Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
time community engagement
I own/maintain several websites dating back to 8 years or so. With some of my sites, like this one, I daily monitor my web stats (unique visitors, referring domains, etc.) I’m obsessed with data! With some of my other sites, I rarely, if ever, look at the actual web site much less the stats. However, the other day when I was bored, I decided to check out the stats of one of my sites that’s about 5 years old and I was blown away when I saw the results.
I remember when I first launched these sites, I optimized the meta tags (well, I actually spammed the heck out of the them, and haven’t changed them since); and I HAVE NOT engaged in any link building activity whatsoever. Google and Yahoo referrals accounted for about 75% of the above visitors.
The conclusion is simple. Aggressive link building and fresh content is not [...]
I transferred my blog to this new domain in September 2006 and I am already gettin’ some love from Google and Yahoo (thanks to my utmost ethical link building techniques of course and my outstanding on-page optimization skillz – jk). For the terms “Online Marketing Blog” and “Internet Marketing Blog” I am on the first page of both engines respectively; right under the master blogger himself, Lee Odden who authors Top Rank Blog; a place where I go daily to learn new things. I do attribute some of this love to Lee since he linked to my blog a few months back (Thanks Lee). Now, let’s keep this in perspective here. Both terms ARE NOT that competitive and only account for roughly 3,000 search queries a month across Google and Yahoo; but hey, one thing about successful SEO is that you start with the less competitive keywords first and then work up [...]
If you are selling products or services directly from your website, it is imperative to formulate a strategy built around persuading visitors to become customers. Ignoring this simple concept can result in poor conversion rates, lost revenue opportunities and a complete failure in e-commerce effectiveness.
Quick Conversion Statistics
Conversion rates, or the percentage of consumers that actually make a purchase, varies from one website to another. A recent study by Intermarket Online states that the average online consumer conversion rate is 2.7%, and that 62% of merchants have a conversion rate of 2% or less, while 5% have in excess of a 6% conversion rate. A Forrester Research study of 41 online merchants found that conversion rates typically vary from 1% to 4%, with under 2% for 70% of merchants. Amazon and CDNow get 6% to 8% rates.
Online Purchase Decisions
It is true that website traffic is essential, but getting potential customers to [...]
As social media begins to dominate the marketplace, it is imperative for marketers to include this growing channel into their overall strategy planning; millions of impressions are at stake. Dove has done an excellent job in leveraging social media in their mix. According to Ad Age, the “Dove Evolution,” a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather was uploaded to YouTube.com on Oct. 6 and has been viewed over 1.7 million times since. Compare this to Dove’s 2006 Superbowl commercial that resulted in 500 million impressions and it’s not that significant. However, the cost for the Superbowl ad was $2.5 million; whereas there was no cost whatsoever for Dove to upload “Evolution” to YouTube. The conclusion is simple: stronger ROI from a YouTube Video than Super Bowl ad.
Technorati Tags: social media, social media optimization, social media marketing, socialmediaoptimizaion, dove, dove video
Google’s quest for taking over the Internet is continuing. They have released a public beta of its Website Optimizer, a new service that allows marketers to test various versions of landing pages to determine which one has the most effective conversion rate. The Website Optimizer allows marketers to test different variables on a landing page (i.e. different headlines, product features, copy, and creative to determine which configuration has the best conversion rates based on revenue or other metrics. According to ClickZ, Google is providing the beta service “on an acceptance basis” to AdWords and Google Analytics account holders who’d like to sign up.
Technorati Tags: website optimizer, google, conversion rates
Awareness and consideration are fundamental metrics used to measure the effectiveness of paid search. One of the most common ways to measure these two metrics is to simply monitor the impressions and clicks. Impressions are usually associated with awareness and clicks are associated with consideration. But using this methodology can be deceiving. Assuming that when a particular search campaign generates 100 million impressions, that 100 million eyeballs actually see the ad is misleading. There are, however, tools that can help measure the level of engagement with consumers when they click on the ad and arrive at your website; which I believe tell a much more compelling story of your search campaigns. One tool is called SEM Director. This tool allows marketers to assign values to particular actions on the website. For example, one page view can equal 1 point; signing up for a newsletter can be 2 points, watching a [...]
I realize that some have opted to call Social Media Optimization something different like Social Media Marketing and vice versa. Given that this is somewhat of a new concept, I understand the friendly debate. Based on a recent post from Rohit Bhargava, he states that SMO is simply “tweaking” a web site by “adding quick links for tagging, syndicating content through rss or submitting content to relevant sites”. Based on this definition, which I completely agree with, I believe that Social Media Optimization is a more appropriate definition.
However, I would also say that Social Media Marketing is somewhat of a different practice within the same space; where firms aggressively target the social media channels (like Myspace, Friendster, Hi5) by creating profiles (Nike, Cingular, Jack in the Box, Aquafina); and engaging in conversations with consumers in places where they frequent.
Technorati Tags: social media optimization, smo, socialmediaoptimization, social media, social media marketing
Many times, I read in various blogs and forum posts that a solid SEO strategy (with good rankings) is good enough to attract visitors to a website. I completely disagree with this view. While SEO is an important component of any integrated marketing campaign, paid search must not be overlooked when implementing an online strategy. According to Clickz, the paid search market generated approximately $10 billion in revenue in 2005 and is expected to grow 41 percent in 2006. How can any organization, marketer or blogger ignore these astronomical figures? Additionally, according to a study by WebSideStory that monitored twenty B2C e-commerce websites, paid search had a median order conversion rate of 3.4 percent, while organic search results produced a conversion rate of 3.13 percent. The data set included more than 57 million search engine visits.
Technorati Tags: paid search, search engine marketing, seo, search engine optimization, organic search
