2008 October

Enquisite Showcases Latest Search Monetization Techniques at Ad:Tech NY

October 31, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Consumers and the global economy are creating the toughest, most challenging holiday season in recent Internet history–so what’s a savvy digital agency or search marketing professional to do? Make darn sure your clients get their share of these tighter consumer dollars. And the way to do this is to ensure your product gets top placement on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

At Ad:Tech New York, Enquisite, Inc, a developer and provider of search optimization solutions, will demonstrate how its search analytics tools help online marketers move their rankings up from the Bermuda triangle of SERPs—page two and beyond–to the very lucrative page one where the customers and sales are.

“Smart interactive marketing agencies and in-house marketers are joining forces with Enquisite because they see how Enquisite quickly moves their campaigns and pages up in search results, and thus leads to a much higher sales conversion rate,” says Enquisite’s Vice President of Sales, Sylvie Moreau.

“Particularly during this holiday season, marketers needs to step up their competitive merchandising. Having a good search analytics tool that shows them which keywords bring in more inquiries and conversions is essential to winning in the 2008 holiday season,” says Moreau.

Search Analytics Spotlights the Search Process

While traditional web analytics shows a marketer what happens once a visitor arrives on site, search analytics focuses on what happens in the steps prior to their arrival, when the visitor is in the process of searching for information, products or services. One of Enquisite’s differentiators is its ability to help marketers mine the longtail of keywords. Enquisite’s technology makes it simple for marketers to get a visual snapshot of longtail-related behavior and incorporate those keywords into campaigns.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Internet Broadcasting and WebTrends Sign Multi Year Deal

October 31, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Internet Broadcasting, the leading local Internet solution provider for broadcast publishers and advertisers targeting local markets, today announced the signing of a new multi-year deal to continue using WebTrends Analytics On Demand™ to measure and optimize web content across the IB Local Network of sites.

The agreement follows the conclusion of a successful two-year partnership between WebTrends, Inc., a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions, and Internet Broadcasting.

“WebTrends has helped spur our growth by increasing visitor engagement and by helping us serve new customers and strategic partnerships, from our TV broadcast partners to CNN.” said David Lebow, CEO of Internet Broadcasting. “WebTrends has successfully proven its ability to scale its analytics services to meet our ever-growing customer volume, on top of the demands of our media customers for fast, detailed insight.”

Since adopting WebTrends Analytics On Demand in 2006, Internet Broadcasting has grown to a network of 76 sites, with monthly visits increasing 61 percent to 110 million. Monthly page views have also increased 55 percent, now totaling more than a half billion. Internet Broadcasting has used WebTrends Analytics On Demand to:

Measure and analyze more than 3 billion visits, including more than 14 billion page views and 380 million video streams network-wide.
Obtain precise, high-value insights, such as detailed breakdowns of visitor content usage across dozens of site sections and hundreds of thousands of unique news stories, leveraging more than 300 constantly updated custom reports.
Meet rigorous media customer requirements for timely analysis after major news-driven traffic spikes.
Optimize content, leveraging impression and click data to double the click-through rate and effective CPM of business development links in just one month.

“Prior to using WebTrends, we had limited visibility into which links were truly driving top results for our advertising partners and a difficult time optimizing for top revenue yield per click,” said Erik Greenberger, VP Revenue Business Development of Internet Broadcasting. “We began using WebTrends in September to track impressions and clicks on individual links within our Links We Like module. This enabled us to understand CTR for individual links and ECPM for the unit overall. Once the WebTrends data came in, we’ve been optimizing Links We Like performance by selecting the top-performing partner links based upon CTR, and have seen a dramatic lift (approximately 67%) in the performance.”

Filed Under: WebTrends

CMS Watch Launches Online Education Program

October 30, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

CMS Watch has developed a series of online courses to help business and technology managers become more informed customers and decision-makers.

At a time when digital content doubles every three years, there is a worldwide shortage of expertise in how content technologies work. “Much of that expertise lies with vendors or integrators who have a vested interest in a particular solution,” noted CMS Watch principal, Theresa Regli, “and therefore enterprise technology selection and strategy teams have to work hard to find trusted advice.”

CMS Watch is helping to fill this knowledge gap by providing vendor-neutral expertise on how different types of content technology tools really work, with online courses based on analytical frameworks developed for CMS Watch product evaluation reports.

Each course is designed to give managers the smarts to engage with vendors and consultants on equal terms, to make the right decisions going forward about whether, where, and how to employ content technologies in their enterprises.

CMS Watch’s latest course, announced today, teaches business managers how to evaluate and “place” SharePoint within their enterprise. Other courses include introductions to Web Content Management and Enterprise Content Management technologies. Future courses will cover E-Discovery, Digital Asset Management, Portal, Web Analytics, and Social Software technologies, as well as web operations management and comparative web application development platforms.

Developed and narrated by CMS Watch experts and selected partners, each course packs a dense amount of information into four hours, via digestible one-hour modules. “Participants can follow a course from any network-accessible computer, anywhere in the world, at their own pace,” noted CMS Watch principal, Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

“Technology buyers around the world have many of the same basic questions,” said CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne, “so we decided to put what we know about how these technologies really work into a format where customers can learn what they need to know without leaving their offices.”

The courses are available online at: http://www.cmswatch.com/Education/.

Filed Under: CMS Watch

G5 Launches Preferred Partner Program

October 29, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

G5 Search Marketing Inc., today launched p3, its Preferred Partner Program. This strategic offering provides new G5 partners with increased sales opportunities, best of breed technology and additional value-added services.

The G5 Local Marketing Platform offers CMRs and advertising agencies a complete local marketing solution powered by G5. It is the only solution on the market that includes SEO, PPC, Maps Optimization, and a media dashboard capable of tracking & measuring across both traditional and online media.

“After five years spent developing our platform and expertise in local and regional marketing arenas, we are now ready to help partners increase their service offerings,” said G5 CEO Dan Hobin. “This should allow us to extend our reach into new verticals and markets as our partners build and grow revenue streams.”

The G5 Local Marketing Platform is a natural fit for partners who serve multi-location clients on a local, regional, or national level. G5′s p3 program enables partnering CMRs and ad agencies to expand their reach into new markets without the capital expense of developing an in-house solution.

Filed Under: Local Search

WebTrends Offers Free Half Day Seminars

October 27, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

WebTrends Inc., a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions, will host a nationwide series of free, educational seminars designed to help marketers gain the holistic perspective of their customers and data that’s critical to success in good economic times and bad.

The WebTrends Connect 2008 seminar series will show how to solidify current customer relationships and uncover new business opportunities by squeezing more insight from web site data and extending this information throughout organizations.

“Our seminars demonstrate how open, standards-based analytics and data integration can help your company understand and engage with customers like never before, using the technology and systems that you already own,” said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends. “WebTrends and our partners understand the tremendous value that can be captured by connecting offline data with online visitor behavior, and we want to show everyone how they can do it.”

Teradata, Brulant and Stratigent will help deliver the half-day seminars, which begin Nov. 3 in San Francisco and run through the end of the month. Other cities include Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, New York and Boston. To register, visit: http://www.webtrends.com/ms/seminars2008/register.aspx.

Group presentations and an expert Q&A panel will provide marketers unique perspectives on how to:

Uncover new business opportunities by gaining a multifaceted understanding of your customers
Increase efficiency through easier extraction of online customer intelligence and integration with other enterprise systems
Improve marketing execution through more accurate segmentation and targeting of customers
Justify your marketing budgets by extending the value of current investments and generating demonstrable results

Filed Under: Web Analytics, WebTrends

A Seat at the Table for Search Marketing in Big Business

October 27, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Whether you are an in-house search marketing strategist at a large organization or you’re an agency who has a search marketing champion, there is a common barrier that you will consistently come across: Establishing priority for search marketing in conjunction with getting buy-in from required stake holders. Below I have outlined 5 ways you can push search marketing strategies along more effectively within big corporations.

Relationships: While working at businesses (>150 employees) you will find there are numerous stakeholders involved with every task. Establishing strong working relationships with team members in marketing, IT, and design is extremely beneficial in understanding the corporate structure as well as the flow for strategic processes.
Quick Wins and Tips: Once you have established some decent relationships it’s a good idea to understand each individual’s priorities/responsibilities. From there you should begin to pass along occasional quick wins and tips allowing these individuals to be more effective with their day to days tasks. This idea will really help build your trust level and make your team members looks good infront of their bosses.
Training: This is a technique I have had great success with. In order to get buy-in on the implementation of SEO and PPC strategies from my marketing team, I designed one hour SEO/PPC training sessions for groups of intimate groups of 5-7. With a better understanding in both SEO and PPC the marketing team was more open to asking for my help in future strategies. I kept the groups small to help promote questions and conversation during the training sessions.
Get Involved: If you see an opportunity to help out or add insight, take it. A suggestion for an A/B test for an email marketing campaign, a missing competitive term in a PPC campaign, an important tweak to a landing page or missing meta tags for a prominent product page – Word these hidden opportunities with benefits and you will find success.
Long Term: Don’t just stop at the basics, once you have established relationships and received some buy-in, continue to evangelize search marketing with on going strategies. Find yourself a seat at meetings related to new website designs, CMS selection, and online campaigns so that you can continue to give search marketing a voice a the table.

Filed Under: B2B, Search Marketing In House, SEO In House

Generate Leads with the Webinar Toolkit

October 24, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Webinars have quickly become an industry standard for organizations to promote their thought leadership as well as their products/services. However, implementing a strong framework for a webinar requires a lot of thought and experience. MarketingSherpa has launched a toolkit targeted for organizations who want a step by step guide for implementing webinars which regularly churn out leads. Download Here!

It’s only $97 and features some of the benefits below:

Tech 101

Some marketers can be intimidated by the prospect of holding a webinar because of some of the technical challenges. Fear not. Webinars are easier than you think.

Choosing and Preparing Your Speakers

Costs

When planning your webinar, cost is an important consideration. Your budget will help you determine how big and bold your webinar can be and how many participants you can allow.

Promoting Your Webinar