I just came across some incredible statistics for last month.
NetApplications, which tracks metrics for all sorts of computer and internet related fields reports that Google now controls 84% of the online search engine market share. This is up from 78.45% the month before!
Nielsen also reports that 82% of all local business searches now occur online, compared to 44% in 2005.
If you’re not dominating Google, who’s taking your clients?
As you may remember from over a year ago, I blogged about Google’s new search index in development, Caffeine.
It’s finished, and here’s a few words from Google on it:
Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.
Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)
So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.
Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.
With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before?no matter when or where it was published.
Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.
We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.
The advertising recovery (if you can call it that – it was hardly ever more than a deceleration) is still in progress. We measured healthy increases in first-page advertiser activity on all three search engines, indicative of an economy which finally appears to be waking up.
However, these increases were not equally distributed among the search engines. We recorded an increase of 7.3% in first-page advertisers on Google, but only 2.8% for both Yahoo! and Bing. This disparity translated into a slight increase in advertiser share for Google (which has remained steady at 80% for around 18 months now.)
This seven-page report also contains the following tables and charts:
1. Monthly Change in First Page Advertisers
2. Share of Advertisers by Search Engine
3. Avg # Ads/Keyword (US & International)
4. Avg # Ads/Keyword (US only)
5. Avg # Ads Displayed Per Impression
5. Ad Spend by Vertical (Google US October 2009 – June 2010)
6. Top 25 US Advertisers by Search Engine
One indicator which has proven to be a reliable predictor of search revenues is ad coverage – the average number of ads shown per search query. There was a marked increase in ad coverage for all three engines over the quarter. Google increased the average number of ads shown by 15%, Yahoo! by 22%, and Bing by 11%… (continued in full report)
The above is just a small portion of the full report. To continue reading, please complete the download form below and receive this exclusive FREE report in just seconds.
Interesting. Four government departments spent almost £6m ($8,000,000 US Dollars) ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years.
The Department of Health was the biggest spender, running up a bill of £4.4m in “paid search” fees.
It said the money was spent supporting campaigns on smoking and the flu pandemic.
The Department for Communities and Local Government spent over £750,000 promoting campaign websites including those for Home Information Packs, Eco Towns and Energy Performance Certificates.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change spent more than £309,000 last year. The Department of the environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) spent almost £500,000.
Reports are out that Google now controls over 90% of all searches on the internet (..compared to Yahoo at 3.9%, Bing at 3.7%).
Google now also controls 98% of all mobile searches (..on smart phones, Androids, Blackberry, etc).
Nielsen reported way back in 2008 that 82% of people needing local services went online to search. I can’t wait to see their 2009/2010 stats..
What’s this mean for you? You do the math.
This is going to be a long read, but one that is critical to your understanding of the search engine game (and how this game has drastically and rapidly changed this month), so grab a cup of coffee and read on..
You may have heard bits and pieces (this has been all over the internet), but regardless if you have (or have not) you need to know everything to understand what’s happening, and how to stay ahead of the masses.
First, Bing has bought out Yahoo. Yeah, you heard me right. Microsoft’s Bing is now providing Yahoo with ALL their search results. Split up, they couldn’t match Google, but combined, they may have a snowballs chance…
What does this mean to you? Well, how about 5% LESS organic traffic to your website for starters. Sound crazy? Read the link to see the facts.
Google has launched their most aggressive expansion campaign EVER. They’ve doubled their pace of acquiring new, cutting edge companies, including Aardvark, reMail, Picnik, DocVerse, Simplify Media, Episodic, PlinkArt, Agnilux, LabPixies, Bump Technologies, Global IP Solutions, Simplify Media, Invite Media, ITA Software, Metaweb, Instantiations, Slide.com and Jambool just this year so far.
Not only that, but they are launching some seriously Revolutionary Technologies. How about a search engine that updates its results AS you type?
Or how about Google letting a Single Website DOMINATE the entire first page of results? Could this mean that the use of “mini-sites” is going the way of the phone books? <– check out this blog post, pretty funny stuff 
On top of all this already, new eye tracking studies are giving new insight into how people actually LOOK at the search results. No longer are headlines and images what convinces your prospect to click to your site..
Finally, don’t overlook Google’s obsession with data and new companies like FourSquare that are quickly allowing advertisers the ability of “location based advertising” combined with social networking.
Google’s press conference about Google Instant hadn’t even ended yesterday when the question of “is SEO dead” started coming up on Twitter, in blog posts and was even asked about formally during the event’s Q&A (the answer was no, twice over, by the way).
No, Google Instant isn’t killing SEO. In fact, nothing’s going to kill SEO. I know there are a lot of SEO haters out there who wish this were so, but that hate comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what SEO is about. If you misunderstand something so much as to hate it, you surely have no understanding about its future.
No, SEO is not about tricking search engines, nor spamming links, nor ruining web design. It’s about building good content, understanding the ways people might seek it — including the words they might use — and ensuring the content is search engine friendly along with being human friendly.
If we’re going to examine if reports of SEO’s death are premature, let’s start with a common definition, which I’ll draw from Wikipedia’s What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? article:
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines.
There are these things called “search engines.” They are services that allow you to locate information. There are big search engines like Google. There are little search engines like Urbanspoon.
SEO is about understanding how these search engines get their information and what should be done to gain free traffic from them. SEOs — and search marketers in general — understand the process of search, and they tap into that process to attract visitors.
What isn’t SEO? Narrow definitions:
Google Instant is simply people searching at warp speed. Rather than getting their search results during a search session that might take several minutes, now they might get their answers within a minute. But they’re still searching. They’re still getting results. And those results can be influenced by SEO, just as they always have.
In addition, SEO includes the process of keyword research. That’s why back in 2005, when Robert Scoble crowed about doing “search engine optimization, blogger style” by getting his brother to rank for “silicon valley law firm,” many poked back. “SEO Professional Style” means understanding whether anyone was looking for firms using those words in the first place — and they weren’t.
In terms of keyword research, Google Instant means the need to look even more closely as some of the suggestions that Google provides in the search box. But that’s not new.
We’ve had Google Suggest (the suggestion part of Google Instant) since August 2008. As soon as it appeared, it warranted a closer look by search marketers. And that’s been happening more and more since the launch.
Google Instant reemphasizes the need to do keyword research by examining suggestions, but that was already part of the SEO landscape for ages — not just from the introduction of Google Suggest but going back to suggestions that many search engines have shown within actual results as part of query refinement features.
We’ve had predictions that SEO is dead going back as far as 1997. If I’m wrong, and SEO is dying, it’s sure taking its sweet time.
I don’t think SEO is dying. I do think SEO has changed and will continue to change as search itself changes. That’s what makes it an exciting industry.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of tweeting and blogging and posting status updates.
So much work, so little time.
So we thought, why not develop a super easy way to do all this, all from one central location: a “bridge” between your blog, Twitter, and Facebook.
Here’s how it works.
When you make a new update or blog on your SmartBox website, automatically 15 unique tweets will be sent out every 6-9 hours for you.
Why do we do this?
Our research shows that 13-16 tweets per blog post is the optimal amount of exposure needed to make sure your Twitter followers are checking you out.
Twitter followers have a more severe case of D-ADHD (digital attention deficit disorder) than Facebook fans do, so they need more attention than just a single tweet provides.
How can I take advantage of this?
Sure there’s other ways to do it available out there.. twuffer, tweetdeck, etc. But the problem with those is that you have to use several different services and link them all together, creating a complex network with lots of failure points.
…which is exactly why we developed this for our clients – so they can manage EVERYTHING from a single page.
Want to see it in action?
We’ve been testing it on ourselves for the past couple weeks. Just check out our Facebook or Twitter pages to see it in action. Yeah, it looks just like a regular Facebook update or Tweet – that’s the point!
NONE of your marketing automation and automated follow-up should look “automated” — that would defeat the purpose!
If you were a patient, would you be impressed if you got a cookie-cutter, automated & generic marketing piece from a dentist in town, or would you be IMPRESSED if you got a unique, personalized, “looks like the Doc wrote that himself” letter?
How much of your time, and your staff’s resources does it take to stay on top of your follow-up and social media?
We can automate everything for you.
Henry Ford had some great ideas when it came to mass production, but in this new dental economy, you need to be reaching out and touching your prospects on a personal level.
A well known consumer reporting firm recently released a study that found that 80% of all sales are closed on the 6th to 12th “touch.” (I’ll be talking about this in depth in July on my blog, subscribe to get updates.)
Automating your follow-up and social media is in vain if your prospects know it is automated! Your emails, postcards, letters, tweets, facebook updates, and blogs need to be UNIQUE and they need to be PERSONAL, otherwise they will get discarded with the rest of the junk mail.
This is THE secret to cultivating an online following & building a steady stream of new patients from the web.
Alright, enough of my banter for this email. More to come later this week.
Facebook has a new mobile application feature called Facebook Places. You’ve probably seen it already, it allows you to “check in” with friends and colleagues about where you are in real-time.
Your patients could even use facebook places to say they’re in your dental practice right at that moment and could even instantly give you glowing review.
Click the video below to watch my 35 sec video on how build a steady stream of new patients through Facebook.
Get in touch with us today to find out how to use Facebook Places and your patient testimonials to EXPLODE your dental practice.
YouTube just announced that every minute, 48 hours of NEW video is uploaded. And 3 Billion videos are being watched every day.
Using video on your website, social media outlets, and syndicated across the internet, you can instantly build your reputation and credibility as the expert in your local area.
I know, that sounds like BS, but here’s the facts:
1) Google can read videos just like they read the pages on your website. Your video needs to be content rich and optimized just like your website
2) Video needs to be syndicated and indexed with the search engines, just like your website. Google is now putting YouTube videos in the top positions when people search.
3) It’s so much more than just text on a page. Video allows you to interact with your patients, show them your office, and let them listen to your actual patients raving about you.
Video is the new marketing vehicle of the internet.
Were you that dentist that in the last couple years, finally decided to get a website?
Video on the internet is the new “gold rush” — those fast-movers and first implementers will get the benefits (just as they did with their websites) and be ahead of the pack for years to come.
Would you be amazed if I told you that switching the color of a checkout button can make the difference between a marginally profitable campaign and an incredible return on your marketing spend? After months of hard work planning a new website campaign, it all came down to the color elements on your landing page and Google Website Optimizer can ensure that you’re getting the maximum conversion rate from your marketing campaigns.
Usability and Design Testing
Each element of your marketing campaign should be tested to determine potential improvements in your intake process. From the types of colors used on your buttons, to the placement and types of images and text on the page, creating an optimized landing page can turn your red campaign well into the green. We utilize Google Website Optimizer to determine which combination of elements is most effective for your campaign, so that we can deliver the best possible return to your web marketing campaigns.
While a manual process of testing each combination of elements would take quite a long time, the automatic testing process with Google Website Optimizer is a proven, statistical-based method to get more customers in the door. Just as split-testing is important with your ad-text, creating an appealing design that is welcoming and convincing to potential customers can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. We do the hard work of generating targeted traffic to your site, and want to convert every possible visitor into a new customer – Google Website Optimizer helps to automate this process in less time.
In traditional marketing, it can take years to hone in on the proper messaging them that resonates with customers. Imagine spending countless time and resources on a price-driven campaign targeting your competition, only to then realize that consumers are more receptive to quality.
With search marketing, however, you can make these adjustments in real-time by writing multiple ads and landing pages to hone in on the exact brand messaging that resonates with customers. The beauty of search marketing is that properly structured split testing can improve your click-through and conversion rates to help grow your business and provide insights into ways that you can expand your product offerings.
Finding Your Brand Message
Split testing multiple text ad-variations allows you to target customers with messages related to your brand advantages including features, service, cost and reputation. Each consumer segment responds to different types of messaging, so you can split test different ads within each ad-group to determine how to most effectively market each of your services.
Studies have shown that optimizing your text-ads and landing pages can lead to impressive bottom-line results that can take your ROI to new heights.
Adwords ads should speak to the exact needs of the searcher and the landing pages should further reinforce trust in your brand – Google rewards those best practices with priority placement in the paid search results, improving the ROI on your search marketing campaign.
Well designed split tests give you the information needed to tune your product presentation to improve the conversions at every level of your sales funnel. You can save countless time and resources by allowing brand messages to compete for the attention of consumers, and adjusting your brand messaging to reflect the winning ads.
Growing businesses may find it challenging to continually provide on-going brand messaging regarding new products and services. Successful, fast moving companies often make adjustments on a daily basis to keep one step ahead of the competitive, and a well-written blog can breathe life into the direction that your company is headed. Blogs are the ultimate real-time brand messaging medium, allowing you to provide a comprehensive social media strategy utilizing your in-house blog, Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with your loyal customers and potential clients.
Quality Content and Customer Communications
Traditionally, companies have relied upon occasional newsletters and events to make announcements to their customers. Since every single industry is highly competitive today, it’s important not only to stay ahead of your competition but to ensure that message is widely heard. Addressing customer requests and ideas on your blog is a great way to build a community – when customers feel linked to your brand; they are likely to remain loyal to your company as well as making recommendations to their friends.
Each element of your blog, from the design, type-face and the writing style is important. Blog posts not only allow you to target long-tail keywords in natural search, but also provide a written identity for your brand. If you’re a consulting firm, establishing authority and a professional voice can help improve the reputation of your business, while a party planner may want to bring a tone of enthusiasm and excitement to each announcement. Crafting informative posts that your customers will want to read can help keep you in touch with your clients in an age of shifting loyalties.
Over the past few years, the increase in microblogging and social media marketing has resulted in the shortening of URL’s becoming popular again, as more and more companies need to get their URL links into their tweets or status updates.
With the use of URL shortening services now being highly visible again, it is important that companies are on top of their game and understand a little bit about how URL shortening works and what factors you should be looking out for when deciding which of the many shortening services to choose from, whether you are doing SEO, SEM or another form of search marketing.
One of the most important things to consider is your 301 redirectpage.
A good shortening service will ensure that the redirect page states that the link is permanently on the full link page. The permanent reference is extremely important as some services will use a 302 redirect which is not a permanent redirection, so if you do not keep an eye on it then your link may not work, and you won’t get the backlinks built that are critical to SEO efforts.
Most companies embarking on social media marketing will use some form of monitoring system to track the effectiveness of their links. Whilst there are many tools such as Google Analytics which are good for doing this, the majority of shortened services will provide some form of tracking results as part of the deal.
We’ve reviewed all the most popular URL shortening services, and combined it into an easy to ready spreadsheet. You can download it here (PDF).
You know you have a well run, competent organization when you can schedule time off, take a trip and not have the walls crumble while you are gone. Sure, you might get an occasional phone call or email asking a question from someone in your office who is just trying to be efficient, but it’s nice once in a while as well to know you are missed.
The other benefit to having such an organization is that it is humming along smoothly and your business can afford the salary you take to plan a nice trip. Some of that comes after a few years of hard, ground grunting work. Some of it is due in part to the things you put in place that run automatically.
I’m happy to say the SmartBox Web Marketing has grown to this point. Over the 4th – and for about a week before – we were lucky enough to get away from the grind and go to Florence, Lucca and Pisa plus a few small towns in between. The sights were magnificent, the food was better than I needed it to be and we had a great time.
But the trip made me realize and appreciate what goes on behind the scenes in any office. This becomes especially clear if a business is struggling a bit due to hard economic times or a lack of understanding of how things could be better and automated.
Marketing is a huge undertaking for any office or medical practice. In dental, chiropractic and medical offices it’s not uncommon for this essential element to be left on the back burner…a kind of “I’ll get around to it sometime” type of approach. Unfortunately it is the lifeblood of any practice. Sure, the medical professional went into his or her specialty thinking they were going to be a dentist, chiropractor or physician but the truth is that there is a business side to the practice as well and that means marketing…knowing what works, how to get the new, big cases through the door and being able to make smart decisions on how to effectively spend advertising dollars.
There lies the rub…so many are busy running the practice that marketing and a good working knowledge of marketing gets pushed back or even ignored. Some practices just do what colleagues are doing; newspaper ads, radio spots and brochures. The successful ones, however, break the mold and change with the times. They move forward either on their own or hire the experts to do it for them.
The medical community hasn’t caught on to the vast array of benefits a good web presence can bring. That’s obvious by the fact that only about 20% of practices have a web site. But even in doing something like planning a trip it becomes obvious websites have their place in this day and age. Booking flights, reserving hotels even looking for the best places to eat once you are there are carried out every millisecond by local consumers. The same is true of potential patients looking for medical specialties. The numbers of people looking online for that medical office that can fulfill their needs is growing rapidly and now surpasses the good ole’ Yellow Pages.
SmartBox Web Marketing has thankfully grown to the point where I can take the occasional trip and enjoy time with my family. I owe a lot of that to the fact that I have a great staff and a well run office. I also owe a lot of it to my web presence. We are seen by countless practices who are jumping on the proverbial band wagon and are looking to build their book of business, especially in the big case area.
Web marketing makes sense for the medical community to do the same. How else will the savvy, tech friendly internet user of today find you? How else can you get the broad appeal your message will have on a well maintained and promoted web site? Brochures can’t give your readers all of the information seen on a website. Yellow Page ads, radio spots and newspaper ads can’t begin to get your total message out there. And when the site is well promoted and set up to deliver your message automatically the big cases do come.
Suppose you are bidding on broad match tooth implant in your Adwords account. What you may not know is Google is selling you traffic from “how long should I want to do an implant after a tooth is extracted&quo
Using this process, you can extract the exact phrase your visitor searched for and include it in your Analytics report.
Referencing the video, here is the text for you to copy/paste into your Analytics filters.
Filter 1:Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Medium: (cpc|ppc)
Output To -> Constructor: Custom Field 1: $A3
Filter 2:Field A -> Extract A: Custom Field 1: (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A1)
Make sure the sequence is correct or it will not work!!
Visit our website for more free video tips and information about profiting from local online advertising.
Albert Einstein once said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.. and I’m compelled to agree with him..
Over the 4th this year, we took a vacation across the big pond, to Florence, Luca and the surrounding areas.
While it was the most relaxing vacation I’ve taken in a while, it made me realize and appreciate even more what goes on behind the scenes in my office. This becomes especially clear if a business is struggling a bit due to hard economic times or a lack of understanding of how things could be better and automated.
Marketing is a huge undertaking for any dental practice. In many offices it’s not uncommon for this essential element to be left on the back burner…a kind of “I’ll get around to it sometime” type of approach.
Sure, the dentist went into his or her specialty thinking they were going to be a dentist but the truth is that there is a business side to the practice as well and that means marketing… knowing what works, how to get the new, big cases through the door and being able to make smart decisions on how to effectively spend advertising dollars.
So many are busy running the practice that marketing and a good working knowledge of marketing gets pushed back or even ignored. Some practices just do what colleagues are doing; newspaper ads, radio spots and brochures. The successful ones, however, break the mold and change with the times. They move forward either on their own or hire the experts to do it for them.
The dental community hasn’t caught on to the vast array of benefits a good web presence can bring. That’s obvious by the fact that less than 15% of practices have a web site. The numbers of people looking online for that dental office that can fulfill their needs is growing rapidly and now surpasses the good ole’ Yellow Pages by leaps and bounds.
How else will the savvy, tech friendly internet user of today find you? How else can you get the broad appeal your message will have on a well maintained and promoted web site? Brochures can’t give your readers all of the information seen on a website. Yellow Page ads, radio spots and newspaper ads can’t begin to get your total message out there. And when the site is well promoted and set up to deliver your message automatically, the big cases do come.
If you’ve got open chairs in your office, take Einstein’s advice: Stop doing what you’ve always done, stop telling yourself it’s “just the economy” and take action.. because without changing your actions, it would be insanity to think the results would be different.
Conversion data is at the core of how we help business owners organize split tests, and is a core part of how to interpret the results of these experiments. In order to ensure that your testing methods are producing quality, reproducible results it’s crucial to get statistically significant results that are based upon actual data. When asking “how long do I need to wait to determine the results of the test?” instead think about “how much data do I need to be sure of the best possible landing page?”
We can help you take the guesswork out of the split testing process, and can explain the results of your campaign testing in clear, intuitive business language. Much like other important business decisions, split testing outcomes should be based upon concrete results and we employ the latest techniques that provide sound, statistically valid data to help you make business decisions. There are a number of experimental designs which can contribute to a high quality split test, and this guide helps to explain some of the statistics behind one of the most popular methods.
How Data can Help Business Owners to Structure Split Test Experiments
One of the most popular ways to analyze data from split tests is known as the optimal design method. According to the science behind this method, experimental outcomes are judged according to finding minimal variance on the outcomes. In business language, this means you can test the relationship between several different design elements and test how they interact in less time. Since each on-page element can impact another change on the site, complex designs on sites (such as e-Commerce stores) are ideally suited for optimal design which can best capture the overall fit of the landing page in terms of conversion outcomes. Major sites such as major retailers rely upon this method to help organize special campaigns and creative’s to maximize conversions. Defining the complete matrix of all possible combinations of offers can be difficult, so optimal design provides a quality source of data that helps to provide better information in less time.
Another common statistical method utilize is known as the Taguchi methods for the engineer who originally designed the technique. With principles that come from manufacturing, the method defines a series of combination of elements which can be tested in a controlled environment. For example, you may be able to pay a newsletter call to action with a certain headline, along with a different headline with a direct purchase option – in these cases, you can organize a Taguchi experiment to test different combinations in less time. Since you can’t feasibly test every possible combination, the methods provides for an important source of testing with time and budget constraints.
Understanding the math behind split testing gives some insight into how the process can help you make sense of web analytics data. We work with business owners to ensure their website tests are well organized, and provide clear reports that help you make informed business decisions based upon the outcomes.
There are many ways to conduct split tests on websites, ranging from basic split testing scripts to complex software that can analyze high traffic tests in real time. For many small business owners looking for a reliable solution, Google Website Optimizer provides an easy setup to test different elements on a landing page to maximize conversion rates.
At a basic level there are three steps to setting up a test using the software, beginning with selecting the landing page and elements you want to test (including identifying on-page alternative elements for the testing), setting up a test by placing Optimizer code on your website to track the data and interpreting the results from analytics. Each of these stages is important and a crucial part of getting the most from your website testing procedure.
Understanding the Process of a Google Website Optimizer Test
Even if you’re using a custom or 3rd party method, understanding the mechanics underlying a Google Website Optimizer test can help you understand split testing in more detail. At the most basic level, the test will compare two static landing pages to determine which one has the optimal conversion outcome – users have to define the outcome according to a predetermine conversion such as a sign-up, purchase or opt-in (as measured by a redirection to a given confirmation page.) Beyond the basic A/B test there are several ways you can leverage Optimizer to gain further insights into campaign performance.
At a more detailed level you can design an experiment (test) in order to determine which specific elements contribute the better outcomes in terms of your data – this includes lowering the bounce rate, increasing page views, increasing conversion rates and any other campaign objective that can reasonably be measured. You can specify an ideal outcome ahead of time so that Optimizer can constantly work to determine which elements contribute to improvements toward your goals.
After tagging your pages with the code provided, you will then begin the test – the length of the experiment will depend upon the amount of visitors as well as the data needed to get a statistically significant result. Lower traffic sites may require several weeks for quality data, while higher quality sites can be optimized within a day, depending on the nature of the experiment. You can monitor the results of the sites in real time, and can analyze the outcomes to see how the test is progressing.
While the results of an Optimizer test can help you to re-organize your landing pages to improve conversion rates, it’s important to understand the many factors that require ongoing optimization including seasonal shifts, changes in your competition and adjustments in the overall economy. Therefore, like any good business practice, it’s important to continually run tests with the winning landing pages from the last experiment as a starting point – continual testing will ensure you’re on the right path to finding a surefire winner. We’re worked with countless clients with Website Optimizer, and can help keep your marketing campaigns ahead of the curve.
The worlds of offline and online marketing are rapidly merging – whether you consider the shift of television from standard, closed broadcast models to open, user-contributed cable channels or the advent of blogs becoming more popular than mainstream newspapers, social media is a core part of every marketing channel today. Many business owners believe they are exempt from the influences of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks only to realize they have customers and potential clients actively seeking out service – Comcast found this out and immediately shifted an entire team dedicated to responding to customers over the service. Your individual business strategy for approaching social media might vary, but even if you focus on traditional drip marketing, there are several ways you can integrate social media into your campaigns.
Encourage Followers with Special Offers and Opt-Ins via Social Media
When you participate in standard drip marketing, the goal is to create a conversion funnel that encourages potential clients to become customers. While there are different ways to convert a new client, social media allows you to extend the conversion funnel by getting their attention in real time with offers, special updates and resources that integrate into their daily news feed. Rather than competing with competitors to get a consumer’s attention, you can form a personal connection with immediate responses, further encouraging brand loyalty.
Becoming a core part of the consumer’s thought process when it comes to purchasing can help you generate mindshare that ultimately transitions into sales. Whether you encourage your marketing list to become a fan on Facebook, follow you on Twitter or opt-in to your email list, you’re getting them one step closer to a conversion. Social media marketing is about creating connections that encourage trust and loyalty in business – once you make a social connection with a person on your marketing list, it’s much easier to gain and retain their business.
By using social media, you can create a bridge by which offline users can get closer to your business – a combination of video, social media updates and special offers can help encourage customers who prefer to deal with vendors they know. Many businesses hold contests and special offers through social media which keeps them connected with prospects and can even help to grow their drip marketing lists even further. By saving time and money over traditional marketing, once you generate social followers the marginal cost of posting an update is close to nothing.
Some of the very same principles from standard drip marketing, including segmentation, seasonality and customization apply just as well in the online world. Whether you’re posting updates via a social site or creating a custom landing page offer for your followers, always keep in mind your brand message and focus on meeting customer needs. We’ve worked with countless local businesses to effectively bridge their drip marketing campaigns in the online world through social networking, and your business could be sitting on a potential local goldmine without realizing it – so get started today!
Are you Linked in? As the largest dedicated business social network, Linked In is a great way for business to business (B2B) companies to reach an entirely new audience. While you can use the site to form personal connections through your network, the site is also a great way to reach decision makers through targeted advertising and social media campaigns. Nearly every Fortune 500 company has a presence on the site, and the integrated advertising and answers feature can provide a great way to reach out to a particular audience to promote business-based products.
While other social networks have a mixture of business and personal content, Linkedin is laser focused on business development, and you can leverage the platform as a core part of your B2B social drip marketing campaign. We are experienced in using the site to help reach a high end demographic and decision makers at the corporate level – if you’re looking to connect with decision makers at the highest level of top quality companies Linkedin is a necessary part of your marketing campaign.
How To Use LinkedIn As Part of Your Social Strategy
The simple reason why you want to build a social presence on the site is to reach the right audience for your corporate product. Suppose you are offering telecommunications services to small businesses – through both the Question and Answers section, targeted PPC advertising and your firm profile you can directly reach out to executives and buyers at firms in your target market. The advertising platform on Linkedin is based upon demographics, so you can target individuals within particular positions in a specific set of industries, ensuring you get the absolute most out of your ad efforts.
Importantly, you can utilize the question and answer feature to ask questions of your own – think of Linked In as a laboratory where you can conduct market research in an open business environment. The wealth of data, re-targeting opportunities and connections formed make it a vital part of any B2B drip marketing campaign.
Any smart business owner today understands the importance of understanding your competition, and Linkedin allows you to analyze your competitors in terms of the types of answers they give to questions, the connections they have (these are potential leads) and what types of projects they’re working on. For aggressive startups and small businesses, you can create a re-targeting campaign to help convert companies looking for a better deal, more responsive service and a new vendor instead of their traditional large supplier who they’ve been with for years.
The millions of decision makers on LinkedIn are always looking for more options when it comes to getting a better product or service at a lower price – the question is, however: are you letting your target audience know exactly what you’re offering? In many cases, business decision makers are hard to reach through only one drip marketing method (such as postal or broadcast campaigns) but once you add a social business campaign into the mix, with LinkedIn and related sites, you can begin creating some traction for your brand.
With a major advertising campaign Best Buy is promoting its “Twelp Force”, a team of technicians and customer support representatives who provide answers, solutions and references to curious customers. If you’re having a technology problem and need help, Best Buy is there to point you in the right direction – that is, in the direction is its services and products. Building out its social media campaign is a smart strategy and can influence the way your company goes about promoting itself on social networks.
Although the sheer scale of the Best Buy approach to real time feedback for consumers might be outside of your reach, we can work with you to craft a personalized social media campaign to help you reach out to new consumers. At any given moment there are a variety of consumers actively searching for the products or services you provide – if you’re not there to integrate them in a personalized way into your social marketing campaign, chances are your competition will. Stay one step ahead of your competitors by helping consumers with resources, good information and quality marketing messages – as a result, they’ll be more likely to turn your way when it comes to making a purchasing decision.
Providing Valuable Information as a Drip Marketing Method
Consumers today are often more difficult to reach through direct marketing messages, and are likely to look for ways in which you are different from your competition. In addition to working to improve the efficiency of your operations, social media provides a great way to quickly update your marketing campaigns more quickly than traditional methods. The traditional formula of market, collect data, re-market is accelerated and amplified with social media – rather than shooting in the dark based upon internal data, you now have a wealth of demographic and consumer data at your fingertips.
Best Buy recognized this fact and now has over 10,000 active followers and reaches out to hundreds more on a daily basis. While the company has a vertically integrated footprint across the nation, in products and services, it also has leveraged a marketing campaign that can inform your own social methods. When you begin social marketing you don’t necessarily need a list of leads as you might in a traditional marketing capacity – instead, you’ll only need a profile of the ideal consumers you want to attract. Building your customer base and list from the ground up can lead you to ideas, new market segments and campaign angles that can make your entire drip marketing campaign more effective.
Rather than starting from square one, you’ll immediately begin learning from the marketplace, adopting new methods, techniques and ideas to help grow your business online. While Best Buy is actively converting consumers to its products, it’s also gathering ideas, feedback and comments that can help it expand into new markets, offer customized specials that can help you stay one step ahead of your customers as you earn the loyalty of a new generation of consumers.
Even as we work with many small businesses to grow their online marketing channels, the offline marketing world is alive and well. While the time of the Yellow Pages have passed, traditional drip marketing through direct mail and targeted advertisements offline still produces quality results. The key to maximizing the return from offline spend is to full track the ways in which a lead becomes a prospect and that prospect becomes a customer.
There are two major ways you’ll want to implement tracking to help increase the ROI on your offline marketing campaigns: with unique phone numbers on each marketing spend, you can better track the direct ROI from the spend, while a dynamic phone number on your website can better track the offline to online returns. Having a high quality website, which is optimized for conversions, is a core part of the conversion funnel in any marketing campaign – your site allows customers to learn more about your business than any static advertisement could since you can add video and related media content.
While your website is a dynamic sales tool, understanding where the conversions come from is core parts of measuring return from marketing spend. Rather than blindly attributing online sales to your online campaigns, you can get better insight into the returns provided by offline marketing with call tracking. There are multiple ways to integrate offline to online tracking including unique landing page phone numbers and dynamic number replacement – we can help you structure call tracking to provide the exact data you need to maximize the return on your campaigns.
The Types of Data You Can Learn from Offline Call Tracking
For small business owners, it’s often a mystery what types of clients you generate from offline marketing spend. You can add some clarity to this equation by implementing call data from phone tracking into your analytics. Just imagine being able to determine the time, duration, location and conversion rates from calls on a given media buy – this can provide insight to help maximize the ROI on your local media spend.
A recent case study from a large service contractor determined that phone calls converted new customers at twice the level of traditional online lead forms – making a direct connection with the customer can help you sales team go to work. Many firms shy away from prominently generating calls since lead forms are easier to track. With phone conversion tracking, however, you can fully implement call tracking to pinpoint the exact origins of the calls.
As with any smart business decision, you should implement adjustments to maximize your revenue, and call tracking can help get more customers in the door relative to traditional lead generation methods. A combination of phone tracking, analytical data and a dynamic drip marketing campaign can take your local marketing campaigns to the next level. We work with small business owners to help them allocate marketing spend in the most promising areas, with a combination of offline, online and traditional marketing that adds up to results where it matters – in your bottom line.
With traditional marketing campaigns, your media partner will allow you to cover an entire territory with placement, whether you’re investing in radio time, newspaper space, direct mail or flyers. We’ve worked with many business owners to help organize local campaigns that are designed to reach targeted customers in your local area. While it’s possible to identify a radius of customers in your geographical area by zip code, getting more precise data from your analytics can turn your campaigns from locally oriented to locally targeted.
Many business owners today know the “sweet spot” in their market which converts best according to demographics and spending patterns. Retail stores often choose locations based upon proximity to consumers based upon this data, and local service providers should use the same logic to understand the geographical reach of their drip marketing campaigns. Whether you’re looking to better understand the returns from your local online marketing spend, or want to integrate more data from your offline campaigns, call tracking can help you precisely determine the origin of your in-bound calls.
Understanding Local Call Tracking Based Upon Location
Suppose you’re a local attorney in San Francisco, and begin a drip marketing campaign to generate new clients in the Bay Area. Since the terrain and neighborhoods are highly diverse you might find yourself generating inbound calls from areas ranging from San Jose to Berkeley. While you may be able to service clients in each of these areas, it’s likely you’ll find a higher conversion and retention rate based upon a sub-set of your leads – this is where call tracking can truly help you to determine which marketing channels are generating the highest quality leads.
Importantly, not all leads are created equal and understanding the quality distribution can provide further insights into targeting your drip marketing campaigns more precisely. A recent study by market research firm Kelsey group noted that less than 1 in 20 local businesses are properly using call tracking to determine the source of their in-bound leads, even though the implementation is cost effective and produces impressive ROI.
We can truly help local businesses not only implemented dynamic call tracking for their offline and online campaigns, but we shine by helping companies to leverage the data from the campaigns to help maximize the resulting ROI. There are multiple ways to implement call tracking on your website, including dedicated landing page phone numbers, dynamic number replacement and Click to Call analytics features.
The bottom line from the process is that call tracking can help you leverage location based data to more precisely target your marketing campaigns, whether you’re updating the settings of a PPC campaign or considering increasing a local media buy (whether it’s a directly mail or direct broadcasting solution.) Don’t sit idly by wondering which local channels and areas are really producing the best return on your marketing spend – we can work with you to help target your campaigns into areas that result in sales, scaling up your local marketing based upon results.
Investing time in high quality content, designs and web citations (links) is a core part of modern search engine optimization, but ensuring you get the technical aspects of SEO right is even more important. Using an analogy from construction, you have to build the foundation of your SEO campaign properly in order for the quality design, layout and interior design to truly have an impact. There are a variety of elements you’ll want to make sure are in place, properly configured and setup in order to get the very most out of your search optimization campaign.
Search engines rely upon a variety of file formats in order to properly organize, rank and access your website outside of just the text and images on your page. While having the right on-site elements is an important part of ranking highly, your investment in a quality site will only be returned, in kind, when you take steps to ensure the technical and service configuration are properly setup. These important steps can help shift “road blocks” impacting your campaign, and can help search engines more readily access your content in real time.
Important Factors in Your Site’s Architecture
- Optimizing Your Robots.txt File
A robots text file is utilized to let search engines know which content to follow (index) and which sections to avoid. This is important to ensure that private and testing content is not indexed in search engines, while relevant content is able to be accessed. Another important way to utilize a robots file is to exclude certain development directories for java script, include files and templates – this way you ensure the search engines know exactly which areas of your site website visitors should see.
The Robots file is an exclusion standard, which means you can opt out of indexing of certain folders on your website. This is important because it can inform the various ways in which you organize/categorize the files on your website accordingly. You can also exclude individual search engines, such as image search bots, from crawling certain areas of your site. Therefore, you can test out a new version of the site on a folder such as /beta and add the following line to your robots file to exclude the testing site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
- Generating a Dynamic Sitemap
When helping search engines to determine which pages are on your website, it’s important to ensure all content is visible through link navigation. This benefits both users, who are able to logically find the right pages, as well as search engines which are able to index a site in its entirety. In addition to investing in proper internal linking you can generate a dynamic (XML) sitemap which can help you to list the full selection of URLs on your site for indexing. A dynamic XML sitemap is simply a feed of the pages in your site, with URLs and the suggested frequency in which they are updated.
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