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.

Here is a discussion on Obama Campaign at Search Insider Summit, held in Dec'08


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.

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).

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?