Internet Retailer: Retailers overspend on search-based marketing

I could see this coming last year in our own campaign buys. Thank you Forrester for reinforcing my already stated position.

Online marketers know that one of the fastest ways to increase traffic is to devote a responsible portion of your online budget to keyword buys at your major Pay-Per-Click search providers such as Overture, FindWhat, and Google. Buy purchasing targeted keywords and keywords specific to your products, brand, and services, you stand a much greater chance to generate targeted traffic back to your website from, you hope, very targeted users that are likely to convert at your site.

However, with all of the mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, bedfellows, and fusion partnerships that the search and directory providers engage in, it's easy to see how one can be overspending and even double spending on keyword placements. Here are a few ways that I've used to ensure that I keep under budget on my PPC campaigns:

1. Maintain a simple matrix of who's who, and who they're feeding. For example, if Overture syndicates on 12 sites, and business.com also syndicates their listings on 2 of those 12 sites, I'm going to adjust my bidding accordingly to ensure that I'm paying the least for keywords that could crossover. It's a bit more work, but the savings add up as the clicks add up - which can be pretty quickly on a hot search term.

2. Use a bid manager like GoToast or something similar to keep a holistic view of my campaigns at my desktop and ensure that my bid amounts are kept in check. As the list off PPC providers grows, it is imperative that you maintain a singular view of your PPC efforts across providers.

3. Buy domains of the major names, house brands, and product lines that you produce or sell. For instance, if you sell a product called Super B2B Brander, be sure to buy that domain name before your competitor does. Remember, over 60% of the traffic to most websites results from typed in or bookmarked URLs.

4. Track, Measure, Analyze. Be absolutely sure to use tracking URLs for all of your keywords and track their performance. Kill the duds and keep the converters. This goes to the point of reaching your TARGET market. Traffic is great, but the wrong traffic dilutes your conversion metrics and costs you real money!

NetSuds March 2003 Monthly Report 9.0 The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker

I have this little zygote of an idea for an article that needs to be written. The topic is how executive directorship is needed in any company that seeks to achieve integration between online and offline marketing. There are too many companies where these are still seperate departments and they are only hurting themselves. Below is a collection of resources to reinforce this position. Look out for the article...

Selling the Web - What salient features does that Web have to offer that make it a critical addition to a companies marketing media mix.

Sales and Marketing Articles from the Sales & Marketing Executives International organization in New Zealand

This is an article that falls into the category of 'works I wish I'd written'. Stephan Specar's article on doing monthly reviews of your competitors' websites should be read and memorized by anyone charged with a corporate website.

Taking readings on things like Google rankings, Alexa rankings, and doing a SWOT analysis of our features vs. their features are all things that I do monthly for our sites. Further, we do this not only for our corporate sites but also for our targeted microsites as well to ensure that we have the most valuable content and most relevant tools and planning information of any company.

Take a look at Stephan's article. This one's a must read.

The Invisible Edge

Stephan Spencer and Brian Klais of NetConcepts, an e-marketing company in Madison, WI, wrote a great article which quantifies the amount of potential business lost by not capturing maximum search engine traffic. Pretty standard rhetoric, but it's refreshing to see it put to numbers.

Not Everything That Can Be Counted Counts and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein

More living proof that many web managers STILL don't know how to tell which way the wind is blowing. How can you be successful if you haven't yet defined success?

We just implemented a new web analytics tool from Web Side Story. It's an amazing tool that could only have been justified by a thorough understanding of what our business objectives were and what we needed to know to better meet them. It's also the most basic tenent in a web-centered marketing strategy. You have to start with your overall business goals, whether leads, sales, or newsletter registrations, and work backwards from there. Everything on your website, heck, everything you spend marketing dollars on, has to support achieving those business objectives. More to the point, anything you measure and track from your website has to support those objectives. No, website hits are not a metric! Here are some metrics that make sense though.

* Number of visits (how many people in your store)
* Duration of visit (how long are they there = how good is your content?)
* Depth of visit (same as above)
* Page views (lots to look at? did they like what you had to say?)
* Registrations (or any other conversion/acquisition method - this is KING!)
* Application interaction (think your tools are 'value added' - did anyone use them?)
* Ease of navigation (usability is a competitive advantage)

Jim Sterne has more to say about this in his MarketingProfs article from today.

I recently had a very enlightening discussion with our corporate PR agent. The topic of our conversation was how we could better leverage press releases and media placements on our corporate website. We are generating some great press, but the momentum is lost shortly after the release leaves the agents desk. This is disconcerting considering some of the recent numbers on how journalists are accessing the web to obtain corporate information. The recent Middleberg/Ross Media Survey indicates the following online habits of journalists:

- 86% of journalists use the Internet for research
- 72% get press releases online
- 70% read publications online
- Reporters prefer press releases and pitches to come by email, and prefer to go to the web for further learning about your cause or company.

Judging by these numbers, if you aren't speaking to the majority of journalists via the Internet, your message may be falling on deaf ears.

A 2002 presentation by the International Association of Business Communicators recommends several enhancements to make your website more media friendly. These are pulled from a variety of sources, including the IABC and the Nielsen/Norman group who conducts studies on the usability of PR sections of commercial websites. Below are seven tactics that you can implement rather quickly to begin leveraging the press and product information that your company is already creating.

1. Link to the pressroom or newsroom from your homepage. No journalist likes to hunt for your information. Moreover, prospective clients who may not be familiar with your company will almost invariably look here for information on what you've been up to. Coremetrics does a superb job of putting a link to the press section front and center and also puts recent headlines on the front page.

2. Add the name of your PR agent or internal press contact to your website's PR section. Journalists frequently require more details for a story that what your average press release provides. The quicker they can find the right person to talk to for more information, the more likely you are to be featured in their story.

3. Include a product releases and updates section. This is a great value add for both press agents and for your current customers who are seeking information on what you've been up to on the new product development front.

4. Add dates to all materials in your PR section, including both press and product releases. A commonly mentioned pet peeve among journalists and customers is not being able to discern which is the most current information about your company. Also, for those industry journalists and customers who visit your site regularly, this is a great way to let them know what's new since their last visit.

5. Add a photos database of your most popular products and high profile corporate officers. Offer both high-res downloads for print (typically 400dpi or above) and low-res photos for website usage. This is a very highly demanded item among journalists. Duke University Medical Center has one of the best online photo archives in the business.

6. Include as much corporate information as you are willing to share. Stock price, financials, mission, officer bios and resumes, environmental and community commitment, etc. Anything that paints the right picture about your organization and tells your story to the public. General Electric does a fantastic job with providing a corporate fact sheet as well as detailed officer bios.

7. Inform your favorite journalists, trade publication editors, and best customers when you have your PR site in place. There's no point in putting up a great PR section on your website and not telling anyone about it!

These are simple and easy to implement tactics if you already are producing press releases and sending out product updates. Making your website a hub for press worthy information keeps journalists and customers coming back for more and more current information about your company.

We receive frequent praise from the online furniture industry community, editors and ad salespeople alike, for being on the leading edge in terms of getting our corporate message out via the Internet. Here's yet another opportunity to break through to our audience with yet another great ad serving tool.

According to Masha Geller, the launch of SF Interactive's Ad Cube is the greatest innovation in ad serving to come along in some time. The agency today announced a proprietary 'Ad Cube' (Ad3) platform a large-format online ad that works like a microsite, housing up to 50 megabytes of video, sound, 3D and Flash animation, and text-based documents and content. It also offers a point & click user interface that with the help of third party ad server BlueStreak measures user interaction -- not click-throughs -- to gauge success. We've always known that we wanted something better than click throughs to measure success. However, conversion is still king. There is no question that if no one converts at our website, the whole effort was rather pointless no matter how much branding was achieved.

Predictably, the unit works best with a broadband connection, but it does conform to current IAB standards and has a footprint of only 25KB. So far, SFI’s clients seem happy with the new format. Verisign liked it so much they're planning to enhance their initial Ad Cube with a downloadable white paper and an interactive FAQ next time around. Cisco and Quantum are also currently test-driving the format.

Me, I can't wait to try this out!

Brand Republic: LONDON - Broadband internet access through a standard electric socket is becoming reality
Can you believe this!!! Technically feasible broadband access via standard electrical lines. Scottish Hydro-Electric is providing Broadband service on par with DSL to rural Internet subscribers via their regular household electrical sockets. Why didn't we think of this?

PR on Websites: Increasing Usability (Alertbox March 2003)

EMarketer:Why Advertise Online?

Industry analysts have been trying to justify advertising online to the masses of media buyers and marketers for some time. eMarkerter has released yet another study that the average household with over $75K in income is likely to be swayed by reasearch done on the internet. Considering that over 50% of the US population were using the Internet in early 2002, at a growth rate of 26% per year, that means that a heck of a lot of people are referencing the Net for information. Considering the Net's importance in the average person's purchase process in industries such as travel, online search, and food, is it any wonder that Internet advertising makes sense for reaching the demographic that is most apt to purchase your product?

I was briefed on the comments from an executive in our company who said of e-mail marketing to customers "I don't know why we would ever want to communicate with these people in that way". Having spent significant time on the proposal stating that our organization should be one rich with customer email and demographic data, I was rather offended. It floors me that, in this day and age, someone could hastily dismiss such a potentially effective (cost and impact) marketing avenue. These are also the people who find print-to-web ad effectiveness tracking to be nothing of their concern. Perhaps a patter emerges.

Come to think of it, maybe I'm happy that not everyone in our industry is doing Internet marketing and advertising. Hey, if they were, it would be a lot more crowded out there!

Airport items land – on eBay
Ok, so not exactly a bake sale - but an eBay auction - that's not far behind a bake sale.

Personally, I really dig the idea. Perhaps it's something that all states, including our great state of Wisconsin, should consider in light of the staggering budget deficits that are burdening us all as services are decreased and taxes are increased. Sell those 'surrendered' pocket knives in bulk at a profit and put the monies back in the state coffers.

Come to think of it, I'm surprised that more corporations haven't jumped on the eBay bandwagon. Sell of those old forklifts, chairs, 20 ton presses and what have you on the world's marketplace: eBay.

On a more serious note, this is something that I've been mulling over for a while on my own. What if a company were to take a segment of their product line and offer it for sale on eBay. Or open a 'retail' division that sells via a Yahoo and eBay store to capture that segment of the market that was simply not aware of that company's brand. There are some risks, such as competition against used and wholesale resellers and there is the potentially brand-damaging element that comes with a 'from the hip' approach to selling on eBay, but I firmly believe that companies that produce and sell goods for sale in multiple channels could profit from eBay.

Integrating Brand With Direct Marketing

Trendwatching.com has just prognosticated the next 'blog thing'. If you read between the lines on the article below, I read 'SMS Blogging'.

SWARM SIGHTINGS

With the help of email, SMS, and digital (phone) cameras, people and
objects can now be followed around town or around the world. The result?
SWARM SIGHTINGS, referring to thousands, even millions of ordinary folks
reporting to a central entity -- most often a website -- to track and
trace anything that moves. James Bond eat your heart out!

Dutch VipSpotting.com invites anyone in
The Netherlands with a cell phone (which now bascially means the entire
nation) to send a text message (SMS) to VipSpotting the moment a
celebrity crosses their path. By SMS-ing name and location, a celeb's
every move can be monitored. This not only creates SMS revenues, but
also highly enjoyable (and perhaps slightly scary) paparazzi style
content that attracts thousands of arm chair spotters.

US-based wheresgeorge.com sells itself as
the Great American Dollar Bill Locator, working together with the public
to find out where that paper money in your pocket has been, or where it
will go next. A question that sufficiently intrigues the masses, judging
from the more than 1.5 million users who have entered and tracked the
serial numbers of more than 27 million US bills!

Whether it is new revenue models like VipSpotting, or turning
wheresgeorge.com into a marketer's dream come true (imagine millions of
consumers tracking your sponsored and bar-coded products or objects to
win prizes etc.), SWARM SIGHTINGS are here to stay. Check out PULSE
PUBLICATIONS below for related opportunities!

Most web execs don’t know their conversion rates, a NetIQ study reports
A measure of the immaturity of the web channel comes from a new survey by NetIQ Corp. that reports that 43% of 540 web executives surveyed believe that conversion of a consumer to a particular action, such as completing a sale or signing up for a service is, a web site’s most important function, yet two-thirds had no idea what their conversion rates are.