Which Digital Marketing Channel Should You Lead With?

It may be painfully obvious but you will surely want to go with the channel that gets the [...]]]> In a recent post I discussed the difficulty in picking a digital marketing strategy without having first looked at your analytics.  But once you know the numbers, what do you do?

Which Digital Marketing Channel Should You Lead With?

It may be painfully obvious but you will surely want to go with the channel that gets the most conversions, right? This would seem the logical choice on the surface but let’s dig deeper. Let’s look at the data below and see if we can make some clear choice as to direction.

• PPC – Say your PPC campaign is closing sales at 1.5%,  with an acquisition cost of $6, and your average sale is $150. That gives you a pretty good ROI.
• Affiliate – Your affiliate program is closing sales at a rate of 2% of visits and is costing  you 6% of your cart, with an average order size of $135.
• SEO – You’ve spent on average $2,000 a month on content and SEO efforts and you’re getting about 500 customers from your organic results each month, and growing, with an average order size of $155.

There are of course many more numbers you could look at, but you’ve got some basic details in the above numbers. However the numbers don’t tell you the entire story. In fact, all of these channels, depending on your cost structure are performing pretty well.

Where would you put your money?

Where you put your money would depend on looking at the bigger picture. Here are some questions you’d want to ask about each channel:

PPC

• How much further can you optimize your acquisition cost?
• How much can you increase sales with better landing pages?
• Are there additional keywords you can expand into?
• Do you have the funds to experiment considering that some of the new keywords may not pan out?
• What would your competitors do if you increased your budget to garner the #1 PPC position?

Affiliate

• Are  you putting as much effort into your affiliate channel as you can to maximize exposure withyour top affiliates?
• What woud your competition do if you increased  your comission structure?
• Are you out of affiliates that can effectively sell your product?

SEO

• How well are you holding up for older keywords  you ranked highly for last year?
• How much budget do you have for additional research to determine what new content to create?
• Have you identified new areas of increasing  your SEO position through Social marketing?

In addition to these questions you need to consider the following pros and cons of each:

Pros

• PPC is easy to budget and measure results
• Affiliate channels only cost you money when you make a sale
• SEO results can give you sales for months or years even after stopping all efforts

Cons

• PPC campaings will stop producing revenue the minute you stop spending money.
• Affiliate channels are built on a other peoples sites continuing to rank where they are today. If their rank drops so does their traffic and likely your sales.
• SEO can be a roller coaster ride going from 14th to 4th in a matter of hours.

Risk and Reward

The point is you need to consider all apparent and external forces when considering which channel to increase investment in. All of the 3 channels mentioned can produce great results, depending on your resources, competitors and market position. All have up and down sides that need to be considered. I only scratched the surface on the questions for each channel, you could easily come up with 5-10 more levers to look at in you decision making process for which one to pull.

Gratification is the new rage, or will soon be. According to Gartner Group, by 2015, 70% of all the Global 2000will be actively using gamification in their business and 50% of their innovation process will be gamified.

Current Examples

Most of us have heard of or tried foursquare, the location based check-in [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

Gratification is the new rage, or will soon be. According to Gartner Group, by 2015, 70% of all the Global 2000will be actively using gamification in their business and 50% of their innovation process will be gamified.

Current Examples

Most of us have heard of or tried foursquare, the location based check-in service that makes a game out of checking in to different location. You collect badges and can become Mayor a location which might afford you special offers or awards. Some even classify Facebook and Twitter as a game where you’re collecting friends. Online collection games, search games an other types have been around as long as the internet. Other famous games include Farmville, which uses virtual currency as a motivator.

In addition to collecting badges you can get achievement awards, virtual or real currency and bragging rights to being at the top of a leader board.

Tapping Human Emotion

Games tap human emotion, reinforce desired activities and get people to do things they otherwise might find boring. Being the mayor of your Starbucks or at the top of a leader board gives a sense of accomplishment. This is nothing new. I found that if I timed my daughters 40 yard dashes and chart them, she becomes much more engaged in beating her previous times. Take this same effect and make it social and people will compete with each other for little other than bits on a screen.

Testing the Theory

Anyone wishing to try this without spending a bundle can go to Punchtab and use their gaming engine and see how it works. Let me know what you think. It’s really more of a social media play with a leaderboard but still pretty cool.

Give it a try and tell me if your company is planning to launch any games.

Related articles

• Gamification: Is everything a game? (econsultancy.com)
• With Playboy as proof, Bunchball says gamification works (venturebeat.com)
• By 2015, 50 percent of companies will embrace gamification, Gartner says (venturebeat.com)
• Event Rollup: Gamification At Altimeter Roundtable ” Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social … (seome.me)

So you’ve got a blog or website that allows users to post reviews or comments for your posts or products, good for you. Engaging your site visitors is critical in creating increased visitor loyalty and trust. The additional content is also great for better SEO.

Taming the Spam Beast

As anyone who has ever [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

So you’ve got a blog or website that allows users to post reviews or comments for your posts or products, good for you. Engaging your site visitors is critical in creating increased visitor loyalty and trust. The additional content is also great for better SEO.

Taming the Spam Beast

As anyone who has ever had to deal with comments or reviews knows, dealing with spam can be a full time job. So much so that programs have become popular that allow you to either log in with another ID, like facebook, twitter or linkedIN accounts, or use a third party service that manages commenting across multiple sites like disqus or js-kit.

The advantage of both of these methods is they validate the site visitor and help reduce spam.

Pros and Cons of External Logins and Community Platforms

Pros

• Easy for site visitors to logon
• Reduced spamming with some
• Sometimes visitors are already logged in making it easy to post

Cons

• You may loose control of your visitor database
• If the service goes down, see Twitters uptime reports, you may loose the ability for visitors to log in
• Javascript based systems like disqus and JS-kit cannot be easily scanned by Google so you may get no SEO benefit
• Facebooks comments box has a similar problem as it is loaded in an iFrame, and cannot be crawled (without some programing tricks)

This last con is a significant enough problem for the javascript based programs to not use them on a heavily community based site. As of this writing we are using disqus on nickvalente.com.

Best Bet for Comments

What will work best of you depends on what you’re trying to get from the comments on your site. Using the out of the box comment system in WordPress ,Blogger or your CMS should work fine for most folks who have a thriving monitored community. If however you have low traffic or don’t actively participate in your sites community, consider one of these solutions.

What do you think?

Related articles

• Disqus now enables tagging in comments (techattitude.com)
• Make Facebook Comments Box Indexable by Search Engines (seomoz.org)

The following chart shows all the major aspects of SEO, their underlying factors, and the estimated weight of each. Weight is a 1 [...]]]> In probably one of the best inforgraphics on Search Engine Optimizaiton, SearchEngineLand.com shows the importance of all the major factors at work to create a perfect storm, for a high page ranking site.

The following chart shows all the major aspects of SEO, their underlying factors, and the estimated weight of each. Weight is a 1 – 3 with 3 being the highest adn can be found int eh upper right corner of each block. Note that the estimated weight is of course subjective and can change from moment to moment depending on a number of factors I’ll discuss a bit later.

No doubt this is a great chart and an excellent representation of how all the pieces fit together.

A Higher Level View

Another way to look at these SEO factors is by their relationship to each other. All have a role in making the other work. Consider the following graphic.

Keeping in mid that just ranking high is not enough, this chart follows top down view of a consumer coming to your website. I added Design (design and usability) as a key factor for SEO. Let’s look at it one block at a time.

1. Architecture - Users dont’ see your architecture but without doing it right the rest of the uderlying blocks are at risk. If serach engines cannot crawl your site or if your site loads too slow, then you risk not getting indexed or having a lower number of pages indexed. It also is the key to content success via your content management system.
2. Content - Content rides on top of your architecture. If your Content Management system is too difficult to use, then you’ll get less new, fresh, timely content. Having a good content planning process will help ensure success.
3. Trust -  Assuming you have a good flow of quality content you will be albe to continually attract new users and build trust.
4. Social and Link Building - Social sharing and natural link builidng won’t happen unless you have trust, built upon your good content that was supported by a solid, easy to manage architecture.
5. HTML (TAGS) - This may not seem to make sense to have at the bottom but consider this. The HTML title, description and header tags are realy part of your content strategy, and your first level of marketing. They are also part of the first thing your potential site visitor sees. If they don’t like the title of your listing you may not get them to read the description. If they read the description it better be exactly what they are looking for or they will move on.

Personal & Design

These factors are shown virticaly to show their effect on Content, Trust, Social and In-bound linking.

• Personal - Location, history &  social are also controled by the searchers previous search history, current events and a dozen other factors we dont’ even know about. Therefore I put it as an over-arching factor against the bottom teirs. Being aware of the world around you as well as current search trending will benefit your content creation,  and SEO strategy.
• Design - Design is really design and usability. With the major search engines offering an instant preview of your content, it also has a major effect on someone clicking through to your site.

The Ultimate Goal – A ClickThrough

The realtive values of all the SEO actions combined, and their relationship to each other is critical for SEO success. It is only as good at the weakest link. Keep in mind that the main goal is not to just rank high on a results page, but to get a click through. So mind your relationships well.

Related articles

• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors (searchengineland.com)

Not a month goes by that someone does not ask me about duplicate content and its affect on your rankings in Google, and your social media planning. At lunch a few weeks ago a colleague complained that he is also constantly asked the same question. I thought I’d put together a collection [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

Not a month goes by that someone does not ask me about duplicate content and its affect on your rankings in Google, and your social media planning. At lunch a few weeks ago a colleague complained that he is also constantly asked the same question. I thought I’d put together a collection of posts from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam team, and the Google blog on what Google really things about duplicate content, and how they handle it.

Summary:

1. There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty”.
2. White hat sites have little to worry about, Google is pretty smart.
3. If you repeat a lot of content on your own site, you “may not” get crawled as much, but no penalty.
4. If you syndicate your content to other places like blogs, other sites etc, just be sure to point back to the original post.
5. If other people are copying your content you probably don’t have to worry, determining the original source of the content is something Google is good at.
6. For e-Commerce sites, reduce your duplicate content using site architecture.
7. For mobile sites set up a separate sub-domain to handle the content, then submit it to Google’s Google-bot mobile.

You can see the references below that I’m drawing these 6 points from, along with links to the source.

Conclusion: Don’t let fear of duplicate content affect content or social media strategy

There is no reason most companies should worry about duplicate content. In fact it is recommended that you put your content where the users are who would consume it. Counting on just the folks who show up on your site, is leaving too many potential readers/customers on the table. So create quality content and put together your content & social media plans today with confidence that by following some simple guidelines, duplicate content is not an issue.

Read references below

General info from Matt Cutts on duplicate content

…typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/ From 2008

…In other words, duplicate content on the same URL can result in Google not crawling as many pages from your site. According to Matt, you have a certain “crawl budget” – and allotment of pages they are willing to crawl within your domain.  Having the same content on multiple pages of your website means Google will likely crawl less pages of your site. From 2010

From the Google Bog

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines: From 2008

What about when someone else copies my content?

Are you worried about a duplicate content penalty because someone else copied your content? Here is what Google has to say about duplicate content caused by your content being on someone else’s site.

We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines. This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content. You can of course confront sites that steal your content you can use a DMCA notice

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

On eCommerce sites with duplicate content

Matt says the canonical tag is one answer.  “There are a couple of things to remember here. If you can reduce your duplicate content using site architecture, that’s preferable. The pages you combine don’t have to be complete duplicates, but they really should be conceptual duplicates of the same product, or things that are closely related. People can now do cross-domain rel=canonical, which we announced last December.”

Source: http://www.marketingwords.com/blog/?p=769

What do I do about my mobile site being duplicate content? (From 2011)

There is a great discussion and video on this site that talks about how to keep your mobile site from showing up as duplicate content. Basically the idea is to put your mobile site under a separate subdomain like m.mysite.com. You would then submit this site to googlebot-mobile by creating a Mobile Sitemap.

Source: http://followmattcutts.com/2011/01/18/your-mobile-site-does-not-have-to-be-duplicate-content/

Look at the two examples below taken just 10 minutes apart from each other. What I’m assuming is the test one on [...]]]> It’s 5/6/2011, a Friday night at 10 pm on the East coast. Google constantly experiments with the SERP page to increase its performance metrics, and tonight I seem to have stumbled on to one.

Look at the two examples below taken just 10 minutes apart from each other. What I’m assuming is the test one on the left has a cleaner look, with lots more space around the results. Interestingly there seems to be only one site less on the page for all this extra space.

Take a look at the example screen shots below comparing Google’s SERP results. Event though the search query is not identical the SERP pages are very different. On the left there is a significant space between the top Paid and Organic results, while the space between the right gutter paid results remains the same. They also seem to be playing with the font color, and they removed the cached and similar links.

Take a look.

What do you think? What other changes have you seen Google test recently?

More importantly, how often do you test your site to see if it is performing at its peak potential?