Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

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 Online Business, large or small has some few consistent sources of Online traffic to their website. Mainly the Direct Traffic, Sponsored Advertising Traffic and Organic Search Engine traffic.

The Long tail for Traffic Sources can be explained as:

A) Numerous Sources each generating smaller amount of targeted traffic.

B) Cumulatively form a significant percentage of overall traffic.

Advantage of Long tail traffic sources

A) Never be completely dependent on few sources of traffic. Never put all eggs in one basket.

B) Mitigate the risk due to competition & market dynamics.

C) Find New segment of target audience.

a. Forums, Social Networks, New Media formats also attract good amount of targeted traffic.
93% of IT professionals in US find social network helpful for professional solutions.

b. 60% of facebook users login daily.

c. It Industry spends more time in Social Media

How to develop a long tail of traffic sources

A) Optimize sites to support all types of users, media formats (Video, Images, Audio).

B) Do not ignore the needs of even a small percentage of users on your site.

C) Include features in your site for every new type of users as well. For example: Video/Audio/Image content users,

Why the effort?

A) People are increasingly using social media sites like del.icio.us, digg, facebook, answers etc.

B) Support your users to use your product on every social site.

B) Competition on newer traffic sources is less, so it is better to make the first move.

C) It is important to increase the length of the long tail.

D) It is also important to increase the width of the long tail.

D) Develop applications to like Blog, gadget, Facebook application, podcast subscription.

Using the Face Book example, which has more than 230% growth even in countries like India:

A) The idea behind making the site Open to developers was to increase the long tail of traffic.

B) Facebook now supports all type of users & all needs of users.

C) Even the need of small percentage of users to share Books is met by a Book application, which notifies people of best books and rates them. Face book car pool application, Face book Linkedin Application

D) Each application on facebook could have been a new profitable online business altogether.

E) Facebook’s is a collection of multiple brilliant ideas put in one single site. This has exploded the website, traffic, activity and popularity & brand value.

F) Every small & medium business can cash in traffic on Facebook by creating an innovative application for users. By giving freedom to external developers it has allowed them to create products for Facebook. These products meet the needs of even the smallest percentage of users on the site.

G) This is the biggest USP of facebook: satisfying the remote need of the smallest percentage of users with products developed by external developers who in turn get their brand promoted.

Overall Facebook wins by ensuring the long tail grows longer and wider.

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The Indian Online Industry is not even a decade old, that is the reason why people who are holding top positions in Online industry today are from related fields like advertising, Marketing, IT, Technology etc…

There a lot of companies/agencies into online business in India, who are looking to hire people with experience more than the company age or even industry age!

Due to high growth rate & success of existing online companies, new companies have emerged with backing of good VC funding. This has resulted in growth in demand for manpower in online industry both from small companies to large MNCs. This has particularly increased in past 3 years and tends to grow at this rate for few more years.

Online Marketing individuals are assessed on one or more of below marketing skills:

A) Search Engine Marketing

B) Display Media Buying/Media Planning

C) Search Engine Optimization

D) Web Analytics

E) Product Marketing

F) Content/Blog Writers

G) Account Management

There are various Job Boards which are exclusively meant for Online Jobs:

A) Alootechie Job Board,

B) Content Sutra Job Board

H) Internationally the Job Sites for Online Marketing are:

A) Online Marketing Jobs

B) Jobs in Search

C) Marketing Pilgrim

D) E-Consultancy.com

E) Craigslist.org

F) Indeed.com

G) Simplyhired.com

On popular Job sites you can use Keywords from above skills to get various job listings from online companies.

The jobseeker should have understanding of the company’s business before taking the decision of making a career move, more so in the online marketing industry. There can also be a lot of cases where there are high paying jobs available in the market, but you may not appreciate company environment & working style. When looking for jobs in startups or newly established Online Business, be sure that you believe in the company’s business model & vision before making a move.

The Major categories of Companies having presence in Online Industry are:

1) Indian Online Businesses

2) Successful Indian Offline Businesses with Online Presence

3) Indian Online Agencies,

4) BPOs, Web Based Services.

5) MNC online businesses with Indian Operations

Indian Online Businesses

These are companies, which are 100% functioning online. Their business model completely operates online. These companies have been started by Indians and mainly operated in India. There are companies which have back end support of a larger group like Reliance starting out Zapak.com, Yatra.com.

There are other companies who started as small startups and with good VC funding & experience these companies have been operating successfully online for a long duration. For example: Makemytrip.com.

Offline Businesses with Online Presence

There are lot of offline businesses who have been successful in their field of businesses are finding new markets, newer channels of finding & reaching their customers through online media. There is significant awareness among companies which have encouraged them to start their respective online divisions.

Many of the businesses are

A) Traditional newspaper & Print media sites.

(HT, Times, Express & more)

B) Banks and Financial Institutions,

(ICICI, HDFC, LIC and All Major Private Banks)

C) Shopping & Retail Businesses,

(Indiaplaza, Futurebazaar, Ebay, and more)

D) Travel & Tours Businesses.

(Travelguru, Yatra, Ixigo, Cleartrip.com, Makemytrip.com & more)

E) Academic Institutions such as career coaching & counseling.

F) Export & Import Trade Businesses.

Every Top player in above industry has significant online presence and has considerable business coming through online & Internet Media.

Online Agencies

These companies were started initially by single person or group of few people, with major business into providing services to other online companies or assist offline companies in online advertising. There are agencies that are into online marketing services business alone and there are offline ad agencies having a separate online marketing division.

There are Top Agencies such GroupM, Pinstorm, Mediaturf which serve all Top brands in India. There are other US agencies such as Tribal Fusion operating in India. Almost all top offline AD agencies now have a digital arm offering services in Online Advertising & Marketing Activities.

BPOs & Web Based Services

These are companies who operate like normal call centers, provide services to outsourced projects from clients across various countries. They might operate in Indian work timings or other geographic work timings.

There are Top companies such as WNS Global, Technovate, Fareportal, Cleartrip.com and many more.

MNC online businesses with Indian Operations

These are Top companies such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AOL.com, who have setup their Indian Operations. These Companies are mainly looking for best Talent from Top colleges in India, and experienced people from other online companies.

You have to decide on what type of company and what role you would like to work in Online Industry. If you are job seeker in Online Industry, then all the best to your career! Don’t forget to keep reading my blog…

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Google is the first search engine which added value to a link given on a website for assessing the worthiness of a web page. This was the key philosophy in developing its Page Rank algorithm. It was able to identify the interconnectivity through different links connecting millions of web-pages across Internet, thereby giving a value to every web page.

Most online businesses which operate online perform competitive intelligence analysis tracking competitor products, websites, traffic through various tools available both free & paid.

There are very few companies which analyze the link structure of competitor websites. In an offline scenario, a company is always aware of its competitor’s reach & various business links.

Competitive Link Analysis

This is actually a process of identifying various websites which link to your competitor’s website. Analyzing these websites based

A) Theme of Content containing the link

B) Freshness of links,

C) Frequency of new link addition,

D) Number of links from each domain

E) Network Structure of Links

Advantage of Link Analysis

A) Insight into Competitors’ Online Strategies

B) Complete picture of some sources of traffic of competitor’s sites, referral traffic.

C) Competitors Business Links, Business Partners, Online Alliances.

D) Get insight into competitors’ online promotional activities.

E) Find out why your competitor is ranking in Organic Search?

F) Identify new methods of Content Promotion, Link Building.

G) Find new forums, answers programs where your target audience is active.

H) Find sites which are mostly talking about your industry, business.

I) Include these links in Custom Search Engines, so that you perform niche search or filtered sample size to perform your search.

Tools Required for Link Analysis

Build software which can find backlinks of any website,

a. Retrieve content from webpages that contains the link. Like Title Tags, Meta, Headings etc.

b. Compare different Urls.

c. Group Urls based in Location, IP addresses, theme of content.

d. Get Page Rank of the Urls,

e. Categorize Urls based on Domain names, Org sites, education sites. Etc.

f. Categorize Urls Based on number of pages present on that domain, i.e group urls based on small sites, big sites.

g. Ability to split Urls to extract just domain names.

h. Filter domain names, unwanted Urls.

i. Given a Keyword or a Phrase, your software should be able to find maximum occurrences of this phrase on these set of links, as anchor, as content.

Read my further posts on link analysis …..

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Some points comparing SEO & PR which to my opinion has a lot of similarity

1) Search Engine Optimization is technique which is optimize your website for gaining better visibility or ranking in search engines.

2) SEO is free of cost

3) SEO is more of promoting web content. Involves a lot of working on your content.

4) SEO can be done in-house or through an Agency

5) SEO involves making your online content richer with keywords

6) Search engine optimization also involves techniques to promote every event, news about your company so as to be gain online visibility.

7) SEO requires lot of linking which again requires you to get in touch with other websites and build relationships

In SEO there is a simple rule you do not know what you do not know.

9) Getting high visibility always require hard work, knowledge and perseverance.

10) Last but not the least SEO has no direct measurable results.

11) Right SEO can get you brand promotion.

12) If you can do SEO right your site can get promoted by itself.

13) SEO involves constant analysis of how search engines & users view your website

14) SEO involves constant analysis of how your competitors are placed against you on search engines.

Similar comparison of above point’s vis-à-vis Public Relations (PR). I am not very good about knowing what PR is about, however do comment me on if I am wrong somewhere.

1) PR involves always working on your content that offline media picks up about you.

2) Right PR can get your free publicity.

3) PR also involves constant check of what your competitors are saying

4) PR adds to your brand value.

5) PR also cannot give you direct measurable results on increase in awareness, traffic etc.

6) PR also involves constant monitoring of how the media looks at your company.

7) PR equally requires hard work, knowledge & perseverance. No shortcuts to gaining success.

PR involves publicizing and taking leverage of every possible event, news about your company and industry.

9) PR also requires maintaining relationships with other network companies to provide positive support to your standing.

10) PR is done mostly through an Agency

11) PR is more of promoting web content. Involves a lot of working on your content.

These are just few points however SEO involves a lot of technical knowledge and know-how and analyzing how search engines rank websites. Also SEO involves optimizing different forms of content such as video content, news content, Image content, to respective media like video search engines, news search engines, Image search engines etc..

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