Feeds for Google Alerts: Learn How To Create Google Alerts!

Last Updated on Thursday, 4 February 2010 09:12 Written by TheAutomator Thursday, 4 February 2010 09:12

Google Alerts can be a great way to keep updated on all the latest happenings on anything you wish!

Google Alerts is quick and simple to setup, simply Click Here and we’ll walk you through it!

Google Alerts

Learn More

Senior Marketers Need Greater Accountability

Last Updated on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 01:20 Written by TheAutomator Tuesday, 2 February 2010 03:00

Posted by randfish I ran across this survey data eMarketer released last week and my heart sank: This first chart looks innocent enough. It's when you look at the next one (from the same report) that things get ugly: As a CEO, an SEO, a web marketer and a participant in social media, this drives me absolutely crazy. The very last item on the list is "conversions, ROI, etc." If your pulse isn't pounding, you might need to cut back on the pharmaceuticals. Absolutely nothing in the analytics world should trump conversions and ROI for "senior marketers" or anyone else who cares about the success of a company. If you're thinking in terms of time on site or unique page views as primary metrics - metrics you'd describe in a survey as being those you're "most interested in" - there's a big problem. The web as a medium is designed to let you capture data beyond number of viewers or engagement level. It lets you track return visits and actions and build sophisticated models that predict what activities will drive up revenue and earnings in the most cost-effective ways. Why let it go to waste? This report from Forrester suggests that the spend on web marketing has a lot of growth, and social media in particular is poised for exceptional CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). But, I'm tremendously concerned that if marketers obsess over metrics like time on site, unique page views and CTR, they'll miss out on the real opportunity of all these channels. ROI should be the ultimate metric - it should be the most important thing on every marketer's mind for every project and every channel. I'll grant that prioritizing the projects and investments that have the highest return is challenging, and even the best do it imperfectly. What worries me is that there are marketers who may be taking their cues not from the great analytics data suggesting that, although first-time visits from social media may have low value, over time, they can drive greater brand engagement, predict higher rates of repeat visits and eventually become buyers and brand evangelists, but from the onslaught of press coverage and media attention around social networks. If you're taking your clues about where to spend your marketing budget from the media, rather than experiments and data, get ready for disappointment. Likewise, if you're measuring the wrong thing, you'll never know the right place to spend those dollars. The beauty of online channels like SEO, landing page testing, conversion rate optimization, email marketing and, yes, social media is that the data tells a story we can read. So long as we're willing to hear the message, we can draw the connections to find the traffic sources that cost less and earn more. We can invest in those until the ROI from them diminishes to a point where other channels become viable. But only if we're paying attention to the metrics that matter. There have been tools, data and experienced professionals in this field, fighting these fights for over a decade now. Tragically, it seems that we're in for a long slog. p.s. We've filled up about 600/1,000 spots for Thursday's PRO webinar on SEO Analytics - feel free to join in :-) Do you like this post? Yes No Learn More

iPad, iPed, iPid, iPod, iPud

Last Updated on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 02:37 Written by TheAutomator Tuesday, 2 February 2010 02:37

Previously only one of those words was an Apple product. After January 26th, however, Apple now sells iPads along with iPods. What may be a silly name or a great name briefly caused a bit of confusion with the search engines.

IPED and IPEDS are acronyms that have quite a few results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, the other spelling brethren to the iPod do not have much meaning. Because of this, all three search engines show spelling corrections for those words and typically include “iPod” search results as well. Today, we still see this for iPud and iPid. And, immediately after the Apple announcement, we saw it for iPad, too.

This was soon corrected, whether naturally or through intervention, in Yahoo and Google. Bing is still showing results for iPod when you search for the new iPad. This instance appears to show a small flaw in the search engine algorithms. How do you quickly add a new term when it had been written off as a typo?

The iPad announcement is the most recent example of this, but many web 2.0 companies experienced the same problem. When companies began to emulate Flickr’s naming convention of adding an ‘r’ to the end of their name, it also confused search engines. Is Snappr a service, or is someone looking for a lawn mower. This is especially apparent when services first launch, which is exactly what we witnessed with the launch of the iPad.

What does that mean for Search Engine Marketers? It means that Google may have a bit more to say about brand names then we would like to think. Is the new product you are launching or marketing a typo for something else? Then you may want to think about a name change. Of course, a strong product can overtake the ‘typo’ designation as they iPad has done in Google and Yahoo, but you may not have the marketing gusto and hype power that Apple carries. If you have flexibility in the name, then do your homework.

It may be time to add “Googleability” to the traditional product naming guidelines. Not only do you need to distinguish your brand from others, but you need to have a brand that isn’t even a close spelling of another product. If I sold a product called a “pespi,” I would be in a world of pain trying to market it online.

We would like to keep the search engines out of these types of processes, and they want to stay out of them as well. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information.” No part of that says anything about governing or changing that information. The unfortunate truth is that online marketing is growing rapidly, and to keep up you need to capitalize on the traffic that Google and the others can drive. So, pick your product names carefully, and market the heck out of them.

Learn More