AdWords Cross-Channel Conversion Tracking Alternative
Adwords Cross Channel tracking is one of the most important prerequisite to allowing advertisers to track their online ads, through channels like Yahoo Search Marketing, Miva and also Banner ads among others.
It is said that Google Adwords Cross-Channel Conversion Tracking will no more be available to the advertisers from August 25, 2008. As of that date, the feature and its related data will be removed from all accounts of the advertisers. If the advertisers would like to keep a copy of your cross-channel conversion data, then they can do so by keeping a record of it for themselves before the removal. Whereas the usual Google AdWords conversion tracking will not be affected by this change.
Alternative to cross-channel tracking, advertisers can use the free Google Analytics service to track all your online marketing efforts. Analytics offers the same functionality as cross-channel tracking, plus much more. It shows you how people find and explore your site, which keywords are really working, which ad text is the most effective, and where your visitors are dropping off during the conversion process. Click to start using Google Analytics.
If you already have an Analytics account and would like to track your non-AdWords online advertising campaigns, you'll need to tag your destination URLs with special variables.
Tagging online ads is an important prerequisite to allowing Google Analytics to show as which marketing activities are really paying off. Fortunately, the tagging process goes smoothly - once you understand how to differentiate your campaigns. Learn about all of the variables an advertiser can use to differentiate campaigns, by reading the five dimensions of campaign tracking.
Now, I should work a bit more to tag non-Google campaigns with Analytics and add new tracking code on the landing pages and shall maintain the flow of Cross channel conversion tracking.
Labels: alternative tracking, conversion tracking, cross channel, Google Adwords, google analytics
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Hillary and Obama's Online Race
Before finding out the actual numbers with (Web Analytics - Case Study), that caused a spike on traffic generated to the Comodo website, let us know some interesting thing as what a print media released on the Online Spending between Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton.
They say that when consultants analysed what went wrong with Hillary's campaign, her online ad spending numbers shed some light. Through the entire 2007/2008 campaign, far less on online advertising than Obama's campaign has this year alone. Still, desparity, they did have something in common: both spent the bulk of their online ad budgets on Google Adwords. Hillary doled out around $292,000 to Google between Mar'07 nd Apr'08, most of which was spent this year. Meanwhile, Obama's campaign has spent thousands of online ad dollars through ad networks and Social Networking websites, but Clinton's filings did notname any such recipients.
It also added finally that if political races are won by the biggest as spenders, the contrast between senator Obama's online ad spending and that of Clinton's could have people wondering whether more of jer ad budget should have neen spent online. My opinion on this context is that not online Online Ad spending fetched Obama with more votes but also with his Social network promotions.
Well, having said about Obama and Hillary's online race, I would like to enlighten you as what exactly made a spike on visitors traffic that increased on our website during a week between 26th Apr'08 - 3rd May'08.
Web Analytics - Case Study on Direct Traffic
What is Direct Traffic?
If you track your website stats, which I am sure most of you do, you’ll see a section of visitors that come directly to your website rather than from another referral websites or from a search engine. Direct traffic does not depend on shaky factors like search engine rankings or social media popularity. This traffic will likely be the most targeted traffic to a website / blog. Direct visitors are warm leads. Whether you are selling products or just attempting to grow your subscriber base, your direct visitors will be the most responsive to whatever you are offering. Because they have chosen to visit your site specifically, they probably value your opinions over others.
We had a press release published on our company's website promoting Comodo SSL certificate by saying that "Obama'08 website has deployed Comodo InstantSSL certificates to provide online contributors reassurance that their information is encrypted and secure". This gave a boost on online traffic to the Instantssl.com website. The factor which I had analysed here on Google Web Analytics was for Direct Traffic and what made the spike in people on the Internet visiting our website.
It is observed that the direct traffic to Instantssl website, most importantly is from the Bookmarking (in most cases people are already familiar with your website / blog and they are choosing to come back) that usually happens when users bookmark through their browser's favorites option or through the WIDGETS (small bookmarking icons) that we provided on our FORUMS, Blog, Support pages etc. Also, it can be through offline promotional efforts through Print media (News paper, Magazines etc.) where people will remember the URL of a website and then type into their web browsers.
Labels: ad spending, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, online ads, online race, traffic increase, web analytics
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Social Media Network
What is a Social Networking?
Social Media Network or simply Social Networking is the place on the Internet where people get together and communicate remotely with each other on their interests, hobbies, passions etc., through social media websites. It is all about the psychology of existing needs and desires, and finding a way to speak to the users using Social Media. When it comes to social media marketing, the concept that holds true is attracting attention and traffic as well (while you intend to promote your websites).
What are social media websites?
Networks on the Social Media is formed by the people through different means. Some of which are Bookmarking the web pages by simply clicking and adding (obviously after signing-up with their services) from a website. By reading a post on Delicious, Blinklist, Furl, Propeller, Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Facebook, Konnects, Twitter and Scribd are few among the ocean of Social Networking Websites and commenting on the posts that interests you.
About Social Networking Widgets:
You can see Social Networking Widget (social media websites IMAGE icons) below, this will appear at the bottom of every article on this Search Marketing blog to allow users to click and bookmark or connect to the relevant content on a Social Media Website.
Finally, there is also a simple way to publish your content to the social networking websites is through RSS feeds on to the Feed sites such as Twitter feed among others as in the previous link (feed sites).
Labels: addthis icon, feed sites, networking widgets, Social Media
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Rules for Email Marketing Strategy
Extremely compelling content scores non-search traffic well before the main website ranks high in the search engines due to the resulting links.
While exercising on Email Marketing which is indeed a powerful marketing strategy, make sure you follow certain procedures to get the maximum out of your campaigns. To create a large ripple you'll need to create quality content with the images specific to your market. This will help you fish for customers with a large net, as opposed to one single hook.
Jeanniey Mullen, contributes for ClickZ articles on email marketing and who’s also the founder and exec chairwoman of the EEC (Email Experience Council) states that:
“Email marketing currently generates an estimated return on investment of $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, according to the Direct Marketing Association we conservatively estimate that if all marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, email’s ROI would jump to $52.69. Not paying attention to rendering impacts revenue directly.”
According to a survey by the EEC and reported by The DMA, most retail email marketers (57%) are still sending image-only or heavy image-based email campaigns to their subscribers. Interesting considering the fact that image-based campaigns are known to trigger higher spam scores and reduce open rates based on their large size and, of course, don’t get seen if images are turned ‘off’ in the email client.Points to follow:
Marketers need to include more HTML in their emails by including the following:
* Headlines
* Section heads
* Product names, prices and other text companying product images
* Text in banners
* Lists (upcoming releases, etc.)
* Menu and navigation bar text
* Call-to-action buttons
* Promotion codes and instructions on how to apply them
Rules of thumb:
* Take the extra effort to create an email campaign that has the right balance of HTML text to images. Keep to the mantra that if images are turned to ‘off’, the recipient can still read your entire message and act accordingly.
* Keep links as text links. Calls-to-action are the key to any email campaign, so ensure these can be seen and clicked regardless of supporting (and blocked) images.
* Never assume that your recipients are savvy enough to add you to their safe list manually and promptly. Work for the lowest common denominator and make your email campaign work on every level.
* Work with your ESP who will work with your ISP to ensure deliverability of your campaign. This will at least give you more of a fighting chance to have your campaign get to the inbox, regardless of content or images.
* TEST TEST TEST. All email campaigns should go through some degree of testing. If you don’t have the time, consider purchasing a rendering service such as ReturnPath/SenderScore, which can mean the difference between an open or an unsubscribe. Just one sale made by a more compliant and spam filter- ready email campaign can pay for the ReturnPath license, so give it some thought.
Building Personas:
What are personas BTW?
Personas is a tactic in evaluating a customer base for both marketing efforts and product development. Personas are essentially imaginary friends, or clients, to be more precise. You invent entire back stories, personalities, quirks, and needs for all of them, then evaluate how each of them would likely react to your products or campaigns.
Follow these three rules:
- Design for convenience, for that persona. 'Convenience' means different things to different people. For me, it means messages I can easily scan and delete or act on. For someone else, it might mean all the information they need, right in the e-mail.
- Tailor every offer to that persona. Sending a 10% off deal to a persona who wants luxury at any cost won't get you much.
- Refresh your memory. Every time you launch an e-mail campaign, review your personas. Otherwise you're going to drift into what I call 'coupon land', where every e-mail starts with '20% Limited Time offer!!!!' or some such. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad offer. Just make sure it'll work for your audience.
Because, the odds that someone would be downloading images from every e-mail, the moment they receive an e-mail with images will be Zero.
To sum-up, a marketer should need to be clearly knowing as to whom they are trying to build awareness. Is it within a certain group? Connecting with people you can learn from or who would be likely to become your clients? Do you want to talk to blogging moms, internet marketers, travelers, jobs, reviews or a survey?
Labels: building personas, email marketing, email promotions, email rules, marketing tips
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Space Tour with Google
Space Tourists are getting their own Ride. Space Adventures, a Virginian Company normally arranges a channel for the wealthy explorers to ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station.
It is appeared on news online and print media that Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google is going to occupy one of the two available seats on Space Adventures' 2011 flight. He made $5 milloin as an investment in the company serving as a deposit for his future travel.
A similar space ride happened with Mark Richard Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth gained worldwide fame on 25 April 2002 as a spaceflight participant aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission, paying approximately US$ 20 million.
These sought of pleaseure / research rides to the space should happen very often to explore the boundaries on space, and I wish I could make my own trip to space once in my life time to appear on the IHT News. Cheers!
Labels: Mark Shuttleworth, Sergey Brin, Soyuz rockets, Space Adventure, space google
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Wikipedia Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent
Nielsen Online released an interesting News about some traffic data of Wikipedia on May 14th. Despite the breathless headline on Nielsen’s press release (“Wikipedia U.S. Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent in Five Years”), growth of the U.S. audience has slowed quite a bit. Nielsen says Wikipedia had 55.8 million unique visitors in the U.S. in April 2008. That’s up 22% from a year earlier. For comparison, April 2007 was up 77% over the previous year. April 2006 was up 285% over April 2005. Clearly the U.S. audience for the user-generated reference site is maturing. Notable from Nielsen’s findings is the extent to which search engines, especially Google, drive visitors to Wikipedia. In April 2008, 61% of visitors from home and 66% of visitors from work to the en.wikipedia.org site were referred from Google.
It is not
Labels: nielsen update, website traffic, wikipedia traffic
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Web Pages for Internet Users
When your goal is to sell more do make users comfortable on your webpage(s) and say what you wanted to say withing first fold of your page. Web users normally hunt for precious content and get relaxed after they gain what they want from their search on the Internet. Users find information on a Website more or less in e following way.
F as in Fast, Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. People read the web pages or a Search Results Page for that matter in this way.
Eyetracking study, recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. It was observed that users' main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:- Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
- Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
- Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.
Labels: Google SERP, heatmap survey, research brief, web pages
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MTD ClickCharge on YSM Financial Reports Tab
What is MTD ClickCharge?
MTD ClickCharge means Monthly Transaction Details. In Financial Reports Description Table we can see:
Monthly Financial Reports Access to Invoices, Statements, and Activity Reports for your account for prior calendar months, which you can download in PDF and text formats, and...
Billing Transaction Detail Reports Historical billing transaction data for your account over the date range you select. The date range is restricted to the previous six calendar months. Displays one row per billing charge entry. We can see that MTD when we click on this link in the reports.
IMO, YSM is 100% waste medium and 100% waste source to pay for their sponsored clicks, because they are from irrelevant ones. When I made an effort to exclude all those irrelevant websites in the YSM campaign Admin section, then I see that there are no more than 5 clicks each day. However, YSM has come up with a click filter as its new report as per its Blog letting users know how many clicks are discarding the irrelevant clicks.
What I can’t understand is that why Yahoo! has been contrary to let its users opt out of content & search network altogether. If I want to advertise only on Yahoo! search site and not on any of its other network, I think that Yahoo! should let its users opt out of its extended network. That will help advertisers further to not pay for click fraud!
It is better to focus more on social media to promote the niche websites, rather than going for PPC from Yahoo!
Labels: Financial Reports, MTD ClickCharge, promote websites, Social Media, Yahoo PPC
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Contact Details
V.B.Lakshmi Narsimhan
Chennai India, email: vblni@yahoo.com
About My work
I am an In-house Search Marketer handling Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) activities for an MNC in Chennai. I write this SEO blog with rave reviews in the Mediapost, Wall Street Journal, WIRED Magazine, SEMPO and The Guardian to attract attention of the users who are inclined towards Internet Marketing.
