Approach # 1: Market Research before Website’s Launch

Proponents of this approach would say that in the process of making a website, the creator should do extensive research about the makeup of her potential client base and incorporate that research into the website design.

By knowing what prospective clients are looking for, you can craft a more targeted message, making sure that everything from your content to your web page design appeals to your client base, thus increasing the rate of conversion among website visitors.

Pros

1. Less risk of diluting your brand.
Trying new strategies on the fly can be appealing, but as the saying goes, “measure twice; cut once.” By switching strategies to try and find the “perfect” solution, you risk turning off those customers you have-and if your first iterations fail to impress, your earliest visitors may leave and never come back.

2. You’ll have to do the research anyway-why not do it upfront?
Any good marketing campaign succeeds or fails based on how well the marketers know their customers. Even if your initial website rollout is successful, at some point you’re going to want to expand and will have to do CRO research. Why not do it upfront, and increase your chances of having your initial website be successful?

3. You’re already building your website for your customers.
As you build your own website, you’re undoubtedly gearing it towards who you think your customers are-this CRO method is just a way of researching whether your assumptions about your customers are correct.

Cons

1. It can be time consuming.
Researching potential customer behavior can be a prolonged process, and figuring out how to act on that research can take even longer. That’s time that you may not have: the longer you take, the longer it will be before your websites start generating revenue, and the more time your competitors have to horn in on your client base.

2. You’ll never be 100 percent certain.
All the research in the world can’t predict human behavior, so the only real way to know whether a particular strategy-whether it’s a particular headline or image or the wording of your content-works is by testing it.

Approach # 2: Launch Your Website, then Research Your Market

Adherents to this CRO strategy would argue that you need to test your ideas on your websites in order to find what works.

Once you begin to get a sense as to what works, you can optimize everything from your web page background to your Flash intros based on actual input from customers.

Pros

1. You can adapt to a changing marketplace.
The way customers shop changes due to outside influences that you can’t control: the economy, the weather, new technological development. By constantly working to improve your website, you can stay on top of emerging market trends and ride that wave as long as possible.

2.Your website can be up and running quickly.By forgoing significant advanced research, you can make your website live weeks or even months earlier. That’s a serious leg up on the competition-and a serious head start on generating revenue.

Cons

1. You might turn some customers off.
Even though customers change their behaviors all the time, they still like stability: just think of all the “We want our old Facebook back” pages that spring up every time Facebook tweaks its system.

2. At some point, you’ll have to do customer research.
It’s the cornerstone of good marketing strategies, and whether you want to broaden your base or just convince your current customers to buy more, at some point, you’re going to hit a wall and need to do customer research. Whichever methodology you prefer, CRO is a vital tool to making your websites successes.

Courtesy: http://www.entireweb.com/

But in 2011, we see brands that now have millions of fans not knowing what to do next and also being unable to either measure that value.

The quickest gauge of power is engagement rate. Take the total number of likes and comments and divide that by how many fans you have. Let’s say you are averaging 100 interactions per post and you have 200,000 fans. That’s only 1 out of 2,000 fans engaging with you, which is 1/20th of a percent. This is about average for brands, but is awful overall. We see some brands consistently hitting 1 percent. Why?

They haven’t let their fan base atrophy. They protect their investment by regularly feeding fans with that they want- content, special
offers, interesting items- all the while being careful not to be overly promotional.

A fan page with one percent engagement on 50,000 fans has as much power as a page with a million fans but only 1/20th of a percent engagement. Which situation would you prefer to be in?

We have one sporting goods company as a client that has only a couple hundred thousand fans, while their competitor has a few million. Yet, our client has more likes and comments, plus more revenue, than the competitor.

Key mistakes:
- Investing blindly in building fans for the heck of it, without a corresponding nurture program.
- Running a general contest to drive traffic and fans without realizing this drives the wrong types of users and permanently polluting the fan base with folks who only wanted a free ipod, not your product.
- Not measuring traffic to the website from Facebook or enhanced placements in organic search (yes, on Google, too, because of your Facebook activity).
- looking at last click attribution as the ROI of Facebook marketing.

Where are you in your Facebook fan lifecycle? Are you still building your base or maybe looking to now nurture fans and extract value? Maybe you are cautious and want to establish a social strategy before embarking on Facebook. Regardless, consider Facebook a multiplier of fan (real world fans, not Facebook fans) emotion. Better to attract and nurture the right people rather than the masses for pure bragging rights.

The value of your fan base is not $3.60 or some arbitrary value from an article somewhere. It’s the product of your nurturing efforts and ability to engage fans.

Courtesy: ppcsummit.com

Quickly named an “Anti-Demand-Media”-Update, I couldn’t find any real data proving this claim. I’d like to change this with this posting: Based on a dataset of one million keywords, which were checked before the update and yesterday I can determine the biggest loser of this algorithm-change. The SISTRIX VisibilityIndex is an index value calculated from traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate on specific positions. Let’s start with a list of the 25 biggest losers:

The table shows the domain, percentage loss, SISTRIX before and after the update as well as the number of keywords found from the one million dataset for this domain before and after the algorithm-change. It is sorted by the biggest absolut loss in SISTRIX VisibilityIndex. Comparing these results with the announcement from Google, they seem to have reached their goal: a whole lot of low-quality domains lost significant visibility in the US Google-SERPs.

Let’s see in detail what Google did to the affected domains. The first conclusion is quite straightforward: the number of keywords these domains are ranking for dropped dramatically. Looking at mahalo.com as an example, it went from 33,875 keywords before the update to just 9,740 keywords after the update went public – a decrease of more than 70%. These were keywords like “zealand air“ (3), “digg“ (8) or “tax check“ (4) where the domain fell out of the top 100 results. The second outcome deals with the remaining keywords. Here is a chart on which Google result page the keywords of mahalo.com were to be found before and after the algorithm-update:

It’s eye-catching that mahalo.com did not only lose more than 70% of their keywords – the remaining keywords are also ranking much worse than before. More than two third of all keywords for this domain could be found on result page 8, 9 and 10. That’s the reason the SISTRIX value fell even more than the raw count of found keywords.

And how about Demand Media? Well, there is no sign that Google tried to downrank ehow.com. Ehow.com even gained SISTRIX value (from 270 to 310) and Keywords (from 317,320 to 324,021) during the algorithm-change. Looking at the SERP-Distribution chart from above for ehow.com, you’ll notice the difference. Quite a statement from Google regarding the quality of Demand Medias’ content, isn’t it? If you are interested in a full list of 100 Domains suffering from this update, please drop me a short notice.

Courtesy: sistrix.com

According to Google, about 12% of search queries were impacted by this update. The SISTRIX blog provided additional insight by posting the top 25 websites that overnight stopped showing up inGoogle for numerous keywords. I was interested in learning about this update, and SISTRIX was kind enough to share their big list of over 300 sites that have had deep traffíc losses. In addition, I’ve had various people send me their sites to look at.

I hoped to analyze the data to spot similarities between the sites that got hit so that I could understand the specific factors Google used when deciding which pages to nuke. As you can imagine, there was a lot of data to sort through and I feel as if I’ve only just gotten started. However, I do have some preliminary findings to share with you as quickly as possible.

Please note that just because I noticed similar things on sites that got hit, it doesn’t mean those things were the cause of the loss of Google traffic. It’s far too easy to make assumptions and mix up cause and effect in nearly every aspect of SEO. So I caution you to treat the information I’m providing, as what it is — preliminary findings that make me go “Hmmm.” Also note that I’ve barely had enough time to look at the potential on-page factors that might be causing issues, and haven’t even started to look at the off-page links that are pointing to these sites. Because we know that links and anchor text are Google’s main squeeze, my on-page analysis could very well be completely off base.

With that caveat out of the way, below are some of the interesting things I noticed that made me go hmmm…with the small set of sites I’ve looked at so far.

Semi-hidden Content

One surprise finding, which may or may not relate to the loss of Google traffic, was that many of the sites had content that was behind tabs, and not visible all at once to someone using a typical browser. It’s possible that this type of design element is so common on websites these days that many sites from a random sampling would also be using it, but it definitely struck me as odd. What made it especially interesting was that most of the sites using the tabs had a very large amount of content contained within them. With tabs such as these, a person only sees the content in one tab at a time, while Google sees all the content from all of the tabs, as if it were contained on one page. (Technically it is, because it’s all one URL.) In many cases all the tabbed content put together added up to thousands of words, and often hundreds of links as well.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using tabs this way (and many sites are currently using the technique), some cases might trigger red flags.

There are many different coding methods to “hide” content behind tabs. The code on two of the sites I reviewed that had lost Google traffic were using different methods. One had this code: “display: none; visibility: hidden;” and the other had this: “overflow: hidden;”.

Why Google might not like it: Each site was using their tabs for different reasons, and I doubt that the “visibility: hidden,” in and of itself, caused Google to no longer like those pages. But perhaps Google took issue with the extremely long pages of content because they might appear to be less user-friendly (if Google didn’t realize that the content is tabbed). In addition, the numerous extra links in some of the tabs might appear to go overboard.

In one instance, I set my default browser to Googlebot and tried to browse a page that was using tabs with tons of content behind them, but I got an error message that the page couldn’t be viewed at all. The error seemed to have something to do with a very strange, hidden ad link contained in the tabbed content.

In another case of semi-hidden content, the pages were designed in a way that is very cool and easy to use for people, but all the content from the various hidden areas, when viewed on one long page as Google saw it, ends up looking like a disgusting keyword-stuffed mess! I have no idea if the site was purposely designed to stuff keywords in that way or not, but before the Farmer Update it was apparently working for them.

Completely Hidden Content

Another common finding between some of the sites I reviewed was having the real “meat” of the site behind a registration wall. While there would be some keyword-rich content on the page in question, you couldn’t read the whole article unless you registered for it. Google hasn’t ever been a fan of that, and even offers their “First Click Free” program so that content publishers who require registration to read their articles can still get their content indexed. But the site must show the entire piece of content to people who have not registered if they got to it from a Google search. The sites I reviewed were not using the First Clíck Free approach.

Why Google might not like it: They believe that if you want your content indexed, you should play by their rules, which in this case is the First Click Free rule. They probably also believe that a page with just a summary of information related to the searcher’s query is likely not the best page for the user to land on. So it doesn’t surprise me that those types of pages may have been hit in the Farmer Update.

Merry-Go-Round Sites Containing Mostly Ads or Links

Interestingly, I recognized one of the sites on the big SITRIX list as one I had done a website review for last year. I have to say that it was one of the craziest sites I had ever seen, and I was shocked that Google was even showing it highly in the search results. So when I saw it got nuked big-time by Farmer Google, I wasn’t surprised. I noticed some similarities between that site and a few of the others that got nailed — mostly that you felt you were going round and round in circles as you tried to find the information you were originally seeking at Google.

Here’s what happens on this type of site: You get to a page that uses the keywords you typed into Google, only to find that you need to click a link on that page to really get the information. But when you click that page, you either end up at another site, or on another page on the same site — and you still don’t quite have the info you wanted. It seems that you could keep clicking that way forever and don’t ever find what you were looking for. Yet you always have the feeling it is you doing something wrong, not that the site simply sucks wind. (Of course, the pages are also always full of Google AdSense and other ads.)

Similar to the merry-go-round sites, others I reviewed were simply aggregating others’ content in one way or another. In many cases, it would make sense for Google to just show the original site (or sites) rather than a page with a list of sites — especially when the list of links is actually just running an ad platform that appears to be links.

One site was a niche comparison site, which seemed okay on the surface. But I found that when I browsed to a particular product and then tried to view it on the website that was listed as the cheapest, in many cases I was brought to either the home page of said site or a page that contained a product similar to the one I was looking at, but not the exact one. Ugh.

Why Google might not like it: Google stated that part of this update was to improve the quality of the results their searchers were receiving. All of the above types of sites have numerous pages that meet the “poor quality” label, assuming anybody ever paid attention. In these cases, I can see where it makes sense for Google to show the pages being linked to directly in their search results, rather than the page that’s doing the linking.

So there you have it — my first impressions from a very small sample of sites.

What You Should Watch Out For

With everything I’ve seen, the consistent themes seem to be usability and the intent of the page in question. I can’t say how Google is technically figuring out intent, but they appear to be going after pages that might frustrate users. Google’s goal is to satisfy the search query of their user — the searcher. Their goal is not to provide their searcher with pages that link to the pages, that link to the other pages, that satisfy the original search.

With all that said, after writing up my findings, I also looked at some of the new Google results, and, sadly, there are some even worse pages that show! In one case, the site I was reviewing, while not satisfying the search query itself (other than having the search words on the page), was beat out by a pathetic little made-for-AdSense site that had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. How that one survived the Farmer Update, I’ll won’t ever know.

It’s key to remember that this update is most likely just the beginning. About the only thing I’m sure of at the moment is that Google still has a lot of tweaking to do over the next few months to truly sort things out.

Courtesy: Sitepronews

Google Shares Some Clues, Impacted Sites Left Guessing

Google’s recent algorithm update aimed at improving the quality of search results has captured a great deal of attention – both positive and negative. The general consensus seems to be that the results are in fact better now, but still not perfect. Perfection will likely never be achieved, but there are still some glaring criticisms out there about Google’s most recent attempt.

Having had some time to reflect, what is your opinion of the update? Let us know in the comments.
Despite the improvement in overall search quality in general, there have been many sites to suffer the consequences of the update – some deservedly and others maybe not so much. As Google will never reveal its secret recipe in its entirety, there are plenty of clues out there, and even facts that Google will share. You can criticize Google’s mystique all you want, but there’s not denying that they do communicate with the webmaster community to a great extent, even if they don’t always tell you everything you want to hear.

Google’s Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal – two of the most instrumental voices in the recent update – shared some clues and insights in an interview with Wired this week. Before we get to specifics, there were some interesting things mentioned by the two that are worth noting. For example, Caffeine, which sped Google’s indexing, led to a flood of content – both good and bad. This seems to have helped the “shallow” kinds of content that this most recent update targeted – not stuff that is quite spam, but…well, shallow. We also learned that Google calls the update “Panda”.

They revealed that prior to the update, they sent out documents to outside testers/raters, and asked them questions about quality. It would be interesting to know who these raters were, but no such luck there. Users were asked things like whether they would feel comfortable giving a site their credit card info or giving medicine from the site to their kids (I wonder if anyone was asked if they felt comfortable getting their brain cancer information from a freelance eHow writer with no credentials in the field), whether they considered the site to be authoritative, whether it would be ok in a magazine, whether it has “excessive” ads, and other questions. It would be great to be able to know more of those questions, but we can only work with what Google has revealed.

“And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality,” Singhal is quoted as saying.

“We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side,” said Cutts. “And you can really see mathematical reasons…”

“I got an e-mail from someone who wrote out of the blue and said, ‘Hey, a couple months ago, I was worried that my daughter had pediatric multiple sclerosis, and the content farms were ranking above government sites,’” Cutts is later quoted as saying. “Now, she said, the government sites are ranking higher. So I just wanted to write and say thank you.’”

Again, why is eHow still ranking for “level 4 brain cancer”?

Google says it still looks at feedback, and Cutts even said that if someone has a specific question about why a site dropped, he thinks it’s “fair and justifiable and defensible to tell them why that site dropped.” He also said that Google’s most recent algorithm contains signals that can be gamed (hence the lack of full transperency). In other words, it can still be optimized for.

Finally, the site Suite101, which data from SearchMetrics lists as the biggest loser in percentage (in its organic performance index) was brought up in the interview. Suite101 and eHow are often compared and labeled as “content farm” type sites. When asked why Suite101 took a much bigger hit than eHow, Cutts simply said, “I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101.”

It would be very helpful to understand the differences Google sees between these two sites. It doesn’t seem very clear by looking through the sites that there are obvious differences in quality. I’m sure it varies on both.

We reached out to Suite101 a few days ago for comment on the update and its impact, but have yet to receive a response. I’m even more interested to hear what they have to say, now that these comments have come out. Update: Suite101 referred us to an open letter from CEO Peter Berger to Google’s Matt Cutts.

CEO Peter Berger stressed the importance of quality in content when we spoke with him last year.
“Every week, several thousand people apply to become Suite101 writers,” he told us. “While we only accept a portion of applicants based on our non-negotiable quality standards, we do have many successful writers on our site who do not consider themselves ‘writers’.”

“We see it as Suite101′s mission to enable people – anyone who can write well and with deep understanding of a subject – to achieve their goals,” he said. “These might be earning money, addressing large audiences, building up a personal professional brand, or simply enjoying creative freedom in a nurturing, peer-oriented environment.”

Results from people with a deep understanding of a subject should lend themselves to quality. Whether or not Suite101 delivers on this is open for debate. Clearly Google doesn’t think so, practically making the site the poster-child of what not to do. The mysteries continue…

What we know Google is looking at with the Panda update:

- User comfort level in the trust area (think credit card/medicine comments)

- Is it considered authoritative (this would apply some indication of expertise on topics covered, I would think)

- Is the content quality good enough for print? (I’ve seen plenty of crap printed)

- Are there too many ads? (How many are too many, and does the ad network matter?)

- We know Google has its definition of what could be considered low quality

- Google uses a “classifier” to draw a line in the sand

- We know that so far, Google has not used indications from the Chrome Extension (emphasis on so far.

Google hinted in the past that this data could potentially be used to tweak the algorithm).

- Google looks at feedback, at least to some extent

- Based on comments from Cutts, Google will tell you why your site dropped (getting that communication flow going may not be the easiest thing to do, but I have personally witnessed Cutts sit down with someone at a conference and look at their site with them.)

- The algorithm can still be gamed. It can still be optimized for. (If you were hit by the update, there are things you can do to get back in Google’s good graces. In other words, you’re not necessarily banned just because of your brand.)

- Most of the changes in rankings will be done algorithmically, but Google will take manual action in some instances (see JC Penney)

-If you use any auto-generated content keep it separated from the original high quality stuff, and block it from search engines. Google’s John Mu said recently, “If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I’d recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.”

This is basically in line with another statement from Google obtained by Search Engine Land: “Sites that believe they have been adversely impacted by the change should be sure to extensively evaluate their site quality. In particular, it’s important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site. Publishers who believe they’ve been impacted can also post in our webmaster forums to let us know. We will consider feedback from publishers and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms.”

Courtesy: webpronews.com

“Foursquare on your phone gives you and your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points and unlock badges for discovering new things.”

Similar to Facebook’s places app, Foursquare allows us to update and comment on places we are at any time on our mobile devices.

Foursquare has a deal with Vodafone in the UK that will see its customers gain instant access to the feature on their new handset, so look out for similar deals in other markets and this initiative is sure to increase user numbers dramatically over the coming year.

Foursquare is encouraging business owners to claim their locations and offer specials which can be discounts or prizes for people who check in at their location. They have created tools which make it easy for the business owner to create different specials and measure the effectiveness of each. Venues are promoting their involvement with Foursquare through Twitter, signs at cash registers, or outside asking their customers to take part.

For example, if a Foursquare user is at your bar/restaurant, they will tell them what they have to do to unlock a free snack or discounted drink. If they happen to be across the street or two blocks away from your venue, they will let them know that your business gives special treatment to Foursquare users and that they should swing by for a visit.
Is Foursquare right for my brand?

Not all businesses will want to engage with customers using Foursquare. The obvious application of the platform suits primarily consumer-facing businesses such as restaurants, cafés, hotels, hairdressers, retailers, attractions and more. This doesn’t mean to say other businesses are excluded though, especially if Foursquare adds new features with the aim of diversifying its user base.

Ultimately, if you are already focussed on delivering excellent value for money and outstanding customer service then you’re doing what it takes to win over Foursquare users. They will be commenting on your products and service quality so your reputation is in the hands of your customers.

As Foursquare continues to grow its user base, you will be well advised to add and then claim your business in order to start engaging with customers on a whole new level. If you would like some help to review the effectiveness of these digital marketing techniques for your business, please contact your local WSI consultant.

Courtesy: wsidigitalmarketing.com

A good landing page lets visitors to a website know that they have come to the right place. Given that aromas are beyond the limits of current technology, that knowledge is typically conveyed visually, using words and images that reflect the message that prompted the click that brought the visitor to the site. Clicking on a paid search ad that displays “15% Off All HP Printers” to people searching for HP printers should lead to a page where that same offer is clearly visible.

In my experience, conversion rates and other key metrics are consistently higher when scent is maintained by aligning page content with traffic acquisition campaigns. There are several ways to do this, including campaign-specific landing pages and micro-sites. Another approach is to enable all of your pages to display conditional content, which is content that varies based on what you know about the visitor, including what brought them to the page. This “universal landing page” approach is particularly valuable when social media sends traffic to your site.

Consider what happens to the scent trail if someone on a social network pastes a link to a product page on your site into a tweet or status update. The good news is that you are getting traffic that you didn’t have to pay for, and the scent trail is, to some degree, taking care of itself. The visitor’s interest in the product has landed them on the product page. But now it’s up to you to amplify the scent, capture the interest, and convert it. If you have a system in place to display conditional content on all your site’s pages–effectively giving any page the potential to act like a landing page–there are numerous conversion strategies that can prove effective; here are four of them:

1. Make them welcome: Use what you know about the visitor to make them feel special, starting with whether they’re a new or returning visitor. New visitors are best met with assurances that your site is the best place to purchase the item in which interest has been expressed. Also highlight information about logistics such as shipping options and return policies. Returning visitors require less information and assurance so use that space to welcome them back, possibly leveraging CRM data about past browsing and purchasing behavior.

2. Make them feel at home: Many visitors respond positively to local content, which you can derive from their physical location as determined by IP address look-up. One pet food website produced a big jump in orders simply by displaying location-specific messaging such that a visitor from Seattle saw: “Seattle’s best source for pet food at discount prices.”

3. Engage them: When someone clicks through to your site from a tweet or status update, you have a chance to engage them by leveraging their interest in the subject of the link. Show them links to similar or related items. Consider a lightbox to ask for their email address with a hook such as: “Want up-to-the-minute news and offers on great products like this? Sign up for our free newsletter.

4. Accommodate them: Your web server knows a lot about the devices people are using to visit your site. If the server detects a widescreen display consider a fly-out box on the right of the page to deliver more above-the-fold information. If the visitor is using a smartphone adjust content accordingly.

One reason for the marketing buzz around social media is the very scenario discussed here: Some number of people are arriving at websites from social media links that cost nothing, attracted by the scent of something that interests them, and some percentage of those people make purchases. Applied with the right amount of marketing flair the four strategies I have described can substantially increase the probability that the social media visitor is converted into a website customer.

Courtesy: ppcsummit.com

The 4 Types of Bids

Google AdWords offers four different options for bidding; manual bidding, automated bidding, CPM bidding and CPA bidding. Each of these methods has both strengths and weaknesses that should be considered.

1. Manual Bidding – This is the classic, auction-style bidding we grew to love when AdWords was first launched. You set a default bid at the ad group level that applies to all keywords in the ad group. You then have the option of setting a custom bid for every keyword if you wish.Manual bidding offers the greatest control of your cost-per-click (CPC) and allows you to see how changes in bids affect position, CTR and even conversions. However, this control comes at a price. Manual bid management can be very time consuming, hence the abundance of 3rd party bid management tools on the market.

2. Automatic Bidding – This is Google’s attempt to make bidding easy for even the newest AdWords advertiser. The user sets a daily budget and then Google tries to get as many clicks as possible with the given budget.While this option requires virtually no effort to manage, you also have virtually no control over what time your ads are being shown, what search queries are triggering your ads or the position of your ad. Unless you trust Google 100% with your money, I don’t recommend this option.

3. CPM Bidding – This is the oldest method of bidding. You tell Google how much you’re willing to pay for 1,000 impressions and they start showing your ad. While some would view this as a step backward in internet advertising, if an advertiser has proven ad copy that delivers a high CTR, this can actually deliver clicks cheaper than PPC, especially for brand terms.

4. CPA Bidding – Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding is the newest addition to Google AdWords bidding. Another name for the feature is Conversion Optimizer. With this feature you must first install conversion tracking (which you already have installed right?) and have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. Then all you have to do is go to the campaign settings and under “Bidding and budget” select the “Edit” link for bidding options. There you select the “Focus on conversion” radio button and set your desired CPA.

The benefit here is that Google is able to use all its available data to obtain conversions at the desired CPA. Google can alter position or time of day, try more broad search queries or different geographies. You relinquish a lot of control, but you can see phenomenal results.

As you can see just choosing your bid type is quite a decision. However, you should also consider the other factors that Google considers along with your actual bid. These factors are rolled up into the mysterious Quality Score (QS).

Enter Quality Score

Perhaps the least understood metric in the otherwise robust reporting of AdWords is Quality Score. It affects where your ad will appear and more importantly, how much you will pay for a click! There are many factors that influence QS. Google lists the following:

* Historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword/ad pair on Google
* Overall account history
* Historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
* Quality of your landing page
* Relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
* Relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
* Your account’s performance in the geographic area where the ad will be shown
* Other relevance factors

As you can see, QS is very complex and constantly changing as Google adds and subtracts “other relevance factors.” Google has also had issues with incorrectly reported QS, though they assured advertisers that it was only an error in reporting, not in actual calculations.

Golden Era Over?

Though simplicity is long gone from the realm of Google AdWords bidding, PPC is still a smart investment of marketing dollars and provides performance metrics that are second to none.

Courtesy: ppcsummit.com

When it comes to your SEM campaigns there are several 101-type action items you need to perform every single day of the week to ensure killer results. Unless you’re a dedicated PPC manager, there are probably some to-do’s that slip with your PPC campaigns like negative keyword research and keyword expansion. Here are some tips to help *semi-automate (*”semi” because a little bit of brain work is still required) and streamline those critical PPC tasks, making it easier to stay on top of your to-do list while improving your campaign’s performance.

1. Negative Keyword Research using the Search Query Report

Don’t spend your money on keywords that are not relevant to your business, not only are you wasting money but you may be hurting your brand image by having your ad displayed on unwanted search queries. Look to your Search Query Report to find the keywords visitors used that lead to a click-through on your ad. Now that AdWords has this report directly tied into the interface you can add negative keywords to your campaigns easier than ever. AdCenter also has a version of this report called the Search Query Performance. Since the AdCenter report can only be accessed through the reporting center and not the interface, schedule the report to be emailed to you once a week to make it hassle-free. It is important this task be executed on a weekly basis, if you left this as a monthly action item you could be losing hundreds of dollars.

2. Keyword Expansion using the Search Query Report (again!)

Not only is the Search Query Report helpful for negative keyword research, but the insights you gain can be invaluable for keyword expansion. If certain keywords start reoccurring in the report that are relevant to your business, let the testing begin! Why not build out new ad groups and start testing new keywords. This is an opportunity to learn about new trends and jargon your target audience is using and start capitalizing on them. Within a week you can determine if the expansion is successful and choose to build it out further or pause the expansion if it isn’t generating conversions.

If you start seeing several opportunities for testing, create a testing schedule and implement a few expansion opportunities at a time, budget allowing. Managing this on a weekly (if not daily) basis is a great way to gain ground over your competitors, be the first one to target new industry trends. Sometimes the physical task of building out the new ad groups for testing can monopolize your time, but Google has updated existing tools and released new ones to help you with keyword expansion.

3. Semi-Automated Keyword Expansion with the Opportunities Tab

There are two additional tools in AdWords, besides the Search Query Report, that will help you with keyword expansion and ad group creation. The first is the Opportunities tab in the AdWords interface. In this tab you will find a list of bid and keyword suggestions based on three different goals: increase traffic, balance cost and traffic, and maintain or decrease cost. Upon your review of the suggestions you can choose to directly upload the keywords or bid changes to your ad groups. In the past a lot of these suggestions have been irrelevant to my account and it was more work to comb though the suggestions then to do the research on my own.

However, Google has added a rating system into the tool, so you can tell AdWords if the suggested term is irrelevant to the specific ad group or to your entire account. If you identify a keyword as irrelevant, Google will learn this and not recommend the term in the future, which makes the tool more helpful and allows you to concentrate on only targeted ideas. By using the Opportunities tab to identify new keywords to test, your job may not be automated, but Google is certainly putting the information and recommendations right at your fingertips.

4. Using the Contextual Targeting Tool to Streamline Keyword Expansion

The second tool, now available in all AdWords accounts, is the Contextual Targeting Tool. While the tool may be meant to help you create granular ad groups for the Display Network, who’s to say you can’t use it for the same purpose on the Search Network. If you haven’t already played around with this tool, you are going to love it! You can find this user-friendly tool under the Reporting and Tools tab in AdWords and all you have to do is type in your keyword suggestion(s) you are looking to target.

Next, the tool will automatically group similar terms into themed ad groups. You can choose to expand the ad group, making it more granular, by clicking on the “Expand” button to the right of the suggested ad group, shown in the below screenshot. The tool even incorporates max CPC recommendations for Search and Display and allows you to export in AdWords Editor format. Having tightly themed ad groups will allow you to do a better job of including your keywords in your ad text, in efforts to increase your CTR and improve quality score. The Contextual Targeting tool helps *semi-automate the process of grouping keywords into ad groups and significantly streamlines your management time.

AdWords is providing you with the tools to efficiently manage your SEM campaigns, the Search Query Report, the Opportunities tab and the Contextual Targeting Tool are just three on the list. While these tools help *semi-automate some of the most important PPC tasks like negative keyword research and keyword expansion your judgment is still needed. Test these tools out (if you’re not already doing so) or use them in a new way and see how they streamline your daily management to allow you to tackle other items on your weekly to do list.

Courtesy: ppcsummit.com

Combined revenue for the 87 merchants that have so far reported annual web sales increased 32.9% to $46.53 billion in 2010 from $35 billion in 2009. In comparison, total retail sales grew year over year about 3% to $2.4 trillion last year from $2.33 trillion in 2009, according to the National Retail Federation.

Fueled by Amazon.com, web-only retailers grew the most in 2010. Among the 55 web-only retailers who have reported their revenue so far, sales were up 37.8% in 2010 to $39.47 billion from $28.64 billion in 2009.

Without Amazon, No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide which grew sales year over year by 39.5% to $34.20 billion from $24.51 billion, the remaining 54 online-only merchants grew revenue 27.6% to $5.27 billion in 2010 from $4.13 billion in 2009.

The analysis of the 55 web-only retailers, 15 catalog companies, 14 chain retailers and three consumer brand manufacturers also reveals:

• Even with only a handful of companies reporting e-commerce sales thus far, consumer brand manufacturers continue to see the Internet as a vital sales channel. Top 500 manufacturers posted combined sales of $340.4 million in 2010 from $233.2 million in 2009, an increase of 46%.

• Store-based retailers continue to generate more business online. The combined web sales of chain retailers grew 13.8% to $4.30 billion last year from $3.78 billion in 2009.

• Catalogers posted the lowest growth rates among all Top 500 merchant types in 2010, growing web sales 3% year over year to $2.41 billion from $2.34 billion.

• Without Amazon, the remaining 87 merchants experienced annual growth of 17.5% from sales of $10.49 billion in 2009 to $12.33 billion in 2010.

Courtesy: internetretailer.com

Sergey and Larry are the majority owners of the company and it stands to reason that they would sign off on any important decision, but investors insisted on “adult supervision” for “the boys” and Eric Schmidt provided it. What now?

Well, first off, Larry and Sergey are now well into their 30s, which means calling them boys and insisting they need adult supervision is so 2002. Second, for all we know, Sergey and Larry have been calling the shots all along, which means you shouldn’t see much change in direction.

Still, the trade press has been awash in rumors that this leadership change was made because the founders feel that Google has been losing its edge, ceding its reputation for innovation to the new darlings of Silicon Valley, Facebook and Twitter. I’m not sure what power Larry now wields that being the owner of the company did not afford him, but I guess we will see.

To me, the real issue is not over how the company will go in new directions (or not), but it’s how well-suited Larry is to the new role he is taking on. Page is by all turns a brilliant man, but he has not been a stirring public speaker, nor someone who has seemed all that interested in being the public face of Google. I have felt all along that the founders would rather be the people calling the shots rather than making loads of public appearances and taking the brunt of criticism for every erroneous syllable.

Perhaps I underestimate the founders”after all, Bill Gates was the top dog at Microsoft and somehow made it work for many years. But I think that the minutiae that dogs a CEO of a large company makes it very difficult for that person to be the visionary, too. Perhaps Steve jobs puts a lie to that, but I think generally it is true. That same Mr. Gates stepped away from the CEO role when he thought Microsoft was losing its edge, so it is curious to see Larry jump into the role for the same reason.

Not that Eric Schmidt was doing such a hot job of being Google’s public voice. His recent gaffes have been well-documented, so perhaps the founder decided that they don’t need him any more because they can’t do any worse.

What does it mean for digital marketers? Despite all the punditry over this issue, I suspect that it will mainly be fodder for people deciding whether to buy or sell Google’s stock than for any other reason. This leadership change may prove in a few years to have made a big difference (good or bad) to Google’s fortunes, but it is unlikely to have a big impact on yours”which is true of most of the industry comings and goings that we all like to focus on. Keep working on what works for you and let Google sort itself out.

Courtesy:  Searchnewz.com

With effect from 1 March 2011, you are required to comply with the requirements set out in the notification of the Reserve Bank of India governing the processing and settlement of export-related receipts facilitated by online payment gateways (“RBI Guidelines”).

In order to comply with the RBI Guidelines, our user agreement in India will be amended for the following services as follows:

• Any balance in and all future payments into your PayPal account may not be used to buy goods or services and must be transferred to your bank account in India within 7 days from the receipt of confirmation from the buyer in respect of the goods or services; and

• Export-related payments for goods and services into your PayPal account may not exceed US$500 per transaction.

We seek your understanding as we continue to employ our best efforts to comply with the RBI Guidelines in a timely manner.

We regret any inconvenience caused to you and hope the advance notice will enable you to plan your future use of our services accordingly.

Sincerely,

The PayPal Team

• In 2010 Gen Y grew to outnumber Baby Boomers

• 96% of them have joined a social network

• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year have met via social media

• Facebook added 100 million users in 9 months

• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest

• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees

• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

• In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.

Courtesy: WSI Digital Marketing

Although there are many firms in India which are engaged in both On-page and Off-page SEO activities, the process by no means is easy. Started appearing in the top of a search engine’s results page requires a good amount of time & strategy and only an experienced company who understands the intricacies of SEO, can achieve the targets.

Why Best SEO Company in India

We assist you in growing your business worldwide or locally by our well demonstrated search engine marketing strategies. Our SEO expertise helps to strategically improve your search engine placement with desired keywords by using innovative and widely accepted search engine optimization technique and implement search engine marketing campaign to benefit you in optimizing ROI and stay ahead with your competitors.

1. Your product pages can gain organic search engine visibility.

There’s much to be said for having your products show up on the first page of Google or Yahoo. Organic search engine listings can bring valuable traffic directly to your product pages without the per-click cost of paid search. You can reach way beyond existing marketing campaigns to a whole new set of consumers who may have never heard of you or thought to shop on your site otherwise.

But search engines don’t like duplicate content. They work hard to return useful results to searchers – and that means filtering out all the “me too” web pages containing the same content.

This puts you at a severe disadvantage if you’re using the standard supplied copy for product descriptions – the same as every other retailer. Search engines are likely to favor the manufacturer’s web site or a retailer that has added elements to customize its product page, while filtering out all the other sites showing the standard copy. Including yours.

Sometimes customizing your product descriptions is all that’s needed to help your product pages show up in searches naturally. Just be aware of important keywords for each product – retain the keywords used in the original content and ensure other possible keywords are also addressed in the new copy. That way your product pages will not only enjoy the likelihood of ranking above those of other retailers for the same keywords in the generic product descriptions, but they can show up for a larger set of search terms, too.

Just one thing. Keep in mind that in order for your product descriptions to help with search engine visibility, the architecture of your product pages must support indexing of that content. If you would like a structural assessment of your product pages, please let our SEO team know.

2. Shoppers who land on your product pages are more likely to buy.

Let’s face it. Most manufacturer-supplied product descriptions are pretty bland. Well-written product descriptions can help increase the shopper’s propensity to purchase from you. Studies have shown that consumers are reluctant to buy from sites that don’t include enough information to answer all their questions. Your unique product descriptions can offer more details than competing sites, alleviating any concerns or unanswered questions the shopper would face elsewhere.

Even if you offer commodity products that normally compete on price, you can create perceived value with the information you provide. While some consumers may still use your site for research and then shop elsewhere to find the lowest price, you’ll find that others assign a premium value to your web site, appreciating that they can research and buy at the same online store.

In addition, creating complete, unique descriptions for each of your products can also go a long way toward boosting credibility. Consumers are more likely to trust a web site that has invested in well-written, thorough product information.

3. You create greater brand equity for your online store.

You sell products provided by a lot of different manufacturers. Each vendor has its own format for the descriptions it provides, leaving your product pages a patchwork of different copy styles, occasional grammatical mishaps and generally very boring, incomplete information.

When you invest in unique descriptions for all the products you sell, you can match the tone to your own store brand. Customers experience a seamless voice from your home page through category landing pages right down to each product. You’ll be more likely to build rapport with customers, which can create a point of differentiation for your store and support greater shopper loyalty.

Yes, it does take a significant investment to provide compelling product descriptions. But with the payoff of greater search engine visibility, higher conversions and enhanced brand equity, rewriting manufacturer product descriptions is well worth the investment. The retailers that recognize this are the ones creating a long-term advantage online.

Why not make your store the place to research and buy the products you sell, rather than just another choice among hundreds? Enlist our Ecommerce copywriting services today.

Courtsey: Seo-advantage