Karl Havard in the British Internet periodical "Econsultancy" uses a football ("soccer", to you NFL fans) metaphor to make a point about all of the other things, besides good solid SEO, that we Internet marketers need do to "score" success. A "goal hanger" is a player who waits just outside the box around a football goal, hoping to deflect the ball that others work so hard to advance. To Havard, we focus too much of our efforts (especially monetary ones) on SEO, while shorting, for example, the conversion elements on our site that make SEO pay off, just as football fans give too little credit to the players who worked so hard to get the ball to the "goal hangers". The algebra of success is Site Entries times Conversion Rate, and the return on conversion investment is often "misunderestimated", as former President Bush would say.

Labels: conversion rate improvement, seo, web analytics, web marketing

Real estate web sites Trulia and Zillow are both reporting growth, according to Search Engine Watch. Truila announced record growth in March, while Zillow announced an agreement to build co-branded real estate web sites for a consortium of 180 community newspapers. This makes Trulia and Zillow increaslingly important resources for realtors.

Compete.com shows significant growth for both Zwillow and Trulia over the past several months, as shown below. We note that Compete's panel does not conform to Trulia's reported Q1 growth, at lest reporting through February. By comparison, Google Trends reports relatively flat search traffic on the terms "real estate" and "homes for sale". It would appear that Zillow and Trulia are taking market share from other sites, perhaps the sites of realtors themselves.

What does this mean for realtors? We expect it's going to be increasingly difficult to draw people to the realtor's web site. Given that, realtors have an oportunity to engage with potential buyers and sellers on Zillow and Trulia. There is also an opportunity to focus locally and build online reputation through a variety of social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

It's going to be up to the realtors to find their customers online and to connect with them where they are. Customers are searching for "real estate" or "homes for sale", but they are increasingly searching out "zillow" and "trulia". Trulia's blog talks about Trulia's presence on Twitter.

Trulia is chasing Zwillow for real estate shoppers. The opportunity is for realtors to become even more nimble. One strategy is to connect ubiquitously to their own local communities as real estate clients, homeowners and potential homeowners, become more connected online.

Labels: nalytics, real estate, social media, trulia, web analytics, zillow

Social Media Club Chicago, March 26, 2009

Social Media Club Chicago had a crowd of approximately 225 last week at The Chicago Mercantile Exchange for an evening of The Uses of Social Media in B2B Communications.


The high point of the panel was when Ellis Booker worried that "people are doing the right things for the wrong reasons." Marketers are using Social Media "not because it is effective, but because it's cheap!"

To extrapolate on Booker's comments: At this stage, most marketers using Social Media are not measuring results, but activity. Social Media becomes 1) an inexpensive focus group, gathering anecdotal evidence from an unorganized stream of information, and 2) an extremely cheap publishing platform with occasional flashes of brilliant or break-out success. Of course, it doesn't have to be that way.

The CME group has made a video of the event.

The SMCC is organized by Barb Barbara Rozgonyi. The event panel was assembled by Jeff Willinger. Great food from Rivers, in the CME building.

Len Kendall, Media Manager, Critical Mass, moderated a panel of:
Allan Schoenberg, Director of Corporate Communications, CME Group
Ellis Booker, Editor, BtoB Magazine, Crain Communications
John Fairley, Director of Web Services and Social Media, Walker Sands Communications

My lightly edited "summary" of the panel:

What are the differences between B2B and B2C on Social Media?
Booker says that "B2C is easy." B2B is a longer process. In the time he has been at BtoB magazine, he has seen a change, "the playfulness of campaigns has ramped up... having more fun."

CME Group's Schoenberg pointed that the B2B audience is smaller and that the value proposition needs to be stated more strongly than in B2C. While Fairly said that "more people are involved in the sale and decision." Social media allows you to reach those people at different points in the decision process.

Booker says that corporate Social Media presence is becoming an expected part of doing business. Fairly says that people will move toward companies who are active in Social Media because they will be perceived as being more available and transparent.

What tools are you using to manage Social Media presence?
Fairly likes free tools that track history, suggesting "SM2.com", "Social Mention" and "Blog Tracker". Schoenberg likes tools that track what people say about the commodities market, and uses "Vocus". Fairly suggested using Twitter Search to monitor mentions of your brand and related terms.

Tools like TweetDeck and PeopleFollow let us filter the conversations and focus on relevant content.

What are ways we can drive traffic using Social Media?
Fairly talked about the relationship between Search and Social Media. You need to understand the tools of Social Media. Study the networks and see if your customers are there. Are they on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or other niche communities? Listen to your customers on the site. What are their pain points and interests. You have to follow social norms, understand the audience. Then establish key relationships. Later you can tweet to the masses. "Our strategy is to tweet about a pain point to a 'maven' in the community, who re-tweeted our comments."

Booker says you have to focus on why you are doing Social Media. He gave an example of a "sandbox" community site created by a company. They wanted to do a six-month trial, but 18 months later, they had 400 of their best customers actively engaged and had no choice but to keep up that test community, even though it wasn't part of their media strategy.

Later, Booker also said that they are "listening more with Social Media. We use the Social Media infrastructure to listen and decide what to report.

Schoenberg's guideline is "C-squared": Content x Community. Keep driving new content into the community, then engage in conversations. He used LinkedIn, then Facebook and talked about cross-pollinating the venues.

Where is the revenue?
Schoenberg had some anecdotal examples. "We have brought in leads for our brokers, and now they are trading." But he acknowledged that Social Media has been less money and more time. However, he says they have 52K followers on Twitter.

Fairly pointed out that Paid Search has set a standard. It's very measurable, but Social Media doesn't correlate directly to revenue. There is a story to be told: how many influential bloggers linked, some new leads, increases in traffic. Viral media brings traffic from everywhere, so you have to look at cumulative effects.

Booker worried that "people are doing the right things for the wrong reasons." Marketers are using Social Media not because it is effective, but because it's cheap!

To extrapolate on Booker's comments: At this stage, marketers are not measuring results, but activity. Social Media becomes an inexpensive focus group, gathering anecdotal evidence from a disorganized stream of information, and an extremely cheap publishing platform.

What metrics are you using? How do we gauge expectations?
Schoenberg said CME Group's Social Media efforts are part of an overall marketing strategy, "it has to fit into everything else we do. If it's just an island, you are going to fail."

Booker pointed out that E-Marketer magazine forecast on-line advertising would grow by 53% this year. Now, they are saying growth will only be 10%. At least, he concluded, it's going up. Unlike print advertising.

Are there ethical guidelines companies should be following?
Schoenberg brought up Digg as an example that Social Media can be gamed. Their biggest concerns were legal. Let people know you work for the company.

Who is in charge of your Social Media Presence?
Last year, the buzz was "you are no longer in control of your brand." You don't know what people are doing until you listen and hear or see for yourself.

Both Fairly and Schoenberg said you need to manage the message, educate your internal people to get a consistent message. Schoenberg expressed a need to manage the message and to be clear about who is the official voice for the organization.

How do you manage the volume of messages and the 24x7 nature of Social Media?
Booker stated that it is important to get right back to people. Fairley said that they "co-Tweet", having a collaborative Twitter account. Schoenberg uses "TweetLater" to schedule messages to drip out into Twitter. Fairly said that "Social Media is like adding another phone to your office, and you have to answer it."

But Fairly also brought up the most important thing you can do with Social Media: Identify people who are most passionate about your product or topics, engage with them, and activate them to be your advocate.

Labels: chicago, social media, web analytics

Parsing the opportunity in site redesign

It's site redesign time for several of my content clients, and a great time to place our bets as to where to put test site improvements and program improvements.
When we redesign, we are not merely trying to make our pages prettier, we are testing to find what can be made more productive by changes to program, format, or focus.
Now's the time -- use the spring months, when usage patterns for most content sites are fairly regular, to push out some tests. How much content can your readers handle in heavy-interest time periods, like the run-up to or follow-up from a convention or conference? Can you better ride the wave of of product or service introductions? Or are there stories that spring from industry personalities or product/campaign mis-steps as people position themselves and their new products.

Elements to test: Program, Format, Focus

By program I mean the contact schedule, from broadcast to user-specific communications by way of RSS and e-mail. Chances are there are additional e-mail programs that will find a loyal readership. Our client Advertising Age has just inaugurated a new newsletter to support the strong content in their CMO Strategy section.

Focus is subject line and headline work. What is the best language to sell the story to your Internet-based audience? What do you want to be on the Google, Yahoo or MS news feed from your story? Which approaches get more blogger and social network juice?

Format is how everything else is laid out for the visitor in emails and landing pages, resulting on more time-on-page, more additional page views, and more refer-a-friend clicks. As usability guru Jakob Nielsen reiterated in January, usability redesigns are still averaging an 83% improvement in key volume indicators. The low-hanging fruit may be gone, but there is still much fruit to be gathered. We recommend setting aside 10% of your re-design budget for analysis to target redesign to the highest ROI site elements.

What are you planning on changing this spring? How are you planning on measuring the results of those changes?

Labels: content, metrics, publishing, web analytics

The Arc of a Story

It's been interesting today watching how a big story develops on line. One of my clients has had a story viral enough to be interesting to watch as it developed hour by hour: Former Dentsu Creative Sues Over Trips to Brothel, Bathhouse, Sharapova Shoot, and and The Dirty Details of the Dentsu Suit.

This gets me to the analytics issue: Individual page reporting on HBX Analytics screens is limited to day-level. Fortunately, the custom Report Builder allows me to report hourly, and the reports are delivered in Excel format. This gives us the ability to visualize how the story is building an audience. With this information, the editorial staff is better able to apply resources to follow-up articles and to position emails.

The capabilities of analytics enable publishers to listen to their audiences and implement a rapid response to stories that break big. The trick is to keep an eye out for these stories, and to ask how we can better communicate with our audience when a story doesn't pick up the audience we think it deserves.

Labels: online publishing, web analytics

More Convergence

We have been seeing (and participating in) a convergence of Internet Marketing disciplines. Ken and I started out seven years ago focusing on Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization. We focused on Processes and Behavioral Segmentation. Now we see Email, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Web Analytics all as part a spectrum of Internet marketing tools.

Over the the past year we have been helping more of our clients with Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. As SEO became more sophisticated and link farming and meta tagging didn't provide the edge, our team's skills in Web Analytics were needed.

Now, SEO expert Mark Jackson writes on Clickz that as Google's search engine becomes even more sophisticated and gives greater value to fresh content, Web Analytics is becoming more important to evaluating results of SEO efforts. Since Ranking changes daily, it's hard to provide good ranking reports. Jackson's solution: putting more focus on analytics than search engine rankings.

I wonder if search engine optimization firms should discontinue the practice of providing ranking reports for clients (at least for now with Google). No ranking reports would be hard for clients to swallow. A better solution? Web analytics.

Labels: internet marketing, seo, web analytics

Getting Finance and Marketing to Common Ground and Common Cause

In her Monday 1to1 weekly newsletter, Martha Rogers recommends rapprochement between the CFO and the CMO.

I'd extend that to marketing directors and their financial analyst counterparts. Learn a common language that takes from both of your tool kits, and work together to build stronger selling and service "machinery".

I'd like to expand on this over the next few days, but here are a few suggested starting stances.

Finance "guy" (whether you be a woman or a man):

1. Be willing to learn something new that you can use from a marketer.
   
2. Accept some squishily imperfect metrics that imperfectly indicate that some spending is mis-spent.
3. Start sketching a simplified model of the "marketing production process", particularly where funds are spent: awareness-building, interest-building, relationship building with channels and ultimate customers, sales promotion, and resale promotion.
   

Marketing "guy" (whether you be a woman or a man):

1. Be willing to learn something new that you can use from a finance person.
   
2. Be willing to be shown imperfect evidence that you've been wrong in some of your assumptions, even in deeply-held ones.
3. Start thinking about where you would spend funds and direct your team's thinking if you find out you are over-spending and over-thinking somewhere else.

Comments? Elaboration?

Labels: direct marketing, marketing analysis, web analytics

The Mystery of the Missing Links: Why are web site Visits Down 30%?

Inbound links are the key to Search Engine Optimization. For publishers, a well-cited web site is a source of high page rank and more traffic from search engines. SEO experts often stress the importance of being linked by “high value” web sites for giving your web site a boost. But the search engines also know that thousands of diverse web sites are also less likely to be wrong.

A large on-line publisher recently contacted us with the following inquiry: “our web traffic dropped after our redesign six months ago, and traffic is still down.” Where their web traffic had been trending positive, we now saw that web traffic, measured in visits to the web site, had dropped 30%.

Comparing web traffic reports before and after the redesign didn’t reveal anything significantly different about the use patterns. The redesign was successful at improving navigation and pages per visit were up. But where were the missing visits? One big answer: Search Engine referrals, especially Google referrals, were down 50%.

Looking for clues, we turned to web usage reports. The web analytics tool this publisher used reports based on volume. And for the first five or more pages of the reports, there was little difference in activity. But when we downloaded the top several thousand web pages (they have a lot of articles), we saw that the number of visits to the lesser used pages dropped dramatically. The old version of the site had a longer tail of pages with few requests per month.

When they redesigned the site, this publisher set up redirects for many of their pages. Unfortunately they made two SEO errors: 1) they missed a lot of URL variations that had given users multiple ways to access the same material and 2) they used 302 redirect codes (temporary redirect) instead of 301 redirect codes (permanent redirect).

These two SEO mistakes lead to their losing page rank credit for thousands of links to their site. First, they lost “credit” for the links. Then they lost page rank credit for the redirected pages. Finally, the effect of their moving content from linked URLs was to “break” the linking web sites (from the perspective of the users and web masters of those sites). This lead to a loss of goodwill, and formerly modest linking sources no longer showed up at all in the long tail of the list of “top referring sites”. And these modest referrers had a big impact on this large publisher.

This left the publisher with three significant tasks: 1) create better programs to handle missing links (even at this point, six months down the road), 2) eliminate navigation "breadcrumbs" from the URLs so that each article text has a single endpoint URL, and 3) create a quiet “referrer relations” program to rebuild credibility among linking referrers.

If you are planning a web site redesign, or you are implementing a new Content Management System, remember this motto: “Make New Links, but Keep the Old.”

Labels: linking strategies, seo, web analytics

Should I Spend more on Google Ad Words?

After reading the Comscore article talking about how Yahoo’s new update has improved click-through rates, an acquaintance wrote the following:

I do only use Google Adwords. My budget of $10 per day always gets reached. According to a recent come-on from Google, I could up my budget to $50 per day at my current bids and the current search traffic. I am not sure I want to up my PPC though. How can I tell if it is good to increase my budget? Can you see in the analytics how many sales I have for the amount I am spending?

Here was my response:

In response to your comment, you may want to get a handle on the "conversion rate" from your ad campaign. If your $10 per day ($300/month) pays back, it would make sense to spend another $10/day (and possibly more). If it doesn't, you shouldn't be spending the $300 in the first place, or we would work on improving conversion rates. When the incremental $10 payback diminishes, we would start picking up leads and sales using Yahoo and other Search Marketing opportunities.

His reply -- "I didn't know you could do that kind of thing."

Labels: conversion rate improvement, SEM, web analytics