piece – a way to spark further conversation around an existing dialogue among parents.

“We make formula, and parents who use our products are often judged for their decision, so we have a stake in fostering support,” said Delco. “But it’s much bigger than that, there are also a lot of other decisions that parents make – like working or staying home or how to discipline your kids – that are often judged. We’re hoping to inspire a spirit of acceptance among parents but also continue important conversations about parenting.”

According to Delco, the video was not intended to promote or sell product. In fact, the product is never shown and the branding in the video is delayed – the campaign’s name and corresponding hashtag, as well as the Similac logo, only appear in the final seconds. Be that as it may, this now-viral content can empower the brand’s audience (women) to feel good about their choices (like using formula, which the video’s creator offers). In turn, Similac has called attention to its products and how its consumers view the world - building influence with every view, every social share and every conversation it changes.

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As a formula brand, Similac knows parents are often judged when they use its product. Similac brought this to light, and other decisions that are often judged like staying at home or working out of the house, in its online commercial that has nearly 7 million views at print.

Discovering Pain Points Solving customer pain points (or addressing them like Similac did) is the starting point for good content that motivates people to click on ads. Brands would be wise to set up a social listening tool (ViralHeat, Simply Measured and Social Mention are popular ones) to discover and act on what’s important to their audience. What are people happy about? What makes them sad? Why are they scared? Why are they talking about a company in a negative way? The list goes on and on.

For Web Talent Marketing, Google is a major pain point for their current and prospective clients. A provider of SEO Services, Web Talent Marketing supported Online PR Specialist Emily Long in creating an SEO version of Taylor Swift’s popular song “Blank Space” (can be seen at wsm.co/1F8d7Cy), which acted as if Google addressed its war on Web spam through a familiar melody (e.g. “Oh my my, look at that page. It looks like your next mistake. Stuffed with

Organic Video Ads? A recently announced partnership between Buzztala and Rakuten Marketing will help Rakuten Affiliate Network’s advertisers create and launch product video ads (PVAs) for hundreds or thousands of SKUs with virtually no effort, according to Buzztala. These short video product summaries from Buzztala appear high in organic search rankings – see image – and can be used for Facebook and Twitter ad campaigns.

keywords, your site’s a fake.” ).

The “Blank Space” parody has been viewed nearly 10,000 times on YouTube alone. More impressively, WebTalentMarketing.com’s site traffic nearly doubled the month it was released, according to Similar Web data. To spark interest, the Web Talent Marketing staff promoted the video through organic social sharing – especially on Twitter where industry thought leaders are more accessible than on other social media platforms. The content piece was also advertised on LinkedIn and Facebook, shared in relevant Google+ groups and promoted in several industry roundups.

“In addition to the roundup emails, a retweet from Matt Cutts was pretty cool!” said Long. “It’s not every day that the head of Google’s Web spam team views your content.”

To measure the video’s success, the team at Web Talent Marketing looked at the number of views, social traction, traffic to that particular page on their blog, time on page and sentiment (people loved it and they were telling them). More importantly, next time a prospective client of Web Talent Marketing needs something SEO related, they will likely turn to the company thanks to the increased awareness and previously established influence.

Brands that are creating content like Similac and Web Tal-

Web Talent Marketing took a popular song and turned it around to address its clients’ pain points, provide the SEO community with a laugh and increase brand awareness and influence, simultaneously.

ent Marketing may want to consider looking into solutions that enable them to “harness the power of attention” they generate. Genesis Media, for example, provides a platform to monitor when content is picking up steam (increased frequency of visits, longer time on site, etc.) and creates an ad to deliver to readers/viewers who have shown interest in this particular piece of content. Since the Genesis Attention Platform (GAP) runs on every page of its partner publishers’ sites, GAP can deliver ads to engaged users at the moment it will be most impactful - a dramatic shift in advertising, for sure.

With the majority of brands creating content to influence their audiences today, it’s time for companies to rethink everything they know about advertising. They need to look at their social data, find out what people are talking about, why they are or are not buying from them and create content that addresses all of those issues and then find the right platform to promote (and advertise) said content.

Due to its popularity, there might be no better place than social. According to an ExactTarget report, 75 percent of consumers peruse social networking sites at least once a day from their phones. What’s more, Facebook is quickly becoming a discovery tool for finding product information online, second only to Google (read more at wsm.co/fbdiscover). Finally, following search engine marketing, promoted posts (e.g. promoted Tweets) and social ads (e.g. LinkedIn ads) are considered the most effective paid advertising methods to distribute content.

STRETCHING SOCIAL Social media networks, specifically Facebook, could one day rival search engines when it comes to how customers discover products and services. According to end-of-2014 data from BI Intelligence, advertisers are following customers to social too. In fact, social-media advertising will grow to nearly $14 billion in 2018, a fiveyear compound annual growth rate of 18 percent. What’s more, BI Intelligence data indicates that social programmatic ad platforms are also growing, stating that spending on FBX, Facebook’s programmatic platform, increased by 150 percent year-over-year globally during the second quarter of 2014.

Jan. 2015 data from Neustar echoes a similar sentiment, indicating that social now represents close to 30 percent of all exchange-based traffic (when a company programmatically facilitates buying of display, video, mobile and social ad inventory).

While brands continue to push large portions of their ad spend to social networks like Facebook, emerging social networks are looking to get their share of ad dollars.

Most recently, Snapchat launched its anticipated Discover feature, a new way to explore stories from different editorial teams. At launch, there were 11 publishers (CNN, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, Daily Mail, ESPN, Food Network, National Geographic, People, Vice, Yahoo News and Warner Music Group).

These publishers create “editions” that are refreshed every 24 hours and are used to promote their articles, videos, full-screen photos and advertising. Publishers can even sell their own advertising space within their content.

According to Digiday, the partner media companies will retain 70 percent of ad revenue for deals they forge themselves, and half when Snapchat closes the deal.

Snapchat’s Discover feature provides 11 partner media companies with a platform to publish 24-hour content editions (like National Geographic’s “Blind Deer” video) and sell their own ad space.

PUSHING PROGRAMMATIC Snapchat’s Discover feature is one more way the advertising landscape is changing for both advertisers and publishers, but one of the most important changes to advertising in the 21st Century is that of programmatic, which automates ad buying by using the parameters that advertisers have set, like bid price and audience type. Programmatic has changed advertisers’ expectations, in both what they are willing to pay for advertising and how much control they have over who sees their messages and when.

Cost and audience control are two reasons that U.S. programmatic digital display ad spending is expected to grow 137.1 percent to top $10 billion this year, according to recent figures from eMarketer. This accounts for 45 percent of the U.S. digital display advertising market. For further reading check out, “Your Jump Start to Programmatic Advertising” at wsm.co/jumpads.

THE END (AND BEGINNING) OF AN ERA The majority of advertisers will never find themselves in front of a Super Bowl audience nor ever have access to a multimillion dollar ad budget, but every piece of content they create and promote, every new social network they look to explore and every ad buying decision they make, has supersized implications. As they look to find the right mix of paid, earned and owned media, they should know the principles of advertising and influence remain the same. They need to prove the risk is worth the reward, remove the barriers to acquisition, identify and mitigate pain points, be where their audience is and stay on top of developing technologies to help them share their content to the right audience and at the moment when it will be most impactful.

Domain

MASTERS

The State of the

New gTLDs

By Allison Howen, Associate Editor

Chances are that few people predicted “.xyz” would be outperforming the likes of “.nyc” and “.guru” when the new generic top level domains (gTLDs) were first announced in 2011. Fast forward to Feb. 2015, however, and .xyz is the only public gTLD to exceed 750,000 registrations.

In fact, data from nTLDStats.com shows that .xyz has nearly double the market share of other gTLDs. Comparatively, the Chinese extension “.网址” (xn--ses554g) has more than 350,000 registrations, followed by “.club” with 177,000-plus registrations, “.berlin” with roughly 155,000 registrations and “.wang” rounding out the top five with more than 120,000 registrations (see Image A).

It is important for Web professionals to keep in mind, however, that the domain industry will have more than a few shakeups as new domain extensions emerge into general availability. Additionally, just because a certain domain currently has the highest registration rate, doesn’t mean that it will be successful long term.

Gauging gTLD Success

A.

B.

The top gTLDs according to ntldstats. com (Feb. 2015)

The .xyz extension, for instance, has seen an influx of registrations likely due to suspected strategic promotions from certain registrars. With these promotions, some registrars are rumored to have provided customers with complimentary .xyz domains.

Network Solutions registered 17,791 new gTLDs on June 2, 2014, the same day the .xyz extension was launched (source: nTLDStats.com)

Take Network Solutions as an example. More than 89 percent of the company’s new gTLD registrations are for the .xyz extension. Curiously, .xyz launched on June 2, 2014, and that very same day Network Solutions’ registered 17,791 new gTLDs (see Image B).

Similarly, more than 81 percent of Xin Net Technology Corporation’s registrations are also for the .xyz extension. Xin, however, didn’t have the same registration spike as Network Solutions on June 2, but the company did see a dramatic spike in gTLD registrations a couple months later.

It is likely that both of these registrars had a hand in inflating the .xyz extension’s numbers through some type of strategic promotion. More importantly, though, is the fact that this data validates that it is too soon to predict how successful a new gTLD may become, as registration numbers don’t always paint a complete picture.

Perhaps the best way to gauge the success of new gTLDs is by thinking practically and identifying which extensions will end up resonating best with their audiences in the years to come.

Consumer Adoption Although “.com” remains the most dominant domain in the U.S., consumers are warming up to the idea of new domain extensions.

A recent study from the Domain Name Association reveals that while 86 percent of U.S. respondents would prefer pre-existing generic and country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) when it comes to shopping online, 14 percent did say, however, that they would shop with a retailer who has a new gTLD. That said, respondents in many of the other countries were more evenly split, with 49 percent of Australians noting that they prefer pre-existing generic and ccTLDs and 51 percent preferring new extensions. For retailers, this suggests that city-name extensions could be an area of opportunity, as these domains have the ability to provide a sense of authority to consumers looking to shop locally online.

gTLDs in 2015 In all, there were more than 300 new TLDs launched in the market in 2014, and even more are expected to be released in 2015. By keeping up with adoption trends, Web professionals will be better equipped to evolve with the market instead of having to play catch-up.

Only time will tell which extensions will resonate with consumers. Even so, many of the new extensions provide unique opportunities for businesses to personalize, localize and humanize their brands – even if consumer adoption is still a few years off.

Website Magazine Webinars Webinars are the best way to get together groups of potential customers and educate them about your product. The webinars also result in the most 1-to-1 conversations and produce the warmest of leads, because you have the opportunity to perform a live demonstration and answer questions.

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Conversion

CORNER

THEY SAID WHAT?!

Conversion-Killing Copy Habits to Avoid

By Brian Lewis, SiteTuners

Everyone has met someone like this before - nice people who have the best intentions, but somehow end up saying something stupid.

Not stupid in an intellectual sense, but stupid in a trip-over-their-own-feet inappropriate way. Most of the time these folks don’t realize they’re alienating the people around them.

Since websites are created by people, inevitably there are some sites that suffer from the same malaise.

Try as they may to motivate the visitor to purchase, the only feat these sites accomplish is compelling the visitor to click the back button.

Fortunately, identifying these annoying communication breaches is not difficult. Here are some of the more glaring conversion-killing copywriting offenses to avoid.

The “We-We” Syndrome People naturally like to talk about themselves, particularly when trying to make a positive first impression.

Website visitors, however, are primarily concerned 32

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with finding a solution to their problem. Company websites that are full of content about “What we do” and “How we work” come across as self-obsessed, not customer-centric. This is what’s called the “we-we” syndrome, and it’s a sure way to turn off visitors and kill conversions.

Imagine being on a first date with someone who talks constantly about him/herself. Even the most interesting person will eventually come across as an egotistical bore. Yet many websites fall into this “we-we” trap with their content – focusing entirely on what the organization has accomplished rather than showing an interest in the visitor and his or her needs.

In a recent spin on the “we-we” syndrome, some companies have deliberately adopted the pronoun “we” in their copy in an attempt to imply a partnership with their customers or prospects. An example of this is Wells Fargo’s slogan “Together we’ll go far.”

But a study published last year in the Journal of Consumer Research indicated that this approach also has its risks, as it doesn’t always communicate the message intended. According to the study, while the

word “we” works well when an actual relationship exists, it can backfire when used to convey an intimacy that is inappropriate or unexpected.

How does a company avoid the “we-we” syndrome on its website? One of the most effective ways is to let others tell their story. Leverage the trust-building power of media coverage, customer reviews and testimonials for copy that is believable without being “braggadocious.”

Using Jargon and Acronyms Jargon and acronyms have an insidious way of sneaking into the content of even the most experienced marketers. Both jargon and acronyms are part of the “secret language” that a company or industry uses to talk about core issues without having to explain them. They can be a great time-saver for internal company discussions, but when used on a website, jargon and acronyms can be confusing, vexing or simply off-putting.

Winston Churchill once said “Use simple words everyone knows, then everyone will understand.”

Sounds easy, right? The challenge, of course, is that many companies develop jargon to simplify their internal communications, and the terms become so commonplace that they forget that they are not part of most people’s everyday vocabulary. In other words, a word or acronym that a marketer uses daily may seem “simple,” yet it has no real meaning to the average Web visitor.

High-converting Web copy speaks the language of the customer, not the company. The right language will help forge a connection with visitors, letting them know they’re in the right place, increasing their trust and moving them toward conversion. Conducting informal usability tests or focus groups, listening to sales calls and researching commonly used search terms are all fairly simple techniques that marketers and writers can employ to ensure their Web content aligns with their customers’ language.

Humans are emotional beings, and Damasio’s research shows how important emotions are in helping people take decisive action. So when it comes to writing persuasive Web copy, great writers know that the key is to evoke emotions. To do this, copy must focus on the benefits, or rewards, that a customer will experience as a result of buying, and not simply provide the facts.

Marketers and sales people are very good at highlighting the features of their product or service and providing what seems to be a logical argument in favor of purchase, but features don’t get a prospect emotionally motivated. As copyblogger Brian Clark puts it, “benefits sell, features support.” The most effective Web content finds the right balance between describing physical attributes (aka “features”) while vividly describing the benefits of purchase in a way that triggers a strong emotional response.

Not Injecting a Sense of Urgency Most marketers are familiar with the principles of urgency and scarcity – behavioral psychologists have demonstrated time and again that the more difficult something is to acquire the more people will want it.

So when a call-to-action on a website gives visitors a reason to act immediately, they’re more likely to do so.

This is the urgency principle in action – and it works.

Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies of online conversion, which is why not injecting a sense of urgency is a big conversion-killing copywriting mistake. The most effective websites have all figured out how to minimize the risk of procrastination by infusing genuine urgency into their offers. This might include putting a deadline on a special sale price or discount offer, indicating the specific quantity that remains in stock, or even promising a certain delivery date if the order is placed in X minutes. Each of these techniques plays on the fear of missing out – a powerful emotional trigger at the root of the urgency principle.

Focusing on Facts and Features

Ignoring the Power of Words

In the 1990s, a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio formulated the “somatic marker hypothesis,” suggesting that human behavior and decision making are strongly influenced by emotions. Damasio spent years studying people who had suffered injury to the part of their brain that controls emotions, and he noticed that without the ability to feel emotions, their capacity to make decisions was seriously impaired. These folks were intelligent and could logically describe what they “should” do in a certain situation, but in practice they found it very difficult to make even the most basic decisions.

In the world of a conversion optimizer, myriad tools and techniques exist for improving the effectiveness of a website. It’s easy to see how big data and exciting new technology could overshadow the time-tested effectiveness of good copywriting. The fact remains: Words have power. Putting the right words to work can have a significant impact on a website’s ability to attract, engage, persuade and convert visitors.

Brian Lewis is the director of optimization at SiteTuners, where he works with clients to diagnose conversion barriers, streamline conversion paths and support test-planning efforts.

Copywriting Cheat Sheet Get writing at

wsm.co/cwsheet

Social Media

MAVENS

Social CRM & the Rise of

Consumer Interaction

By Scott Taback

According to research firm Gartner, customer relationship management (CRM) revenue tops $20 billion and is on track to exceed that mark this year.

Along with substantial growth, however, the market is undergoing an evolution as power shifts from companies back to consumers.

In large part, it’s thanks to the rise of social media.

Customers now expect businesses to respond in the same way as friends or family using social sites — without delay and on-topic. Gone are the days where general answers to specific inquiries or lengthy delays are acceptable: Companies that want to engage consumers and get ahead of the game are turning to much-hyped “social CRM” alternatives. What does this technology really hold for the future of consumer interaction?

State of Affairs Social CRM is a nascent technology. Processes and technology exist to support social CRM but there’s no standardization, no uniformity; just a general sense that integrating social into traditional CRM processes is better. As a result, many companies are putting money into social platforms hoping to catch consumer attention, but there’s a problem: inconsistency. Users often find that while company blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and other social media streams are all active, they each have a different tone of voice and point of view.

The result is often a confusing mess: which one really speaks for the business?

Adjusting the Balance Bridging the gap between CRM and social CRM means changing who has control of process and dia-

logue. In traditional CRM deployments, interaction is controlled by the company. The goal is to deliver products and services that meet customer needs in the short term in order to make a sale. Information is “pushed” out to consumers to produce “simple transactional outcomes.” These systems are simple, effective and easy to maintain, and produce significant results for companies willing to invest. The rise of always-on social media channels, however, and the ability of consumers to voice their praise or disappointment in a brand to other buyers worldwide (instantly), necessitates a shift in balance.

As a result, the future of social CRM means putting the customer in charge of the experience. Instead of focusing on sales alone, companies must seek out ways to build long-term relationships with consumers and be available for complaints or concerns all day, every day. What’s more, advertising and marketing must take on a “pull” mentality — along with micro-targeted information, consumers must be able to access the information they want, when they want it, rather than when a company decides to share.

Ramping Up There’s a lot to be excited about when it comes to social CRM. Most importantly, it provides a way to uncover brand advocates and leverage their interest into positive social feedback. Every brand has them — fans and fanatics who love the way a company does business or the products it sells. True social CRM lets businesses find these advocates and collaborate with them to produce effective engagement strategies. A wealth of social data also becomes available when these conversations start happening. When combined with predictive analytics tools, this social data can help predict purchase decisions, minimize consumer complaints and deliver targeted content to users on-demand.

Taking advantage of the burgeoning social CRM market, however, requires a corporate shift, where each member of a company values and prioritizes social CRM. In addition, it’s critical to define success before starting a social initiative, along with identifying metrics to measure this success. While the term “social” carries inherent ambiguity, achieving ROI with social CRM requires specificity.

The CRM market is shifting as social interactions trump business-driven messaging. Social CRM has a bright future for companies willing to invest in both the technology and the necessary corporate culture shift.

Scott Taback is VP of business development at Highland Solutions, the premier provider of social business software for businesses throughout a variety of industries such as healthcare, insurance, retail, etc.

10 YEARS

12 MONTHS OF WEB SUCCESS Don’t wait, subscribe FREE at wsm.co/subscribe15 Join the largest audience of Internet professionals of any industry publication by claiming your FREE subscription to Website Magazine today.

Software

EVERYWHERE

Protect Your Brand by Instituting

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

By Jack McGannon, CEO of Canto

Chances are the last time you searched for an image on Google you found what you were seeking and shared it on a social media channel without giving a second thought as to whether that image was copyrighted or not.

Copyright infringement is not just a problem for individual Internet users who stream movies and download music illegally, it’s also a major threat for companies, and it can adversely affect organizations and their daily operations.

Companies generally underestimate the potential risk copyright problems pose. And more often than not, digital rights management (DRM) is only taken seriously when a claim for damages is on the table from the licensee who is being infringed upon.

Understand the Importance of DRM DRM is a practice used by a variety of companies including hardware manufacturers, publishers and copyright holders. First-generation DRM focused on the control of copying, while second-generation DRM aims to control executing, viewing, copying, printing and altering works or hardware devices. According to U.S. copyright laws, intellectual products such as pictures, videos, photos, or artistic, literary or academic texts are the intellectual property of the creator, which may be an author, photographer, filmmaker or artist. According to the law, only respective creators may decide whether or not their works may be reproduced or used by others. The ability to control the use of content on the Internet has become increasingly difficult as digitization has made it possible to duplicate content easily.

Using images found on the Internet for website content can be very risky. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a photographer can petition a website or Web page to be taken down if it’s using unauthorized or unlicensed works. In one such case, $40,000 was awarded to a photographer in a jury trial because a business used his photos in a media campaign without consent. It was a very costly lesson in DRM that 36

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was easily avoidable had the organization instituted a solid DRM policy and enforced it.

One way organizations can avoid copyright infringement, and potential lawsuits and fines, is to use an automated control system that logs license information. However, in order for the automated mechanism to be effective, a system that can process this information must also be implemented. One way this can be accomplished is through the use of a centralized digital asset management (DAM) system that stores licensing and copyright information along with images.

One of the advantages of using a DAM is that users don‘t have to enter all the information manually. Since most stock images and photos that are purchased from photographers, graphic artists or creative agencies already provide information in their metadata, the DAM can be configured so the license information is imported with the images simultaneously. Automating processes saves time and money, while preventing the inevitable human errors that can occur during manual data entry.

DAM systems can handle myriad tasks including storing files and metadata in a central repository, annotating assets and cataloging assets so they can be more easily retrieved. They are also instrumental in the retrieval and delivery of assets in appropriate file formats, so assets can be used in accordance with license and copyright agreement.

Make DRM Part of the Corporate Culture The DAM can do most of the heavy lifting to support a DRM policy, as long as it’s being enforced company-wide.

Some of the most common reasons DRM policies fail are: Information isn’t captured – There’s no repository or place to capture the data.

Too many moving parts – Complicated and impractical workflows lead to short cuts, especially if licensing information is held in a separate external database requiring extra steps, and time, to hunt for it.

Out of sight, out of mind – It’s very easy to forget that one may inadvertently infringe on a copyright, putting an organization at risk for fines or a lawsuit.

In order to avoid failure of a DRM policy and change how a company deals with copyright-sensitive material, the first step is to change the corporate culture by communicating the policy, the issue of infringement, potential consequences and the importance of policy enforcement.

If employees are well informed about the risk of copyright and license infringement, and can comprehend the reasons for the policy, they will be more likely to adhere to the policy and before long DRM will become a critical component of corporate culture.

Insights on

ANALYTICS BUILDING A DIGITAL ALERT MACHINE

FOR INTELLIGENCE EVENTS

By Peter Prestipino, Editor-In-Chief

There’s a lot going on at a website at any given time, but it’s not always easy to identify the most “meaningful” events those which truly matter to the success of an enterprise - without some form of alert or notification system in place. The alternative is to analyze website performance manually. This can not only be time consuming, but is also a practice that is prone to errors.

It’s even possible to create annotations on what caused an alert to be triggered (e.g. a successful email blast or social media promotion).

With some understanding of how and where to access and view alerts through GA, and a commitment to tracking the top priorities within an enterprise, it is time to start turning brand attention to establishing custom alerts that will help a team be more productive and effective.

Without the ability to accurately understand what’s happening (e.g. increases in conversion or decreases in referral traffic) it is impossible to eliminate issues or virtual roadblocks and optimize the elements of a digital property (website or application) for continued success.

Alert systems offer a controlled and customized view into the data that matters to one’s digital initiatives and it’s something that all ‘Net professionals should develop or gain access to – and soon.

The following is a quick guide to setting up a powerful alert and notification system through Google Analytics (GA) – the Web world’s most popular analytics system today (BuiltWith, in fact, reports that 53 percent of the top 10,000 websites use the system). Since GA is by far the leading website analytics system right now, it only makes sense to start there.

The following are two alert ideas designed to expose what can be tracked, but there are many, many others.

Readers will also find a quick guide to setting up these custom alerts at wsm.co/qgalert.

ACCESS ALERTS IN GA Within Google Analytics, there are two types of “intelligence events,” – Automatic Alerts and Custom Alerts – which can be set up for monitoring (these events are also reported daily, weekly and monthly). The intelligence events can be accessed within the left-hand sidebar of Google Analytics.

Automatic alerts are those that Google has already preconfigured to help websites track major changes in traffic patterns. They are, of course, quite useful. Those responsible for tracking website performance, however, should also know about custom alerts, which make it possible to create notifications on changes in metrics that the brand itself deems most meaningful. Unlike automatic alerts, custom alerts can be sent to an email address or be delivered by text message when a condition is triggered.

ALERT ESSENTIALS

+ Traffic Increase/Decrease: Knowing is half the battle, right? Set up a custom alert that sends a notification to a team when sessions increase or decrease by a certain percentage. Consider configuring the alert so that it compares traffic from the same day/ week/month in the previous time period. + Conversion Rate Drop/Spike: Conversions are arguably the most important metric to monitor so having an alert that provides a notification when something is performing as expected or underperforming will certainly prove useful. With this alert active, brands are able to drill down and understand where in the funnel users are leaving.

The two alerts above should be on every Google Analytics account, but they really only scratch the surface of what is possible. As a website (and audience) grows, managers will find it useful to develop more granular alerts; looking outside of “sessions” alone to gather site-wide intelligence from every corner of the digital enterprise.

Instead of applying conditions to all traffic, for example, consider looking exclusively at a particular user segment, geographic area, campaign or referral source (in relation to traffic increase and decreases, as well as conversion rate drops or spikes). Managers just might be surprised at how different the intelligence gathered is when applying different values and conditions.

Go-To List of Analytics & BI Solutions Discover powerful analytics systems on the market at

wsm.co/bilist15

Net

ADVERTISING

Creating Effective Campaigns Through

SEARCH AND SOCIAL TARGETING

By Seth Norris

Maximizing the return on investment from ad campaigns today requires highly focused, personalized targeting that combines audience data from both search and social channels.

By layering behavioral, interest, demographic and other data sources to develop these extremely specific audience profiles, marketers can create customized content that is highly relevant and engaging to those personalized segments.

Consider the following approaches for your own digital advertising initiatives and see where the ‘Net can take your enterprise:

Leverage Information Customers Provide Whether visitors realize it or not, they are providing marketers with all the information they need to develop a clear understanding of their audience segments and create highly targeted campaigns.

To create more effective content, marketers should first analyze the data found in their website analytics solution (e.g. Google Analytics) to understand general user demographics and how their audience en38

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gages. Monitoring social interaction (e.g. shares, likes, retweets, etc.) can also help identify user interests, behaviors and engagement. Combine this information to establish audience segments and identify their needs and expectations from the brand. Top-performing content on a website and social channels can reveal the interests within segments and help develop strong targeting and messaging for all paid media advertising.

Additionally, email databases can be leveraged in certain ad targeting (such as Facebook) to target specific users and keep a brand top-of-mind.

Localize Ads with Geotargeting Targeting users based on location can offer many advantages for ad campaigns and can allow personalized messaging encouraging immediate action. Google and Bing offer the ability to target ads within a specific area while many social channels offer detailed location targeting down to the country, state, city and zip code (postal) level. Leverage these features to increase foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores through promotions and digital coupons. Location-specific content can help increase engagement and drive sales through timely and specific messaging.

Identify Decision-Makers Using Demographics Targeting decision-makers allows marketers to increase engagement by sending actionable content to users who will inevitably make purchases. Depending on a target audience, decision-makers can take all forms.

Marketers can isolate a brand’s decision-makers by analyzing engagement and purchase trends. They can also consider the interests of audience segments/demographics and get specific with targeting across all paid media channels. By creating specialized campaigns for individual groups of decision-makers, marketers can customize their messaging and offers to drive more sales and generate a deeper understanding of what influences audience segments.

Analyze Purchase Patterns through Search Trends Purchase history and historical search data can teach marketers a lot about their audience and help improve campaign targeting by identifying how users engage with their brand. Consider shifts in seasonal trends and other influencers, such as weather, economy and competitors, which can impact search and sales patterns - requiring adjustments to targeting and campaign messaging.

Leverage tracking pixels from search and social campaigns to see how users move through and engage with the website. Examine page visits, bounce rates, time on pages, landing page selection, top keywords driving traffic and where users drop off in the conversion funnel to identify obstacles and opportunities for targeting, content and website usability.

By focusing on bringing back existing clients, brands can save time and resources by increasing the value of those returning customers.

When looking to expand a brand’s reach and attract new customers in new markets, marketers should leverage Google Trends to identify popular content and purchase patterns within new audience segments.

Further, brands should use customized ad content and promotions that speak to the needs of audience segments and monitor engagement to adjust campaigns.

Optimize for Mobile Engagement Data shows that mobile targeting is a massive opportunity for marketers. By leveraging mobile in search

and social campaigns Internet professionals can increase their brands’ visibility and engagement across the Web on all devices. Mobile campaigns help convert leads at the moment of interest while users are out shopping or looking for information. Promotions and coupons can help drive sales in real-time from new and existing users.

Keep in mind the user experience when developing campaigns, as mobile users possess different interests than desktop users such as location information, instore availability and local sales. Above all, keep mobile ad content concise to capture engagement on small screens and increase visibility on the go.

Monitor Engagement and Adjust The best way to create effective campaigns is to monitor results and test adjustments to targeting and content.

By watching how campaigns perform and analyzing patterns, marketers can create deeper audience understanding that can increase engagement across all digital assets, including paid media.

Further, listen to audience needs and react to customers’ interests and behaviors. Isolate drivers of engagement and messaging focus by analyzing what content and targeting performs best across various channels on the Web. Continue to analyze data and adjust campaigns to stay competitive and targeted as audience and industry behaviors shift.

Improve Ad Quality Search and social targeting offers opportunities to increase campaign effectiveness by generating a better understanding of audience interests. Leverage data and behavioral trends to create specific audience segments and utilize personalized content and delivery to increase engagement and drive more sales. Layer data sources to discover best opportunities by cross-referencing information from various platforms and crafting more complete audience profiles. Identify the interests of unique audience segments and appeal to them in targeting and campaign content to maximize ROI and increase ad quality.

Seth Norris oversees paid search, affiliate marketing and product feeds at ZOG Digital, incorporating the company’s mandate for results into each of the solutions.

The Future of CRM? Pipeliner CRM’s newest release introduces a relationship graph of the ways different contacts and accounts are connected, allowing users to designate multiple influencers and decisionmakers within an opportunity (read more at wsm.co/crmsfuture).

Web

COMMENTARY

THE PROS & WOES OF TELECOMMUTING

By Amberly Dressler, Managing Editor

Office workers often dream of the chance to work from home – no commute, no dress code and better life-work balance.

Workplace Flexibility See how tech is changing the workplace at

wsm.co/wpflex15

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Today, many of them, particularly knowledge workers (those who think for a living) are getting that opportunity. In fact, 80 percent of knowledge workers surveyed by collaboration software provider PGi say their organization offers telecommuting options, and, according to the survey, both they and their managers think they are happier and more productive for it.

Two of the most forward-thinking enterprises in the world, Yahoo and Google, however, have strong stances against telecommuting. In 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ended the company’s work-from-home policy – wanting Yahoos to communicate and collaborate side by side. Similarly, Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette has been quoted as saying that as few people as possible telecommute at Google.

It makes sense. Even though Google is a big player in making telecommuting possible (Google chat, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, etc.), its unique culture would be difficult to replicate remotely. Its yurts, cafes, whiteboards for brainstorming and “sharing cubes” that can be found in its offices around the globe all contribute to an environment that fosters creativity and teamwork.

Still, more and more companies are turning to telecommuting as a solution for staying open during inclement weather, or recruiting top talent or for meeting changing demands like those from the millennial workforce (those ages 18-34) who are expecting the option to telecommute, even if it’s just one day a week. Staying connected in an increasingly remote world, however, has its challenges, which of course differ depending on a company’s infrastructure. For example, if only a few people work offsite full-time their needs will be different than those of executives working remotely on Fridays or those from a globally distributed workforce.

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To keep an enterprise moving forward, brands must be creative with how they keep everyone connected to colleagues, to clients and to industry peers – and connected in a way that email, conference calls, chat or project management software don’t afford.

After all, there are still relationships to be nurtured.

Social media management company Buffer, for example, has its two-dozen plus employees distributed across the globe and in order “to have deliberate faceto-face time together to bond and have fun” they hold multiple Buffer retreats per year, where they gather the whole team in a single location. Past locations have included Thailand and South Africa. Buffer covers all the expenses, flights, accommodation, most meals and activities (which actually might be more affordable than office space in San Francisco, for example).

According to Buffer, once the team members get home, their conversations with each other are enhanced. Buffer writes in its blog that they now “know the tone of somebody’s voice and the way they approach problems and discussions. You read their emails differently. This changes things, and is why we’ve found retreats to be not only a fun part of our culture, but an absolute necessity.”

Aside from face-to-face time, mobile apps provide unparalleled opportunities to stay connected.

Colleagues and associates could become “friends” through Fitbit, for example, an activity tracker with a corresponding app that provides the opportunity to challenge other Fitbit users to a “workweek hustle” or “daily showdown” to see who can be the most physically active. There are messaging capabilities as well to cheer or jeer participants. It could simply be a fun way for remote workers to build relationships that would naturally happen in an office setting.

Of course everyday productivity is key to working on-site or remotely, but as the number of organizations that offer telecommuting rises, it’s important to nurture relationships wherever one is working.

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