• Essentially this is the discovery phase for your potential customers, they have come to a realization that they need a specific product or service but are just testing the waters at this point. It’s also a discovery phase for your business as well because it helps you identify the various touch points users are leveraging to find your site and additionally you can begin to get a sense of the content they are viewing which is enlightening them on products/services in your vertical. This is why I have selected referring sources and content viewed in this initial phase.

Research

• Users now have an idea of what they are looking for and are starting to narrow down the choices by checking out the competitive landscape. B2B Marketers should offer product information, pricing, competitive information to help keep them engaged with your site. I mention downloads and time spent on site in the research phase and want to emphasize that it has to be combination of these two metrics in addition to content viewed which begins to paint the picture of the level and quality of interactions users are having with your website.

Decision

• Site visitors have narrowed down their selection, they are making their final checks on a shortlist of vendors and are ready to make that final leap to become a customer. The number of repeat visits should help indicate if you have made this shortlist and similarly the referring keywords should start giving you a sense of visitors in the decision phase. Keywords which were broad before should start changing to long tail and eventually to branded keywords as visitors begin to grow more accustomed to your site.

Purchase

• Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for – customer acquisition. This doesn’t mean your job is over yet because it’s still very important to understand more about your users purchase so you can learn and apply the knowledge next cycle. Revenue is always good to collect but even more so is ROI segmented down by all your advertising channels. Furthermore it’s useful to get a sense of the length of your sales cycle to help you dictate the timing of your marketing campaigns for users during this entire process.

Labels: Web Analytics

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Labels: comScore, Google

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1. Subject is Key: You can't simply create a popular list out any subject, for example, who would want to read the top 50 types of door knobs? Pick topics that will help people in their research, are "hot" in your industry and that are easy to relate to.


2. How Many Items? Should you go top 5, 10 or top 100? I suggest you mix it up a little, if you're going to do 100 items in your list make sure you can keep your readers engaged for that long. If you're doing 3 or 5 make sure there is enough "meat" in your content.


3. External Links: I find that if you link out to other websites within your list there is a better chance for your list to grow in popularity. The owner of the site you linked to will recognize the incoming link and potentially spread the word for you as well.


4. Always Nice to Share: If you think you've outdone yourself with a great list then be sure to pass it around with to your colleagues as well as some notorious bloggers in your industry. Getting a prominent Sphinn or Digg user to vote for your story always helps too.


5. Ever try Video? Lists are not only meant to be done in text so I suggest you add some flavor into your routine by putting out a list using video. Video is different, fun and allows you to share the inner actor in you.

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• Search Engine Guide: The 19-Hour Website Analysis, in 20 Minutes or Less
• Web Pro News: Facebook Chat's Launch Finished
• Bruce Clay: A Marketer's Guide To Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Unofficial SEO: Yahoo! Search Index Update Is Official!
• Search Engine Watch: ComScore CEO Fires Back at Google, Wall St, and Bloggers
• SEO Book: SEO is a Social Activity :)
• eMetrics: Europe and the Web Analytics Association
• June Dershewitz: Web Analytics Data Reconciliation How-To Guide
• Boot Strap SEO: Great Expectations (for SEO)
• HR Marketer: Random Thoughts About comScore, Web Analytics and Measuring PR

Labels: Industry News

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“More and more of EF Education First’s sales are driven by its online channel so it’s crucial that it understands what is happening on its Web site,” said Neil Weston, senior vice president and general manager, Omniture EMEA. “This challenge is made more difficult because EF Education First is an international organisation with a wide range of products, which means it effectively has a number of Web sites all housed within its www.ef.com domain. Omniture will help ensure that each visitor is directed to the appropriate sub-site, presented with relevant content, and that navigation is as smooth as possible.”

Labels: Omniture, Web Analytics

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Below Analyst, Susan Moskwa explains how to leverage Google's Webmaster tools in order to specify your website's target region.



How do I use the geographic target tool to specify my site's target audience?

If your site targets users in a particular geographic location, you can use our geographic target tool to provide us with information that will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. This data supplements our existing information, and setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user uses Advanced Search to limit the scope of the search to a certain country.

To set a geographic target:

1. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
2. Click the URL for the site you want.
3. Click Tools, and then click Set geographic target.
4. Select Associate a geographic location with this site.
5. Select the geographic information that applies to your site's target audience, and click Save.

Labels: Google

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• Analytics is not a priority: In many cases web analytics is often an afterthought and is not implemented during a site launch or during a sponsored/email campaign. Web Analytics needs to be given more priority and should be thought of before any marketing campaigns are implemented so that you can actually quantify the amount of dollars you budgeted and spent for the marketing.




• The right stakeholders are not getting the right data: If the same dashboard is given to every person involved with your online strategy then you're not allowing them to make informed business decisions which affect their part of the overall plan. Customized reporting is an absolute must - show the Marketing Manager leads (SEO vs. PPC), show the online marketing team keyword referrals/ROI by source, show the CEO/CFO sales and revenue numbers, show the IT Team Site Errors/Traffic Spikes and show the usability team barriers within conversion funnels.




• Too much data and not enough resources: In both the In-House and Agency worlds there becomes a time where analysts are simply bombarded with so many requests that they simply can't keep up. Web Analytics is an extremely important tool used to show the performance of a business and how to best tweak your business's performance, so WHY NOT add some more resources to it.




• Tough to find good analysts: It is difficult to find analysts who have the technical ability to implement a training solution but also have the marketing savvy to know what recommendations to offer once the data has been collected. However, there are a few good ways to train a new analytics analyst: Get them involved with the SEO/PPC teams so they better understand the business, Give them a mix between reading and scenario based training, give them some work to do which is out of their comfort zone, work with them through an analysis or deliverable, send them to SEMPhonic for some analytics training, and finally see if they're still passionate after all of this.

Labels: SEM Training, Web Analytics

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1. Make business personal
2. Update your Facebook Page frequently
3. Harness the power of News Feed
4. Choose the applications that are best for your business
5. Promote your Page through Facebook Ads

Labels: Facebook

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Labels: Apple, Google

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• Because you can
• Birthdays
• Fate-tempting is bad. You just never know
• Mailing lists
• Phone numbers and addresses
• Posterity
• Procrastination
• That guy
• Winning arguments

Labels: Gmail, Google

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Labels: SEO

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• SEO Moz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild
• eWeek: Yahoo, Google Spice Up Web Analytics
• 4Hoteliers: The Problem with Web Analytics
• ASK Enquiro: Think you’re Strategic? Think Again.
• Top Rank Blog: Conversational Thoughts on SEO as a PR Tool
• Pro Blogger: The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog
• Shoe Money: Life After 2.5 Wordpress Upgrade
• John Chow: Make Money Online with Click2Sell
• Inside Adwords: Website Optimizer Now Out Of Beta
• Unofficial SEO: Yahoo! Weather Update In Progress?
• Marketing Pilgrim: AOL Buys Sphere; Pays Less Than $400 Per Content Partner

Labels: Industry News, Must Reads

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Heather Dougherty over at the Hitwise Intelligence blog had a very insightful post recently discussing how Search has caught up to Social Networks and Forums in providing upstream referrals to video sites. Below is a summary o Heather's post:

• Search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic. Last week (ending April 12, 2008) the share of upstream traffic from search increased 35% over the same week the previous year, while the referred traffic from social networks declined 20%.
• So who accounts for the majority of traffic sent to video websites? MySpace, Google, and Yahoo! - each of which own & operate video properties. The share of traffic referred by Google (up 44%) and Yahoo! (up 13%) to the video category increased for the week ending April 12, 2008 when compared to the same week last year. While MySpace accounted for the largest share of referred traffic, there was a 25% decline when compared to the same week during the previous year.
• Universal and blended search are providing more prominent video results and may be one of the reasons for the growth in search-referred traffic.
• Another driver for this change in referral behavior may be the shifting demographics as video websites attract a more mainstream audience. The traffic to YouTube demonstrates a good example - for the 4 weeks ending April 14, 2007, 30% of their traffic was aged 18-24. This has declined to 21% for the 4 weeks ending April 12, 2008, with the share of traffic being more evenly represented across all age groups. While social networks are no longer only the playground of the young, the majority of the audience (47%) is under the age of 35.

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If you loved the board game Monopoloy, then you're really going to get a kick out of Box.net's new Internet board game: Googolopoly. Instead of purchasing property, in Googolopoly you buy shares in companies like Double Clikc, SalesForce, News Corp, Urchin, Ebay and Paypal. Remember the 4 railroads? Well they are now various Google platforms like developer, social, mobile and desktop. Below is screenshot of the boardgame (click image for larger view):

One day we got tired of being serious about the situation and came up with Googolopoly, a game where you can take part of ruling the internet even if you don’t work in Mountain View. The goal of the game is to use Google shares to buy as many properties as you can without landing in the deadpool and losing your stock.

Download the Full Game here: http://www.box.net/shared/dguu2bfy88

Labels: Googolopoly

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Labels: Online video metrics, YouTube

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Labels: comScore, Google, Yahoo

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Recently I have been involved in creating a search marketing training program which some very clear objectives: help new search marketing strategists get up to speed quicker, allow them to work on billable client work sooner/more efficiently and get them prepared to participate in high-level brainstorming strategies. As much as I can teach the new strategists, I have learned it's as important to learn from them to continually tweak and improve the program. Below I have outlined 3 steps to creating a stronger search marketing training program.

• Constantly Reading, Sucks: Providing course material to your trainees is important but don't overload them with constant reading. There will come a time where their ability to absorb content through line and lines of text will simply run out.
  
  I suggest mixing up the textual content with audio and video, additionally I recommend you introduce scenario based training. Scenario based training is way for trainees to get their hands dirty with tasks that they will face on a day to day basis. If you're providing training for an agency or even in-house training, create tasks that are related to current issues that the company is facing, you never know what kind of innovative ideas some fresh minds could come up with.
  
• Create a Relationship: When you're training someone it's important that you create an open door policy right from the start so that your student(s) can approach you with any questions related to the training program or search marketing in general. Throughout the training program, schedule some regular time with your students to ask them how they're doing with course material. This will keep the students stay engaged with the training program and help you design a course which is custom rather than "cookie cutter."
  
• Get Feedback: Your search marketing training program is not going to be perfect right off the bat and it may not be perfect for a while, but the idea is to continually tweak your program with feedback from the people who are undertaking the training. Whether it's your clients or your co-workers, it's important to get their comments/suggestions in-relation to the course content, their ability to understand the concepts, the level of difficulty of the material and the relevancy of the course material to real-life business situations.

Labels: SEM, SEM Training, SEO, SEO In House

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Labels: HitWise, YouTube

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Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], and Google [Nasdaq: GOOG] today expanded their global strategic alliance to make it easy for companies of all sizes to run their business in the cloud with Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps™ suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Salesforce for Google Apps also leverages the Force.com Platform and Google's open APIs, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners.

Communicate Directly from Salesforce

With Gmail, you can email customers and colleagues directly from within Salesforce. Log messages from Gmail automatically into Salesforce lead and contact records and eliminate the need to transfer information manually between the two applications in which you spend most of your time. Create new email messages from within Salesforce records—or any time you see an email address in Salesforce—and the recipient is added automatically to the To line. Plus, you can view past correspondence with your contacts in one place, and so can your colleagues with appropriate access levels.

Instantly Chat with Colleagues and Customers

Google Talk makes it easy for internal sales teams or customer-facing support teams to collaborate during sales calls, while coordinating with partners, and when servicing customer issues—all without leaving Salesforce. Google Talk is included in the sidebar within Salesforce, so you don’t have to switch between applications while reviewing CRM data. Using the power of instant messaging, you can instantly share information, coordinate changes, and plan next steps. Then save chats in Gmail and associate them with leads or contacts to preserve a record of your conversation for easy access later.

Collaborate in Real Time with Your Teams and Customers

With Google Docs, you can share and collaborate in real time on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with team members, customers, or partners. Create documents right from Salesforce records without wasting time jumping between two user interfaces. Associate materials with contacts and leads so you never have to dig to find the right ones. Best of all, you can quickly share Web-based documents that everyone can review and edit without worrying about whether they have the latest version.

Quote Generator for Google Docs and Reports Collaboration for Google Spreadsheets (both powered by Astadia from the AppExchange) let you generate quotes and export reports into Google Docs for easy collaboration. Say goodbye to email attachments and managing multiple versions—working together has never been easier.

Stay Organized and Share Events

Salesforce and Google Calendar help you stay organized and manage all your work and personal events effortlessly. Keep track of your sales meetings, team schedules, and other events from Salesforce (using Appirio’s Sync for Google Calendar from the AppExchange) and share them with others using Google Calendar. Map campaigns in Salesforce to any Google calendar and see them displayed alongside personal or work events with Appirio’s Campaign Timeline (from the AppExchange). With Salesforce and Google Calendar, you can see all your important events at once with the checkbox simplicity and drag-and-drop convenience you would expect from an Internet application.

View Everything That Matters—in a Single Glance

Start your day with a customized, all-in-one view of everything that matters to you and your business with Salesforce and Google Start Page. All your critical work activities, metrics, documents, messages, and other important details are in one place; you can even display dashboard components from Salesforce using Appirio’s CRM Dashboard for Google Start Page (from the AppExchange). Now you can hit the ground running before you finish your first cup of coffee.

Screenshots of Google Docs, Home Page and Chat integration:

Labels: Google, salesforce

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Phil Kemelor over at CMSWatch posted his thoughts on the latest news about Yahoo acquiring IndexTools and he did a good job in questioning how Yahoo's analytics service will compete with the likes of Google Analytics and Omniture. Below is a portion of his blog post, the full post can be found here:http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1208-Yahoo!-steps-into-analytics-with-IndexTools-acquisition

While Rubix could be a differentiator, without it, IndexTools does not offer the functionality that distinguishes it from Omniture and WebTrends -- for example the ability to analyze unaggregated data from a graphic UI and to perform repeatable Excel reporting. For now, you must use regular expressions to analyze unaggregated data and do manual updates of Excel...just like Google Analytics.

Dennis Mortenson, COO of IndexTools, claimed repeatedly that IndexTools could do 80 percent of what Omniture could do, at a fraction of the price. People also say the same about Google Analytics. This is marketing spin at its best. It doesn't matter which 80 percent or which 20 percent; it matters only how it matches your requirements.

As Web Analytics Report readers know, larger IndexTools customers picked that solution to get good standard reports, plus additional reports customized by the vendor, all at an attractive price. Feature richness and attention to individual customer service are not traditionally the hallmark of mass-market solutions, so Yahoo! has some clear choices ahead here, and IndexTools customers will want to watch carefully which way the new owner takes the service.

We at Omniture congratulate IndexTools and welcome Yahoo! back to the Web analytics business. Let’s be clear though: this move by Yahoo! was done to compete with Google. IndexTools does not compete “toe to toe” with Omniture. The majority of their customers are small businesses (80% of IndexTools customers are SMB according to CMS Watch.) This is great news for small businesses that use Yahoo advertising. However, mid-market and enterprise customers demand advanced functionality, deep domain expertise and specialized services.

*** UPDATE ***
Index Tools is now Free!

Labels: IndexTools, Web Analytics, Yahoo

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• Yahoo! acquires web analytics company IndexTools - Dennis Mortensen
• 22 Great Web Analytics Videos - Rich Page
• Website Re-Design: A 21 Step SEO Checklist for Planning a Website Re-Design - SEO Space
• 6 Quick and Easy Accessibility Issues That Make Your Visitors Happy- Search Engine Guide
• How To Excite People About Web Analytics: Five Tips. - Avinash Kaushik
• Delicious Not Shrinking, But Another Problem Looms - Tech Crunch
• Getting the Most Out of Your Corporate Blog - Lee Odden
• Yahoo To Serve Google Ads - David Naylor
• The Beginner's Checklist For Learning SEO - SEOMoz
• Why SEO Cant Be Your Only Value Add - GrayWolf's SEO
• SEO Step Nine Of Ten: Conversion Optimization - Rick Tobin
• Google Puts News On The Map - Search Newz

Labels: Industry News, Must Reads

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