Internet Marketing and Digital Strategy Blog
Posts tagged Website ROI
Social Media insights
Jun 20th
PEW Internet & America Life Project released their latest report on Social Networking sites and our lives. Sites reviewed included mainly the following:
- MySpace
Key takeouts include the following:
Usage of social media:
- Usage had doubled since 2008
- Average age of user has gone from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010 (The older you are the later you adopt?)
- 56% of users are female, 12% more in 2010 than in 2008
- Most females are on Twitter as proportion of users
- The males are all on LinkedIn
- 92% use Facebook
- 52% and 33% of Facebook and Twitter users, use the platform daily
- Largest growing age group is 50-65 year old
- The young folk have either moved or are not bothering much with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace at the moment
What are they doing on Facebook?
- Commenting (42%)
- Liking content (26%)
- Updating their status (15%)
- Sending private messages (10%)
Who are their Facebook Friends?
- High school (22%) – boring
- Family (20%)
- Co – workers (10%)
- College friends (9%)
- Other (39%) – seems like a lot?
Only 3% of friends generally have not been met in person.
Australian Social media Stats
Sensis and AMIA have also one a report here. Key findings were:
- 62% of internet users have a presence on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn.
- Facebook captures 97% of social networking users and 60% of all internet users.
- The average Facebook user spends more than five hours a week on the site.
- The top reasons people use social media are catching up with friends and family, sharing photos or videos, and coordinating social events.
- Many consumers take no notice of advertising on social networking sites.
- 12% of social media users said they use social networks for researching products, 36% said that the last time they used social media to research a product or service resulted in a purchase.
- The types of products and services most commonly researched on social networking sites are clothing/fashion, electrical goods, furniture/things for the home, computers/software and music.
- Social media users are most interested in what businesses can give them in the form of discounts (57%), giveaways (45%), invitations to events (41%) and product information (41%).
- Blogs and reviews have a notable influence on buying decisions, with 63% of social media users reading reviews before making a purchase decision.
- On average, people read six reviews before making a decision. However, only 24% of online users post blogs or reviews, so reaching that 24% of ‘influencers’ is key for marketers.
- The majority of social media users (64%) don’t follow any brands or businesses on Twitter, suggesting that marketers need to carefully plan their Twitter strategy so it connects with their audience.
Some considerations for Businesses
- Much household product or service research is done by women and while they may not make the decision alone they would be a strong influencer in the final outcome
- Females are generally better at relationships than males, I say that in a very general way and thus it is no surprise they use social media sites more, other than LinkedIn which is dominated by males and really more about business, networking and selling than sharing
- Social media sites, while not there for product search will influence outcomes
- Users are ruthless and want stuff for nothing from companies on social media sites
- The opportunity exists to connect with these people the challenge is the strategy and how best to connect
Can you afford not to be on Facebook? No, is it clear exactly what you should be doing on Facebook? No. But getting your contact and brand shared between trusted communities is powerful. The volumes and final impact or ROI will come out in the wash as more data is collected over time.
Monetising your website
May 17th
So everyone has a website or a blog, or both. Many dream of retiring to a deserted island and running their networks of websites, getting rich and having this amazing work life balance. Well guess what? It ain’t going to happen, easily anyway. Of those with sites, many are limited by their developers to various CMS’s and expensive changes. For those who control and manage their own hosting, their main tool and marketing method (and Im talking small business here) is content and ofcourse SEO. You can get lots of content written around the world for $10 a 500 word article or less.
So setting up a site and getting content and even some basic SEO in place is simple, cheap and can be done by yourself with some experimenting and time. So anybody can publish and many are indeed. Whose making the money so far. The hosting providers and those selling ad ons for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.
So now all are publishing, what are the monetisation options?
- Ad sense, selling contextual ads from say Google
- Selling a virtual product, like an E Book
- Selling other ads or listings, if you can get them
- Being an affiliate
- Selling some sort of offline or related product or service
While all of these are valid, most of them require significant pageviews to make them viable. Click throughs can be as low as 0.25% on a banner or ad, affiliates also require conversion, so getting enough traffic takes lots of something.
To be continued…
The ROI SEO Committment
Feb 28th
Are you Committed
Some of you may have heard the saying: Are you the pig or the chicken. When it comes to eating a breakfast of egg & bacon, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. When it comes to your online search campaigns, are you the chicken or the pig? Should the type of business you are in help decide whether in fact you should be a chicken or a pig?
We all agree ROI is important. We all agree that any marketing or business activity should have some form of ROI. How do we best manage the link between SEO and ROI, especially when there are very different players, angles, business models all trying to rank for the same keywords?
Consider the graph below and how the various players might interact or see SEO in their business model.
The Large Consumer Bank would have a large dependency on their website for operations i.e. Internet banking, applications and so on, however when it comes to sales they would have multiple, multiple sales channels from account managers to television spots to in branch activities, all driving people to convert either online or offline. Operations would be driven by complex systems integrating to the front end behind the scenes. May take a couple of touch points to convert a customer. While the need for SEO might be considered small, being found online for all the campaigns, slogans is not. SEO is integral, most of them just realize how integral.
Structuring In-House SEO Teams – Part 2
Aug 27th
Mixing up SEO and SEM. Logically these 2 should fit snugly together, practically the skills couldn’t be further apart. SEO is more business focused, strategic, innovative and technical. SEM or paid search requires focus where cost per conversion or acquisition is being targeted and is somewhat process driven with some creativity required for the ads. We have found staff fit into, and do well in 1 of these areas, seldomly do they excel at both.
Having established that, where do they converge and where is it important to have touch points:
- Keyword research and the use and identification of keywords in general is the obvious starting point, confirming focus, search volumes and usage between the 2 areas
- Campaigns, ensuring both teams understand what current and future campaigns are on the go and which are better served by SEO, medium term and SEM, short term etc.
- Links to the offline marketing team, to understand offline activities, branding efforts etc.
- Reporting, ensuring both the SEO and SEM teams work in tandem and are not dysfunctional
SEM Teams
Finding SEM staff is a little easier, finding SEM staff who have managed a provider/ agency relationship and who have managed large campaigns is a little more difficult. SEM is also also becoming increasingly competitive and software centric (Bid management software) so finding SEM staff with the above skills and with relevant bid management software experience can be even more difficult. Training outside of practical experience in a good SEM provider is hard to find.
Some considerations for the SEM Team
- Consider centralising SEM management, keeping expertise and liason with external providers through a single point of contact More >
Structuring In- House SEO Teams – Part 1
Aug 19th
The ongoing saga of firstly whether to build an in-house SEO team or outsource and then how to best structure this team to work across marketing, legal, sales and IT.
As always, onesize does not fit all and there are factors such as organisation size, geographic location, culture, maturity of the web presence and also the role the web presence plays in the marketing mix. Organisations whose website or sites are there key channel to market obviously would rate this a higher priority than say an offline retailer who does not sell online but merely provides information.
Approach it logically
Having said that, consider the following.
- If you are doing search engine optimisation (SEO), you are more than likely doing or considering doing paid search or search engine marketing (SEM).
- If you are doing either of these you are hopefully also running some form of Analytics
- SEO and SEM although different skill sets, SEO is specialised while SEM is more process driven, but still converge when it comes to landing pages, on-page content and quality scores and conversion
- Finally, these numbers all need to agree, the traffic numbers from SEO need to be reconciled with the numbers form SEM and SEM spend to other marketing campaigns.
- Marketing folk from all over the business need to give input on keywords, campaigns and initiatives. Make sense. Read on…
Search Reach Update
Aug 7th
Interesting data available this week after my last post. Per a recent Pew report, (US based ofcourse) in fact as recent as today Pew found the average search user, according top their survey of 2,251 US adults was:
- A college graduate (66%)
- Earned income of over US$75,000 (62%)
- Had broadband at home (58%)
- Was predominantly 18-49 years old
Probably not that much in that, other than the fact that well educated wealthy people who can afford broadband at home use search engines more than the rest of us.
But then in another interesting article at Search Engine Land, based on Forbes.com and Gartner Research found the Internet was the most influential and important source of information to CXO or C level executives where 67% are using the Internet and 86% are using search to research competitors and trends dailly.
It would make sense that C level executives fall into the demographic above. Very convenient.
The key point however is that search is the start of these people’s online research, search is their doorway to information. This information maybe anywhere on your website, not just your homepage. Prepare your site with numerous landing pages and give those that land on them direction.
Capitalisation of Search Engine Ranking Costs
Jun 11th
Search Engine rankings and value
Search engines allow users to find products, services or information. This is also known as search based intent. Given search engines are around 24% of traffic to websites on average (Hitwise) this is valuable traffic to most websites.
Organic search engine rankings cannot be bought but rely on the quality of your website, website content and linking. To rank well for competitive terms can take some investment not only in internal resources but also external search engine optimisation consultants.
The potential return on this investment is high, as high search engine rankings for popular keywords will drive trafficwith the potnetial to convert. Search engine rankings thus have a value to the organisation. Not only do they provide ongoing traffic and potential customers, they also assist in the organisational branding and visibility, as good search engine rankings usually perceived as belonging to quality websites and organisations.
As with any asset, to maintain high search engine rankings requires maintenance. Like any asset, the rankings can be impacted by internal constraints, competitors and search engine algorithms. As with assets, they can become obsolete, damaged or destroyed by “Acts of God” or search engines.
So undeniably, there is effort, cost and knowledge development from which an asset results, which also results in ongoing benefits to the organisation. The asset, being search engine rankings and the ongoing benefit being traffic to the organisation website. So should the cost of achieving high search engine rankings be capitalised and considered as an asset in an entity’s balance sheet.