Online Marketing Blog

With our involvement in the PR, search and direct marketing industries through consulting and speaking at conferences, we’ve seen a huge boost in resources allocated to understanding and implementing various social media marketing tactics.

Despite that, the meaning of social media as a marketing/PR channel doesn’t seem to extend outside personal universes of interest. ie, search marketers often look at social media as using tools like Digg or StumbleUpon to drive web site traffic. PR practitioners often see social media as a branding tool using sites like YouTube & Facebook.

Arriving at JFK was surprisingly un-eventful and smooth. Carry on is certainly the way to go. I walked right off the plane and to the taxi area where a town car agreed to take me to Midtown for the same price as a cab. There is no substitute for a ride with legroom.

Upon arrival at the Hilton where the ad:tech NYC conference was being held, I ran into Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads/Media Whiz. A great guy and very successful as well. I didn’t think to take a photo, but in case you don’t know him, he looks like that fellow on the show “The Bachelor”.

Raise conversions by 55% you say? That’s what Marketing Sherpa says in the promo copy for their new Landing Page Handbook. One of the most popular posts we’ve ever had on Online Marketing Blog was the 10 Landing Page Tips by Jon Miller of Marketo. That’s why I think this new report from Marketing Sherpa may be of interest.

You can spend a lot of time testing and fine tuning landing pages on your own from scratch, but in many cases, it makes a lot of sense to get a bit of a head start. This guide is about both the art and science of landing page creation and optimization.

Analytics is a big part of a website’s success, However, even though analytics software is getting better and cheaper, website owners still don’t really know what to do with it.

Matt Bailey with Site Logic is an excellent speaker on this topic. He talks about how analytics is more than just hits, it’s about segmenting and tracking and learning how your visitors are using the site. Tracking things like page views, top 10 entry pages, keywords and hits are just scraping the surface. There is so much more that should be happening. What are the KPIs? Analytics numbers are just numbers with no action and figuring out what they mean is the key to success.

I was recently taking a survey from Jupiter or ClickZ (I don’t recall which) and one of the questions asked about measurement of success for search marketing. While a lot of what you hear from search marketers involves talk about fundamentals ranging from links to rankings to visitors and conversions, the answers offered in this survey included a pretty interesting mix:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Building buzz
• Search share of voice
• Improving brand favorability
• Increasing intent to purchase
• Maintaining brand exposure alongside competitors
• Engagement with rich media (i.e. video, animation)

Chris Sherman is doing another Search Marketing Now Webcast tomorrow at 1PM EST on “Measuring Search Success“. This is a free event sponsored by our friends at ClickTracks.

You’ll learn:

• How to recognize a successful search strategy
• How to fine tune your current marketing efforts
• Which analytics tools can save you time and money

Chris is without question, one of the most knowledgeable people in the search marketing industry, so sitting in on this webinar is a no-brainer.

My morning track has been all about analytics this morning. The first was Web Analytics & Measuring. With two presenters, they both had a good amount of time to cover their topics. The second was Vendor Chat on Measuring Success where there were six presenters talking about analytics in very short 10 minute presentations. Some takeaways included:

• Track organic, paid and referral traffic separately to see who is increasing or decreasing.
• Keep an eye on exit rates and how they compare to entrance keywords.
• Track new vs return traffic rates.
• Setup goals to track what you want to measure.

This was more of a speed intro to some of Google’s newer services. Topics included Google Analytics, Google Gadgets, Webmaster Tools and Personalized Search. Each presenter gave a quick 10 minute overview of their topic and it was hardly enough to really get to know much about each service. The real value of this session was in the question answer portion. I learned that Google’s personalized search is going to offer analytics in the upcoming weeks so that you can see what people are looking for in your custom search. Customized Google Analytics reports are also being discussed, however it’s hard to say when that may become a reality.

One vendor you’re sure to see at virtually every SES and Pubcon conference is web analytics company, ClickTracks. I had the pleasure of speaking at a few DMA conferences at the same time as ClickTracks founder John Marshall and found him to be one of the most enthusiastic evangelists for web analytics in the industry. On top of that he’s really a very good guy.

John and his VP of Marketing, Michael Stebbins took out a few ClickTracks’ freinds for dinner on Tuesday night and it proved to be some of the best conversation. I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of networking after the daytime sessions are over.

RSS to Email service FeedBlitz has launched version 2.0 of the service. Lots of upgrades. via Blogger Design.

Google launches a new multivariate testing tool, Google Website Optimizer and is looking for beta testers.

Yahoo launches the new version of their sponsored search program, Panama.

Here’s a new e-book on social media (pdf) from spannerworks. This is a great companion book to the PR 2.0 Essentials (pdf) document from SHIFT.

Brian Solis publishes the next installment in his series about blogger relations: “Reaching The Blogosphere Part 4 - Writing and Distributing the News“.

Early this morning I received an email from John Marshall (as did other bloggers and pubs) announcing the merger of ClickTracks into a group of companies owned by J.L. Halsey that includes: Lyris, EmailLabs, and Hot Banana in a deal worth about $10 million.

I must say, congratulations to John, he’s a great guy, entertaining speaker, smart and very passionate about web analytics. The combined resources of the J.L. Halsey companies is sure to help ClickTracks offer a very valuable set of services to each group of customers as well as attract a new set of clients.

This session, “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark - Persuasion Architecture - Persuading Customers When they Ignore Marketing” with Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now is titled after the book of the same name. Basically this session was about marketers getting poor results because they are using old Pavolovian rules of marketing and that consumers buy differently than in the past. Customers are less like compliant dogs and more like finicky cats. Hence the title.