Web analytics is an integral part of any business intelligence portfolio and cannot be avoided in any decision-making phase. But it is perhaps most discussed among online marketers, who require it in order to make the best sales and marketing decisions.

These are often the same users who face a decision between paying for Web analytics tools and using free ones.

Since the time long ago when the release of the free Google Analytics tool created immense noise, significant differences between paid and free tools have emerged.

The biggest advantage of paid Web analytics solutions is the extensive support offered in terms of training, consultancy, and expert advice in measuring every aspect of your Website. Also, free tools normally just show trends and a summary-based view of the data. With paid analytics, it is possible to have much more graphical information, including a summary of data by date presented in dashboards.

The choice of free or paid depends on the intensity of your business. A personal blog or a nonprofit Website might be easily integrated with free Web analytics tools, such as Google’s or those available from BBClone, FireStats, 4Q, Grape Web Statistics, JAWStats, MochiBot, Piwik,Snoop, Woopra, Yahoo! Web Analytics, to name a few.

Free tools like these may well be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses. And even for a large enterprise, free tools can act as prototypes to showcase the power and importance of eventually opting for paid Web analytics.

A corporate or enterprise Website, in contrast, may require data that can only be furnished by a paid Web analytics solution, such as those available from Clickstream, Clicky, Coremetrics,Lyris (formerly ClickTracks), Mint, Omniture, Unica, or WebTrends, to name a few.

Paid-for Website analytics from suppliers like these will help firms answer queries like the following:

• Which keyword(s) or referral source is giving me the best sales activity?
• Which geography is giving the best clicks and sales?
• Is organic search working well for me? Or is it the inorganic search giving more leads? (Note: Organic search refers results that appear automatically for free; inorganic search results are linked directly to ads or sponsored links.)
• Which is my best online marketing campaign?
• Who are my visitors in terms of geography, age, browsers, etc.?
• What areas of my Website are visitors most interested in?

These reports aren’t the end of what can be done with Website analytics. All the Web intelligence and insights drawn from these tools fall into the area of business intelligence. To be specific, I would call it Website business intelligence.

Users can create spreadsheets and presentations to showcase Website business intelligence. But suppliers offer help here, too. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), for example, has partnered with WebTrends to deliver Web analytics through IBM’s WebSphere Portal Software, a corporate BI management and reporting system.

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) and SAS Institute Inc. are in the Web business intelligence area, too: Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems has added the Sun Web Analytics Solution to Oracle’s kitty. And SAS has its own Web analystics tool.

The growing popularity of Web analytics tools is a clear indication of how important it is for any businesses to extract Web intelligence to optimize the user experience on corporate sites. Only Web analytics can help optimize online marketing campaigns while contributing valuable detail to business intelligence.

–Meer Irfan Ali

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RESTON, VA, February 11, 2010 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In January 2010, Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 11.3 percent market share, up 0.6 percentage points versus December.

January 2010 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in January with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (17.0 percent), and Microsoft Sites (11.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.5 percent.

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 15.2 billion searches in January, up 3 percent from December. Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million).

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

January 2010 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the January analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with more than 14 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.8 billion searches. Bing experienced large growth during the month with an 11-percent increase in query volume to reach more than 1.5 billion searches. Craigslist jumped one position to #6 with 636 million searches, while Facebook grew to 395 million searches, representing a 13-percent increase from the previous month.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

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The second of the five “core” conversion marketing patterns is the “Portal” pattern. Last month, I talked about the “brochure” pattern. In future posts I will discuss the “eCommerce” pattern, “considered purchase” pattern and “site as a service” pattern.

My goal with this series is to explore three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for five categories of web sites. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher and higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.

For this discussion, I assume you are generating reasonably qualified traffic and that your offering has a demand in the marketplace.

The portal pattern

Also known as the “advertising model” and “subscription model,” The portal pattern can be identified by the following characteristics:

• The site itself is the service. Portals are most often content focused.
• The site “monetizes” the content through advertising, with some sort of pay-to-view strategy, or by offering complimentary products and services.
• Consumption is usually spontaneous. Visitors don’t think long about whether or not they are going to consume the content.

Sites built on the portal pattern include news sites, research sites, educational sites, forums and association sites. Most revenue-generating blogs follow the portal pattern.

Overall, the primary goals of a portal are to get people to stick around, to view more pages, and to join or subscribe. Here are the conversion strategies that will impact these goals most.

The home page

Many businesses design their site believing the home page is crucial to conversion. In this case, it is. If designed correctly, the home page will be the primary landing page for the site, though portals are often well suited to bringing search traffic to internal pages. Great content is the best organic search strategy.

I invite you see the home page as a traffic driver for the content. Just as you would advertise on other web sites, you advertise your content on your own home page. In this sense the home page is more akin to a search engine result page, or SERP. It helps a visitor identify which content they will investigate within your area of focus. For the information portal, the home page is like a magazine cover.

The home page must be laid out to quickly route the visitor to items of interest. Specific content should be featured. Many of these sites provide their most important stories on the home page. This is particularly true of the blogosphere, where the most recent articles appear on the home page.

The home page should say little about the company providing the information. If it is important that your company or products be highlighted, you probably should look at the “considered purchase” pattern, which I will discuss in another post.

Navigation

Visitors have different navigation needs. The brothers Eisenberg have a nice way to model this in their book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? where they define four “modes of persuasion,” or whatSitetuners professor Tim Ash would rather call “cognitive styles.” Your readers may favor some of these modes, and this model will help prioritize investments in navigation features.

A visitor in a “competitive” mode may be trying to solve a problem or stay up-to-date on a topic.Site search is critical if you’re attracting such visitors. Make sure your search engine doesn’t return a raft of irrelevant results. These visitors may lose patience quickly if they don’t find what they’re looking for near the top of your search results.

Visitors that in a “methodical” mode want to go deep on a topic. They will appreciate the traditional “drill down” style of navigation that most sites employ. Nested menus and category trees appeal to them. Links to related content on are also appreciated.

Visitors arriving in a “spontaneous” mode may be browsing. They are looking for an excuse to engage. They move on quickly if they don’t find something relevant content. Advertise specific content on the home page for these visitors. Intuitive categorization of the content will also help them find something of interest. They may also be drawn to categories like “Newest” and “most popular.” They’ll respect a site that categorizes content using terms that they are looking for, not just by industry conventions.

A visitor arriving in a “humanist” mode may be relationship-oriented and interested in what others think. Let them explore content on an author-by-author basis.

Site maps and bread crumbs are additional navigation tools that have proven to aid stickiness and conversion rates.

Your internal content pages are your landing pages. Each should offer the reader ways to explore additional content. Consider adding site search, proper categorization, author pages and related content features to these pages in addition to your traditional navigational menus.

Enrollment

What a tragedy it is to entice someone to subscribe to your site with your fine content, only to chase them away with a poor purchase process. It’s easy to rationalize that these visitors weren’t really ready to purchase. However, web site optimization efforts have proven successful in decreasing abandonment rates in shopping carts and registration processes. Maybe you’re the one who’s not ready.

While some abandons are the result of a visitor getting distracted at their computer, many are the result of unanswered questions and poor trust-building in the purchase process. For someone you’ve asked to provide their credit card number, anything your site does that leaves a question in their mind—or places one there—will cause them to reconsider.

Of the three strategies listed here, you might focus on this one first.

The first step is to know what your abandonment rate is. Subtract the number of people who become customers from the number of people who click your “join” button. This is the number of visitors who abandon your process before finishing. Divide this number by the total number of visitors who click “join,” and you get the percentage of people who don’t—or can’t—get through your purchase process.

It stands to reason that, if you have a pay-to-view business model, you’ve got to make it easy for people to sign up. Most visitors have a natural resistance to parting with their money. Any friction generated by your purchase process will increase your abandonment rates and decrease the number of paid readers you have.

Maybe the portal pattern should be called the “obvious” pattern. These strategies are the primary concerns for many web sites. However, this pattern stands as a contrast to the other patterns: Brochure, eCommerce, Considered Purchase and Site as a Service. These patterns have different make-or-break strategies, which I will explore in future installments.

Examples to explore

How well are these portal pattern sites serving their visitors?

• CNN.com
• Oprah.com
• Stratfor.com
• Texas Nurses Association

–Brian Massey

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Promoting content in social media is only half the battle. Once it is in the face of thousands of visitors, there needs to be some sort of emotional and psychological drive to get them to share that content with others. This is key in creating a “snowball effect” that will build perpetual motion to reach a much more pervasive audience.

I covered creating emotional “hooks” to lure people in to viewing content in The Anatomy of Linkbait, but that doesn’t necessarily provide a visitor with the same kind of emotions to want to pass the content along to an individual or mass audience.

Seven types of content sharing motives

To understand how to make content more shareable we must first understand what motivates people to share in the first place.

1. Self-expression

The biggest motivator in social media is self-expression. It’s great that there are so many different ways to do this in social media. When promoting content, use this motivator by providing easy ways for the visitor to express themselves, via social share buttons, comment threading, or some other form of engagement. If a person’s beliefs or interests are related to the content, then they will be glad to share it.

2. Affinity

Everyone wants to feel like they belong and that they’re a part of something. Sharing within communities helps meet that desire. This is an especially dominant motivating factor in niche related verticals or communities.

3. Validation

Confirming or approving something often times feeds the ego for many by making someone feel important. Content that provides personal validation will likely motivate someone to share with a wide audience.

4. Prurience

Obscene or lustful content can be highly shareable. Some people pass the guilt of consuming such content on to others to make themselves feel better about doing so in the first place.

5. Status achievement

Individuals like to be recognized for their efforts, especially publicly. If content or channels feature users who share the content, then they are far more likely to be motivated to do so.

6. Altruism

Benefiting others often times makes people feel better. Content can motivate visitors by giving them the opportunity to do something good for the community. For example, an environmental report to raise awareness can be a motivating factor to share it with others to get the message out.

7. Self-serving interests

Rewarding people for their efforts goes a long way. This can be done in the form of status achievement recognition, financial gain, free or discounted products or services, and so forth. Motivate people who share content by rewarding them if they do.

Sending vs. spreading

Viral sharing can reach many different audiences, hubs, and influencers. There are a few ways (and reasons why) people share content.

One-to-One

This type of viral sharing is most common via direct messaging through social networks, IM, or email. Dan Zarrella did a study on this and found that most people share in a one-to-one scenario due to:

• Personal Relevance (40%)
• Humor (16.4%)
• Utility
• Relationship Building (9.5%)
• Common Interests (7.8%)
• Sole Informant (5.9%)
• Reciprocity (2.4%)

One-to-Many

This type of viral sharing is most common on social networks and social content aggregation sites. Social media has created an outlet for this type of sharing to explode. Also in Dan’s study, he found that most people share to many others due to:

• Audience Relevance (18.6%)
• Increasing Reach (10.7%)
• Increasing Reputation (8.8%)
• Furthering a Message or Cause (8.6%)
• Utility and Usefulness (7.4%)
• Feedback (5.5%)
• Personal Networking (5.25)

Below is a chart showing the most popular social media sites for sharing content. As you can see, Facebook is the furious leader.

Four tips for creating content for viral sharing

1. Value

Trust me, I’m just as sick of hearing “create great content” and “content is king” as you are, but it really is the key to in getting people to share. By creating valuable, resourceful, and compelling content you will seek the approval of the masses.

2. Credibility

Make sure that your domain, brand, and author(s) are always seeking to establish credibility. Often times it comes down to the credibility of the source, not the content or message itself.

3. Usability

Making the content easy to share and driving them to do so with a call-to-action will do wonders.

4. Digestibility

Make it easy for people to consume your content. Whether it’s putting boring statistical data in a visual infographic, formatting the layout of the content, or chunking and segmenting content with headers and other methods, you are providing an easy way for the user to digest the content. If they feel the content and data is easy to digest they’ll feel comfortable sharing it with others.

The takeaway…

While many people might think that viral Internet memes happen on their own, the shocking truth is that most of them don’t. There is a large cycle of creative, development, deployment, and seeding that ensures success. By readying content and campaigns for viral success, you are taking the first steps in the cycle.

–Jordan Kasteler

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Consider that $3 million you just dropped on a 30-second Super Bowl spot a waste of money — unless you’ve got a smart, calculated search-and-social-media strategy behind it.

Last year, the ads from the big game racked up 99.5 million collective online views, according to Visible Measures, which talliesviral-video data; 98.7 million people watched the game on TV, per Nielsen. It’s further proof that while Super Bowl is still valuable because it’s one of the last high-profile, mass-media TV events, it’s maximized with an ongoing online effort.

“Social media provides a longer shelf life for people’s campaigns,” said Anthony Iaffaldano, senior director-strategy and innovation at Reprise Media. “It’s about who’s got a plan in place to take the equity they’re building through all this activity and activate it after the game. Social media becomes more valuable as you continue to engage.”

About 90% of brands had their Super Bowl ads up on YouTube in 2009, estimates a Google executive, although that’s just the bare minimum. A quarter of the brands in the Bowl tapped social networks to try to drive additional comments, ratings and conversation. And more than two-thirds bought paid-search ads against their brands or products.

This year, those figures will be even higher, setting the stage for what might be the most significant study to date on the interplay between paid and earned media. Marketers such as E-Trade are already planning how they’re going to extend their spots online.

And while the buzz of the game’s commercials will provide a healthy dose of PR value, most of the big winners from past years alsorelied on paid-media support. Visible Measures said paid promotion more than doubled the reach of a Super Bowl ad on the web. In that regard, brands in the game have come a long way. In 2005, only 21% bothered buying paid search around Super Bowl ads; last year that figure more than tripled to 65%, according to Reprise Media, which creates an annual Super Bowl scorecard rating advertisers’ online efforts.

So it’s no surprise the online-video-sharing sites are building major programs around the Super Bowl, hoping to capitalize off the dollars marketers will be putting against the game. YouTube is again promoting its Ad Blitz, and Break.com has created an entire editorial channel around the event, complete with its own custom content it can sell.

“One thing marketers are struggling with is ‘Do we put [the ad] up on our site and try to drive people there?’ or ‘Do we put the content on other sites?’” said Andrew Budkofsky, senior VP-sales and partnerships at Break.com. “It depends on the marketer and its goals — if you’re running a specific promotion you might send people to your site and that’s why we do the custom content — so we can speak to a promotion and do editorial plugs. We can create custom content in a video.”

Here are lessons from Super Bowl’s past to make sure you make the most of the big game.

CAPITALIZE ON PREGAME BUZZ

According to Google, searches for “Super Bowl commercials” start rising about a week before the game at a rate of 10% to 20% a day leading up to the game. (They peaked the day after the Bowl.) Meanwhile, Visible Measures reports pre- and post-game buzz can account for more than 50% of a campaign’s reach.

E-Trade is the poster child for a smart pre-game strategy; last year it released outtakes from its talking toddler campaign several days ahead of time. It took over the YouTube home page the Thursday before the game to promote the spots.

E-Trade also bought search terms on YouTube as well as on the main engines and set up a Facebook and Twitter account. Today, the E-Trade baby is still yammering away to its 3,000-plus Twitter followers. (A recent gem: “Can someone give me the 411 for the tooth fairy? Are milk teeth a commodity? If not, mine are staying in my mouth.”) No surprise, it’s back in the game again this year and already working on its online push.

BUILD VIRALITY INTO YOUR CREATIVE

Doritos has epitomized this for the past two years, running contests to see who could create the big game spot. The strategy capitalizes on the fact that friends and families of the finalists spread the word around the web since votes help determine the winner.

GoDaddy falls into this category as well. While its ads appeal to the lowest common denominator, the narrative it’s built around them generates interest. Several weeks before the 2008 game, CEO Bob Parsons started moaning that early versions of the ad were too racy for network TV — but not too racy for GoDaddy.com. In 2009 the ads were approved in advance, but viewers got to vote on which ones they wanted to see in the game. Visible Measures also advises leaving room for social interpretation — will the ad be spoofed? Is there something for viewers to discuss?

BUY SMART SEARCH TERMS

Cars.com recognized competition for search terms such as “Super Bowl ads” would be stiff, so it also bought terms related to its incredibly detailed ad about a genius named David Abernathy. Among its more obscure paid-search terms were “Gompers,” the name of Abernathy’s pet rabbit, and “Aristotle,” his guinea pig.

Smart search is also about recognizing what people are likely not searching for the day after your ad airs. “People searching for Super Bowl ads may not be directly interested in peripheral marketing campaigns,” said Jerry Canning, finance industry director at Google.

THINK REAL-TIME

Gone are the days when a CMO can enjoy an uninterrupted game in the network’s luxury box. Today smart marketers will be talking on Twitter, tweaking search campaigns and leaving no rock unturned in their quest to drive impressions. Like E-Trade’s baby, the star of H&R Block’s spot, Tax Guy Murray, turned up on Twitter and actively reached out to people talking about the ad or taxes — during the game. “My prediction is this year you’ll have armies of marketers fanning the flames of their ads on Twitter,” said Pete Blackshaw, exec VP, Nielsen Digital Strategic Services. “‘Did you like it? Check out this link. Thanks so much for the high five.’ Marketers are getting smarter about taking the earliest signals, even from early PR events, and parlaying those into something that would increase odds.”

Real-time thinking also applies to media buying. Search is a near-immediate channel and marketers can monitor the conversation and help that inform their buying. You might also consider holding money back so you can make short-notice buys on the sites where the campaign is getting the most traction.

DON’T FORGET THE CALL TO ACTION

Denny’s had one of the most-talked-about promotions — a free Grand Slam breakfast — but forgot to offer up a URL or other direction where people could get more information. According to Reprise Media’s Scorecard, the marketer’s website crashed right after the ad aired and was down for the rest of the game.

And if you’re going to do some sort of call to action — or buy paid media or search — make sure the landing page fits. In other words, don’t do what Pixar did last year. According to Reprise, it had a call to action and a URL with previews — something the other films in the game lacked. But, it wrote “in spite of this, the actual site was not integrated at all with the Super Bowl ad and there were no paid search ads to help direct confused searchers to the ‘right’ page.”

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Sure, flying cars may not be zooming near the windows of our 40th-floor lofts and robots with aprons aren’t cooking our meals, but the future is getting here. Unfortunately, it’s starting to look like something between “Minority Report” and “1984″ – at least when it comes to marketing.

Advertisers and retailers are increasingly using technologies to mine for consumers’ demographical information, create super-personalized ads and zero in on people’s shopping habits.

Proponents say new technologies are getting products that consumers want into their hands faster and eliminating ads that don’t speak to them. But privacy advocates are concerned no one’s asking people if they want targeted ads or if they agree to be studied as they shop.

Last September, a Castrol oil campaign in London used cameras along roads to capture license plates of passing vehicles, then cross-referenced them with vehicle registration records, and displayed in a digital billboard a few feet away a targeted ad suggesting which type of oil the drivers should use.

The campaign, however, lasted only four days. Shortly after it started, British transportation authorities launched an investigation of the oil firm’s access to vehicle registration records.

Meanwhile, a handful of Whole Foods grocery stores in Chicago and Canada installed cameras last year that use facial recognition software to analyze passing shoppers and cater ads to them.

According to an Intel video showcasing the anonymous video analytics detection software powering the digital ads, the program helps marketers “understand how many people watch their displays, how long they look, what content is viewed, as well as audience demographics.”

And for almost a decade, a few retailers have studied the way costumers navigate through their stores using radio frequency devices attached to shopping carts and baskets that track their path through the aisles. When the data of thousands of shoppers are processed, marketers can produce what looks like a heat signature map that reveals the most and least visited spots in the store.

“Retailers have a very poor understanding of what shoppers do in a store,” said Herb Sorensen, scientific adviser for TNS Global and the creator of the radio-frequency identification device PathTracker. “What we’re doing is finding a way to help the shopper get what they want much faster. The faster we can sell to them, the happier they will be.”

In a report released in late January, the World Privacy Forum said retailers aren’t doing enough to inform consumers about how they are being recorded, how their information is being used or even allow them to consent to the practice.

“While most consumers understand a need for security cameras, few expect that the video screen they are watching, the kiosk they are typing on, or the game billboard they are interacting with is watching them while gathering copious images and behavioral and demographic information,” the report said.

In particular, the forum expressed concern about the lack of rules regarding how images of minors are used and the possibility of price discrimination based on consumers’ age, gender and ethnicity.

“Just because the companies have decided that the lack of storage or recording of the data is equivalent to privacy does not mean that consumers should be left in the dark about such technologies,” the report said.

Sorensen argued that in a public space people don’t have any presumption of privacy.

“People’s lives are becoming more transparent. Everything that can be done will be done.

“Everybody can be tracked, everybody will be tracked,” he said.

–Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera

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Of all the metrics that I struggle and fight with, probably the easiest one I’ve found to correct is a high bounce rate. The reality of website design lies in the fact that many choices are made in page layout, color and image choice based on what the graphic designer or website owner like—not what the customer wants.

Testing on the web has come such a long way in recent years. Once upon a time you had to make a change, and then watch metrics to see if things were better or worse. Now you can make educated choices to determine why people aren’t clicking on a button, or why they’re distracted from beginning your sales funnel with a variety of inexpensive tools and metrics that any webmaster, beginner or expert, can use. Aside from systemic issues such as bad coding that makes pages load extremely slowly, its quite easy to fix your high bounce rate pages.

Fixing high bounce rate pages in two simple steps

The first thing I do when I work on a web page with a high bounce rate is figure out what is distracting the user and making them leave. I always start with the organic phrases used to findthat page. For example, one of my clients offers vacation rental units in a variety of complexes around Mexico coastal resorts. His number two keyword is “Riviera Maya weather.” The landing page for that keyword has a 70%+ bounce rate, and my client wanted to know why. All it took was a quick look at the page to see that it isn’t about weather at all—it’s about renting vacation units in a complex, with weather info pasted in below the fold.

The problem? the searcher is mislead to believe the page is about weather. When they land on the page and don’t see the weather information they’re expecting, they leave right away, their queries unanswered. In this scenario we’ve learned the first rule of fixing high bounce rate pages: Make sure traffic to the page is targeted and you’re giving users what you promise in the search query on the landing page they arrive on.

After determining the traffic to the page is targeted and should be engaging with the content, I look at the layout itself. I use a few tools for this depending upon the timeframe I have for research. If I need immediate results I capture a .jpeg of the above the fold portion of web page, and run it through the Attention Wizard tool from Site Tuners. This tool simulates the eye tracking on a page via an algorithm and generates a heat map of the hot spots and path the typical eye will take around the page. This provides really quite remarkable insight that can help you find fast ideas for improving engagement on a page. Attention Wizard is also great for testing page layouts you want to try, because the page doesn’t have to be live anywhere. If you can create a .jpg of a page you can test its potential results.

If I have more time to test, and want results based on the eyetracking from actual visitors rather than that simulated by an algorithm, I use ClickTale, which I’ve talked about previously.

Either tool will help you determine where they eye and the mouse is going instead of into your sales funnel. Use this data to improve page layout and get users to your message faster. The second rule of fixing high bounce rate pages: Make your conversion path so easy to follow that a monkey could figure it out.

Bounce rates can kill your conversion path, but in reality they’re pretty simple to fix. Can everyhigh bounce rate page be fixed with these steps? Probably not, but I bet you can address 75% of the issues caused by high bounce rate pages by following these steps.

–Carrie Hill

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I count my lucky stars that my fortunes don’t rely on SEO and PPC alone. I’m happy to be part of a couple of agencies with a full range of interactive and traditional marketing solutions. That means I don’t have to pretend like SEO and PPC always are the best choice for clients. They’re not.

I thought it might be refreshing to talk about when SEO and PPC are NOT a great choice for local businesses- but not just to discourage you- The reasons they don’t work can tell us something about the businesses, what they should do next, what makes a good business in a certain niche, and so on.

First, let’s think about what makes for success in search:

1. Relevant keywords
2. Prospects that convert
3. A competitive advantage or a not too competitive niche
4. Proportion of cost and revenue that creates positive ROI
5. Trackability that can prove that ROI

We’ll look at each of those in the ideal situation, and how problems in each can lead to marketing failures for local businesses.

1. How a Lack of Relevant Keywords Can Doom Search Efforts

I typically divide keywords into two groups:

• Brand names
• Category (general) keywords

The brand searches are the low hanging fruit. If a local business has a strong brand and repeat customers, there’s good ROI here. And you can make it even better by testing ads.

Category keywords could be vertical-related, offering-related, or geomodifiers. For a mexican restaurant, it could be “mexican food”,  “myrtle beach restaurant”, or “myrtle beach mexican restaurant”.

Where this breaks down:

–> If you get too long tail; for example, “myrtle beach mexican restaurant with California burritos” isn’t going to show evidence of volume in Google’s Keyword Tool.

–> If your vertical is too competitive, and you’re not near any geomodifiers that get search volume; e.g. a golf course in the boonies on the edge of Florida and Georgia might run into trouble- not committed enough to get good results from either state, not near a big golf tourism city, and “golf” itself is way too competitive in SEO and too expensive in PPC. Add in lack of brand recognition, and you’ve got an uphill battle that looks a lot like a sheer cliff.

–Brian Carter

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The Email Experience Council is pushing to standardize metrics it has developed after a two-year research endeavor that included surveying dozens of email broadcast vendors.

The bottom-line reason for its call for industry-accepted metrics, it says in its blog, is that it has become impossible to compare response and deliverability rates when terms are based on different calculations.

The result of the work of its volunteer committee, Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, is a newly created and vetted list of definitions of key measures,  [pdf]. The EEC is asking for industry input with a survey on its site as well as feedback on the definitions.

Ongoing Debate

Much of this debate has been taking place in the email marketing community for some time. Almost a year ago Loren McDonald, co-chair of the EEC Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, posted his views on why the EEC wanted to see the term ‘render rate’ replace ‘open rate at the Deliverability blog.

“The open rate has become extremely inaccurate because disabled images, use of preview panes and HTML-unfriendly mobile devices lead to an underreporting of the true number of opens,” he wrote. “Fellow EEC Roundtable member Morgan Stewart has done analysis across several ExactTarget clients and estimates a typical underreporting of from 5% to 35%. Meaning a measured 30% open rate is actually from 31.5% to 40.5%.”

Industry Trends

As the industry talks about new metrics it would also be helpful to consider the changes in the larger shifts taking place. In a recent Mailer Mailer Email Marketing Metrics Report [pdf], the company again noted that open rates are becoming less accurate with many people reading email from hand held devices and disabling image downloading.

“The fact that click rates remained fairly steady suggests that people are still reading the messages even though fewer opens are being reported.”

Alternative Measures

There is also a case to be made for considering – if not formalizing – alternative metrics, according to a post by Chad Horenfeldt at Eloqua.

Besides the typical benchmarks such as those provided by MarketingSherpa, Horenfeldt suggested the following:

• Automated Email Metrics. “The goal is to demonstrate that key email metrics such as opens, click-throughs and conversions are much higher while unsubscribes are much lower using an automated program such as lead nurturing when compared to manual email sends (“one offs”). It would be very useful to B2B marketers to have benchmarks to track if their automated campaigns are trending upwards or downwards year after year.”

• How Email Contributes Further Down the Sales/Marketing Funnel. Increasingly marketers need to prove the value of their marketing spend in even greater detail, he says. “Email opens as an example is not good enough. What we need to see is metrics such as the number of marketing touches (including email) that lead to an opportunity and/or closed deal. This data needs to go beyond the communications that marketing is sending but should combine the efforts from marketing AND sales.”

• Database Accuracy Metrics. “I would like to see metrics that include the percentage completeness of contacts for key contact fields and the resulting email response metrics for campaigns that involve data that has been cleansed.”

• Multi-channel Metrics. “It would be very helpful to see which channels combined with email were the most successful in certain situations.”

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You can think of social media as a set of tools that your business center can use for a variety of purposes – customer service, branding, promotion, relationship management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.

Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool.

The barrier for getting started with social media is low; it’s dependent on your involvement level, objectives, and goals. Thefacilitators of the message, our tools, are the key components that make it all work. The sole purpose of these tools is to: create, manage and distribute content, build awareness, drive traffic, connect with our customers and hopefully turn a lead into a prospective sale.

If social media represents a set of tools – what should be in your office business center’s toolkit?

Social Media Statistics

The default tool in any toolbox always starts with Analytics. Knowing where your executive suite company’s existing traffic or lack of traffic it is coming from will yield a goldmine of data that can be strategically utilized.

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher converting websites.

Build your blog community with RSS
Give your readership ways to stay up-to-date and informed with your blog, by encouraging them to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. FeedBurner, another Google-owned product, is the only game in town for feed management. It will give you statistical data about your feeds content, distribution, and subscribers. Even though the data can be taken with a grain of salt. The real benefit of Feedburner is the ability to offer email and RSS reader subscriptions to readers of your blog. The trend, I find, is shifting more to email subscriptions than RSS subscriptions. Feedburner’s email delivery service works very well and it can be customized rather nicely. If we can’t educate consumers on using RSS readers, we can at least educate them to subscribe via email, something everyone has done at some point.

Social Networking and Social Signage

Professional Networking
LinkedIn is the tool of choice for professional networking. At the very least, if you’re not using the site for employment purposes, fill out a completed work history, resume, and profile. Set your profile to public so that it ranks for your name. LinkedIn allows you to aggregate third party service content such as, blogs and SlideShare presentations into your profile page. Use your profile to showcase your work and talent. Create a group page for your business center and keep in touch with current clients and prospects that way.

Social Networking
Facebook: love it or hate it, it’s here, and it’s the 800-pound guerrilla force to be reckoned with. Use Facebook for professional or personal networking. Be cautious on how you combine the two, because they can very easily spill over onto each other. If you’re going to be doing any marketing on Facebook, set up a public fan page. Facebook is a completely different beast and should be treated as such. There are a ton of bells and whistles that will allow you to customize your Facebook page, in addition to aggregating content from other third party sources.

Social Megaphone
Twitter is a social megaphone. There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter, however due to 140 char limitations it’s best for megaphoning links and information back to your home base. Establishing a Twitter presence is standard protocol nowadays, but ask yourself what you want to get out of Twitter. Your objectives and goals will dictate how you use the service.

Social Profile
Create a Google Profile and control to some extent what information people see about you online. As long as your profile is set to public, it will appear in search results for your name. You can also link all your social profiles. This is outpost number one – spend the time, and optimize it correctly.

Social Curation
Delicious and Diigo are the only two tools for this category. These bookmarking tools have proven that they can scale and have a solid track record. There are pros and cons to both, but they both achieve the same objective: tagging, saving, and storing bookmarks. The nice thing about Diigo is that it can save all new bookmarks automatically to Delicious. This gives you peace of mind knowing your digital data is archived.
Video and Photo Sharing

Thanks to the advent of mobile technology, faster and more accessible broadband and sites that host, broadcast and share consumer generated content, the video revolution is upon us and has been for some time now. Social media, is well, social. Stories get people talking. Create informative videos that are relevant to your messaging and brand, encourage others to share it and to create their own video content. Viral videos are rare and lots of factors determine if something will go viral. If your content is good and worth sharing, people will take notice.

YouTube reigns supreme in this category and rightfully so. YouTube is yet another Google owned property (are you starting to see a common theme here?). YouTube makes it extremely easy to host and stream videos. YouTube videos are easy to embed and are very shareable. Create a branded YouTube channel for your brand and always optimize your title and keywords accordingly. YouTube is a video sharing site at its core, but it’s also a massive search engine.

Pictures are worth a thousand words
Photo sharing sites are in abundance, but the two we recommend are Flickr and Google’s Picasa. Flickr has been around the longest and has lots of social components, specifically a built-in diehard community. Picasa has the same functionality with basic editing capabilities and easy bulk uploading to the web. Both services offer the basics: uploading, tagging, and sharing of photos.

In Conclusion

The number one benefit of social media marketing is gaining the all-important eyeball. It will also generate exposure for your businesses, improving traffic and build new partnerships. Start working on your toolkit today to build your Social Media platform. Just take one step at a time and you will eventually reap the benefits of your efforts.

–Susan Smith

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