Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

An Internet or web enabled business thrives on the user base who have access to internet, of which who are active online.

The idea of this blog posts and future blog posts is to identify problems in web based business and how analytics can help solve it?

Blogging and Blogs

You have a small blog and spend considerable amount of time updating it, also have spent some money in creating and putting it up live. Measuring the success of a blog is not just pageviews, subscribers and unique visitors count.

ROI of a popular blog can be huge, if you have rich content and have active RSS subscribers. You don’t need a resume. Every popular blogger gets job offers regularly flowing into his email. Above this you have created a brand for yourself. This is a huge economical benefit considering the money and time you spend on make your blog active.  If you have a great blog then you have separate brand and identity for yourself.

Small Scale Business Online

Concentrating on search engine marketing, seo, affiliate marketing to generate profitable visitors to site is fruitful. This is the cheapest form of advertising online. You have control over spends and will be able to monitor your ROI. Set up Google Analytics or any other analytics tool which will help you look at the visitor information.

Conversion University from google is very helpful in optimizing the website for higher conversions and sales (http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77123)

Small scale business must focus their marketing efforts cleverly around geo-locations to get maximum return from marketing & advertising. The site must clearly offer maximum benefit & response to their end users as promised in their USP. Most sites initially work on small set of customer base and keep them satisfied at all circumstances.

These companies are ecommerce sites, shopping sites, travel agent sites that are looking to sell products to their websites’ visitors. They should target at long term steady and consistent growth not looking to achieve instant traffic hoping to dramatically increase page-views and visitor count hoping make revenue quickly and grow faster.

Large Businesses Online

There are various large online website who advertise heavily online & offline for the purpose of promotion. The spend a big amount of money with an objective to increase visitors, page views hoping to increase brand value. It is unwise to spend money on marketing, advertising without looking at the actual value it adds to their users (customers).

Increase in page views and visitors may not proportionally be related to increase in revenue and profit. There are definitely smarter ways to reduce cost of marketing & advertising without impacting the bottomline.

I read about many large advertisers in US & worldwide who have decreased spends on search marketing as it has become unprofitable after a certain limit. They have found search engine optimization, social media marketing ways more effective to gain relevant traffic to their websites for increasing their sales.

Measuring ROI through every channel and making them profitable is very essential and must be the key factor

EXAMPLE:

The traffic to my blog has constant traffic from social media sites like stumbleupon and other social network sites. Few days it has huge spikes of about 2000 hits in a day from stumbleupon alone, totally free traffic.

Blog attracts about 16% of overall traffic from social media sites of which 48% contribution is from Stumbleupon alone.

The cost of promotion on stumbleupon is consuming few hours of time in writing rich useful content and building a network of bloggers, friends & general users. Comparing this with search marketing campaigns, same amount of traffic might have costed me few thousand dollars.

Never be afraid to use new format of media, content for promotions such as Videos, Apps, Images, podcast, audio files, flash files etc. It is just a new form of content by the underlining principle of promotion remains the same.

Reading:

Measuring ROI from SEO : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625973

Measuring ROI from Social Media Marketing: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/measuring-the-roi-from-social-media-marketing.html

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

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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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