What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of an ad campaign? How do you go about measuring it? Which attribution models work best for your sales process?
These are some of the things I was working on this afternoon which led me to ponder the following relationship. As you start to think of the ROI question, it sounds very straight forward.
Return on Investment = (Gain – Investment) / Investment
Then you begin to realize that there are a lot of different ways to define each of these. And what about the interplay between the various ad campaign investments? Where does it end?
It’s not until you work it through further that it becomes clearer once again.
Why do humans abandon projects just before they’re finished? In this talk, recorded at the 99% Conference, Seth Godin explains how our fearful “lizard brain” often gets in the way of success.
Here’s a shout out to @w_chris_davies who first pointed out this talk to me.
You go through the ritual once every couple of days. Unless you have auto-follow, that is.
How do you decide whether or not to follow someone back on Twitter? I fielded the question on Twitter and here are some of the responses I got.
@CWarfield:shared interests; no spam or useless “eating a ham sando” posts
@rtstrategy: re following back: educational/entertaining content & signs they are engaging.
@alewi854:They need a good bio and tweet regularly RT @andrewspoeth: what do you look for when considering to follow someone back?
@walkerjill:but not tweet TOO MUCH! RT @alewi854 good bio & tweet regularly RT @andrewspoeth what do you look for when considering to follow ppl back?
Take a look at your newest followers in Twitter and decide who to follow back. My process involves a CTRL+click on each profile name to open up a new tab for each person. Next, I scan profile information and tweet stream. Looking at these, I consider:
1. Interests of the Twitterer
How closely do they match mine. I tend to keep open to various interests, unless it’s something like sharing wealth or getting rich quickly.
2. Follower count
I don’t look for a large number of followers. More important is a balance between Following and Followers. If the person is following way more than being followed, it’s a red flag.
3. Tweet volume
Check number of tweets against number of followers. If this person’s tweet volume far exceeds the number of people who follow them, it’s likely an indication of boring tweets.
4. Quality of content
What would be described as quality on Twitter? I personally look for tweets that are:
thought provoking
funny
resourceful
current
generous
engaging
A twitterer should have a healthy balance between original content, retweets, and engagement with others. It’s also encouraging to see the occasional question – an indication this twitterer is interested in listenting.
Redesigning a website can be a lengthy, complicated process. Done properly, it can give a dramatic boost you your online presence. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure, and pain, of being a part of several redesign projects.
Here is a checklist for website redesign, a series of steps that developers will go through in a successful redesign project.
Document the reasons you’re redesigning the website.
Having these listed will act as a compass through the lengthy project. When things get stressful, you’ll want this reminder.
Test the old site, e.g. with an online intercept survey.
How easily can users find key parts of the site? Other testing methods include focus groups and eye tracking. For the survey, get enough data to make it statistically relevant. The qualitative, descriptive feedback from one-on-one sessions with customers is also very valuable.
Conduct a baseline analysis of the old site.
A baseline analysis is a document which sets the bar by which the future site will be measured. It should detail how the old site has performed over the past year, including key performance indicators like visitors, bounce rate, conversion rates, pages/visit, etc.
Set targets for the new site.
These should be actual numbers and be based on the baseline mentioned above.
Hire a design company.
Choose a company which has experience in your industry and has demonstrated success in the past. Do they ask you the right questions? Do they understand your customer? Do they deliver on budget and on schedule?
Map out the new site’s architecture.
Work on a whiteboard or a blank piece of paper. Use one box per web page, starting with the home page on top. Draw lines between the pages to show logical connections. An alternative process, called Card Sorting, starts with cue cards. Create one cue card per web page, lay them out on a large table and start grouping and arranging them.
When mapping out the architecture, remember to keep the site compact, i.e. don’t create too many levels. This is bad for usability and bad for search engine optimization.
Do keyword research.
Consider words being used by your customers, at conferences, etc. Take a look at your old site’s analytics to determine which keywords have been bringing traffic from the search engines, especially traffic that converts into real business. Also consider third party tools like Google’s Search-based keyword tool, Seo Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. And don’t forget Google Trends.
How long should your keyword list be? That depends on your business model. But in most circumstances, a list of 20-30 is a great start.
Audit all of your existing online collateral.
This includes all old and existing web pages, online brochures, podcasts, etc. Make a list in Excel and leave a couple of columns for notes and an instructions, e.g. ‘keep’, ‘keep but edit’, or ‘throw away’. B2B sites should also make room for columns to describe the type of buyer that web page appeals to, e.g. technical buyer, economic buyer, and when in the buying process that web page would best be viewed, i.e. Phase I: Awareness of Problem, Phase II: Researching a Solution, etc.
Write content for the new site.
Each page should have a clear purpose, give an opportunity to continue, and be optimized for 1-2 keywords identified in number 7 above.
Create wireframes, mock-ups, etc.
Carried out for the most part by your design company, this is where your combined knowledge of the target market turns into a creative and user friendly design which works. Have the design company give you at least a couple of unique designs for the home page to choose from.
Test the mock-ups for usability. Let some customers loose on these mock-ups. The pages only need minor functionality for now, e.g. be able to click on a couple of key areas. Make note of how easily and quickly key parts can be found.
Fix, adjust and iterate
Based on the results of your tests, iterate until you have a design which you can live with for the next 2 – 3 years.
Build out and populate pages.
A lot of this may be handled by the web design company. Take all of the freshly written content and place it in the built pages. When choosing file and folder names for pages, consider using the keywords you identified in the keyword research stage above.
Organic optimization (SEO)
You’ve already written the content and used the right keywords. Now is the time to take it further by ensuring that each page’s title, description and header tags do the same. Include links between pages. Interlinking is great for usability and great for search engine spiderability.
Don’t forget to create a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps, one which is on your site and visible to the user, and one which is visible only to the search engines (an XML Sitemap).
And, don’t forget inbound links coming to some of the old site’s pages. Put a redirect in place for each of those so the new visitors, and link power, know where to go.
Testing. Try to break it before the site is launched.
Get a large group of people you trust to poke around, find broken links, etc. Use various browsers, operating systems, look at it on a smart phone.
Add tracking code to each web page.
This will ensure you can measure what’s happening with the new site. For tracking software like Google Analytics, it will be a fairly easy process, i.e. same tracking code on each page which can be applied in the footer.
Launch day. Flick the switch, uncork the champagne.
Don’t forget to take a screen shot of the old site.
Post-launch monitoring
Make a schedule and force yourself to note the key stats at regular intervals after the site is launched. For the first few days, do it every day. After that, weekly. If you have budget, do a second intercept survey (see #2 above).
Take the time to create a Content Development / Maintenance plan. Use a calendar and map out when you’ll be adding new content. How often will the ‘latest events’ section be updated? Who will update it? When will you review the product descriptions? Or case studies?
Twitter is reaching a significant milestone. At nearly 50 million tweets per day, the average output of Twitter users has climbed dramatically over the past year.
@kevinweil in his post on Twitter’s blog puts this in perspective. 50 million tweets per day equals roughly 600 new tweets every second. A year ago, average output was 30 per second. Looking back further, we get closer to Twitter’s very beginnings.
It wasn’t long ago that Twitter allowed you to see a feed of all tweets on your Twitter home page. Anyone remember those days?
Looking at the graph above, one wonders what happened at the inflection point around April 2009. Was it the Ashton Kutsher/CNN race to 1,000,000 followers? Was it Oprah signing up for Twitter? Or was it a combination of elements creating the perfect storm?
Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the much-anticipated Apple iPad. The internet has been buzzing with speculation over the past few weeks at the prospect of this announcement. Many were calling it the iTablet, some thought it would be the iSlate. The Wall Street Journal humorously noted that the “last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”
But this morning it became official.
What is the new Applie iPad?
The iPad is a content consumption device that will likely pave the way to a new category of devices, something that fits in between the smart phone and the laptop.
Apple lists the full specs of the iPad on its site. In many ways it is like a giant iPod Touch, including WiFi and 3G internet access.
Here are five of my favorite iPad features:
- multi-touch interface
- sharp looking LED display
- 10 hrs battery life, a month of standby life
- maps that also include Google street view
- the iBookstore (ePub format)
There are some things that the iPad still can’t do, such as:
- play Flash
- multi-task, e.g. you can’t listen to Pandora while writing an email
One of the most talked about features of the iPad is the iBookstore. Apple already has several publisher deals in place, and many more will likely follow. So the question that follows is, will the iPad be a Kindle killer? What will it do to Sony’s eBook?
And with the iPad infringe on the netbook market?
The entry price for the iPad was a pleasant surprise and lower than expected, at $499. It looks like Apple has learned form its experience with the iPhone where it entered the market slightly higher than it should have.
iPhone and iPod Touch owners will still be able to play all of the apps (currently just over 140,000) that are available for those devices, on the iPad. And app developers will be able to design separate apps which utilize the full capabilities of the iPad’s superior graphics and touch screen.
What’s next for the iPad?
Well, first there’s the wait. According to today’s announcement, it will be available 60 days from now in the US.
Once available, it will be more than interesting to see how the market handles the iPad. And if it succeeds, this tablet device will likely be the first generation of many more to come.
In case you hadn’t heard, or seen, Bill Gates launched his own website last week called The Gates Notes. Bill Gates’ new website allows you to “stay up to date on where Bill is at, what Bill is learning and what is on his mind.” The Twittersphere welcomed Bill Gates last week as well. In case you’re not following him, Bill Gates’ Twitter username is, unsurprisingly, @billgates.
So back to Danny Sullivan’s critique of The Gates Notes. Danny starts off by showing the Search Results Page for the query ‘bill gates blog’. The results show his blog listed in the top 10 in Google, but being outranked by some fake Bill Gates blogs. Interestingly, in Bing, his new blog didn’t show up at all in the top 10.
The blog post proceeds with a well-laid-out walk through SEO 101. And the example he uses happens to be the founder of Microsoft, the world’s second richest man who has just started blogging and tweeting. It points out the importance of:
- relevant title tags
- description tags
- unique title tags for each web page
- the power of inbound links, even from Twitter
I’ve just taken a look at The Gates Notes site and it looks like some changes have already been made to the Bill Gates site. Back on his blog post, Danny Sullivan is taking some heat, but also a lot of well deserved praise in the comments section. And it looks like Bill reached out to him on Twitter as well:
I normally don’t stray too far from marketing when I post on this blog, but this is too beautiful to not re-publish. This time-lapse video collage of downtown Vancouver captures the beauty of one of the best cities in the world. The filming is fantastic and interplay of light, water, fog and frost is mesmerizing.
Being a Vancouverite by birth, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride with the upcoming 2010 Olympics. You can feel the momentum picking up as the Olympic games draw closer every day.
Just a few days ago, we were circulating this video around the office at Enquiro. It’s a new commercial from Tourism BC, a client of ours, titled You Gotta Be Here in 2010. Enjoy!
If you’re interested in the future of Search and have got an hour and a half to spare, I highly recommend sitting down with your favorite beverage and watching this video.
In this video, Google presents their most significant product releases of the year, including real time search.
Marissa Mayer starts off by presenting four main areas of innovation at Google:
1. Modalities
How people search, e.g. mobile devices, voice search, search by taking a picture 2. Media
The types of media appearing in search results, e.g. maps, books, video, news 3. Language
Translation services which open up the world’s content to people of all languages 4. Personalization
Search results with higher relevance based on your location, social networks, etc.
Later in the talk, Google Fellow Amit Singhal talks about the huge relevancy challenges faced when delivering search results, especially now with real time search. He shared Google’s 4 pillars of search delivery:
Comprehensiveness,
Relevancy,
User Experience, and
Speed,
with relevancy becoming more and more difficult. The audience poses several important questions near the end of the presentation, including the question of whether Google uses the same algorithm to rank its general index as its real time results.
Real Time Search is being rolled out gradually for all users over the next few weeks. Whether these results appear or not will depend on the keyword used. There is a way to see real time search results right away, through Google Trends.
Andrew Spoeth is Enquiro's director of marketing, with interests in B2B marketing, social media, the psychology of leadership, and just about everything else you can point a finger at.
