Archives : 2011 : January

RSS Feeds

Syndication is described by www.BusinessDictionary.com as “Supply of content or information on a subscription basis to marketers or media.”  This is essentially what an RSS reader is.  When you visit a web page and you see a Really Simple Syndication (or RSS) icon, you are being asked to join an association of followers who are getting a supply of content or information from the website as well.

When you click on an RSS icon (image above), you are asked to subscribe to a syndicated web feed.  A web feed is a concise form (e.g., page title and description) of a web page’s content that is designed to notify you of the page’s existence.   By notifying you through a web feed, you are more inclined to visit the web page and explore its content.

The web feed can be considered a form of advertising which you have subscribed to as a result of your personal interests.  In the process, you are showing your enduring interest in that website’s content.  Website owners understand this and hope to increase subscribers resulting in more traffic and committed following.

Web feeds are aggregated in a reader (often called an RSS reader or channel) that can be web, desktop or mobile-device based.  Many RSS reader services are available.  For example, Google Reader is a web-based service that is offered as part of a user’s Google Account.  This reader service is useful if you desire to use your Google Account to access other services (like Gmail) under one login.

Users of the World Wide Web who frequently visit certain websites looking for new content (e.g., news sites) might want to try a reader service.  As they visit websites and subscribe to RSS feeds, they can opt to have the feed pulled into a reader of choice.  In this process, they are creating a one-stop location to look for updates on their favorite websites.

Website owners are advised to use RSS to promote website content.  By actively providing new fresh content on their website, they have greater opportunities to use various forms of social media (e.g., videos).  RSS feeds provide a way to “get the word out” to individuals who have already visited the site and might have interest in what is new.  RSS feeds are a free form of online advertising that helps create a stronger following from interested visitors.  Configure your web pages to use an RSS service.  If you need help, contact your web provider for more information.

As a business owner, RSS feeds help you to see all the fresh content that relates to your business in one location.  If you have not previously subscribed to RSS feeds, now might be the time to give it a try.  Go to your favorite websites, or competitors’ websites, and look for the RSS icon and subscribe to those topics of interest.  When prompted, choose a reader service to aggregate the RSS feeds onto one page for you to explore at your pleasure.  As you visit your RSS reader service, you can quickly jump to those pages that seem most interesting.  Also, when you’re logged onto your reader, you can type in keywords about your business, to stay on top of new developments in your industry.

So if you don’t have an RSS reader set up yet, it’s probably best to set up and RSS reader that is already at your fingertips.  The top three search engines all have RSS Readers as a part of their accounts. If you have an account with Google, Yahoo! or Bing, then you have access to a Reader right when you log into your email.

• Google Reader – google.com/reader

If you already have an account, simply go to this page and sign in. Once you’re signed in, the browser should bring you to your home page, where you can click “Add a subscription” in the upper left hand corner. In the box, you can either type in a keyword relating to your business, or a specific website that you would like to subscribe to!

• My Yahoo! – my.yahoo.com

You can log into your account in the upper right hand corner of the page. Once you’ve arrived at your home page for My Yahoo!, you can click “New Tab” on the left side, and customize a new tab to fit your needs. If you click “Content,” you can type keywords into the box on the right and find widgets that will apply to your business.

• My Msn (Bing) – my.msn.com

Once you’ve signed in (on the upper right hand corner of the page), it will lead you to a default page, showing you what an RSS Feed should look like. To customize your own, click “+ Add a Page,” and choose which category (or Blank page) you would like it to be in. After that you can go to the right side and click “Add Content,” where you’ll be able to search for relevant modules or add RSS’s from other websites or blogs.

Facebook Fan Pages vs. Group Pages

Facebook says, “Facebook created Pages when we noticed that people were trying to connect with brands and famous artists in ways that didn’t quite work on Facebook… Not only can you connect with your favorite artists and businesses, but now you also can show your friends what you care about and recommend by adding Pages to your personal profile.”

This allows you to become a fan of a product, famous person, company, public figure, movie, etc.  Once you like one of these types of pages, a newsfeed goes out to all of your friends that you “Like” or support this person, brand, idea.

Now what is the difference between all of these pages and when should you use one versus the other?

Fan Pages

Fan pages are very similar to normal profiles on a site.  A brand, concept, celebrity, or public figure can have friends, upload pictures, and allow friends to make posts on the wall of this fan page.  If the fan page has allowed updates to show, then they page will communicate to all the other pages that “like” this page as well.  Fan pages can also have applications.

Groups

Groups have an administrator that can appoint “officers” within that group to have restricted admin rights.  Administrators can manage the group, posts, approve applicants, or invite others to join.  Group pages can be open to all of Facebook or just a particular network of people.  You can set join permissions which will allow it to be open to anyone, closed (users must be approved), or by secret invite only.  Administrators can invite members to join via Facebook email or regular email.

Should I Pick a Fan Page or Group Page?

There are many factors to consider when trying deciding which one to choose.

• Because of security features and size, only groups under 5000 members can send email blasts.
• Groups are an extension of your personal page, so when you make posts, they are shown as your personal page information
• Activities on the Group Page will reflect on you personally
• Fan Pages can create content that come from the pages itself
• Fan Pages are indexed by external search engines, groups are not
• Groups offer more control over who gets to participate, settings, and approvals
• Fan Pages can host applications, groups cannot.
• Both Groups and Fan Pages allow you to create related events.
• Ads can be purchased to promote both groups and fan pages.

Quality Score: the Great Misnomer

One of the great Adwords misnomers (a term which suggests an interpretation that is known to be untrue) is the phrase “Quality Score”.

The name implies that it is a measure of the ad copy’s merit, when in fact it measures more than just this. It measures not just “relevancy” and landing page quality, but also “commercial intent.” However, this last piece has been largely neglected in widespread discussions about Quality Score.

It is simple to think of QS as something wholly under an advertiser’s control–we control the ad text and the relevancy of that copy to each keyword, and we control the landing pages. That said, the only excuse for poor Quality Scores might seem to be failure on the advertiser’s behalf.

QS has been a favorite focus of outsiders who are inexperienced in the paid search game. It is easy to run a report and sort by Quality Score, concluding that,“25% of your keywords have a QS of less than X and that needs fixed.”

The problem with this simplistic view is:

1. A higher QS may not be in the advertiser’s best interest. More compelling copy may increase CTR but may simultaneously drive ‘unqualified traffic’ (i.e. non-converting traffic) decreasing conversion rates to a degree that the trade off isn’t worthwhile.
2. A higher QS may not even be possible. If the commercial intent of users searching with that phrase is low, there may be no wording under the sun that can improve the QS beyond a certain point.

It is this last piece that the industry outsiders really don’t get.

Consider a user searching for “motorcycle”. The user’s intent isn’t particularly clear. They may want motorcycle gear, they may want information on nearby races, they might want videos, or simply a picture of a motorcycle.

 

Look at the screen shot above. The fact that none of the paid ads appear above the organic listings indicates that Google doesn’t see much ‘commercial intent’ here. Therefore none of the advertisers meet the minimum Bid * QS threshold needed to secure a promoted listing. It is wagered that the QS of NONE of these ads is above an 8, and potentially not even above a 5.

The advertisers here can flip copy until they’re blue in the face and it won’t impact those scores.

Note: this doesn’t mean the ads will perform badly. These could be tremendously valuable ads if those who do have a commercial intent click on the ad and this leads to a conversion (assuming an appropriate price is paid for the click).

A Proposed Solution

A simple metric to help advertisers understand whether their QS is below par because of something within their control might simply be to provide a benchmark against all other ads running on that same keyword. You may think that a QS of 5 is low, but if that score is in the 95 percentile of all ads running for that phrase, then you might be better to save time for more ‘high-value’ projects instead of trying to fix something that isn’t broken.

Read full article…

8 Ways to Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a page and don’t visit any others within the same site. It should be used to measure the effectiveness of landing pages. Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik says a bounce rate of less than 30% is good, but with 60% or higher, you have a problem. However there are exceptions, such as a blog that offers all of its content on one page. Generally speaking, blogs are reported to average an 80% bounce rate, so other metrics like time on site and number of comments left should also be considered. The best standard is to measure an individual page’s bounce rate over time.

With the explosion of social media and help from search engine optimization, many web users are bypassing homepages and landing directly on product pages and blog posts. Thus, we now need to optimize “first impressions” at all entry points in order to reduce bounce rates.

Here are eight ways to lower your site’s bounce rate:

1. Make Data-Informed Decisions

Good web design is important, but effective optimization of your landing page can only be accomplished with data-informed decisions, so make sure your reporting system is easy to use and understand. Some of the top analytics packages have very complicated user interfaces, but in the end, a fair amount of usable data is better than copious amounts of information that takes hours to decipher.

2. Prioritize & Optimize

Start by comparing your highest volume landing pages to evaluate those that are performing well and those that are not. You can use heatmap tools to see the relationship between referreral and clicks. Once you find the pages with the poorest performance, test multiple changes and approaches for improvement.

If your traffic is less than 1,000 views per week, use A/B split testing for significantly different page design approaches. For situations where you have a lot of traffic and multiple factors and variations you want to test, use multi-variant testing tools such as Google’s free website testing and optimization tool.

3. Utilize Profiling and Segmentation

You can monitor the bounce rates for different geographical locations, languages, browsers, operating systems and traffic sources to identify various issues which might be at play in producing a low or high bounce rate. For instance, you may notice a high bounce rate for Firefox, versus Internet Explorer, which might indicate a browser rendering issue on your web page.

4. Maintain Keyword Integrity

Make sure that the keywords you are using in your metadata have low bounce rates and that you are reinforcing these terms in your content. Your own brand or site name should have the lowest bounce rate.

If the bounce rate is high for particular keywords in your paid search marketing efforts, you will either need to improve the landing page to reinforce the topic, or bid on keywords that are more relevant to your content.

5. Improve Loading Times

The loading time of your webpage is not only an important factor in SEO, but also in having a visitor stay on your site. Deactivate unnecessary plugins and optimize your images and code to speed up the load time of your site. Your visitors will be more likely to view additional pages if your load times are faster.

6. Be Careful with External Links

One of the consumer benefits of web publishing is that content providers often embed hyperlinks to reference external pages with more information. However, this can create an exit point for a user. You should be judicious in the use of external links or at least consider placing them toward the bottom of a page.

7. Don’t Get Tricky

There are lot of other tricks you can use to lower your bounce rate, like embedding polls, contests, and other attention-grabbing clickable content. However, if the sole purpose of these tactics is just to lower your bounce rate, you may lose sight of what a real consumer is looking for.

The temptation to use keyword and SEO-heavy headlines is strong, but if they misrepresent the content of an article or post, you may lose out on repeat visitors, even if your bounce rates are reduced temporarily. While it is important to make a good first impression, a site’s main mission is to sell, entertain or inform and this should always be primary.

8. Account for Social Media

As more sites are being discovered through social networks, the impact of these platforms on bounce rates is becoming more important. With social media, there are some limitations — like Twitter’s character count, for example — in properly identifying the landing page content, so use relevant hashtags to qualify your content, along with other metadata like location, that can add more information without exceeding the character count of your message.

View the full article…

The Facebook Rise and MySpace Demise

Facebook… over 550 million users; over 70 different translations; a movie was born out of its existence; a Dummies Handbook has been written for it; and one out of every dozen people on the planet have a Facebook account.

We don’t need to tell you what Facebook is; everyone has at least heard of it, and as you can tell above, a large portion of the population are frequent users. Alexa ranks Facebook as the number two top site on the web, second only to Google.

But do you remember a time before Facebook? Before this blue site infiltrated every aspect of our lives? There was something else, think hard and you might remember… MySpace.

In this blog post, we’d like to compare and contrast the workings of Facebook and MySpace. Why such a quick growth? Why such a quick fall? And why does my computer recognize “Facebook” as a word, and not “MySpace”?

Things to think about…

• MySpace was launched in January of 2004, by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, ages 37 and 33.
• Facebook was launched in February of 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and three friends, none of them over the age of 23.

• MySpace began with two men who had worked in internet marketing and social media all their lives.
• Facebook began with four guys in a dorm room.

• MySpace founders launched it as a social networking site, and always planned for it to go global. It started out locally though, in Southern California, with local musicians and actors. It reached one million members in a month, near the time that Facebook was first launched.
• Facebook’s founders originally intended it to be a Harvard community website, but by March it had expanded to include Stanford, Columbia and Yale University. It reached one million uisers by December of 2004, ten months after it’s launch.

• It took MySpace a little over three years to reach 150 million members.
• It took Facebook a little less than five years to reach 150 million members.

At this point in the story, it looks like MySpace is coming out ahead. It certainly got moving faster, led by two men who were internet savvy, but Facebook was the tortoise… “Slow and steady wins the race.”

We know for a fact that Facebook is more popular now, but MySpace definitely had the lead in the beginning. So what contributed to its downfall? An article in the New York Times referenced the site’s basic framework as ‘just unattractive’. Because it was bought out by a big company, the ads and overall look of the site became unappealing. Facebook, on the other hand, features advertisements that are relevant to each individual user, based on keywords used most often by each person, as well as thei claimed interests and hobbies.

Another problem is that MySpace focused on the money, while Facebook has been more attentive toward growth. DeWolfe talks about his focus, saying “The paradox in business, especially at a public company, is, when do you focus on growth, and when do you focus on money? We focused on money and Facebook focused on growing the user base and user experience.” It’s working out better for Facebook, we think.

Speeding up to the present, what has happened lately on both fronts?

• Near the end of 2010, MySpace changed their logo to “My___,” promoting their site as a way to now  “Connect with entertainment,” rather than a social network in competition with Facebook.
• Near the end of 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was named the Times’ 2010 Person of the Year, for “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them…”

• Mid January 2011, MySpace announced that they would be laying off 47% of their global workforce, impacting “about 500 employees.”
• Mid January 2011, Facebook paid the American Farm Bureau $8.5 million for the domain name FB.com, which simply redirects to facebook.com.

The kicker is this: you can now log on to MySpace through your Facebook account. If that isn’t the ultimate surrender on MySpace’s part, we’re not sure what is.

But what happens now? Is Facebook going to suffer the same death as MySpace? Will Mark Zuckerberg sell out to some big corporation? Only time will tell if Facebook will follow in the footsteps of MySpace and become just another “social networking site of the past,” making way for some other up-and-coming site to follow in its path.

4 Ways to Improve Ad Performance on Facebook

Paid Facebook ads hold tremendous promise for marketers looking to reach targeted audiences. Where else do people willingly share such specific information about themselves – enabling marketers to target ads and evaluate their performance based on consumer information such as age, interests, employment status, location and even one’s relationship status?

However, the challenge that Facebook advertisers experience is that Facebook users aren’t necessarily actively searching for products or services. That’s why carefully selected images, calls-to-action and messages – specific to this advertising channel – are important for success.

Here are a few insider tricks that you can use to take your Facebook targeting and ad performance to the next level.

1. Remember User Experience

Many marketers start using Facebook ads expecting to drive traffic directly to their website. While this may work for some, tailoring the experience for a Facebook user typically delivers better results. Try promoting your company using a Facebook Business Page or Facebook Applications. This will maintain a consistent browsing experience and result in a lower bounce rate.

Directing people to your Facebook Page rather than your website makes it easy for consumers to “Like” your product or brand, and every user who ‘Likes’ your page is a potential for future marketing through status updates about deals and upcoming events. Facebook Apps, on the other hand, provide the marketer with more control over the user experience, as well as the ability to gather detailed demographic data from user profiles.

If you truly require sending people to your website, consider tailoring your landing pages to social users. This could include writing different ad copy, including ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons on your site and presenting user-generated content such as videos or reviews, as opposed to product information.

2. Expand Your Targeting Parameters

Facebook users can utilize any terms they wish when defining their likes and interests, so in order to target a full range of potential customers, you may have to do some investigating for terms and phrases that go beyond your general keyword list. For example, by using the target parameter “camping,” your ad will not reach users who have listed “camping in the mountains” or “tent camping” on their profile.

Expand your targeted keyword list by typing the ‘root word’ (i.e. “camping”) into Facebook’s “Likes & Interests” target settings, and then type a single letter to find related terms. Using the camping example, entering “camping i” results in a list that includes “camping in California” and “I love camping.” Adding these unique terms to your targeting criteria expands your audience, helping you reach additional valuable consumers and improve ROI.

3. Segment Your Ads

With 500 million users on Facebook, there are probably plenty of consumers that you want to reach with your ads. However, Facebook users are all very different. Start by breaking down your target audience into different segments and establish the value of each. Then adjust your bid rates accordingly to help optimize your Facebook budget.

Dividing audiences by age, location, and gender should help you find the segments most likely to convert, making each segment more valuable to you. As you measure the performance variance between your segmented advertisements, you can adjust your bids to improve the overall ROI for your Facebook ad campaigns.

4. Make Sure Your Ad Gets Seen

People use Facebook to interact with friends, share photos and play games, not to look for products and services, so… your ads need to grab their attention. The most successful ads include colorful, engaging images — and of course, a compelling and relevant offer. Adding borders to your photos in colors such as orange or yellow, which contrast with the blue and white Facebook interface, is a simple way to pull the user’s eye in the direction of your ad.

Make sure you test your ad performance often, as the results will surprise you — the most-clicked ads are not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing; they are often the ones that stand out on the page. Also, because ads can be served to the same users on multiple occasions, users will start to tune out repeat ads, so keep your approach creative and fresh. Rotating images and headline copy as performance drops over time can help boost click-through rates.

Conclusion

The Facebook advertiser base is still relatively small in comparison to the Facebook audience. As a result, costs-per-click rates remain lower than paid search and other channels, so now is a great time to start advertising on Facebook. As advertisers continue to shift dollars to Facebook, costs will rise, and advertisers that have managed to build a fan base early will be better positioned to reap dividends from their investment. By using the tips above to target and optimize your Facebook ads, you should have a head start in Facebook marketing.

View the full article…

Straightforward Ways to Improve Page Speed (Part 2)

This continues our discussion about “page speed” and what’s needed to stay competitive in organic search rankings. If you missed first blog, go here.

Though Google said that it expects fewer than 1% of search queries to change as a result of incorporating site speed ranking to their algorithms, many site owners want to improve page speed now. Here’s three simple, straightforward ways you can.

Optimize Your Images

If your images are not optimized, they can significantly increase page load times. The problem comes when images are scaled down to fit the application rather than physically being resized. What this does is require the browser to load the full high-resolution image, when it only needs a fraction. Several free file size calculators can help you do this.

Optimize Your Files

Having clean HTML, CSS and other files can speed up your site load time. A good idea is to remove extraneous and old code from your files.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Trimming the number of components on a page can reduce the number of HTTP requests required to render a page—and in turn, shorten your page load times. Combining files using CSS Sprites is an additional way to improve page speeds.

All of the ideas above are good, but the most important strategy to keep your users and Google happy is continuing to deliver relevant content.  Relevancy will always be a priority to Google; site speed a bonus.

7 Tips for a Killer Mobile Search Campaign



One area brands should be looking at in the near future is mobile search. As mobile devices have become more sophisticated and easier to use, mobile search has become the starting point for consumers on the go.

Before tackling a mobile search plan, it’s necessary to understand how mobile paid search differs from its traditional web-based counterpart:

• There is less competition within mobile search, but there are also fewer ads per page.
• Calls to action and user experience can vary based on objective. For instance, click-to-call and click-to-map don’t need to point to a mobile site.
• Shorter search queries means there are greater demands for relevancy and understanding intent.
• The constantly accessible devices lead to greater immediacy with consumers’ needs.
• Marketers must get their point across faster.

Here are eight tips for integrating mobile search into your marketing mix.

1. Group Mobile Campaigns Separately

Mobile search campaigns tend to perform differently from online search campaigns, so you’ll want to be able to measure them on their own benchmarks. Additionally, you’ll often want to establish different bidding rules for each campaign.

2. Broaden Your Scope

Mobile search volume tends to be significantly lower than online search for most keywords. To achieve the best reach, you’ll want to target queries more broadly, include more high-volume queries and possibly include additional keywords.

3. Go Local

Google Mobile reported that about one in three mobile searches has local intent. If geo-targeting matters at all for you with online search, it’s going to be vital for mobile, because mobile search is especially useful for local queries.

Whether or not they include local modifiers (such as a city name or zip code), consumers searching for “JCPenney” on their mobile phone will expect to find one in their area.

4. Incorporate Mobile Functionality into the Creative

Click-to-call was somewhat useful online, but it’s poised to play a pronounced role in mobile search. Anytime a consumer would benefit by talking to a person, from a booking agent, or someone at a local store, click-to-call can potentially improve conversion rates.

For example, travel companies can leverage click-to-call to connect with on-the-go mobile users searching for information on flight schedules and airline tickets.

5. Target Immediate Needs

Ad Age reported that 70% of mobile search users complete their task within one hour, compared to 30% on the PC. Make sure copy and landing pages are useful for consumers looking to meet their needs right at that moment. For example, entertainment companies can promote movie listings, theater locations, TV tune-in reminders, album releases, concerts and other live events.

6. Target Searches Outside the Query Box

Some mobile searches take place directly from mapping applications. For Google AdWords advertisers, marketers who enable location extensions and opt-in to the mobile content network can have their ads run on Google Maps for relevant queries. Ads can then direct consumers to Google Places listings to get people right to a store.

7. Prepare for Instant Search

When Google launched Instant Search recently, it was clear that this will be much more important for mobile devices where every keystroke counts. Marketers will want to make sure their listings rank well for the relevant queries at the top of Google’s suggestion list. If this feature proves to be popular with users, you can expect other search engines to follow suit.