Search Advisory

Why do people “like” a company on Facebook?  According to an ExactTarget/Co-Tweet study this year, the number one reason is “discounts & promotions.”  Number two is to “show support for the company to others,” and third is to ”get a freebie.” 

Adam Proehl, Managing Partner of NordicClick Interactive, spoke on Advanced Social Media for SEMPO Atlanta last Friday.  He said that “check ins” on sites like FourSquare and Facebook Places are not really interesting in and of themselves, but they can be very valuable to your brand when they generate “likes” and comments for others to read.

Adam Proehl of NordicClick Interactive speaks on Advanced Social Media for SEMPO Atlanta

 Marketers are starting to do clever things with location-based services.  The History Channel will send messages via FourSquare to people who check in near historical sites.  For example, check in at a restaurant in Yonkers, NY, and receive a message telling you that the Otis Elevator Company was founded nearby in 1853 when Elisha Otis made his first sale to a man needing an elevator for his furniture factory.

Note that a follow or a “like” does not mean that someone is actually engaged with your brand, however.  People can hide you in their Facebook news feed, or ignore you.  This isn’t very different than an email list where open rates tend to be declining.

Measurements & Signals

Everyone wants to know how to measure the impact of social media.  Some of the common metrics include:

• Mentions.  How many times was your brand mentioned?
• Sentiment.  Was it positive, negative, or neutral?
• Share of Voice.  What percent of the overall buzz about your market do you have?
• Influencers.  Who’s important to your industry?  Your customers?  Who can influence opinion?
• Velocity.  How fast is the conversation spreading?  How is it picking up steam?
• Reach.  How far has this conversation gone?  Who’s picked it up?

Be aware of limitations in measuring tools.  It’s impossible for any one tool to measure everything.  Data is not absolute, and a manual review is constantly needed.  Many profiles are closed (if your Facebook profile is set to “private,” no tool can measure your activities).

“The Fallacy of Sentiment” says that software cannot determine the sentiment of a post or comment 100% accurately.  Adam gave three examples of comments about the iPhone that were rated inaccurately:

• “Love the iPhone, but AT&T sucks.”
• “Successful call on 3rd try…nice network AT&T!”
• “The new iPhone is SICK!!!”

The Future of Social Media

Marketing vehicles such as social media, email, direct marketing, search marketing, etc., need to come out of their silos and work together strategically.

There’s a risk of overload with social media.  Just like banner ads had a declining click-through rate, and email response rates are dipping, social media’s at risk of overloading people as well.  Marketers must be strategic and smart, and use segmenting.

Adam envisions “permission profiles” in the future, similar to email best practices.  Users will be able to control permissions for their various social media profiles more finely.  They’ll be able to choose to receive messages most relevant to them and avoid bombardment.  This kind of advanced profiling will help marketers segment their audiences and increase response rates.

Cool (and Free) Tools

Adam whizzed through a slew of social media tools, all of which are free.

Twitter Tools

• CrowdEye.  A Twitter search engine – search a keyword to see related tweets, search a URL and see links to that site that have been tweeted and retweeted, etc.  Even includes tweet volume, sentiment and locations.
• Twitter Sentiment.  A quick snapshot of the sentiment in tweets.  The accuracy is so-so – it’s a good starting point but definitely do a manual review.
• Twitrratr.  Another quick snapshot of sentiment – includes numbers of positive, negative and neutral tweets, and highlights the words indicating sentiment in the tweets.
• Foller Me.  Information on users, including topics, hashtags, mentions and geography.
• Mentionmap.  A visual, interactive tool of mentions.  Shows networking and degrees of separation.
• Twilert.  Get regular email updates on a keyword, hashtag or user.
• Twitalyzer.  Links up with analytics and tracks retweets and links people are clicking on.  Shows who’s influential in getting people to your site.  (Free and paid versions.)
• Chatterscope.  Sentiment analysis.  Benchmarking over time, competition, geography, etc.
• ReTweetist.  Tracks retweets for a user or link.
• Hashtags.org.  Tracks volume of and trends in hashtags.  Shows charts of hashtag usage, and lists tweets and users.

Facebook Tools

• Open Book.  Searches posts for keywords (so check your privacy settings and keep it out!).  Great information for a quick pulse.
• Open Facebook Search.  Similar functionality as above (but not as pretty).
• Face Pinch.  See popular topics, people and searches.  (But you’ll also see annoying ads.)
• It’s Trending.  View top links being shared, including videos, images, news, etc.
• Booshaka!  Search keywords and featured topics.

Multiple Platforms

• Metricly.  Track your metrics in one place from multiple sources including Google Analytics, Facebook, Mailchimp, Twitter, and Salesforce.  Build your own custom dashboard.
• Snip-n-Tag (Firefox Add On).  Shorten a URL and easily make it trackable in Google Analytics from one interface on a Firefox sidebar.
• Kurrently.  Compiles your Facebook and Twitter streams into one feed.
• Addict-o-matic.  Pulls feeds from multiple social media sources into one dashboard.
• Folowen.  Quickly view and interact with a company’s social network.
• 48ers.  Search and filter multiple networks (Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Digg, Delicious).
• Who’s Talkin.  Similar to 48ers except it has more platforms, and you can narrow/filter by platform.
• Website Grader.  See how search- and social-friendly your site is.
• One Riot.  View links containing a particular keyword and how they’re being shared.  Pulls from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg.
• PRmetrics.  Images, videos, blogs, Twitter, SlideShare.
• Keotag.  Searches multiple social media sites and search engines at once.
• Heardable.  Scoring algorithm for category and local benchmarks.
• BackTweets.  Type in URL to see who’s sharing links (pro & limited free editions).
• BackType.  Engagement comparisons chart, audience/link metrics.
• TimeTube.  Video timeline based on keyword search.
• Fablistic.  Follow all a user’s likes, reviews, interests, etc.  Gives you context, not just a “like”.  (Sort of a combination of Facebook and Yelp.)
• Flowtown.  Enter an email address to see which social network accounts are associated with that address.

Adam wrapped up by giving instructions for tracking your Facebook page in Google Analytics.  Set up a new Google Analytics profile for your Facebook page, and then past this line at the top of your FBML code:  <fb:google-analytics uacct=’UA-XXXXXXX-XX” />   (Replace the Xs with your Google Analytics number.  More info on this Hongkiat page – scroll down to #8.)

Follow Adam on Twitter at @adamproehl and view his slides on Slideshare.

This wraps up our series covering SEMPO Atlanta’s first half-day educational event.  Click here or on the “sempoatl1010″ tag below to see all the posts in this series, and don’t miss SEMPO Atlanta’s next event!  Join the Meetup Group for free and you’ll be notified of all future events.

An unnamed company was pleased to be getting 90% of their web leads from search engines.  Until Matt Bailey and his company SiteLogic dug deeper into the data and found that they were getting exactly 0% of their sales from search engines.  All their sales during that particular time period were from a link that had been bought ages ago and cost $20 a year.  This is why analytics – meaningful analytics – is important.  You need to know where your money’s coming from.

Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Speaks on Advanced Analytics for SEMPO Atlanta

In his presentation on Advanced Analytics to SEMPO Atlanta last Friday, Matt listed three obstacles to advanced analytics:

• The Dashboard.  Most analytics software packages have them, and most dashboards were designed by “the geeks in the basement.”  Just because someone, somewhere decided to slap a metric into a dashboard doesn’t mean it should be an important metric to you.

 

• Velleity.  Matt defined this as “the intent to do something, but not enough desire to actually do it.”  (That’s a term that could apply to so many things, but I digress….)

 

• Hamster Wheel Analytics.  The person in charge of analytics copies and pastes some data from a dashboard into a spreadsheet and forwards it to someone else.  The someone else asks why a number changed since last month, so the hamster goes back to the wheel and spends the rest of the week running, trying to figure out what happened.  It’s far better to spend your time and energy on moving the needle all the time.

“Caveman Analytics” are defined as reporting on the number of visitors, the time spent on site, the top 10 pages viewed, page views or even (God forbid!) “hits.”  These are pointless metrics.  Reporting needs to focus on one goal only – making more money.

Data – Information – Knowledge – Wisdom

The traditional knowledge pyramid comes into play here:

Knowledge Pyramid

So you know you had 34,000 pageviews last month.  That’s Data – it doesn’t mean anything in a vacuum.  Information is data+context, such as “the average page views per visitors was 8.”  Knowledge is information+more context, for example, “visitors who entered the site on X page and stayed for more than Y amount of time converted at a rate of Z%.”

The top of the pyramid, Wisdom, requires an analyst.  It’s often been said that companies should spend less money on analytics technology and more money on analysts, so they can use the data to move the needle and make more money.

Question-asking is the single greatest tool humans have.  Asking questions is the way to wisdom.  A good analyst is a rebel and a trouble-maker.  He or she questions everything and is disruptive to the status quo.

The Star Trek Red Shirt Phenomenon

Aggregate data assumes everyone does the same thing on your website.  Averages can be misleading.  Matt used his Star Trek Red Shirt Phenomenon to demonstrate this in an entertaining way (that link goes to Matt’s blog post with more details).

In aggregate, Star Trek TV show crew members had a 13.7% mortality rate.  Those crew members wearing red shirts (as opposed to blue or yellow), however, had a 73% death rate.  Yipes!  But the more you ask questions and dig into the data, the more interesting it gets. 

The first question is, why do these red-shirted crew members die?  Inter-planetary travel was a risk – 57.5% of the time a red shirt beamed down onto a planet with Captain Kirk, he or she was killed.  Alien battles on the Starship Enterprise were also dangerous – during 42.5% of these, a red shirt died.

So let’s ask another question – is there anything we can do to prevent red-shirted crew members from meeting their fate?  Again, the data holds the answer when properly segmented and analyzed.  When Captain Kirk got involved with an alien woman in an episode, the red shirt mortality rate dropped to 12%.  This probably indicates a “friendly alien” situation.  So here, we can move the needle by ensuring that Captain Kirk meets a new conquest!

The moral of the story, obviously, is to segment your data and then segment it some more.

Segmenting & User Behavior

The 3 Cs of analytics are Context, Contrast and Comparison.  Segment the data to understand the context, and therefore, the intent of the searcher (what are they looking for?  What should you show them?).  Then compare and contrast that segment with other segments.

People think that analytics is about numbers, but it’s really not.  It’s about people and user behavior.  A good analyst is a psychologist more than a numbers person.  They find intent, determine expectancy, observe reactions, and analyze behavior.

SiteLogic’s client – a tourism site for the Black Hills/Badlands of South Dakota – had a high bounce rate and a miniscule conversion rate.  The numbers told several stories, including the fact that a large percentage of visitors were looking for maps of the area.  The site’s one map page was not particularly search engine-friendly, and it was buried in the site.  So Matt’s company created a slew of (optimized) maps in a new, easily accessible section of the site.  The conversion rate rose from 0.01% to 5.88%.

Another example: a SiteLogic client ranked #3 for the highly competitive search term “vacations” (plural).  From this, they averaged 600 visitors and 0 conversions per month.  They also ranked #34 for “vacation” (singular).  From this, they averaged 1800 visitors and a 2% conversion rate.  Clearly, the singular “vacation” was much more valuable, even in position #34!  So they “unoptimized” the page that was ranking for “vacations” (plural) and let that search term go, targeting the singular version instead.

Sometimes you’ve got the right ranking but the wrong page.  A high-ranking page may not be converting as well as a different page with a higher conversion rate.  So reoptimizing here would be beneficial as well.

You can even measure the value of your inbound links with analytics.  Segment by type of link (contextual, ad, blog, keyword-rich, social, news, etc.) and then look at time spent on site, page views per visitor and conversion rate.  You may find that contextual links drive fewer but better visitors.

Usability

An advanced analyst understands usability.  And sorry, designers, we’re not talking about the pretty details.  Surveys show that layout, typography, font size and color schemes are the four factors that affect (a) readability, and (b) credibility.

Keeping these factors consistent (across your site and even across the web) will boost conversion rates.  Every degree you get away from using blue underlined text links, for example, you’re asking your users to relearn what links are.

Matt recommended that analysts have three computer monitors on their desks – one with an analytics program open, one with a spreadsheet to work in, and one with the website onscreen (analysts need to look at the site!).  With these tools, a good analyst can question, dig, segment, analyze, and use their wisdom to improve the metrics and make more money for the organization.

Follow Matt on Twitter at @sitelogic.

Tomorrow, we’ll cover Adam Proehl’s presentation on Advanced Social Media.  Click here or on the “sempoatl1010″ tag below to see all the posts in this series (a new one will be added at 6 am EDT daily from October 4 – 8).

Keyword Research

Soovle is a new keyword brainstorming tool that simultaneously searches (and autocompletes keywords from) Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and Answers.com.  It’ll help you think laterally.  Example: you’ve got a site selling baby supplies and notice that a lot of people are searching for baby names.  Add content to your site about baby names and optimize it for those types of keywords.

Be sure to log out of your Google account when using Google for this type of brainstorming using their autosuggest feature.  That way, the suggestions you see right below the search query box won’t be personalized to you but will be applicable to the world at large.

When using Google’s Keyword Tool, the default is broad match, which means the data’s inflated with related searches (the search volume numbers for “mortgage” on broad match will include every search that includes the word “mortgage”).  Change the settings to exact match for much more accurate data.

Linking

Make sure your most important pages (most profitable products, etc.) are all linked to from your home page.  Keep all pages no more than a couple of clicks away from an external link source.

Test everything.  Sample test: if you’ve got site-wide links pointing to the home page with a keyword in the anchor text, is it really helping the home page rank higher for that keyword?  Stephen bets it isn’t.  Establish a baseline or rankings for that keyword, then switch all links to say “home” and watch the rankings impact.

Don’t have huge blocks of links to lots of internal pages at the bottom of your page or on the sidebar.  Google’s “reasonable surfer” patent indicates that they think it terms of whether the link is likely to get clicked on by a typical web surfer.  If not, due to its placement on the page, it’ll probably be discounted by Google.

Be creative with external link-building.  Netconcepts created a contest for a printer client asking people to design Shoemoney’s business card.  The winner would receive free business cards for life.  (Small print: 1000/year for 20 years – total cost to the company wasn’t much.)  The printer received so many inbound links with “free business cards” in the link’s anchor text that they actually ranked #2 for “business cards,” which they were never visible for before.  (More on this case study, and using SEO to drive your social strategy, here.)

To find .edu sites where you might get a link by making a donation, put this in Google’s search box:  site:.edu “sponsors” or “patrons” or “donors”

Coding Issues

When using canonical tags, be sure to use absolute URLs (the entire URL, like http://www.site.com/directory/page), not relative URLs (/directory/page).  This is a mistake even Wikipedia makes.

Several examples of “canonical tag misfires” were displayed.  Since I can’t recreate the screen captures, read Stephan’s articles about the topic (here and here).

XML sitemaps can be a crutch – better to have an easily crawlable site.  Google now has vertical-specific sitemaps for news, video and mobile.

Click for Stephan’s primer on robots.txt.  Make sure you’re not inadvertently blocking search engine robots from your site – we’ve all seen that happen.

Since Google has never supported keyword meta tags, there’s no reason to use them.  Spend your time on SEO tasks that are outcome-focused, not activity-focused.

H1 tags (a way of coding headlines) no longer count for much with the search engines.  (But Stephen says don’t take his word for it – test this – test everything!)

URLs

MarketingSherpa found that searchers are twice as likely to click on short URLs as long URLs.  Not only that, long URLs seem to drive searchers to instead click the listing directly below them – those listings get clicked on 2.5 times more often!  So use short URLs when you can, test everything, and if you have to redirect a long URL to a short URL, use a 301 redirect.

WordPress uses 301s automatically when renaming post slugs, so you don’t have to even think about it.  You can mass edit WordPress URLs with the “SEO Title Tag” plugin.

SEO Metrics (that not many people track but should)

• Page yield:  % of unique pages yielding search engine-delivered traffic
• Keyword yield:  ratio of keywords to pages yielding search traffic
• Brand-to-nonbrand ratio:  % of search traffic coming from brand keywords vs. nonbrand keywords
• Unique pages:  non-duplicate pages crawled
• Visitors per keyword:  ratio of search engine-delivered visitors to keywords
• Index-to-crawl ratio:  ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages
• Engine yield:  how much traffic the engine delivers for every page it crawls
• Top converting/performing pages that are ranked on page 2 of the search engine results (expending some effort to get them on page 1 will have a big impact)
• Top converting/performing keywords on one engine that are non-performing on another (buy PPC ads on the other engine – you already know that keyword works for you!)

Click to read what Stephan talked about in terms of scoring your SEO.

There are some new real-time feedback tools that will score your web content or blog post as you write it – no need to wait for crawling, indexing and re-ranking to see the impact.  These include Scribe (WordPress plugin), Compendium Blogware and Covario Organic Search Insight.

Are there pages that are being crawled but aren’t delivering traffic?  Fix these freeloaders!  Target the most frequently crawled nonperforming pages (they’re low-hanging fruit) and reoptimize them.  If they don’t perform after repeated attempts, consider dumping them from your site’s link graph (nofollow, noindex, etc.).

Advanced SEO Odds & Ends

Stephan reviewed a number of SEO myths that won’t die but need to (click at left for article, and here are even more in his follow up article).

You can add “&pws=0″ to the end of a Google search results page URL to turn off personalization (this doesn’t work with Google Instant, though – you have to turn that off first).

If you want to see 100 sites listed on Google’s results page instead of 10, add “&num=100″ to the end of the Google search results page URL.  (You can replace “100″ with any number.)

Stephan questioned the common knowledge that it’s ideal to have both a paid and organic listing in the search engine results pages.  While there often is synergy, he showed an example of a client where some degree of cannibalization occurred instead.  (Read his article on the topic here.)

When you post a video to YouTube, put your complete URL (including “http://”) in the description field – early so it’s displayed without the viewer having to click “more” to see it.  These links are nofollowed, but they’re clickable.

Stephan also walked us through a mind-bending example of how to bump a competitor’s second, indented organic listing off the first page of results.  I’m afraid there’s no way to ‘splain it in text - same with his tip for finding free Forrester research using search engines…shhh!  You’ll just have to come to SEMPO Atlanta’s events next time!

Follow Stephan on Twitter at @sspencer and view his slides on Slideshare.

Tomorrow, we’ll cover Matt Bailey’s presentation on Advanced Analytics.  Click here or on the “sempoatl1010″ tag below to see all the posts in this series (a new one will be added at 6 am EDT daily from October 4 – 8).

Forget third party bid management tools, says David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing and undisputed pay-per-click expert.  Google’s Conversion Optimizer is all you need.  It’s the most efficient campaign management tool on the planet because it’s got data across all advertisers, which third party tools don’t have.  And it has data on sites’ conversion rates.  (I must note here that some of us see this Big Brother-ness as a negative, not a positive, but in terms of sheer volume of data, David’s right, Google can’t be beat.)  David recommends bidding based on Target CPA (cost per action).

During David’s presentation on Advanced Pay-Per-Click for SEMPO Atlanta last week, he covered a number of topics, including turbo-editing with AdWords Editor.  (That involved a lot of screen shots, which isn’t conducive to recapping in a blog post, unfortunately.)  He also said that since Bing/Yahoo now have roughly 30% of the market share, anyone only advertising on Google is missing the boat.  There’s an easy way to export your Google campaign in a format that can easily be uploaded to Microsoft’s adCenter – there’s a link to David’s instructions here.

David Szetela of Clix Marketing speaks on Advanced PPC for SEMPO Atlanta

Google’s remarketing (aka retargeting) is also worth investing some time and creative thinking in.  (We explained what it is toward the end of our April newsletter.)  David showed an ad that was displayed for one of his ecommerce clients, shown for site visitors that started to make a purchase but abandoned the shopping cart.  The ad’s description read: “You were so close – come back and finish your buy & take 20% off!“  Another ad for a luggage site read “We miss you – please come back, we have a cool new tote just for you.”  This “welcome back” language was echoed on the landing pages, and these campaigns were both highly effective.  (Video on remarketing from Clix Marketing.)

The previous day was the first day Google had publicly spoken about their interest-based advertising, which is still in beta.  This will enable advertisers to target searchers by their interests, which has the potential t be more powerful than placement targeting and more efficient than keyword targeting.

Facebook advertising was also covered.  Ads with images consistently outperform those without.  Images with facial expressions are usually best.  Facebook’s responder profile report will tell you people’s favorite TV shows, musicians, etc. – you can use this information to be very specific with targeting, ad copy and landing page copy.

If your goal is to build your Facebook fan/likes database, then the landing page should be on Facebook.  If the goal of the Facebook campaign is something else, such as driving ecommerce sales or lead generation on your site, then a page outside Facebook should be the landing page.  Increasingly, however, conversions in addition to “likes” can be done right on Facebook – David recently met a company in New York that’s about to launch Facebook store pages.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network.  If you’re selling a product or service to white collar professionals, it’s definitely worth using.  Note that this isn’t necessarily limited just to B2B marketers – those selling luxury/high priced B2C items can also find their audience on LinkedIn.  The ads don’t even look like ads – they’re one line of text across the LinkedIn page.

David recommended that every company have their own company LinkedIn page.  Advertising on LinkedIn allows marketers to target by company size, job function, industries, seniority, gender, age and geography.  Ads can be bought on a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.  LinkedIn’s tracking is rudimentary at this point and doesn’t include conversion tracking.

The click-through rates and conversion rates for Facebook and LinkedIn are roughly equivalent to Google’s display network, which is typically lower than Google’s search network.  This is because people seeing ads on regular sites or social networking sites are usually in a different mindset than those actively searching.  David recommends driving to a softer conversion action (“Sign up for our newsletter” rather than “Buy now!”) on Facebook and LinkedIn.

As for Google’s display network, anyone may download a free sample chapter of David’s book “Customers Now” which covers how to create text and graphical ads that sell.

Follow David on Twitter at @szetela and view his slides on Slideshare.

Tomorrow, we’ll cover Stephan Spencer’s VERY Advanced Search Engine Optimization presentation.  Click here or on the “sempoatl10″ tag below to see all the posts in this series (a new one will be added at 6 am EDT daily through Friday, October 8).

Four hours of advanced search marketing content, delivered by internationally-renowed speakers.  That’s what SEMPO Atlanta’s first half day educational event provided last Friday to an audience of both in-house and agency search marketers.  (More photos are posted both on our Meetup site and Facebook page.)

Julie & Amy (PPI), our client Eve (Generation Mortgage), Christine (PPI), our client Amanda (ControlScan), Stacy & Sherry (PPI)

Four speakers came into town to spend an hour apiece covering:

• David Szetela, ClixMarketing:  Advanced Pay-Per-Click
• Stephan Spencer, formerly of Netconcepts:  Advanced Search Engine Optimization
• Matt Bailey, SiteLogic:  Advanced Analytics
• Adam Proehl, NordicClick:  Advanced Social Media

I’ll cover each session in one post per day for the rest of this week.  Special thanks to Allison Fabella, SEMPO Atlanta VP of Programming, for bringing in our superb speakers, and Benjamin Rudolph, SEMPO Atlanta President, for handling logistics (including the excellent food).