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Sarit Harel, Koranga CEO, participates in a TV show every Friday on one of the Israeli main official channels.
Sarit is exploring the online users to the internet world in many aspects and equips them with tips according to the relevant arena.
ppc increase profit
One of the main success measurements of a Google Adwords campaigns is the conversion optimization.
Every site has a goal, whether it is branding or selling a product. A visitor that fulfills this goal is a ‘converted user’. Documenting and analyzing these goals is called a ‘conversion tracking’. Improving the campaign, based on that analyzed data, is called a ‘conversion optimization’.
Conversion optimization is a great way to improve your PPC campaign!
Conversion optimization tracks only part of the purchase funnel. We can track it up to a lead, but a lead continues the funnel process to purchase a product or even more, the visitor’s coming back after a month to purchase another product. Many leads do not convert to a purchase level. Tracking conversions gives us only partial information about the visitor.
Optimizing up to a conversion level can bring many conversions for a good price per conversion, but many of these conversions will not lead to sales, so marketers are actually wasting money on these conversions. Other conversions might cost more, but these visitors actually purchase a product, so these are profitable conversions. Optimizing your campaign according to profit is called profit optimization.
Optimizing your campaign according to profits enables you to improve your profits and your ROI (Return on Investment), rather than improving your conversions. KorAnga, via its technological partner, Kenshoo (www.kenshoo.com) – global leader in online marketing optimisation technology, delivers all the necessary functionalities to enable efficient marketing implementations with profit maximization processes.
What happens if many of your purchases occur over the phone and outside your site? This too is traceable. In order to trace your offline purchases, you need to use an advanced PPC marketing system, such as Kenshoo Search used by KorAnga. Such a system integrates your CRM (Customer Relations Management system) interface with your PPC campaigns running on Google, Yahoo!, Bing and even on Facebook.
Such integrations will ensure tracking every purchase done on your site, whether it is online or offline. The purchase will be tracked to its origins (search term/keyword/referring URL/referring site/ad group/campaign etc.) Kenshoo search system can integrate with phone call tracking systems, to trace direct calls done from your campaigns with no further online interaction.
Tracking conversions via your PPC campaign is a great success factor. But it is not the ultimate one. As your site’s goal is to help your company make a profit, the tracking and optimization should be done in the profit and ROI level rather than the conversion/lead level. KorAnga ensures an efficient budget marketing allocation, and you can get more details at: info@koranga.com
Earlier this week Google Israel hosted it’s forth year celebration convention in Israel. Google invited over 1300 Google adwords advertisers to attend lectures and have Google adwords experts review their campaigns. Among those Google adwords experts were 2 Koranga representatives.
It was a great honor to be acknowledged by Google as an expert, and even a bigger honor to be personally invited by Google Israel to help their advertisers.
The Google adwords advertisers who came to the convention varied between high-tech in house campaign managers and cupboard carpenters who manage their own campaigns. It was quite challenging to help each advertiser optimize their campaign. Sadly there was not enough time to invest in every advertiser and we could only help with basic optimization tips.
In order to optimize the campaigns, we created a checklist which might help you optimize your own campaign.
Before you go on with this checklist you should go over the Google Adwords University presentations
PPC campaign optimization checklist:
The client:
- Know your client – who is your client? How old is he? Is he male or female? What is his income? Where can you find him on the internet? What are his surfing habits?
- Know your product – what are your products benefits? What is its unique selling proposition (USP)? How does it apply to your client?
- Campaign goals – what are your campaign goals? Is it to receive more conversions? Lower the Cost Per Action? Etc.
- Internet site – Is your internet site user friendly? Does it match your goals? Does it have a clear call to action? Is it designed correctly?
The account:
- Good and bad – What are the good elements in your adwords account? What are the bad ones?
- Account preferences – Are your Google adwords account preferences correct? Is your geo/network targeting correct? Does your account budget match your cost?
The campaign level:
- Campaign structure – How is the campaign structured? Is it by geographic location? Is it by subject?
- Content network – Is there a content network campaign? Is there a placement campaign? Do the content/placement campaigns have a variety of ads and banners? Are the content & placement campaigns separate from the search campaigns and from each other?
- Campaign settings – Are the campaign settings appropriate?
- Daily budget – Is the daily budget exhausted on a daily basis? At What time of the day?>
Ad group level:
- Ad group structure – What is the rationale behind the ad group structure?
- Number of keywords in each ad group – Is there a maximum of 50 keywords in each ad group?
- Relevancy – Is there a connection between the keyword, ad content and landing page content.
- Ads – Do the ads have a clear call to action? Do the ads use dynamic keywords? Does each ad group have at least 2 ads? Are the ads optimized?
Keyword level:
- Keyword performance report – Are there words which are not displayed because of low budget? Are there relevant keywords with low ranking? Do the words have a good quality score?
- Search Query report – Find new keyword opportunities, find new negative keywords.
Conversion & tracking:
- Conversions – Do you measure conversion? Do you use conversion optimizer?
- Google Analytics – Is your adwords account connected to your Google analytics account?
After reviewing this PPC campaign optimization checklist, you should ask yourself: how can I improve the campaigns so it will reach my goals? Of course you should set viable goals and not imaginary ones. You should review the whole flow of your marketing efforts from the campaign level via the user behavior on your site until the conversion.
As you all must already know, Google unleashed their new creation “Google Buzz”, Why?
To kill, without mercy, the time on site of social monsters like Twitter and Facebook, Why?
To bring people back to Gmail and other Google tools that have been somewhat neglected by the common user.
Let me extrapolate;
We used e-mails, SMS and Instant Messaging applications (IM) to communicate (I could go back to snail mail days and pigeons, but give me a break), and when we wanted to hear the persons voice we would call him, Today, however, it works differently?
I send private messages to friends instead of emails (use my Gmail mainly to sign up to websites), the only time I would use an email is when I want to attach files to it, something that Social Media networks are not offering yet (and users eagerly await) in their private messaging features. And yes, I know that I can throw them on public file dumps, but it’s a hassle that I usually avoid.
I calculated meself and confirmed by my colleagues that if you have a surfing package on your mobile phone, it is cheaper to surf to Facebook and post something on a person’s wall or send them a private message in comparison to sending a regular SMS (text message).
IM’s are also struggling to survive, with ICQ unleashing a new version that offers updates and notification from all the mainstream Social Media networks and Windows Live Messenger offering their version of status updates (that I personally never use). The main reason for their struggle is the fact that Twitter updates so fast that you almost feel like you are surfing an IM and Facebook, they have Facebook chat just like MySpace, so there is really no reason to use any IM software besides Skype, and this will also end once there will be an integration of a similar voice service in one of the Social Media networks.
And in terms of voice calls, well this is my own speculation, the more features a Social Media network offers the less you actually call people, especially when you are near a computer. If I really need to make a call it would usually be done outside the house when I need to verify something or notify someone about something that is very urgent. In most other cases I would just send a private message, post something on Facebook or tweet.
Google are trying to take all the Facebook junkies (Please admit your addiction, this the first step to recovery), and move them to Gmail, by offering them the power to share, communicate and explore like never before. Here we are seeing that Google are ‘cheating’, unlike Google Wave that crahed on the online ‘Wave Breakers’ by having people react; “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?” Now they are taking the huge amounts of Gmail users and just adding Buzz to their accounts, in other words they are recycling their Gmail users into a new service without the need for a signup or anything. Just click the button asking if you would like to check out buzz. This is done with a great call to action (CTA) focus on a very nice and vibrant button, with a plain text button saying “nah, just get me to my inbox”.
The problem is, because I rarely use Gmail, I actually have no followers, and my only option to get them is by name or email…I sense another Wave Breaker coming Google’s way.
I would like to finish by saying one simple thing, the only thing that can kill the iPhone is a better iPhone, and the only thing that will kill the massive Social Media networks will be a better Social Media Network. So next time you want to kill something huge in size go play “God of War” or something.
In the monetization arena the publisher’s playing ground is a result of two elements, the quality and quantity of their generated traffic. Traffic is measured in several ways; there is raw data available from analytics and other traffic tracking and rating report agencies such as QuantCast and comScore. Amongst others, data can range from; Reach, Page Views, Unique Visitors, Number of Visits, average Page Views per Visit, Geo Location and Language, Browser type, Demographics, even Behavioral and ultimately, when you display advertising on your website, Ad Impressions count.
The online advertising industry grew too enable publishers to realize positive monetary financial gains by leveraging their traffic. Granted, there are other revenue generating business models such as monthly subscriptions and other pay walls, nonetheless some online publishers have opted to remain free and assimilated themselves into the embrace comforting blanketed upon them by CPM advertising.
CPM, or Cost per Mille (one thousand), is a crude traffic measuring method of market forces attempting to value eye balls. We do not know what someone is doing or thinking, perceiving or impressed with visually (or other stimuli) when a pair of eyeballs happen to cross over the sweet ad banner matrix of pixels glaring at them in their home or office.
Large publishers generate large amounts of traffic. The ad impression Quantity is an element that is more then less a dry objective observance, well mostly at least. It is as objective as per the trustworthiness of the market accepted ratings agencies and the reports they generate and distribute, usually for a fee. Quality of traffic, on the other hand, is as subjective as consensus, and is the reason for the large gaps between CPM prices quoted by advertisers and publishers alike.
More often than not, large publishers are mostly unable to sell their entire ad inventory directly. Recently a report by the Rubicon Project, an Ad Network management service, suggested that large publishers have a hard time selling directly on average more than 15% of their monthly bounty. That leaves a remainder, where the lion’s share of the catch is sold into the marketplace; this remainder is known as remnant inventory. Remnant ad impression inventory can be sold to Ad Networks or even to Ad Exchanges, the secondary market where Ad Networks trade amongst themselves.
This online advertising marketplace is like any marketplace. Different parties, selling what appears to be many units of the same products to each other. Publishers sell their traffic to Advertisers, and like all marketplaces enter the middle men; Ad Networks. Ad Networks are all traffic traders, looking to unload products onto their publishers and advertisers customers/clients. The successful Ad Networks are the ones that do the best job matching a portfolio of publishers with a portfolio of advertisers. The CPM model allows publishers to unload inventory in the crudest way, usually en mass and in bulk. A publisher that sells his entire ad impression inventory maximizes his eye balls earning potential. CPM sellout allows the publisher to return to his core business, publishing content and increasing traffic to the website.
Advertisers on the other hand have one main goal – grow sales. More often then not, since banner display advertising, although interactive (by a click), remains as a passive form, as opposed to a more intended and user initiated searched result. Advertisers, being the performance oriented bunch that they are, resist the publisher’s demands for inventory pricing based on eyeballs (CPM) and seek a model that provides as much quality elements over quantifiable ones. Performance based advertising such as Affiliate Marketing, Cost-per-Action (CPA), Cost-per-Lead (CPL) and Cost-per-Click (CPC) all rest upon qualitative performance metrics. Here the advertiser doesn’t care about how many eyeballs may (or may not) scan over a banner; they constantly try to tie the publisher deeper into their sales funnel.
Large publishers seeking to maximize their revenues should focus on their core strength, the content they publish. These publishers have a hard enough time marketing their own content across the internet and should not be lured in by performance driven advertisers seeking to lure them into marketing the advertisers brand and products as well. It should be the advertiser’s responsibility to take care of the sales funnel, not the large publisher. CPM based transactions stands as the best monetization position for large publishers, except maybe for a direct acquisition or partnership. A large publisher should stress the potential Brand Awareness his visitor audience can give the Advertiser and charge in CPM.
The Ad Networks pony up to the publishers and seek to help the advertisers in improving their sales funnel as best they can. As the Ad Networks grow larger and gain more audiences then any one publisher can amass, they begin to analyze the data that they transact with. Learning more about the audiences they serve too, they can better assist Advertisers in converting those potential eyeballs into desired actions. This relinquishes the publishers from the qualitative burdens the advertiser wishes to set upon them; the Ad Network is better positioned to handle them anyway.
SEO is one of the biggest marketing buzz words in the last few years. Many companies approach Search Engine Marketing agencies, and in turn these agencies encourage the companies to invest part of their marketing budget on SEO. However, SEO isn’t relevant for every company, and investing marketing budget into SEO efforts could result in wasting valuable budget which could have been directed elsewhere.
Don’t get me wrong. SEO is important – just not for everyone.
First of all lets consider your field of activity, if you are a business directed at other businesses (B2B) most likely you will have to reach your target audience with other methods such as Social Media Marketing (SMM) and even a direct approach. Second, we need to check out the search volume of various relevant keywords and key phrases, you can use the Google keyword tool to do so.
If your phrases have a high search volume you should check their relevancy and competition, both these terms need to be taken literally and their weight in determining the SERP is a trade secret of the If they are too general try and focus and phrases which are more relevant. If the competition is high, try checking different kinds of phrases. Usually it is recommended to focus on a bulk of long tail keywords so you will get highly relevant and focused traffic rather than focusing on one general keyword.
If your phrases have a low search volume, your site, service or product is in a small niche. In this case you should try and find keywords or phrases with higher search volume. Failure to find such keywords is an indication that SEO is not for you. Either way, you should consider the ROI you will get from your SEO investment.
To calculate your SEO ROI you need the following data: monthly traffic, expected traffic increase (this depends on your industry and the SEO level of your site), traffic conversion percentage (calculation of total purchases/conversions divided by total traffic), average purchase per user. This data can help with calculating your expected revenue from your SEO efforts, and then you need to divide it to by your annual SEO expenses to get your ROI.
If the ROI is bigger than 1, your SEO efforts will bring a profit. If your ROI is 0-1 you should consider other online marketing strategies or lower your SEO expenses.
Finally it is recommended you should focus on high quality traffic, conversions and conversion rates rather than focusing on rankings.
Even though you decided SEO is not a viable marketing strategy for your business, you can still use some basic SEO methods to improve your traffic.
- Build a basic SEO friendly site
- Register your XML sitemap to the Google Webmaster tools
- Include relevant textual content on your site
- Define your target audience and focus on building a great site for this audience.
There are many alternative online marketing strategies you can use to approach your target audience. Social Media Marketing tools enable you to find the arenas of activity of your target audience, taking part in these arenas will bring you closer to that audience. PPC campaigns (sponsored links on search result pages) will help you bring immediate traffic to your site (also great for testing). Content campaigns are good branding tools, so are media campaign. PPC, content and Media campaigns are good for any kind of budget, small or big, which will generate different amounts of traffic respectively.
We already know that today’s user is not ‘into’ blogging, well the user is not really blogging for a long time now, people have Video Blogs, gathering millions of views and exposure for themselves and their ideas People use Facebook Notes to write about what they have to say, create groups and fan pages to the most mundane things such as: “Feeling like a ninja when I drop something and catch it.” gaining over half a million fans (and this is not the most silly thing you may find).
Someone once said that, “one day we will look back and realize that we became fans of the most stupid things ever, like brushing our teeth or eating a banana”. And this is true, look at all the profiles you follow on Twitter, look at all the pages and groups that you are listed in, we become fans of the most trivial day to day things, and we are ALL loving it!
So when recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that only 14% of users between the ages of 12-17 are using blogs (about a quarter less than in the years previous to 2006) and that only half of them actually bother leaving comments, a number that is 75% lower than the numbers 4 years ago. Yet the more adult audience is following in a steady stream. There is reason to believe that 1 out of every 10 adults is writing a blog, a number that has seen no changes since 2005. This means that in the US alone there are more than 30 million adults that are writing a blog, up from nearly zero a decade ago. Those numbers did see a very nice increase in the past few years showing that the percentage of users who are over the age of 30 and are writing a blog rose from 7% in 2007 to 11% in 2009.
Once spamming comments in blogs was something that was left for the gloomy Black-Hat SEO people, all the teens moved to their new homes, the Social Media Networks. Which currently house more than 75% of the young users in the internet, compared to the 55% occupation four years ago.
The social media spammers didn’t wait long to follow, they were just waiting for ways to do that.
Unlike blogs where you create your identity in seconds by typing in some basic information about yourself inside 3 letter boxes, the social media world is much more complex, you need to build trust, and this takes time and effort. Forcing the less complex and “thinking out of the box” spammers have little to no success in that field, while several others are doing just fine. Zombie is a term attributed to a fake profile or user on a social media website. Why Zombies? Well it’s quite simple, they look alive in terms of communication, they are doing things, yet on a very low and basic level. They are not very bright and yeah, they sort of have ‘no brains’. After all they are operated either by a very tech savvy and multi tasking social media marketing (SMM) manager or by a pre-scheduled machine, making their behavior very linear and predictable.
Zombies are great things to have, they can be used to monitor your brand on various social media arenas. They are a great tool for viral marketing by having them spread the content saying how amazing it is, just like a Zombie would spread its disease. They are even better when they are working together as a team or should I say swarm, just like in the “Dawn of the living Dead” movies, the more zombies you have, the easier it is to take over areas and dominate them with a “Brutal Zombie Force“.
Zombies can be used for evil as well as good, and by good I mean brand monitoring and things that don’t make people want to take a shotgun and go hunting for you (for the Zombie that you are). The Evil side of your dark minions comes into play when Spammers take the wheel, and then things get messy.
I have more than once received messages from seemingly sweet college girls that are offering me to go and chat with them somewhere else because she just happens to have to leave the computer, but she will defiantly continue chatting with me over at XXX (substitue a bit.ly link to an adult site instead of XXX). Then clients ask ,and not once; “Do you think they get conversions from that kind of activity?” and it took me a while to come up with an answer, and I think that it is YES, they certainly do. This is not the best way to bring traffic, and I am sure that the bounce rate will be enormous but people click!
If you were roaming the cyberplane when ’mIRC‘ was dominating it, with its revolutionary underground users and infamous BOTS, then you know why this sort of tactic converts. The same happened in various chat services with a strong emphasis on Yahoo! chat, which was extremely popular at the time. The more advanced and experienced users, or those who already clicked once and understood the drill with those links, know not to click them again. Yet there will always be those who got what they were looking for, and will click those links over and over. What about monetizing from that traffic? I would estimate and please don’t take my word for it, but I think it’s somewhere around the same as a standard untargeted display banner or even less coupled with an insanely high bounce rate.
“My Ex-Girlfriend Cheated on me… Here is my revenge!”, this is the title that so many people had on their walls in Facebook. Showing just how many people fell into that honey trap. The thing with the girlfriend revenge virus is its ability to virally spread itself from one user to the other, let me explain. You see that message saying that your friend’s really hot ex-girlfriend that you have never heard of or ever seen in your life was cheating on him, and to avenge his manhood he will now use all their private video sessions and images that can make you drool like a Pavlovian dog. Oh yes embracement like this is the sweetest revenge of them all. Every time one of your interested friends clicks that status, he gets it pasted on his wall as well. By using the main purpose of Social media, this Revenge worm didn’t do anyone any damage, yet people who were curious enough to click the link are advised to remove the post from their wall and to change the password due to the risk of Facebook identity theft. Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook, told Mashable that the whole worm was executed with some smart use of CSS and an iFrame, triggering the “Share event” feature every time the link was clicked.
More attacks were listed on the social media world, “Koobface” was the one that sent you messages asking things like: “Are you sure this is your first acting experience?”, “Is it u there?”, “impressive. I’m sure it’s you on this video”, “How can anyone get so busted by a spy camera?” and “You’re the whole show! I’m admired with you.” I think that once even I clicked a message of that type (no thanks for a good antivirus and basic common sense) yet no harm was done. The thing about “Koobface” is that it would send you to a YouTube like video, and once you try to watch it, the website will ask you to install a new version of Adobe flash player. Skilled power users will go to the original Adobe website for the install, or will straight forward feel suspicious about the whole thing. Yet once you install the “New Adobe player” you get infected and the cycle begins once again but this time you are sending the messages to your friends.
Cases of profile phishing were the most common, with a massive phishing wave that struck Myspace several years ago.
Here are some basic things and rules to follow when being attacked by Zombies:
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