A friendly business acquaintance of mine, Jean-Julien of Sid Lee, asked this question recently on Quora. I thought I’d answer here for the benefit of my readers.

The question is kind of futile, in my view. It’s the same way many marketing award shows are only aimed at promoting themselves (they charge thousands per submission…). Just as those award shows don’t really pinpoint the best in the country, it would be impossible to answer this question accurately without doing a comprehensive rating… and none of these answers (award shows, surveys, etc) are ever really comprehensive.

How would you measure this? Average revenue made per campaign? For themselves? The client? How/why would people even share that data?

Most entertaining agency? That’s typically what the ad/mktg awards are about, but of course this says nothing of actual ROI. (Yes, social media generates an ROI measured in dollars (PDF). See also this aside from Michelle Blanc on social ROI.)

It’s like how CSS galleries do nothing to promote good user experience and are instead just about pretty visuals.

If you’re looking for a social media agency, interview them with questions and don’t allow yourself to be satisfied with buzzwords. Engagement is great, OK. What does that mean? How do you measure it?

If you’re looking for a social media agency, look for multiple case studies where the client’s metrics for success are the same as your own. [I take for granted that marketing companies obviously only publish case studies of successes.] That way you know they’re experience with achieving your goals.

Liked this post on critical thinking? Get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO for more.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In yet another fascinating case study, Mr Green’s blog shares a mobile marketing campaign aimed at recruiting panel members for a demographic research service.

What’s fascinating is the bit about optimizing the campaign by device, carrier etc. Some phone models convert better than others, and not always for reasons of usability. Shoemoney years ago shared a case study of targeting ringtone offers by carrier, and showed how he dug into the demographics of each carrier to find the demographic most likely to convert on his offer.

While that’s well and good for affiliate marketers, it’s another thing entirely for customers of panel measurement services. If you’re buying data, you want it to be representative of the audience you’re researching, for ex.: smart phone users in general.

But if the panel is disproportionately heavy on one particular model or carrier etc, relative to the general audience you’re researching, the data you’ll be buying will be skewed. Of course, you can then slice and dice the data to solve the problem, but that depends on the panel measurement service enabling that.

Another related issue is panel recruitment based on giving away freebies. That also attracts a skewed demographic that may exclude the wealthiest elements of the population.

If you liked this bit of critical thinking, then check out my advanced SEO book, which teaches Advanced SEOs’ 7 Rules of critical and creative thinking.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Excellent criticism of daily deals on TechCrunch

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/why-daily-deals-raw-deal/

The question is – how do local companies go about following up to make these deal seekers become repeat buyers? The startup that solves that problem will be bought for 9 figures asap by Groupon.

Some leads to follow:

http://www.blacksburgbelle.com/2011/04/3-tips-to-turn-first-time-customers-into-repeat-customers/

http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/columnist/abrams/2003-09-12-abrams_x.htm

http://www.startupnation.com/business-articles/9437/1/repeat-customers-raving-fans.htm

http://blog.garrettspecialties.com/2009/09/uncategorized/turn-one-time-customers-into-repeat-customers/

On a related note, I dispute his estimated acquisition cost per subscriber of $26.50 – that’s absurdly high. I’ve gotten emails+names for $3 or $3.50 average, and I’m an SEO/CRO guy, not a PPC guru.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I put $2000 US into a paypal account of mine, and Paypal is listing that as being worth 6653.79 Israel New Shekels (ILS). That’s an exchange rate of 1 USD for 3.32689 ILS. (6653.79 / 2000 = 3.32689)

According to XE.com, the exchange rate between the two currencies is 3.42120 . That’s a full tenth of a percentage point! I realize they need some space to protect themselves from sharp fluctuations, but this seems to me more in the nature of profiting on the exchange, and taking money from you in addition to what Paypal’s fees are.

If you’re interested, I once interviewed various search marketers on how they handle currency fluctuations.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

David Szetela has long been one of the PPC experts I most admire, not least of which for his informative presentations at SMX – typically on the Google Display Network (GDN), his specialty. He wrote a book for Wiley/Sybex’s online marketing An Hour A Day series, Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing An Hour A Day, along with his fellow Clix Marketing pro, Joseph Kerschbaum. I was fortunate enough to be given a review copy, and while I’m sadly quite late in writing this review, I figure better late than never!

First of all, since this blog is geared to an intermediate-to-advanced audience, I’ll answer the first question everybody asks themselves: yes, you’ll learn something new.

What are some examples of things that I didn’t know about before reading PPC An Hour A Day, having barely ever touched the GDN?

• How to write and design a banner ad
• Static vs animated banners
• Ad types and sizes – what are the most popular, for instance, and will get you the widest coverage on the GDN
• Demographic Bidding

One thing that I found surprising with PPC SEM An Hour A Day, since originally I recall this being contrary to AdWords guidelines, was being encouraged to use title case in copywriting. That Means Capitalizing Every Word In Your Ad, Like It’s An Article Title.

Since Szetela and Kerschbaum’s book is meant to be a comprehensive overview, there is a lot that won’t be new to anyone who’s run an AdWords campaign before, and naturally the more experienced one is, the more “know that, next” moments there’ll be. But I think that even intermediates and advanced people will find interesting material in the book.

For example, there’s a generous section covering various advanced reports within AdWords. Since optimizing is an essential step on the way to profitable campaigns, this can’t be overlooked. This includes insights into methodology that Clix Marketing obviously uses, such as various Excel functions that enable PPC managers to manipulate data and understand it more easily. Reviewing this sidebar I notice the words “Huge Tutorial” that I wrote in pencil when I read the book.

With regards to copywriting, people who’ve attended SMX conferences will likely have heard some of the David’s tips, but despite being a past attendee of his panels, I was surprised to discover that AdWords will allow you to use ALL CAPS, and with dynamic insertion yet. News to me!

People who use critical thinking ideas described in my advanced SEO book will find that some ideas described re: the GDN can also carry over to Facebook ads (or Plenty of Fish, for the affiliates reading this). For example, keeping banner sizes small – for the sake of load times – and therefore using only one or two movements.

In sum:

1) Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing An Hour A Day (try using Dynamic Insertion with that title…) is a comprehensive book, addressing everything from campaign set-up, to writing, bidding, landing page testing and design (a good section, but mostly stuff I knew), to advanced optimization and reporting.

2) The newer you are to the field, the more value you’ll get out of the book.

3) The material on interruption based advertising will probably be new to most people, since the majority of us are into search engine marketing, after all… because of search!

4) Kerschbaum and Szetela have ensured that they also cover modern developments in AdWords, such as demographic bidding, ad sitelinks and so forth.

5) Ignore the fact there’s an appendix about Facebook ads, because it’s useless.

You can buy it on Amazon.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by Stephen Croome of buyaniPad.com; his bio is below.

A baseline for mobile growth

Real numbers and our plan going forward:

There is a lot spoken on the growth of mobile but not much actual data shared. SEOmoz recently posted trends for mobile in 2011 and I thought I would contribute to the discussion with a baseline for expected mobile growth based on real sales data.

I have included data from two very different but high traffic sites. One is a pure play commercial sales site, and the other is a site that is purely informational. Neither have a mobile version of the site although both websites display fine on smartphones.

Hopefully this information helps people make better projections for their own clients. I encourage you to share real data so we can build a better picture of where the next few years’ growth is going come from.

UK sales site’s revenue from mobile devices

Conversion rate for mobile devices:

Click to enlarge

You can see I found an error in how Blackberries interact with our site, 0.08% conversion rate is far too low. Analytics ftw!

On digging into the problem I found it was merely that Blackberrys seem to be terrible for buying date and price intensive things online. I sat with a colleague and I bought a ticket on my iPhone 4 in about 2 minutes and he just gave up after 5. So, not all smart phones are equal!

The iPad conversion rate looks way ahead of handheld mobiles. Is this going to be an emerging theme – larger devices converting better than smaller? It makes sense to me but we will know when more players like the Galaxy Tab filter into the market.

Growth in mobile sales with projection:

This growth looks amazing and I think that when we look back at the end of the year, the growth that I’ve plotted is likely to be conservative.

However, let’s not get carried away just yet:

As a % of overall revenue, mobile sales are still small.

UK information site

This site has no sales, just public information. Warning: These projections are rough and ready due to the volatility of their traffic.

Visit data for mobile devices:

When you look at the visits by device data, you see more pages per visits and lowest bounce rate on the iPad. Other devices have a high average time on site but a low pages per visit and a high bounce rate.

I would suggest this is because people have more difficulty using the site on mobile devices and less on the iPad. Mobile is growing, but it still has form factor challenges to overcome.

Growth in mobile visits with projections:

However, let’s not get carried away just yet…

As a % of overall visits, mobile traffic is still small.

Mobile health tips

Whatever the level of buy-in to mobile in your organisation, there are a few universal tips that will serve you well
• Share your knowledge with your clients
• Have an opinion on mobile and a plan (even if it’s not likely to be actioned immediately)
• Push for mobile best practice, at least a simple mobile version of your sites
• Stay on top of the data, make sure you can clearly measure mobile sales and interactions on your sites

About Stephen: I’m a SEO interested in getting companies to re-engineer their products and processes to market themselves. I have some test sites that need some love www.buyanipad.com where I look at spam and www.purehairstyle.com where I look at the peculiarities of image search and generating impressions per visit. In my spare time I dream up marketing ideas like www.startupbeanbags.com.

You can follow me at your own peril at seomoz or @firstconversion

If you liked this post, you should also check out this post on mobile landing pages.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I was recently playing around with Brighter Option’s Social Ads Manager (SAM) – a Facebook ad creation and management software – which includes its own conversion tracking.

SAM has a click redirector option for tracking, and while it requires you to tag your pages, it just occurred to me that there’s perhaps an alternative solution to tagging – cookies. This is desirable for the sake of saving loooooots of time copy-pasting code on every page of your site until your fingers go numb and your braincells commit collective suicide.

How would it work?

1. Send the clicks through the click redirector.
2. Cookie all visitors who arrive on the redirect page.
3. Track the visitors’ interaction with and use of the site by means of the cookie!

The problem is that I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know whether this is technically feasible. I can already see people raising the objection that cookies get deleted, but that’s done by a very limited percentage of people.

(Don’t believe me? Take a random poll of your friends and ask how many of them know what cookies are on their computer.)

Also, since most web analytics rely on javascript tags and not server logs, you can make a similar argument against Google Analytics et al. insofar as 5% of the web browses with javascript turned off… And yet that’s probably the most popular web analytics tool out there!

Thoughts? Comments? Explanations why this wouldn’t work?

If you thought this idea was interesting, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO, for more out of the box material!

Update: The good folks at SAM (hi Liam!) explained that you still need Javascript to interact with the cookie, since the cookie is passive. D’oh!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Today, Twitter suggested I follow Bill Gates. It’s the best suggestion I’ve received in a while on who to follow from amongst the advanced SEO community. How is Bill Gates part of the advanced SEO community you ask?

As I explain and detail in my book on advanced SEO, a key requirement of advanced SEO is the willingness to learn from everyone and to think laterally.

Bill does that exceedingly well, as he shares in the following post. He visited a Coca-Cola distribution center in Kenya and drew lessons for preventive health care. Read the post on his foundation’s site.

Update: The article and insights are actually written by Melinda Gates, as pointed out to me by Trish Thomson. I just saw it tweeted by Bill, and assumed it was his item. So yeah, Melinda Gates would be a great SEO!

Add my RSS feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email for more out-of-the-box thinking on SEO.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Ever try creating lots of Facebook ads that you wanted to track using Google Analytics? If so, you probably know Google’s URL Builder, which generates URLs with tracking tags. (See post-script for an explanation if you’re not familiar.) It does this for a spectacular amount of URLs at a time! Exactly one URL at a time, to be precise.

Frustrated by Google’s URL Builder tool? Here’s how to build URLs with tracking tags in bulk.

Use SEO Book’s “Keyword Concatenator” tool, and instead of inputting lists of keywords, input your URL and variables.

If you’ve never used SEO Book’s concatenator tool before, let me explain how it works. You input 2+ or more lists of words. You then press generate. The tool takes each word in list 1 and combines it with each word in list 2, to generate list #3.

For example, suppose I have these two lists.

List 1: car, cars, auto, autos
List 2: used, new

The tool will generate list #3: car used, car new, cars used, cars new, auto used, auto new, autos used, autos new.

Obviously, it’s important to get the order of the lists right.

The trick is to just use some creative thinking – exactly the kind of lateral thinking I teach in my book on advanced organic search marketing – and replace the keyword lists with so-called “name-value” pairs. That is, your tracking variables.

(A name-value pair is just the technical name for variables listed in a name-of-the-variable=value-of-the-variable format. You’ve all seen this before in math class. Y=X+1 And you’ve seen it in meta description tags and image tags. < Meta name=”Description” content=”This is where you put your meta description to try and generate a high CTR.” > < img src=”url of your image.jpg” alt=”description of the image for blind users and Googlebot” / > )

Step 1: In word list #1, you input your URL(s) and the first tracking variable:

Ex.: http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=

(You can’t see it because of the underline on the link, but there’s an underscore between “utm” and “source.”)

Step 2: In word list #2, you input the values for the first variable. Note: Only use commas, not spaces, or the tool will add spaces into your results:

email,bing,blogs

Step 3: In word list #3, you input the second variable:

&utm_medium=

Note: You must include both the ampersand (“and” sign) and the equal sign. The ampersand connects what follows to the rest of the URL. The equal sign tells Google Analytics that the text before the equal sign was the variable name and what follows is the variable’s value.

In word list #4, you input the values for the second variable:

cpa,cpc

In word list #5, input the third variable:

&utm_campaign=

At this point, you run out of lists in the tool, but that’s no problem. Step 6 is to generate results and turn those results into a single list so you can iterate in the tool.

- Click “Generate.”

- Copy-paste the results into a text editor (Word, Notepad etc are fine).

- Use find and replace to add a comma after the third variable, on each of the URLs you generated. In my example, I’d find “&utm_campaign=” and replace it with “&utm_campaign=,”. This makes the URLs fit to be used as words in the keyword list generator again.

- Copy-paste the resulting URLs back into SEO Book’s concatenator, in the text-input field for word list #1.

In word list #2, input values for the third variable… you get the idea.

Finally, generate your new list and import to Word. Use “Find and Replace” to eliminate the spaces inserted by the tool between keywords. Recall that the tool was built for concatenating keyword lists, not URLs. So you’ll usually get results with spaces. Ex.: seoroi.com/blog/?&utm_source= facebook &utm_medium= cpc

Bonus tip: Though Google Analytics requires input for the source, medium and campaign variables, you don’t need to use separate lists for each. That’s only the case if you’re using multiple sources, each with multiple mediums, each with multiple campaigns.

More commonly, you’ll just be tagging URLs for one source (ex.: AdWords), and it’s all CPC or email. So you can just concatenate that using one list, saving time. Ex.: In list #2, write: ?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=cpc .

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. In about 2-3 minutes, I bulk built 126 tagged URLs using this technique. Here’s just a handful for show:

http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=linkbait
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=google
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=bing
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=cpc
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=cpm
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=adwords
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=commercial intent
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=linkbait
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=google
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=bing
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=cpc
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=cpm
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=adwords
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=commercial intent

Post-Script: Google Analytics will track any marketing campaign you’d like. You just need to add tracking tags as above, and Google Analytics will use those tags to organize the collected data for you. For example, tagging a URL with “utm_term=keyword-goes-here” will allow you to see a report on the visitors who came on URLs tagged with that term – how many visitors you got, your bounce rate, conversion rate etc.

P.P.S. Some of you may recall I shared a similar idea for local keyword list generation.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I was browsing the analytics of one of the top financial sites around. Just about everyone in the financial blogosphere knows this site.

The online advertising rate card for this site lists impressive numbers. But when you look at the analytics, you might be surprised at what some of the traffic is coming to the site for.

Here are some keywords sending them traffic:

top interview questions
quick chicken leg quarter recipes
sugar sandwiches
how to answer questions at an interview
giving away items on craigslist

Of course, they do have other valuable keywords sending them traffic, such as people interested in mortgage topics.

The catch is that if you just buy based on their traffic numbers in aggregate, you’re buying mortgage traffic along with hungry chefs and job seekers. Probably not what you were looking for in a finance site ad buy.

I have some ideas on solutions, like requesting/paying for access to their analytics, or just buying ads within 1 category of their content, but I’m not sure how likely people are to give anyone that access. How would you guys go about solving this? (AdSense obviously is a solution, but it has other problems, and sites don’t always use Webmaster Welfare to monetize…)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by Troy Redington. Find him on Twitter @TroyRedington !

I’ve been into web development since 1995. I started dabbling in high school and just couldn’t stop. I felt comforted, and challenged by the vast sea of knowledge that I could learn. Plus, since the languages, technologies, and trends were always changing – I knew I wouldn’t get bored with it.

In the year 1999 I scored my first real, full-time web development job for an audio company. My boss was a man named Tim Storm. I learned a LOT working for Tim. I went from dabbling and hacking, to actually producing and innovating. Tim started Fatwallet.com (a coupon site) as his hobby while we were still working together. I felt honored to be a part of its community development in the first couple years. Tim quit his day job and went full-time on Fatwallet.com shortly after.

Fast forward to 2006. I was a web developer for Fatwallet, on a team of 4 or 5. I had been dabbling in SEO on the side for the last two years, mainly for my wife’s [former] online scrapbook store. I was incredibly passionate about Fatwallet. Tim, and his company, had both done great things for my career. Knowing some SEO basics, and seeing the major SEO problems and HUGE search traffic potentials of the site, I went to Tim and told him that the company needs to spend some time on SEO.

Maybe I wasn’t clear with my intentions since Tim transitioned a different coworker to SEO. The next six months were miserable as I was the developer in charge of implementing the new SEO’s techniques. I watched and fought tooth and nail as the SEO spent countless hours on extinct techniques like meta keywords. After several arguments with the SEO, and whiny complaints to the man in charge, old SEO out, Troy in.

I was given 3 months to see if I could make an impact on traffic. Tim and I both agreed that we needed a kickass metric system for measuring the efforts and results – so I spent the next 2 months doing nothing but writing a new search traffic analytic tracking system. I used it to monitor the current search traffic, and find opportunities for easy optimization.  I quickly found terms like GoDaddy coupon that were driving some traffic to pages that were NOT optimized (and quite unfriendly to search engines).

I rewrote URLs throughout the site, changed paging systems, implemented dynamic cross linking systems, cleaned piles of dirty, messy, pathetic code (that I had written in years past). Once the site was search engine friendly, and KINDA optimized, we watched the traffic increase day after day. After a few months, search traffic had doubled. Hell yeah, I felt like a winner.

Then I met with Tim again. Tim wanted to know which terms were converting, and how much traffic has increased to the terms that are the highest converting. It took another couple of months to tweak the system and start producing metrics that prove ROI. And then I became the full-time, in-house SEO for FatWallet.

The next couple years were brutal, as I fought many challenges. FatWallet’s search traffic is incredibly long-tailed, with a million plus members in the forums, the site is loaded with rich user generated content – and we all know how search engines love UGC. However the terms I was expected to target were far from long-tail, and often far from reality. Most people in the company didn’t really know what I was doing, hell sometimes *I* didn’t really know what I was doing.

I kept trying and kept learning…and more importantly, I kept finding search traffic opportunities that could align with our content. My passion for the company, and now for the industry, fueled debates with sales managers, designers, developers, and sysadmins. In the end, our results have made it all totally worth it.

My responsibilities, and respect for what I do, are higher than ever at Fatwallet. I’m producing results, getting involved with big projects, and even driving big projects.

Tim continues to inspire us, and is currently a finalist in the Entrepreneur of the Year contest.

My career has been created by passion and a strong desire to learn and succeed. What drives you guys in your search careers?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from P*able. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks.

Anyways, I hope someone responsible there sees this and adapts accordingly.

Update: I’ve had email followup from P’s founder and VP of Customer Development, Craig Bloem. After initially asking to speak over the phone or in person (impossible given my location overseas), he writes:

“I am not going to beat around the bush.  We had a community development manager who should have been writing more constructive thought provoking posts and engaging with the community in a positive manner. A mistake on our part that he was writing comments that could
be considered spam.  I take responsibility for that.  I appreciate you brining it to our attention and it is being fixed.”

Impressive, professional and responsible. I like it. I’ve removed the company’s name from the title of the post and from the body content so it won’t show up in search engines (or at least show up lower) and won’t cause them further reputation management issues.

For the record, I’m preserving one of the spam comments I got:

On a related note, I’m very impressed by the feature set of the shopping cart known as Pinnacle Cart. Anyone know if you can edit the shopping cart and/or split test it or MVT test the cart and other parts of their ecommerce site building system? E.g. Can I split test product or category page designs, for example? Can I MVT test the billing info page in the checkout? Etc…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing analytics with a internal search case study from Adi Reguev, and PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Michal Neufeld – Google Analytics – Tying Adwords Into Analytics

Some pros of tying the two together:
- Understand the whole funnel, from search to site exit
- Instant and granular view of ROI on AdWords
o This enables optimizing to profitability
- Uniform goal language between the two systems.
[Seems like a feature to me and not a benefit, and I can’t remember why she brought this up. Honestly, I had trouble following because she went through her preso incredibly fast.]

Funnel:

Visitors, clicks, impressions, CTR, cost and ad position are all visible in one report.
Likewise for PPC (did she say CPC?) ROI and margin – they’re all available by integrating AdWords and GAnalytics, which enables optimization.
[Again, I don’t know what this has to do with a funnel. Sorry!]

Tip: Watch % of new visits from a given keyword.

This helps with decisions on when not to kill keywords with a longer latency or that are higher in the funnel. [This also helps Google draw more money out from you while you’re waiting for enough data to decide. ].

Another You can also use this information to adapt the call-to-action (CTA) to something that would evoke more response earlier in the buying process. E.g. ‘Download a free guide’ instead of ‘buy now.’

I wanted to ask, but didn’t get to in the end:
1) “What patterns or types of keywords they see showing these greater latencies?”
2) “What CTAs work early in the process?”

I imagine that head terms (eg ‘glasses,’ ‘cars,’ ‘movie’) show more latency, but I’d have really liked to hear about other patterns in the data as to what keywords show greater latency and what CTAs work better early. I get that you can call for action besides ‘buy now,’ but there’s a range of soft possibilities out there from free, unrestricted dowloads to trying out an online app to email squeeze pages etc.

Another tip Michal gave was that you can position your ads better when you integrate GA to AdWords, by seeing metrics like time on site, bounce rate and so forth by position. This data is available from the Position Performance Report.

I apologize to Michal for giving a half-assed account of what was a much more detailed, intelligent presentation. It was just very difficult following her at the pace she was going, especially with my pen and paper!

Daniel Waisberg – Easynet SEM – Behavioral Targeting & SEM

Tip 1: Use dynamic banners that will match the numerous keywords sending traffic to your homepage.

[I think he meant dynamic hero graphics/flash-animated featured-content areas, which are frequently dead center at the top of the active window.] Excellent tip imho, given the wide range of keywords typically sending traffic to a homepage.

Daniel next gave a few lists of tools, but he, like Michal, went too quickly for me to write it all down. Some paid tools he listed: Amadesa, SiteBrand, Test & Target (Omniture). Some free tools: BT Buckets and Google Analytics.

BT & GA can work together to create/adapt buckets. It hacks GA & gives you additional special reports.

What’s in it for me?

1) My notes ambiguously read: “Hard to find brain power + many pieces of code.” I’m not sure if that’s a reference to trying to build your own or a con that people should be aware of regarding installation.
2) Cross selling opportunity is offered by behavioral targeting, where you’d offer a firewall to an antivirus purchaser, for example.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Adi Reguev – Go Internet Marketing – Internal Search

Some key questions…

1. What/how much people are looking for [something].
2. Does internal search answer your visitors’ questions?
3. Can they find what they need easily?

Case Study: Travel

Site search [analytics data?] shows locations in a drop down. They monitored destinations people wanted to go to and especially the top cities of interest.
- They inferred from searches for two tickets that the person searching was part of a couple.
- Home page navigation was not reflecting people’s interests.
- They understood that there were seasonal variances in people’s choices of destination. Bangkok was big in winter, London in summer.
o But volume [of searches] does NOT tell the whole story!
o You need to compare the volume numbers to the ecommerce report.
o Why? Because though the volume of searches change, that doesn’t necessarily correlate to average order values (AOV). So items with low search volume were still valuable because the AOVs were higher.

What does this suggest in terms of changes to the site? Dynamic navigation or highlighting of navigational elements that adjusts to demand and AOVs.

Final tip: Don’t allow yourself to create reports with so many parameters that you end up overwhelmed. View fewer parameters, and make them actionable.

If you enjoyed this post, come back tomorrow for more coverage of SphinnCon’s web analytics tips. Or, because we want to make life easier, you can add my rss feed to your reader for more (that link also lets you subscribe by email).

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.