Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

How to get traffic from Social Media sites

Remember yourself in school, in school, there are various sections/classes for the same batch and each section/class had set of students. Now think of how popular you were among your entire batch students. How many of them knew your name, how many of them were your friends.

Now the question is suppose you join a school today, how long do you think it takes to become popular among your batchmates. What would you do to become popular among batchmates?

If you have answers to these questions, you have answers to promotion on social media network site.

Almost all businesses are looking to promote their business online. All of them are looking to tap the potential of traffic present on the social media sites. However most of them do not have clear strategy or method to proceed.

This method of marketing on social networks is essentially a form of Direct Marketing. I have participated in social networks and would like to share my experience on starting a community on a social networks and media sites. It requires 100% involvement & participation for making it successful just as you would need to start a new business. There is very thin line of difference between communicating to a community and communicating to a single user. You should be clear of what your site has to offer to the audience. Why should people join your community?

Once your community is built to a stage where it can sustain by itself. It requires minimum participation from your end and will reap maximum benefits. However in initial stages it requires all your time, effort, dedication and careful reputation management.

Social Networks & media sites are best place for reputation management and image building activity for big companies.

There are various smart ways to attract audience to join your community. Link Baiting is very hot topic among webmasters, SEOs, link builders.

If you are good at link baiting then you should know want content to be distributed to attract audience.

• Use various content formats such as Videos, Images, Content for keep your community happy

• You can organize contests, puzzles, quizes for engaging the users.

• Understand & know your community group members, their preferences, geo location, profession, Interests.

• Mostly the mode of communication is Email, Scrap book(Message Boards) or Chat.

• Two main areas of management: Managing Content, Managing Users

• Advertise you community on Blogs, Social Media sites and even on PPC program works good. Nobody has tried advertising
  
  References:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/holy-mother-of-linkbait

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitytypes.htm

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Social Media Optimization and Social Media marketing is a phrase used to increase the popularity of your website on various social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, Facebook, The Objective for SMO can be very different such as:

1) Brand Building: You want your website to be popular among Social media users, The idea is there is lot of people using Social networks, Social Media sites. How do you become popular among the users?

2) Reputation Management: To attain leadership in industry. You participate in forums, answers program to build an image of your company.

3) Networking with people in the same industry or related industry again for brand building and reputation management.

4) Building Backlinks and Traffic: Social media optimization’s biggest benefit is backlinks and traffic. Traffic directly from social media sites and traffic search engines due to backlinks from social media sites.

Advantages:

1) Ability to target your Market segment

2) No Media costs

Method:

It is form of viral marketing technique, 3 Success Elements in SMO: Linkability, Visibility/Discoverability, Popularity

It is 50% what you do and 50% what your users do. What your users do will depend on how you build your relationship with your users. For example: By providing an easy access to submit your content on social media sites there is good chance your users will post it, if your content is worthy.Therefore the process of making your website social media complaint is known as social media optimization.

Key features of Social Media Sites:

A) Social Media sites have large number of users, therefore increasing the visibility of your website on these sites will surely have marketing benefits.

B) Social Media sites have lot of information such as user profile data which can be effectively used to rank users, or target a specific set of users for advertising.

C) Social Media sites have high user activity, due which fresh content upload happens at frequent intervals sometimes faster than News & PR sites.

D) Most social media sites has the ability to measure the quality of user generated content/users quantitatively and are transparent to general audience and search engines.

For example Digg gives details on how many diggs on content, who has dug, who has blogged about the content, what are their user profile data. All these details are transparent due to which the quality of the site, quality of users and quality of content can be measured both by users and search engines.Elaborating the points stated by Rohit Bhargava on social media optimization.

· Increase your linkability: Linkability is definitely the first step of optimization wherein users must be able to link to your rich content from other websites/blogs. Every successful website/ online business inherently is aware of this.

· Make tagging and bookmarking easy, submitting content easy: In short this means encourage to people to link to your website or post your content on other sites. As website owner you must encourage your users to link to your content and make the overall process of linking simpler, by few clicks.

· Reward inbound links: When you reward your users by giving a link to them in return of their link, you will encourage them to write more about you. This is very nicely practiced by Google blogs, you can find Google blogs(Adwords blog, Webmaster central blogs etc) linking to every blog who write about them. This encourages blog writers to write more about Google and their latest news.

· Help your content travel: This is another important optimization. If you allow your content travel, you are also generating backlinks wherever your content is published. RSS feeds are great example.

· Encourage the mashup: Mashup is simple algo in which inputs one or more content and outputs a new content using standard functions. Do you know the behavioral pattern of users who visit your website? Find out the behavioral profile of your users:

A) Are they tech savvy?

B) Are they first time internet users?

C) How many of them have a blog?

D) How many of them have Orkut profile, facebook profile?

E) What is their Internet Usage frequency?

F) How many of your website users, have a profile in social media sites?

A website like irctc.co.in may not currently need a social media optimization, but a website like rajshri.com definitely needs one currently. It also depends on how you want to grow as online business and which market segment you want to target in future.

1. Create Valuable and useful content, junk content can never be able to achieve the traffic, rankings you desire. The content must be useful for the users in your market segment, so that your attract quality traffic.

2. Help the social media users to post, rate and review your content.

3. Participate in relevant social media site, and network with people.

Types of Social Media Sites

Various types of social media sites are reviewed on SEO, Traffic, Ease of Optimization: For actively promotion and building your community high participation levels are required in each of the below sites.

1) Bookmarking Sites: Most bookmarking sites are open for crawling; hence getting as many pages in other users bookmark list is beneficial.

2) Social Media Content Rating Sites like Digg, reddit, propeller etc.: The work has to be done in building your network, friends’ circle that diggs your content, only way to attain top rankings is high level of participation in combination with posting high value content.

3) Image Sharing Sites: Upload images, tag effectively, form groups & networks for sharing and tagging.

4) Video Sharing Sites: Sites like Youtube.com, Dailymotion host videos as well allow users to post them on blogs, link to them etc. Additionally there are users viewing your video & posting comments on your video.

5) Social Networks such as Orkut, Facebook etc: Very little SEO value, as most sites are not open for search engine crawlers. Ideal for reputation management.

 

Social Media Optimization cannot be separated with Search Engine Optimization as SEO reaps significant benefits from SMO activities. Moving forward Social Media optimization will be the way to optimize sites, as sites will focus more on personalization, local and building relationship with niche audience.ROI of SMO activities is dependent on what you measure as success. If generating backlinks and ranking on search engines is success for you then you must invest in SMO activities for generating backlinks only.

The question is how do you measure success?

If you have a small website you can measure traffic and backlinks. For this you can set up Google analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversions. Look at traffic from referral sites and you can find traffic from social media sites. Also, you can find increase in rankings for top keywords on search engines.For more study on Social Media Optimization you could find these links useful:

• http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/introduction-to-social-media-optimization.html
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060829-150053
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-optimization-13-rules-of-smo/3734/
• http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/08/new-rules-for-social-media-optimization/
• http://blog.seoptimise.com/2007/02/ultimate-social-media-optimization-list.html
• http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html

This Article was originally found on praveenkodur.comCopyright 2008, All rights reserved by praveenkodur.com.

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Direct traffic is that traffic which has no referrals recorded by your analytics tracking system, therefore there are certain factors which directly or indirectly impact Direct traffic to your site: Direct traffic is generally considered as the type in traffic, Traffic due by BRAND VALUE, they are users who are influenced by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar. This is not entirely true, as any traffic which is not tracked (has no referrals) are considered as direct traffic:

1. Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking

2. SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools

3. Traffic from Bookmarks.

4. A Viral Marketing Campaign

People who take advantage of direct traffic:

Domain name purchasers, typosquatters, cybersquatters whose intention is to purchase a domain name with typo mistake of popular brand, hence hoping to generate traffic. For more information please visit SEOmoz

Affiliate Marketers, Adsense money makers whose main intention is to make money through arbitrage.

Tracking Direct Traffic

Tracking Radio Ads and offline advertising internally: Some advertisers advertise their brand in Radio and give out the URL such as “http://radio.example.com” which is 301 redirected to URL “http://www.example.com/xyz.php?trackingcode=number”. This way the impact of advertising on the channel can be tracked. This will help in comparing the effectiveness between

1. Two different Ads..

2. Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation

3. Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.

4. You could further extend to record Page Views, Time on Site and other details..

Google has launched tracking of Adwords audio campaigns in Google Analytics..

Below is an Interesting Example of my blog: The search engine traffic, referral traffic to my blog can be easily analyzed and explained as they are fairly straightforward. SEO, Referral traffic analysis requires no expert, even a layman can understand if they look at Google Analytics Report. However, the interesting part is the Direct Traffic Analysis, which initially I failed to understand until a few months back, hence I have decided to share this analysis in this Direct Traffic post.

Traffic Details

Traffic Share – Medium Wise

Direct Traffic User Details

What can we analyze from the given data?

What Google Analytics says?

1. 13.97% of users are direct, how are they finding my blog even though there is no offline Ads, no TV Ads, no Radio Ads whatsoever?

2. 49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?

3. Blog has 80.38% bounce rate (for direct visitors) which is high Can we figure out where the problem lies? What is wrong with the site?

4. Average Time by Direct Visitor is 41 seconds. This is a time taken for glancing a webpage, not even reading it.

This means half my direct visitors are new, they glance the page in 41 seconds and most of them leave without doing anything. Not sure how they are finding my site. They mostly visit 1 page of my site and bounce off the site like it was yuck.

Google Analytics does not give any details apart from the above.

Analysis from the above data

The direct users are landing on inner pages of the site. Its very unlikely they are typing the entire URL in the address bar…These Direct Users must be from RSS feeds, bookmarks.

Another data to look at is number of comments.. I get about 12-15 comments in a day most of which are junk and some genuine ones.

1. Users could be clicking on blog posts on their RSS feeds and land on specific page.. They then read and/or post a comment and leave the page.

    

   This is the reason for bounce rate being so high. The users read the blog post and leave; hence bounce rate is not relevant figure to look at.

 

2. Users visit one page and leave, therefore the Average time spent calculated is wrong. Google can only track time correctly if users visit more than one page.The reason being that when a new page is requested from the server then the log files records the time at which the new page was requested from server by the same user.The difference in time at which the page 1 was requested and page 2 was requested is calculated as time spent on the site. So, consider a example when a single page was requested then time spent by user on that page is cannot be determined. Hence average time here is the time spent on site by the users who browsed more than 1 page divided by the total number of users who visited the page.

 

3. Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
   1. They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
   2. Users may be finding the site through Book-marking sites, Social media sites add it to their own bookmarks, where users directly find the link to inner page of the site.

Direct Traffic is the most targeted traffic, as these visitors really read the content on your website.
Most returning visitors return through Direct Traffic, especially when you are not advertising offline. They are ideally the best source for returning visitors, hence business can sell their content easily.

This Article is Originally found at praveenkodur.com

Copyright @ 2007 Praveenkodur.com

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Conversion rate metric is most commonly used by advertisers, publishers for measuring performance of advertising campaigns.

In measurement and benchmarking of conversion rate never make comparison of conversions rates or other metrics between different websites. You often find users quoting statistics like 5% conversion rate in retail industry, 10% conversion rate in services Industry etc..

There are publicly available tools like Fireclickhttp://index.fireclick.com/: or shop.org which contain benchmarks on conversion rate statistics w.r.t to industry.

How accurate is it to fix a conversion rate number for an industry? The comparison of conversion rates is irrelevant & inaccurate, Web site A might have 8% conversion rate and Website B may have 5% conversion Rate for variety of reasons

Difference in Conversion Rates between sites may be dependent on:

1) Branding & Overall Popularity of the site: Web site A may be industry leader; Web site B may be a startup.

2) Products Service Offered.

3) Landing Page Structure

4) Sources of Traffic

5) Seasonal Offers, discounts offered by few sites.

Measuring Conversion Rates (Issues): There are issues in measuring conversion rates.

Latency issue:

a. Users may convert at later point of time; Users may bounce but return after a certain time period to sign up or complete the form.

b. Users may call you on the number displayed on your landing page

c. Users may visit your site and buy offline.

Tracking Issue:

d. Google uses a 30 day cookie

e. Analytics Software may use track differently, (Log file analysis tracks conversions differently using IP based tracking)

f. Deleted Cookies

Incomplete conversions:

g. Users who buy a product but abandon the cart at checkout page.

h. Users who fill incomplete details in form

A user visits your website many times and may be through different channels before making a purchase or converting. Is your business capable of measuring such users?

Reasons for users not converting on the site:

1. The User did not want to visit your site in First place
2. Miscommunication between Ad text and Landing Page
3. The Landing Page did not load
4. The Advertising Traffic was not directed to the Right landing page
5. >Sponsored advertising & external links on landing page may be driving away users

There are various methods to increase conversion rates.

http://www.sherpastore.com/RevisedLandingPageHB.html?8913

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/02/learn-about-landing-page-optimization.html

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/

Other Users

Majority of Users who have landed from advertising channel do not convert. Should we care about them? Yes, because they tell a different story. We can know a lot about our website if we just know the activity of these users online.

How do you measure the activity done by users who did not convert? However advertisers have paid the channel to bring them on their website. Since we are paying to get users on the site, can we identify these users and their actions?

What actions did these users perform?

• Did they click sponsored links, links to external site
• Did they view/navigate to other pages of the site?
• Perform a search on the site.
• Did they view the FAQ, Contact Us, About Us pages?
• Subscribe to Feeds
• Downloaded any content, files.
• Tagging, Bookmarked, Rated any content
• Submitted a Comment

Attributes of these Users that should be measured:

A) The Time Spent by these users on our Site

B) Depth of their Visits

C) Frequency of each Visit (Did they return again to our view the site)

D) How many Unique Visits (Detect unique IPs)

What were these users looking for? The Ad text, keywords and even the channel of advertising can give us a better Idea.

If you are an ecommerce site, find out how many times a user visits your site before making a purchase. And how many users are repeat customers, and through what sources do they visit your site.

Marketing is not about acquiring One Time conversion, it about building relationship. Therefore it is necessary to identify different users online and understand their activity, behavior to value them differently.

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Every Company into Online Marketing and advertising are concerned about their return of investment..

In Search Engine optimization the cost incurred are mainly is on effort, time, agency cost/employee cost. While as in Search Engine Marketing, the costs are Advertising cost(which is CPC, CPA, CPM etc) and the cost of time/effort.

It is necessary to track the value derived from Visitor Engagement on the site and revenue generated,

Visitor Engagement Tracking

Visitor engagement depends on objective and size of the business,

1) Defining Visitor Engagement depends completely on the content present on your web site.

a. On a Shopping site: Engagement has to be product sale, product search etc..

b. On a Blog: It is the number of comments posted, subscribing RSS feeds, Average time spent on the site, No of page views per visit can be engagement metric.

c. On a Corporate Business Site: People might just visit to pick up telephone number, address of the business. Therefore none of the metrics work.

d. On a News Site: It is number of subscription RSS,Email. It is again time spent on article, number of comments posted, no of page views per visit.

e. On a Forum site: Registrations are a value.

f. Software Downloads Site: Number of downloads are a value.

2) Getting Users to Subscribe your RSS feed is a value. These users will read your content more than repeat visitors. It shows the measure of content popularity.

3) Users favourite the page, site in social bookmarking sites, social network & media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com is also a value provided by SEM traffic.

4) If Links to your blog post increases from SEM traffic, due to people positing your link elsewhere in answers etc, then it is a big value..

5) Users might land on specific detail page pick up the phone and dial the number given on page. Measuring telephone call rate is necessary.

6) For smaller business getting targeted traffic to their website is a value, since it adds to brand building etc.. if not sales..

7) For larger websites, brand is already in place, hence traffic which has a direct effect on revenue is more of a value than mere traffic from.

If the mode of revenue generation is advertising then attracting just traffic, might be worth

For small shopping sites setting up ecommerce tracking is very useful and necessary

This can be done by using the option present in Analytics Settings à Profile Settings àEdit. Give details of Currency, decimal places etc.

Tracking Ecommerce Transaction through Google Analytics

Once you opted Ecommerce tracking, you must edit the receipt page, which is the page after transaction, install a script into this page passing the order value into the Analytics system. Google has provided a comprehensive material on setting up ecommerce transaction.

For other business they need to monitor, track the objective of SEM campaigns. If not the engagement of the visitor on the site.

Optimizing SEO, SEM Campaigns

1) Generally Specific Keywords have higher conversion rate but are lower in volume

2) It is important to add as many new specific long tail keywords as possible…it need effort in research on new keywords on regular intervals.

3) The Head of the keyword list is pretty much fixed with little variations but more effort has to be made in making the tail longer…..that is where maximum effort and time as it can change the ROI of the campaigns.

4) Competitive keywords are always costly and extra effort can change CPC minimally…

a. However the efforts has to be done on Landing page creation..

b. Small changes in conversion rate by new landing page optimizations can dramatically increase ROI

5) Constant Generation of long tail keywords and new keywords are always the key…

6) Using different landing pages for each set of keywords is very good

a. Domain name keywords can be landed on home page

b. Category Specific Headings can be landed on respective section on the site

c. Product keywords or Specific keywords must be landed on inner most pages of the site or respective product pages.

7) Make sure your website ranks for all brand terms including the misspellings of your domain name etc..

a. This can be done by creating a page with list of all misspelled keywords

Using Misspellings can be a great way of generating low cost traffic…but remember there can be 2 types of users typing misspellings

a. Users who accidently typed a misspelling, will most likely click on “Did you mean - Correct Spelling”

b. Users who are uneducated or illiterate,

So you need to decide on keeping such keywords based on the quality of traffic you generate

9) For Large Websites tracking of every keyword to last metric of calculating business ROI is essential…For example:

a. Banking website could track the number of savings accounts, number of loans applied per every keyword along other details such as location, amount of loan, income of user and other other quality measurements which will help determine the quality of keyword.

b. This will help them to make a decision of increase bid rates, adding more same kind of keywords etc..

10) Track phone Calls, If you are running a Click to Call Campaign then provide the keyword which generated the call to call center executive. After the call process collect the feedback of the user and measure the business quality of the keyword, which is again fed back into the Adwords campaigns.

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