Bevelwise

Social Media & Online Advertising Help You Reach Your Audience

noreply@blogger.com (Holly Glover) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:25:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of my friends complaining that they are “creeped out” when they see Facebook ads tailored to their demographics or interests, or when they see ads from websites they have recently visited on other websites. This is technology at work to benefit both the user and the marketer.

Facebook’s privacy policy has long been a controversial issue. In my opinion, if you put something on the internet (especially something about yourself) you need to have the mindset that it could be possible for anyone and everyone to read it. By entering your interests or personal information in your profile – even something as simple as your gender or marital status – you are making it possible for those advertising on Facebook to group you into a "category", which is then used for marketing purposes.

Now, I don’t know what makes advertisements catered to my interests so creepy. Personally, I think it’s great. Do I want to see ads about fantasy football? Not really. Guys, do you want to know about a great deal on stilettos? Doubt it. The same principle applies to marketers. Why spend your advertising budget on an uninterested audience? Seeking out your target audience is certainly not revolutionary, but once it is applied to Facebook, it seems to make people unsettled. These strategies are done to help you get content you want and eliminate clutter.

How does Facebook target users?

The thing that I think people misconstrue about Facebook’s ad targeting is HOW they are actually getting targeted. It’s easy to think that “big brother” is scouring your every move trying to figure out what type of person you are, but in reality, the only information used is what you voluntarily supply. Let’s say I opened up a dog grooming salon in Detroit, Michigan. I would be able to specify that I want to serve ads to those who report they are living in Eastern Michigan and have dogs listed as one of their interests. Better yet, I could even be as specific as targeting dog owners with the breed of dogs that tend to give me the most business AND set a geographic distance from the zip code of my location(s). Talk about specific, relevant, and cost effective advertising!

Retargeting follows you around the web

Another effective way to advertise to a more appropriate audience is through retargeting. It’s not necessarily a coincidence to see an ad from a website that you might have visited a couple of days ago. Some websites set cookies through your browser when you visit a certain page(s) on their website and can then serve ads to you on other websites while you are surfing the internet after setting this cookie. This is also possible to do through Google Adwords via the Audiences functionality. After putting a tracking cookie on specific pages of a website, display ads will then be shown to individuals who have visited those pages as they browse websites on the Google Display Network.

This strategy goes back to the frequency principle of marketing; people will generally need to see your ad several times (typically 3-7 times based on your demographic and desired audience) before responding to it. By incorporating retargeting into your campaign, you are able to target people who have already established they are interested in your brand because they already visited your website. As a result you will be much more effective in your advertising strategy and budget.

Love it? Hate it?

As a professional marketer, I would rather get content that I can relate to and leave the "clutter" of things I am not interested in behind. As a consumer, would you rather have your interests ignored and have anonymity when it comes to being marketed to online? Or do you prefer to see ads that are tailored to your interests and profile you build by the sites you visit? We would love to hear what you think.

Google Adwords Call Metrics Effectiveness and Billing Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wellman) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:25:00 +0000

If you haven't already been using Google's Adwords Call Metrics feature then you really need to look into it. Sadly, if you don't already know about it then you have missed some functionality that was initially rolled out as free. This will not be the case very soon. Let's first take a look at the functionality and the value that it adds, excluding the cost initially.

Call Metrics & Its Benefits

If you're driving traffic through any form of internet marketing you are always looking for ways to track its effectiveness and justify ROI for your ad $$'s. Often times we are all tracking conversions on sales leads and sales through e-commerce, but what about the person who also gets value from phone sales or drives user interaction through offline communication? This is a great way to justify the offline conversion of your traffic and add value to your clients by letting them know the real effectiveness of a campaign if you are ultimately driving sales leads or calls over the phone.

How To Setup Call Metrics

First, go into your Adwords campaign under the Ad Extensions tab and add a Call Extension to your campaign. The next step is to establish what the phone number you want those calls redirected to. Then check the box to use Call Metrics and you'll be able to establish whether you would like a toll free number or a local area code number associated with your tracking that will be displayed. This brings up another factor of marketing and the local spin of your business if this applies to you. Users love to see local phone numbers and know that they are talking to someone local, so if you are a local business then I would recommend using a local phone number. Even if you need to start separating out campaigns for different geographic areas to achieve this the extra effort is worth it. Either way now Google will use its Google Voice platform to assign you a phone number and they will handle the forwarding and tracking of that number. Another thing I want to mention with this is there is also another feature I have skipped over. The Call-Only Format is only possible to use if your device is capable of making phone calls. This could be any mobile phone or computer with Skype or a VOIP system. This will disable the functionality to click the headline of the ad and go to the website, and give the user only one option to interact with the ad and that is using the Click To Call functionality. If you're trying to drive sales through a phone number then who doesn't love a 100% conversion rate. Also, if you haven't broken out your PPC campaigns and separated out a mobile strategy then you need to do that as well, but I'm not really covering that whole concept in this blog post.

Call Metrics Changes Very Soon

What will be changing very soon is the way Google bills for this value added service. Soon campaigns will be charged $1 for every time this number is called manually. Now when I say manually basically I mean any time the number is called NOT using the Click To Call functionality. This could be when the user sees the number on an Adwords ad, doesn't click, but calls the number. You would be charged $1 in that scenario. The worst thing about this is users who may call your business for the first time through a PPC ad and then save the phone number in their contacts list. Users could be using this number in excess and costing your campaign money. This is just one downfall to think about. I still believe the functionality is worth the cost and will be testing to see how many times users will actually be calling the number manually. We can measure this against how many users call the number and do not charge the additional $1, and make our judgments after we see more data.

Reporting On Your Call Details

An extra feature that makes this even more valuable is the way in which we are able to report on this data. If you go into your campaign and look under the Dimensions tab you'll want to view the Call Details information. This will give you:

Start Time Of The Call
End Time Of The Call
Status - Received or Missed Call
Duration In Seconds
Caller Area Code

This information is very valuable because it gives you very valuable information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC budget. Also you should be using this data to setup your Day Parting strategy to further target your ads to drive the most ROI.

Social Media Strategy - trigger interaction & response

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:29:00 +0000

You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even "cool" to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already "passed" your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say - "if they haven't said anything about it yet, then I probably don't need to pay attention to it yet." And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up "first" on Google, doesn't make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don't know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Fri, 06 May 2011 20:34:00 +0000

Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges - like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the "squeakiest wheel gets the grease". These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience - especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have "complaining" on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, "liking", or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it - then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction - it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs - the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share - giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:50:00 +0000

I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just "another marketing or advertising campaign" of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn't really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don't be thinking that a "catch all" corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want - be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don't make it a "news" page. If you are updating them with content they don't care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider "several" Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success - in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from "legal". Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial "lines" get crossed and they feel like you could get into any "trouble" resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further - A customer service person that asks "are you following us on Facebook yet - we have specials we run for those fans on occasion" can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don't have to "agree" with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the "big picture" work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts - You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 - they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing - (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

What are your company's value propositions and differentiators?

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:21:00 +0000

Just re-reading a great article from Jeffrey Gitomer in the local business journal. It resonated with me because we preach this to all of our clients when talking strategy for their marketing and sales efforts. Everyone needs to know their differentiators because if you don't then you are just another product or service that you will market as a "commodity". A better question is do you know what your value proposition is?

Everybody has their set of products and/or services. Most have spent some time coming up with "differentiators" so they can tell why they are different. But true value combines what the client or prospect perceives to be in favor of them combined with what you perceive is in favor of them - hence the value proposition.

Are your Brand and marketing strategy reaching beyond the product or service itself to a relationship with your clients? Where are the areas where the most value you provide is perceived by your clients? Whether you consult Fortune 500 clients or sell shoes, you need to craft, create, and control the perception of value your product or service. Social media is exploding because it helps create this value and gives businesses more access to each customer relationship and therefore the ability add more value and integrate themselves with a client. In the case of services, your presence out in the web channels can add to building trust, in the case of shoes - how many people they can see are talking about them will add "perceived value" to your shoe or Brand of shoes.

Perceived value can also far outweigh the actual price paid. That value can actually help justify the price in a client's mind. Everything you do needs to drive the prospect/customer to perceive value and the value you give provide to them. Price objections are typically more about them not perceiving enough value - it also you just need to change their perception and your content, messaging, and social media strategy can all help you change that perception.

Work on developing these propositions and you will see your revenue grow. Here are some helpful marketing tools to help you craft your marketing and web strategies.

Extra parked or redirect domains don't show up in search engines

noreply@blogger.com (Craig) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 16:29:00 +0000

Extra domains that redirect to a different "primary" domain do not help you by showing up in search engine results. For example, if Bevelwise were to own the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com which is full of keywords and redirect that domain's traffic to bevelwise.com it would not help us in search engine rankings at all. If someone were to look for the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com in Google, it wouldn't be found.

If search engines were to see this extra domain and try to index it, they would see that there is not any content on this domain, it just redirects to a different website. Therefore, it has no search engine value and the search engines will completely ignore it.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, people used to type in the address bar a keyword and add ".com" to try to find something. For example, someone who wanted to buy office furniture might type in "officefurniture.com" and hope they are taken to a legitimate website. People who wanted to capture this traffic would purchase these domain names and put up websites or redirect this traffic to a different site. This is sometimes called "blind" searching and it is very rare to find people doing this today. Search engines have removed the need to do blind searching.

There are a few reasons to have and keep these extra domains. The primary reason is to ensure that no one else (like your competitor) buys the domain. That is a very good reason why you would want to buy the ".net" and ".org" version of your primary domain, you wouldn't want your competitors to have those domains.

The other reason to have extra redirect domains is to capture the traffic of common misspellings of your primary domain name. For example, Google owns the domain gogle.com and if you go to that address it redirects people to the primary domain of google.com.

Outside of the two above reasons, we do not recommend to purchase additional or extra domain names unless you intend to create unique websites for those domains.

Adwords Extends Ad Titles To Test And Improve CTR

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wellman) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:58:00 +0000

Google is always making changes and testing the way they display results and ads. We all know about the change from a while back when they stopped calling ads "Sponsored Results" and starting call them "Ads". This made a big impact, even though it was just a simple change. Well they're at it again and this time they are testing extending the Ad Title's of text ads. What they are doing is taking the first line of the ad copy and appending it to the title. This has a variety of things to take into account with this change:

Ad Titles are the clickable area of an ad, and extending it gives users a larger area to click and make the text appear as a hyperlink.
It will increase CTR and drive more traffic through paid search.
As PPC managers we will need to alter the way we write ad copy taking into account the mix of ad titles and ad copy.

To see Google's post about this topic you can visit the Adwords Blog where they describe how they rolled this out and how your ad needs to be formatted to receive this change. You'll need to end your line 1 ad copy with a form of punctuation. A period or question mark will need to be used to imply your ad has actual sentence structure. The example that the Adwords blog used to illustrate the difference in ads can be seen here.

The implication of this could be huge from a CTR stand point and the volume of traffic that can be driven to your site through paid search. We like when changes like this are made because when you know how to manage and optimize campaigns we can maximize results for our clients. If you're not actively managing your Adwords campaign then you'll miss the boat when big changes like this can affect results on a large scale. This is a good reason to have a professional manager of your campaigns that will stay up to date for you. The scarier thing may be that your competitors could be using this to their advantage, which will give them the better CTR and overtake your ads position with a higher quality score. You may be left in the dust.

If you have seen this in your own campaigns and have noticed the differences in performance leave a comment and tell us how this has affected your results and strategy. If you haven't made adjustments that take this into account... go make them now and measure the results for yourself.

Top Search Terms and Visited sites for 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:30:00 +0000

Experian does an annual study on the top search terms for each year and the top ten visited URLs for each year. Below you will find a graphic for 2010 versus 2009. Facebook found itself at the top of both lists - showing you the power that brand and property has become. There is a reason why Mark Zuckerberg was Time Magazine's Person of the Year and there was a movie made about the Facebook story. As you will see, FOUR of the top ten search terms were all facebook.

Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches so you social media doubters needs to stop doubting.

New terms that entered into the top 50 search terms for 2010 included - netflix, verizon wireless, espn, chase, pogo, tagged, wells fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and hulu.

The combination of Google properties accounted for 9.85 percent of all U.S. site visits. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 8.12 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 33 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, an increase of 12 percent versus 2009.

One of the next questions becomes, will Facebook be able to be knocked off it's perch from either list? You would think at some point there would be something else that needs to get searched for more than Facebook just because "everyone" will already be a user right? But when does that happen? 2011? 2012? When the next great social media invention comes along? It will be interesting to watch this over the next couple of years.

Some other fun facts and top searched items :
Athlete: Still Tiger Woods - Dallas Cowboys were the team
Destination: Disney World and Disneyland was #2
Movie Title: Star Wars
Company: Bevelwise (just making sure you are paying attention, lol)
Music Artist/Band: Justin Bieber mania was BEAT by Lady Gaga
TV Show: Dancing with the Stars beat Amercian Idol...
Personality: Kim Kardashian has passed Oprah and Rush was third...

We just thought it was very interesting how powerful Facebook as become. Let us know if you think any of these numbers/spots will change for 2011 and why. We'd love to hear your opinion.

As we begin 2011, thanks to everyone...

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:11:00 +0000

There are several things when you run a small services company that come into play. Good staff, good clients, and always a little luck. As a marketing firm, with heavy emphasis in the web marketing, search optimization, and online media fields that are highly competitive, you have to always be on the top of your game. For example, there is typically more than change per day (550+ in 2009) to how Google ranks sites, not to mention Bing and other factors. This "whole Internet thing" takes a lot more attention by the qualified people to do it and it will help maximize results because web is open 24/7. You also need to make sure you are not taking short cuts and you are building for long term as much as short term because long term will get you further for the money over time.

You also need to be able to create and implement marketing and web strategy you can measure and helps people establish and get to their goals. If you are not doing these and marketing effectively, then you are not maximizing your budget and return on investment. It isn't about showing some results and saying "look at what we've done". We find it extremely easy (with about 80% of our prospects) to have the ability to increase their marketing response by 10% or web hits by 33% just through implementing best practices and optimization of all media, but you have to look deeper than that. It's more about using what we learned making those initial improvements and what we are going to do to get you to the next level of results. At some point, you will reach diminishing returns, but knowing when you shouldn't spend the money to try for it is crucial to maximizing each and every piece of your marketing matrix and that is where we shine.

If you look at all the pieces of marketing as illustrated by these two graphics, one will see that the interactive or digital marketing picture alone has the same amount of moving parts as an entire strategy used to just 12-15 years ago. That in itself makes once have to pay attention to it to keep your business moving forward.

What we do is help get and keep businesses moving forward through building communities with their audiences and making sure their interactions with their customers and prospects gives them the best chance for success. I wanted to take a moment as we begin a new year to thank my wonderful staff for all their hard work and dedication, all of our great clients for believing in what we were telling them and trusting in our execution (even when they didn't fully understand it) and just say that Bevelwise is nothing without both of you. Here's to a great 2010 and hopefully an even better 2011.

Seach Engine Strategies 2010 In Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wellman) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:15:00 +0000

This is Steve Wellman @ Bevelwise coming to you just after Search Engine Strategies 2010 in Chicago. What a great event this has been. There are tons of industry experts in town for the event speaking and sitting on panels for seminars. I have had the privilege of attending as many of these seminars as possible and am just soaking up as much as I can. The conference has offered a ton of information on a range of topics. Anything from local search optimization tips all the way to organic and PPC search marketing tips. I really enjoyed Eli Goodman's take on Competitive Research for SEO. He gave a number of good strategies to utilize all of your competitors information on the web, and how we as SEOs can leverage that to our advantage.

We have even gotten to hear some viewpoints straight from Google, and had a keynote from Maile Ohye, a Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google. Maile went over a lot of new updates and functionality they are building into the Webmaster Tools. She even let us know that internally their team has a "Webmaster Happiness Rating" they monitor with the forum support team to let them know generally how happy webmasters are with them around the net. I'm surely going to remember that next time I'm going back and forth on their Webmaster's Forum.

We here at Bevelwise tried to attend as much as possible and wanted to get as much information as we could to help serve all our clients better. Here is a list of the seminars that we thought would help our clients the best and would provide us with the highest level of material.

Advanced Keywords Research - Looking at the latest and best techniques and tools used in advanced keyword research and helping discover the best possibilities for our marketing and optimization efforts.
Ads In A Quality Score World - When we look at pay per click marketing we are always looking to improve, optimize and expand our campaigns. Knowing how quality score works and writing unique, relevant and great ad copy will help us improve campaigns and get lower cost per clicks than our competitors.
Advanced Paid Search Tactics - This seminar shed light into techniques that the best of the best in the industry use to optimize their pay per click campaigns.
B2B Search Marketing Tips - We all know that depending on the type of marketing tactics we use depends on the audience we are trying to attract. In this B2B series SES looked at the differences and challenges specifically associated with B2B markets.
Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search - Depending on your business we are always trying to leverage local opportunities where applicable, and search is no exception. We looked at where local search has come from, and where it will be heading in the future.
Competitive Research - It doesn't matter who you are or what type of website you have. You probably at least have a competitor or 2, and knowing that everyone wants to gain some insight into their competitors and what works for them. Dissecting a competitors SEO strategy can be a very tactful way to figure out what has worked for them, and to also find possible holes in their strategy.
Making The Jump From Search to Display - Yep... all of you thought that display advertising was a dying breed, but there are some revolutionary things that display advertisers are doing to get a new fresh perspective on their advertising channel. Well you can guess who they are trying to attract... the search marketers.
Stretching Your Marketing Dollars: The Upside of Search - Ok well you don't have to convince me that when your marketing dollars are tight that the best avenue to pursue is search. What I am concerned with is learning new and revolutionary ways to further stretch things as people continue coming to me looking for ways to improve their sales and leads, while at the same time lowering their budgets.

If you have any questions or want more in-depth information about these subjects you can email me at swellman@bevelwise.com and I will answer any questions.

I plan on trying to write more in-depth posts about these subjects to a further extent in the near future.

Using Your Web Analytics To Make Actual Business Decisions

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wellman) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:59:00 +0000

I have spoken with a number of people who have websites, and some who even have Analytics. (usually Google Analytics, because it costs $0.00) One of my favorite questions to ask is "what do you most enjoy looking at in your analytics that helps you?" and usually the response to this unfortunately is "how many people are coming to my website." That's all and well and good, but lets take a minute to look at the concept of "Segmenting Your Data".

I doubt that you are looking at an overview dashboard and are actually going to figure out anything you're ready to make a decision on. So what should we as internet marketers be looking at that will actually help us make decisions.

I often speak with people who are spending a gob of money on various online marketing opportunities, and I want to to see if what they are getting for their hard earned money is actually worth something. Lets take this a step deeper. One example is to look at conversions rates and/or goals (if you're using Google Analytics) and segment by either the traffic sources and/or the campaigns associated with those traffic sources. If you're not passing in variables for traffic source, medium, and campaign with your various advertisers(for example, a banner ad) I would recommend starting to do that right now. The variables below apply to Google Analytics, and are very useful when passed into your destination URL's:

utm_source=
utm_medium=
utm_term=
utm_content=
utm_campaign=

And this would be an example of using these variables to establish where some traffic actually came from using our website. bevelwise.com/?utm_source=ourblog&utm_medium=textlink&utm_campaign=using-your-web-analytics. What this will do for measurement, is assign the following variables when you click as such:

source=ourblog
medium=textlink
campaign=using-your-web-analytics

You could then reference all the clicks that came in through any campaign online/email campaign to goals that you have pre-determined and set up for your website and use them to further drive your marketing objectives and strategies.

Getting back to the concept of segmenting you would always want to be drilling down into your data and breaking out specific variables and sections of that data that mean something to your business. Having someone who is experienced with reading your web analytics is just as important as having a CFO that knows how to read a balance sheet and it can help produce better financial results. I've heard someone say before, "oh we know what our website is doing, because we put analytics on our website." Interpreting those analytics and helping to make actionable decisions for your organization involves much more than knowing the basics of what analytics tells you. Do you know what areas of your website's content is delivering the best results? Do you know where your advertising $$ are being best spent?

Bevelwise does seo from grand rapids, MI which includes Google Analytics measurement and will put our skills up against anyone out there in the Midwest. Would be happy to help you with your search engine optimization, web strategy, web analytics and all marketing from a measurement perspective. You will get insight to drive all your marketing initiatives if your website done and measured correctly.

Video SEO Benefits your Overall SEO Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wellman) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:48:00 +0000

Optimizing video has always posed great opportunities in the SEO world, and all companies should find ways to leverage this medium. The internet has become more diverse and more visual over time, and that’s not going to slow down. It’s easy to start with the basics of where you host the video, what titles, descriptions, and content you load into the video. The harder step most of the time is distributing the video and getting press and rankings from it. Often time this means instead of saying where are we hosting, or publishing the video it means saying, how many places are we going to post the video to. YouTube, Hulu, MySpace are just a couple of examples. How are you leveraging your social media channels to get visitors to see your video, and hopefully make it go viral? Do you even have social media channels? You should and this is content that those channels will find enegaing if you do it right.

One thing to be aware of with Google’s most recent change to their results page (if you haven’t seen it, it’s on the left sidebar) is where you can refine searches based on a variety of factors. For example, you can scope your search for just news, shopping, images, videos, books, blogs, updates, and discussions just to name a few. The thing I want to point out here is the more people are going to scope by video. Then when you get into those results you can further refine the videos by duration, posted date, relevance, quality, and even source. This expands on the options that we have to optimize video. Now businesses can take into account when they are making videos are they going to be short, medium, or long, and at what quality are we publishing. This also plays into the question of where are we posting our videos? All of these factors are going to continue to play a role in the evolution of video SEO and interactive media.

A short video or "webmerical" can go a long way with helping your web strategy and online exposure. If you are looking for a company to assist with a video or your online marketing or web strategy, contact us @ Bevelwise.

5 New Features Google Analytics Offers In The New Beta AdWords Stat Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Wellman) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:20:00 +0000

A couple of us Internet Marketers here at Bevelwise were just talking about this a few weeks ago. I had even provided this as feedback to a Google survey a few months ago that I would like to see, specifically goal tracking day parting on campaigns. I feel like those Windows 7 ads - "I'm an Adwords Certified Professional and day parting of conversions was my idea". Google has beta released the new stat tool for AdWords data in their Analytics package. This adds a ton of features and ways that we can look at Pay-Per-Click traffic and how it is interacting with websites. If you've never checked this section of Google Analytics out before then go under "Traffic Sources -> Adwords" you will see a wide range of new options under that.

I thought I would give a little more insight about about some of the new features I've enjoyed checking out this morning and point out my top 5

The new Adwords Overview looks at your CTR and Bounce Rate metric side by side and line graphs it for you very nicely by default.
You can now see your goals/conversions broken down by day-parting. This is something we've not been able to see until now, and lets you see exactly what time of the day is bringing you the best conversion rates.
The layout of your Destination URL's are easier to get to now, and you can see the statistics breakdown for how each destination url on your website is performing. This helps even further when we are looking at conversion rate optimization
You can see your "Keyword Positions" performance, which lets you pick a keyword anywhere in your account and see how many times it is clicked when it is served in the first position, second, third, etc.
You can see statistics breakdown for each match type you use. This means that you can see the bounce rate if you want for all your broad match types, and compare that to your phrase and exact types to see what is bringing in the most qualified traffic.

As you can see this a big addition to their already great Analytics package. There are so many ways to apply this to further improve Google Adwords advertising, and websites in general when we are looking at conversion rate optimization.

If you don't already have a company that helps you manage your search engine marketing or website analytics Bevelwise is a SEM firm that is utilizing these strategies and all of the most current techniques to drive our client's business and have successful web strategy. Staying up to date with these great additions and changes is more than a full time job for us, it's our passion - which makes us good and what we do.

Is it Social Media or should it really be Public Media

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:15:00 +0000

The term Social Media is not really accurate any more. Why? Because we have moved well beyond "social" into doing business. You want information to get into the marketplace, just turn to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc - and you can get it out to the masses more quickly than ever. Another reason, all of the a four mentioned have more value that being social if you use them right.

Also, one does not really have any control over what can be said/posted about them or your company or organization. It is really "public" media. Word can spread at warp speed to the public, especially if people deem it to be interesting. Several companies, public figures, and celebrities have "social media" site about them that they don't have anything to do with - but all go into controlling public opinion of them. Some have to spend significant time to control their brand out there. The bigger your "Brand", the more time you have to spend in this space to control your Brand.

I could also see the term "community media" being a potential moniker as well. All of these tools we mentioned above really go into creating a "community" of people who are interested in similar topics, products, information - and they feed off each other. That is an effective strategy to utilize all of these mediums. Add value to your clients and prospects, filter information for them, be a resource and partner to them as much as a supplier or vendor.

Creating an effective social media strategy is all about the execution of it and understanding how each piece plugs into the overall picture. You should hire someone to guide your strategy, but the information and content really has to come from someone internal while the expert will tweak that content for maximum effectiveness through "public" media channels. That guide for most companies that would mean outsourcing as would not be near a full time position - the right partner should have some understanding of your business and industry in order to be most helpful.

Local Search and the Multi-Platform Approach

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:11:00 +0000

I was just reading this article from Search Engine Land about the topic above. While their "case study" method left a bit to be desired (why would you ever go from your own Facebook page to the yellow pages and put them in front of ALL of the competition make absolutely NO SENSE!), you do need to have multi-platform strategy to effectively keep your presense in a local marketplace.

You do need the local search methods, the directories, and your web content all to help you maintain your presence and potentially "own" the local listing, I just don't see yellow pages being the answer. Social media would be more effective than that. I cannot tell you the last time I personally looked in a phone book. I also don't go to online yellow pages unless there is something specific that I am not finding through Google/Bing/Yahoo. You can tell the writer definitely came from the Yellow Pages world.

As these mediums, try to revamp to become more relevant in an Internet driven world, there could be some value here, as web strategy is the "sum of all parts". Local Search is something that needs a trained professional to help you with in order to maximize effectiveness and ensure you are getting your ROI. If you are interested, find someone (like Bevelwise) who understands it, can explain it, and has no reason to be bias to any one media - only to produce the results you desire.

Google Apps is ceasing support for Internet Explorer 6 as of March 1st

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:49:00 +0000

Google sent us the email below stating that they will no longer support IE 6. So contact your IT staff and tell them you need to make sure you are upgraded. We suggest you get IE 8, Firefox 3.5, or Google Chrome 5 (the fastest browser) and for Mac users get Safari 4.0. You might a well upgrade to the latest version if you need to upgrade.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Anyone can be a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professional right?

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:15:00 +0000

I was just going through a Search Engine Land discussion thread that was posted through their Linked In profile and it was all about "What passes for an SEO professional". Needless to say it has 94 posts over a 4 month period - mostly about how people have paid for SEO and never realized results and trying to establish some sort of benchmark or certification to protect people from have a bad experience with Search Engine Optimization because anyone can call themselves an "expert".

Really, almost anyone who builds websites would be an expert compared to the average business person. Part of finding a good source for your SEO partner is knowing what to ask for. Lots of web people can say a lot that sounds good to the average business person, and they probably do know what they are talking about. BUT...execution of strategy makes all the difference in the results you achieve.

I have had to explain to customers that they didn't necessarily get "screwed" with their web site or SEO, but it is just because they didn't know the questions to ask and the person they worked with just didn't know how to follow best practices or execute to maximize results. There are over 200 factors that go into determining how a site will rank, and unless you have pretty deep pockets, you will have to rely on execution to get results with a focus on 10% of these factors.

It is about properly setting expectations and working to achieve those. You cannot guarantee someone everything they want unless you are using what is known as "black hat" techniques - but you measure you results and guarantee your work based on those properly set expectations. And black hat catches up with a site eventually.

Tips for successful SEO:
1. Be very specific with the keywords or phrase you want to get ranked
2. Understand that this is an ongoing process and you could check every hour of the day and see your own results vary probably up to 10 positions for the same keyword or phrase.
3. Ask for references and examples of work.
4. This is more of an ongoing relationship to be successful - doing it once and expecting it to last is going to be VERY temporary for results.
5. Don't spend all your budget "up front" or for one time optimization. It should be a 6 month budget because then you have the money to adjust once you start to see results.
6. There are basics to effective SEO, but every client engagement should be based on what that client wants to accomplish so your "plan" should be based on your desired goals.
7. Algorithms change regularly - usually 1-2 major changes a year, so there is no long term solution other than to tweak your optimization and it takes some work in order to keep SEO "expertise" by your resource. If you are reading it in a book, it is already TOO OLD to really help.
8. If you are starting from ZERO and don't rank for much of anything but your name, anyone should be able to move the bar for your results. Understanding if you are getting maximum value for your money is much harder for you to quantify unless they help you quantify it. Ask them. Ask for today, and ask for 6 months from today.
9. Be prepared to have more content and pages than you EVER had and have your site grow in pages in order to have enough content to create the quality scores and keyword density you need.

There are many more things to effective SEO, but I don't want to go on forever. If you want to have a discussion, just contact us at www.bevelwise.com and we will be glad to answer your questions and help further.

Twitter to be Indexed on Google and Bing

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:54:00 +0000

Both Google and Bing (with Yahoo SERP going to be powered by Bing they will really be one in the same) plan to begin indexing Twitter tweets in 2010. That will allow them to show the the tweets within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). This will more than likely be the first test for real time, non-paid, content to be indexed and shown on SERPs. That means you should position your Brand for more in depth, relevant, and timely tweeting because you will be able to move the bar on the search engines more quickly.

This will also help move Twitter from the social space into the main stream for business purposes because this will make it relevant on so many levels. Effecting real time search results? That is power. I would see Blogs getting the real time priority next(especially those using Blogger if you are Google) as they already help immensely with index-able content on a site. One would have to think that Facebook posts would be on the short list as well to go real-time

Emotional Marketing Messaging vs. Facts Based Rational Messaging

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:27:00 +0000

I was just re-reading an Article from earlier this year in Advertising Age that talked about why emotional marketing messages beat the rational ones. They looked at 880 case studies, covering two recessions to see if there was any difference between the "good and bad times". What was determined was emotional advertising was twice as likely to generate profit gains than the rational ones, with the campaigns that use both, splitting the difference right in between.

The biggest difference was the emotional marketing reduced price sensitivity, which helped companies to be able to hold more firm on their pricing (with a better economy, it would allow you to probably charge a premium). Emotional advertising allows one to create a sense of differentiation for your brand and helps it appear to be worth "more" to the customer. However, a person that would respond to more data driven advertising or rational messaging, is typically more analytical so it is expected that they are more price sensitive because they would be one that "does their homework" first.

Balancing this in the Internet age takes some effort because of how Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, and everything can spread more quickly - especially through industry trade channels. If you combine that with the fact that 80%+ people research what they want to buy online (especially if it is not a standard consumable good) then you have to make sure your message reaches across all mediums.

If you ask most business owners, "Would you like to be able to keep 1% more through your price or increase your volume 1%?", holding that price would be more to the bottom line that the equivalent increase in sales volume. Your marketing needs to help you achieve that.

Success in Local Business SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Jessie Kleino) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:31:00 +0000

1. Non-Business Name Searches: It's great if people searching the internet are discovering your website without typing in the name of your business. Probably most of these visitors were previously unaware of your business. This signifies that your website is ranking well for phrase that describe its location and the type of products or services.

2. Specific Service or Product Searches: If your company offers a exclusive product or service you will definitely want to be found for it. These keywords will point to your website because you have a search engine friendly website well optimized even for its more unique services.

3. Searches by Zip, Street, & City: An important component of Local Business SEO if having your address in the footer or on every page of your website. Your company can even gather online traffic for searches by multiple zip codes across your region. This is also a result of having a well optimized map listing. For example, in your Google Local Business Listing, make use of targeted keyword phrases in your list of services or products.

4. Synonyms for Products or Services: If your website is well optimized, it will be able to draw traffic from multiple keywords describing its services. Optimize for multiple phrases to describe your business's services and products on pages within your website.

Have you locked up your Brand Identity for Social Media?

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:49:00 +0000

There are several sites out there that people use for sharing information and more social media aspects that you should consider registering your name. Even if you don't plan to use Facebook or Twitter, we would advise you at least lock up your name so someone else cannot steal it - which is known as "squatting". Besides, just because you don't plan to use either of them does not mean there isn't the next hottest one around the corner that you should lock up.

This happened with domain names in the mid 90's as websites were coming into popularity. Several Fortune 500 companies ended up in court trying to get their trademarked names back. There has not been any precedence set for Social Media and if and how companies can get control of their Brand once it has been registered by someone else who is not them. As reference, here is an article from Adage that shows you some of the big Brands that don't own their Twitter identity.

You can see if anyone has squatted you out and potentially avoid that by visiting UserNameCheck.com . There are 68 different sites that someone could "squat" you on. Some of them you have never heard of, several are familiar and you can find all the different sites people could squat your identity on. You never know what might be the next big fad or emerge so it is best to lock them up and as new "fads" come out, register those as well, even if you don't ever use them - you can at least know you are protecting your Brand when it comes to Internet & Web Marketing and Social Media.

Google jumping out of the internet into your hardware

noreply@blogger.com (Craig) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:34:00 +0000

Google's take over of your internet connected devices is now becoming more clear. The are taking a multi-pronged approach targeting mobile, netbooks, tablets, laptops and PC's.

Android 2.0 is now released on the largest cellular carrier (Verizon) in the US and I fully expect Android to take over the iPhone in just a few years. Why am I so confident that the number of Android supported cell phones will out number iPhones in a short period of time considering the current iPhone lead? The answer is openness and applications.

Google is making a smart move by making Android hardware agnostic and not limiting what devices may run the OS. Just like Windows, Android may run on a whole slew of devices produced by numerous manufacturers. Whereas Apple's mobile OS only runs on a few selected devices (iPhone and iPod Touch). It was recently announced that several new devices will be running Google's Android OS, including a tablet PC from Vega, a e-book readers to compete with Amazon's Kindle and a netbook from Acer. Expect more and new types of devices to come in the future. I can imagine Android to show up in your TV, in your GPS, and in your car soon.

The slew of new Android devices will demand the attention of developers. Developers and creators of applications will gravitate towards the platform where their applications will be sold and used the most. Also, with Apple's big brother attitude over applications, why would a developer risk their application being rejected? There is less risk writing applications for an open platform like Android. Just like the gaming console wars and the OS wars, the winner of a platform is the one that has the most popular applications.

Also, it is now unofficially released that the Google Chrome OS will be launching within a week. Google's Chrome OS is initially intended for less powerful netbooks and laptops (in fact it may even compete with Android) and will be competing head-to-head with Microsoft. Of course netbooks and small laptops is currently the fast growing segment in the PC market.

I'm not convinced that the Chrome OS will have as big of an impact in the PC market as Android has in the mobile market. Microsoft will not let go of its grasp of PC's very easily. However of all the options available to the netbooks, Google has the best shot of nudging Microsoft from its podium a little bit.

I believe that when people look back to find when the time was that Google started jump out of the internet into hardware, the answer will be in late 2009 into early 2010.

What are your thoughts?

Google buys Mobile Ad Leader AdMob

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Barry) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:51:00 +0000

Marketing to Mobile Devices is here to stay and only going to increase. With the new droids and Blackberry Storm2 and the iPhone, this is only going to be more prevalent and more people move to these data savvy phones. These devices also require you to get a data plan so they are always connected to the Internet as long as they are in a service area - no "hot spot" needed.

Google has deep enough pockets to keep anyone at bay. The interesting part of this deal is it was an all stock transaction - but $750 MILLION worth of stock. The interesting part of this is their sales are $40 and most experts think ad networks should be worth 6 times sales - or in this case $240 million. They received TRIPLE that figure - will it pay off? I think so.

If you are in a consumer oriented market, you need to begin to think about this as part of your media mix. In a lot of ways this will be BIGGER than the social media craze...certainly more valuable and measurable than that.

For a good article about this acquisition of AdMob by Google, visit this Adage Article

Budget Adwords wisely by using Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Jessie Kleino) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:04:00 +0000

Use Google Analytics to optimize your Adwords Pay-Per-Click spending by monitoring your conversion rate, bounce rate, and ROI.

First, link your Adwords to Analytics. Tip, do it from your login account (same admin on both), not a My-Client-Account MCC. Make sure your "cost data" is applied to the correct adwords account number.

Once your accounts are linked, apply conversion tracking/goals. Do this even if you don't have e-commerce. A goal could be a sign-up, contact request, newsletter request, purchase, key page view, etc.

Now, login to Analytics and analyze you data! Find your adwords data by going to Traffic Sources --> Adwords.

Check the bounce rate. Ideally, a lower percentage is better...especially because you are paying for these keywords. Bounce rate is a visit with only one page view on your site, then they "bounce off" aka leaves your site. If the bounce rate is high, the landing page may be wrong.

Check average time on site. Usually longer time is better. You may want to improve the look of landing pages with low time on site because it may mean that the searcher immediately doesn't like what they see. Or maybe they can't easily navigate around your site.

Find out what time of day you are getting highest amount of conversions. This can help enable "Day parting" if you would like to lower your budget (or increase impressions for times when people are more likely to buy.

Expand on keywords with high conversion rates. Bid aggressively on keywords that are giving you a good return-on-investment (ROI). Ditch the keywords that aren't converting!

Please contact Bevelwise if you need someone to manage or straighten out all of this data!