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44% of Small Businesses Still Don’t Have a Web Site
2009-06-28 05:32:23

Over at Frank Thinking, contributing Pilgrim Frank Reed shares a study that reveals just why it’s so hard to get small businesses to break their local newspaper/yellow pages advertising habit.

Then why shocked?? Why? Because they’re still using the darn things! Even though a staggering 44% of small businesses don’t yet have a web site–with 78% of them spending 5% or less on internet advertising–there is some hope that small business owners are (finally) waking up to the web.

* 23% say they use the Yellow pages less
* 42% say they use the local newspaper less Over the past two years,
43% of small businesses say they have increased use of search engines in their marketing efforts. In contrast, use of traditional small business advertising mediums is on the decline:

While 82% of consumers turn to the search engines when finding a local business, only 69% of small business owners do the same. I’m shocked! Either the glass is half empty (will small businesses ever "get" the internet) or half full (small businesses are a hot target for marketers). What’s your take on the numbers?

AD Tracking The Overlooked Key To Your Success
2008-02-09 12:39:55

Though often misunderstood, ad tracking is at its core a process for simply counting how many people respond to a particular advertisement. Typically this tracking is usually done by tracking the number of clicks or visitor actions.
Using ad tracking (also known as analytics) on your own site can be done using via Active Server Pages (ASP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI) or Personal Home Page (PHP) script - or can be done through a third party ad tracking service provider, also known as remotely hosted servers or through a combination of these. Software of this type ranges from free – as in the case of Google Analytics (at the time of this publication) to twenty five thousand dollars a month for the very high end tracking solutions.

Ad tracking platforms & software vary but all monitor the traffic coming onto your site and the results or goals achieved from this traffic, and can mean the difference between making little to no money on your site, and making a killing.

Ad analytics tracking software relate traffic directly to marketing activities and then translate those activities into measured results, giving you the ability to calculate a return on your advertising dollars spent. Ad tracking also monitors the clicks that you receive for all your advertizing campaigns, such as e-mail marketing, banner ads, affiliate programs, classified advertising, bulletin board, e-zine advertising, forum, links on other websites, pay-per-click ads, among others. Some tracking software also offers integration into legacy systems, sales management, customer profiling, and scheduling. With most service providers and software.

It is possible to set up an unlimited number of tracking links or URLs in advertisements, such as on a web page, in an email, a pay per click ad, etc. Ad tracking helps save time and maximize results from your marketing expenditure by giving you access to the following information:

• Number of visits generated by each of your ads
• Number of unique visits generated by all of your ads
• Which ads generate the most visits and the most sales
• Number of sales (or other actions) generated by each ad
• Cost-per-click, cost-per-sale and click-to-sale ratios for each ad
• Return on investment for each ad, so as to know which are profitable
• Organization of the important details about your ad campaigns Overall, ad tracking is an invaluable tool in understanding the response to any promotions you run in your messages or in your website.

But the real hidden advantage of ad tracking is targeted conversion improvement. Lot's of businesses just don't get this but if they did, their profits would skyrocket! For example let's say that your testing indicates that you are running three news letter ads, in three different newsletters.

If you are tracking your sales, and where they came from you would have no way of knowing which of these newsletters pulled better for you and so you'd just keep paying to run your add in all three.

However, if you track the sales, you might find that newsletter #1 generated ten sales, newsletter # 2 zero sales, and newsletter # 3, one sale.

Now if you made a profit of $50 per sale and each newsletter ad cost $50.00, you're your ad newsletter #1 made you $500, your ad in newsletter #2 COST you money, and newsletter #3 you broke even on. With this information you can quickly see where your ad is working and where it's not.

Using the example above you would be better served by taking the money you spent on newsletter # 2 and advertising elsewhere. Ad tracking gives you the power to know where your advertising is working, where you are making money and where it's being wasted.

This allows you to focus your advertising budget on only the ad sources that are profitable. Here are some of the better tracking solutions on the market. The depth of features offered varies by price, but all will allow you to track your ads and make more money.

http://analytics.google.com http://www.clicktracks.com http://www.onestat.com/ http://www.1automationwiz.com/split-testing-software.htm http://www.webtrends.com

The bottom line is that if you are not testing and more importantly, tracking your advertising results, you could be leaving money on the table. Worse yet, you could be losing money. The take away here is do not even consider spending a dime on advertising until you have a tracking mechanism in place.

Are you noticing huge crises in your traffic sales less searches in advertising and search results
2009-04-15 20:39:02

The whole world is currently affected due to the crises and recession in each and every field. I have been noticing a fall down everywhere in my client's search engine's traffic. This recession has specially affected US and UK customers who are feeling this heat. They are avoiding unnecessary expenditures, fun times, tourism, spending money, keeping money in banks. Similarly, peoples are avoiding searching or shopping now a days.

This is only a prediction but when I researched on it, I found some interesting facts which I am sharing here: Rimm-Kaufman posted data which is a summary showing people are avoiding searching for products and services to purchase, leading to fewer sales, which is also impacting the whole PPC campaigns and budgets. Yes! This is all related to this global recession.

• Approximately 20% reduction in sales from search ads from last year
• Approximately 20% reduction in his costs from search ads from last year
• The average order value from search ads dropped 10% from last year
• The conversion rate from search ads seemed to remain stable from last year
• There may be more competition in the space, but hard to prove

I know you are a SEO expert or beginner reading this post. And, of couse, running your own clients. If you are noticing a fall down in traffic, please take part here and let us know if less people are searching and clicking on your ads.

Google's Matt Cutts Talking How to be visible on Google
2009-04-30 22:05:39

I assume we all SEO know Matt cutts very well. Matt cutts is the pioneer Google engineer who is responsible for SPAM checking on Google results. Spam has been implemented on a huge level these days, and being a SPAM CHECKER he is going to check with the Google algorithms, search results and manipulate to deliver the best results out of SPAM. Recently he was interviewed on "How to get better visibility on Google", Here is the video:

Make Your Website a Lead Generating Machine
2009-06-16 05:44:41

Everybody knows one-sided relationships never work. The same is true with websites. If a website is focused entirely upon you, you will lose any visitors that may stumble across it. On the other hand, a website done correctly (one that focuses on the visitor) can easily become a lead generation machine! When designing your website, think about these four ideas:

• People are egocentric. Subconsciously they're viewing your website and thinking, "There's tons of companies just like you. What are you going to do for me?"
• People love being entertained. If they believe your website is providing interesting information, you'll have them hooked.
• People want their opinions valued. This is why most companies have incorporated a blog or forums-so their customers can put in their two cents.
• And this is the ticket for generating leads for your business: visitors want to do something.

Give your visitors something to do. Give them something free to download. Offer a free report or whitepaper. Ask for their opinion on a blog entry. Do something, anything, and once the person responds, you "Require" the following information: name, address, phone number, and email. Guess what you just got? A qualified lead. Qualified because they stayed on your site long enough to take action.


Thinking of building a fresh website or re-working a current one?
2009-10-22 19:35:02

If you are at the moment thinking about a new internet site and you would like big visitor numbers for the site then now is the right time to adopt the services of a search engine optimization company. The services provided by some of this organization are necessary if organizations are to validate the time, effort and cost that will be invested in a new site.

Depending on the difficulty of the website that is about to be composed or re-worked your spend could rather easily reach the thousands of pounds mark. If the goal is that the site brings new customers, leads and business then it could be the best designed site in the world but if possible customers don’t get to see it, it’s useless. This is where the Search Engine Optimization Company comes in.

though more expenditure at this time may not be great it is absolutely crucial if any investment is going to create results. You could have the best appealing website in your industry but if customers do not see it appear on page one of their searches results all the effort has been in futile. Your competitors will be occupying the coveted positions one to ten and the customer will definitely find what he is looking for among them, meaning that your expenditure in your new website has been wasted.

If you employ with the Search Engine Optimization Company at this early juncture they will be able to steer you and your web designer down the best possible path to make certain that your site is obvious to the search engines. Whilst this input without help rarely means that you will achieve page 1 search engine positioning without additional action, it can radically cut down the amount of money you will need to spend on Online Marketing once the site is live.

Once the site itself has been optimized to its up most the Search Engine Optimization Company will then support the site using a variety of strategies to make certain that the required Search Engine Placement is attained, i.e. page one of the search results. They can then continue to hold you on that page with regular online PR for an indefinite period.

It is possible toban existing website but if this has not been constructed with optimization in mind then the issue is more time consuming and therefore costly. Nevertheless if the existing site already has a valuable number of returning buyers and a reasonable Search Engine Placement already it might be better to work with what you have. Either way employ with them as soon as you can.


Happy Birthday, Digital Advertising!
27th October, 2009 17:09 PM

The Banner Campaign that Started a $24 billion Business, and Got a 78% Click-through Rate

Oct. 27 marks the 15th anniversary of the industry's first banner display ads, which appeared on Hotwired.com. To the many of you reading this who weren't in the business back then, that's not a typo; I'm not referring to www.HotWire.com, the travel site, but HotWired -- the first commercial digital magazine on the web and the offshoot of Wired magazine.

Its launch in 1994 was not without debate internally as to whether the ad units offered to the advertiser community should be simple text links or graphical ad banner units. Graphical ad display banners won out and the rest is history. And take a look at the hilarious come-on AT&T used to generate a click-through: "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You will!"

The reaction ran from enthusiastic to somewhat leery. MCI, as one would expect, was truly supportive of our proactive initiative. Their corporate culture encouraged exploration. Volvo, on the other hand, understood the value of our experimenting with the new medium, but did not want to push/urge any interaction with the consumer. They didn't know what to expect, did not know how to handle responses and was concerned legal implications were involved. As a result, you see the first Volvo ad banner was nothing more than the Volvo logo and photo of an auto. No call to action or direction to click was to be incorporated into the Volvo banner. In fact, if someone clicked on that banner in October of 1994, it would take them to a simple questionnaire that could be emailed by the consumer on what kind of Volvo they might be interested in.

HotWired was the first commercial web magazine to attract blue chip corporate sponsorships dollars on the web. The site launched shortly before Netscape's browser, and the advent of such other new media such as Pathfinder.com (Time Inc.'s commercial web content offering) and Cnet.com.

Looking back at the birth of this industry and the first simple graphical banners, I am still amazed at how much has been achieved in the first 15 years. That said, I anxiously await the further advancements coming our way in terms of new ad technologies, ad forms and ad measurement capabilities (e.g. attribution modeling). The issues surrounding display banners and online brand measurement are many and have been well chronicled (see the recent special eMarketer report entitled The Online Brand Measurement: Connecting Dots for example).

Research suggests we have a long road ahead in terms of measurement -- and I don't disagree; however, I'm not convinced we're that far off. I don't believe there will ever be a "silver bullet" to solve all of our problems, as our industry is constantly evolving, becoming more complex and proving to be a moving target. But all that said, from what we have learned through the use of fundamental building blocks of acquired knowledge, industry and case studies, the use of traditional media metrics, the use of existing best measurement practices for digital and a quest to continually "test and learn," we will ultimately be successful.

Has any one item in our industry been encased with so much debate -- at times even disdain -- as to its true value, role and contribution to marketing communications from its inception in 1994 to this day? Yet the display banner is the impetus to the creation of the online advertising category that will reach beyond $24 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more important, no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.

So on Oct. 27, I hope you will join me in toasting the birthday of the banner display ad -- whether you are a "cup is half-empty" or "cup is half-full" type of person. Some days I love the business and others day... well, not so much... but I have to admit: it's been an unbelievable 15 years.

I leave you with a challenge... Can you guess the two-word copy from one of the original banner ads that generated 78% click-through rate? I look forward to your answers.