Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Twitter with Historic Year over Year Growth

According to Marketingcharts.com, Twitter, the online social media phenomenon, has had  1,382% year-over-year growth in February 2009. According to Nielsen online's research, the number of total unique visitors increasing from 475,000 in February 2008 to seven million last month.  Shockingly, adults ages 35-49 had the largest representation on Twitter, with nearly 3 million unique visitors from this age group. This comprises nearly 42% of the site’s audience in February.

Who's using Twitter?
Continually growing in popularity and importance in both the consumer and corporate worlds, where it has morphed into a tool with which brands can reach customers and other stakeholder constituents.The ability to access Twitter through the PC-based web, the mobile web, and through text messages is also a factor in the site’s growth, Nielsen said.


Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Social Media Monitoring

Learning about social media monitoring, we use SM2/Techrigy. A very good point that everyone should keep in mind.
  • You can see which popular blogger's are frequently discussing your brand/product.
  • You can see which sites are talking about you
  • You can see what sites each blogger or site links out too.
In other words you can use some of this information to find areas of content that you should target your advertising dollars to. Also you could look to contact a blogger as a brand ambassador.

www.zigmarketing.com

Monday, March 23, 2009

Banner Advertising Ah-Ha..... People More Likely to Click Ads that are Relevant

Found a great article today on Marketingcharts.com today involving what makes people (Ages 18-24 & 45-54) more likely to pay more attention to an ad they see online.  The two times people pay the most attention to an ad they see online:

1). When the ads are relevant to me (50%)
2). When it is useful to me (43%)

Other influencing factors that make people pay attention are:

3). If it gives me money off 
  • 40% - 18-24 yr. olds
  • 32% - 45-54
4). If it is entertaining
  • 26% - 18-24
  • 14% - 45-54
5). If it gives me new and/or exclusive information
  • 20% - 18-54
  • 16% - 45-54
Not a surprise that consumers would prefer ads that had some relevance in their life.  Is your marketing team serving your ads in relevant areas, on contextually relevant sites or are they just buying impression numbers to make the ads entertaining?  There is probably a reason that only 14% of adults 45-54 click on entertaining ads, but more than double that (32%) click on ads when they are relevant.  Give them what they want, what they can use, what they are asking for.

Another search "fix"

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/22447.asp

Ugh...not sure i agree with this. So everyone is going to go out and add "cheap" what does that do to your brand??

Monday, March 16, 2009

Google Dominates U.S. Searches

Search engine power player Google accounted for 72% of all U.S. online searches conducted in February, an 8% increase compared to last year, according to Hitwise.

Google towers over its competitors:
  • Yahoo! (17% of all U.S. online searches, down 17% from a year earlier)
  • MSN (6% off all searches, down 20%)
  • Ask.com (4%, down 10%)

Having such control in the search engine marketplace makes Google the best destination for companies new to online adverising especially Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  Google's Pay Per Click (PPC) model allows advertisers to only pay when their ads are click on, not just served.

Reaching 72% of all searches, and only paying when people select your product offering; Two compelling arguments to get in the SEM game.   

Source:

Five Tips to Help Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

5 Tips to Help Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

For most companies the #1 traffic driver to their company's website is a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, etc).  In order for your company's organic listing to be seen and clicked on, try these 5 optimizing tips:

1). Optimize Title Tags on Web Pages - Meta tags appear in the code of your web pages and search engines read these tags to help determine the relevancy of a web page.  writing a good title meta tag is the single most important thing you can do to improve your SEO.

2). Create Links Between Pages on Your Web Site - Search engines used programs called "Spiders" that search the web, following links, to find web sites and pages to index and store in their databases.  
Improve your internal links by:
  • Creating a robust internal link structure among your web pages for search engines to follow
  • Use keyword rich text for the links
3). Use a Site Map - A Site Map or Site Index, is a page on your site that lists and links to all other pages on your site.  It is full of text links that gives a search engine a way to find and index every page on your site.

4). Increase Links From External Web Sites into Deep Pages - Deep pages are pages below the home page in your Site Map.  Having external site links to these pages can help them rise in the search engines' results.  Partner sites, Associations, Blogs, Tweets, etc are a good place to seek out incoming links.  

5). Get Involved in Online Communities - Another way to add external links to your deep pages (Press Releases, Case Studies, etc) is to get involved in online communities important to your customers and industry.  
Some great places to start in are social bookmarking and blog sites such as:
  • Delicious.com
  • Reddit.com
  • Digg.com
  • eblogger.com
  • wordpress.com
  • technorati.com  
The best way to track your efforts in SEO is to chart the progress of your search engine listing by creating a baseline:  Where are you now as a starting point/how far down is your listing?, where is your listing  in 1 month? 6 months? 1 year later?  

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Google Tackles Behavioral Marketing

It’s about time for Google to get in the behavioral targeting (BT) game. According to ComScore, Google has over 75% reach on the web so it only makes sense to offer targeting 2.0, BT. Being able to aggregate that level of data across their search and network, gives them a compelling arguement for giving a better slice of a user’s behavior, opposed to other networks with less reach, and less areas to pull cookie data from.

Smaller behavioral targeting firms sell or at least should sell based on their data collecting algorithms since most do not have the reach of a Google or Yahoo!. Google like PlatformA has a network, and has operated based on content/contextual channel targeting but now is integrating behavioral targeting technologies with the acquisition of DoubleClick (just as PlatformA acquired Tacoda). Pressure from the recession is affecting the online ad space, and with the amount of ad space inventory nearly limitless, smart marketers are looking for better ways of targeting their audiences outside of just content/contextual targeting.

It will be interesting to see how Google’s behavioral targeting solution competes with the likes of Audience Science (formerly Revenue Science), PlatformA (Tacoda), Specific Media, and others. There is no question they have the reach, and more data to aggregate together, but do they have the technology and algorithm behind the network to fuel true behavioral targeting? Time will tell.

Check out Ad Age’s Article at:

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135152