The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency - most people place it around 7 times - for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have!

“Do we credit the first click or the last click for this conversion?”

(more…)

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At SMX West (yes, West; I’ll talk about the awesomeness that was SMX Advanced soon), one of the most interesting things I learned was that an advertiser who spent $30,000 on banners saw a 20% lift in branded search. When you consider how well branded search converts, that’s good news, especially if that demand lasts (for the caveats on measuring true branded search ROI see “What Every SEO Needs to Know About Branded Search“). This post is going to explain how you can use the link graph to get similar lifts in your branded search, (more…)

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer). (more…)

One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy! (more…)

Want to find out competitors’ keywords? Want to avoid getting your keyword research ripped off? Here’s how to do competitive keyword intelligence for free. (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to (more…)

I really dislike Google. Bill Gates, on the other hand, is a very charitable guy and MSN hasn’t done any deals with the devil nor helped terrorists, like Google has (hat tips Sunshine and Atlas). So I’m squarely in Bill’s corner. Here are the 5 things MSN/Live Must do to win search share from Google and Yahoo. (more…)

Here is the final campaign data of my two Facebook flyer campaigns, both of which were terminated December 3rd. All things told, spending under $2 for about 30,000 impressions seems like a sweet deal to me! Plus, I got some clicks and awareness, and it helped me make a good industry connection that has since translated into a few links. So while Aaron paid $500 for links through AdWords, my results seem to have been similar (OK, so you can’t compare newspaper links to industry links, but still) for much lower cost :).

I tried copy-pasting the table from my Facebook report, but it ended up only showing one line of data. So I’ve changed the copy-paste to attempt to show you both campaigns. The column headers that have consequently been ommitted read:

Campaign Name | Date Range | # Clicks | # Impressions | CTR (%) | Max CPC | Avg. CPC | Dly. Budget | Total Spent.

So on the first campaign, Want to Make Extra Money?, running from Oct 30 to Dec 2nd (i.e. they were no longer running the 3rd), I got 16 clicks on 22,113 impressions. The CTR in % is thus 0.072. I was topping my bids at 8 cents and ended up paying an average 7 cents. My daily budget of $5 was never reached obviously, as my total spent on the campaign was just $1.13.

Want to Make Extra Money? Completed

Oct 30 to Dec 02

16

22,113

0.072

0.08

0.07

5.00

1.13

The other campaign, which was a bit of a trial grounds, got 6 clicks on 7,492 impressions, for a total cost under a quarter. Because I was bidding less per click, this one ran more sporadically (though erratic impression volume seems to be inherent with the system, from what I’ve seen) getting 1000+ impressions some days and none others.

Date	Clicks	Impressions	CTR (%)	Avg CPC	Total Budget Used
Dec 01, 2007	0	452	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 30, 2007	0	277	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 29, 2007	0	50	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 28, 2007	0	143	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 27, 2007	1	343	0.292	0.08	0.08
Nov 26, 2007	0	162	0.000	0.00	0.00

Date Clicks Impressions CTR (%) Avg CPC Total Budget Used Nov 24, 2007 0 633 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 23, 2007 0 366 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 22, 2007 0 230 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 21, 2007 0 265 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 20, 2007 0 418 0.000 0.00 0.00

Date	Clicks	Impressions	CTR (%)	Avg CPC	Total Budget Used
Nov 17, 2007	0	763	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 16, 2007	0	665	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 15, 2007	0	605	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 14, 2007	0	214	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 13, 2007	0	652	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 12, 2007	1	920	0.109	0.08	0.08

On a related note, you might not have noticed, but there’s new Facebook advertising fare to be had: Facebook profile page ads by Weblo (story tip from Marty & aimClear).

From the NYT (yes, that link is a nofollow and no, it’s not by accident) comes news that Montreal company (I love our city!) Weblo is helping users sell advertising on their Facebook profile pages. That’s not all though. Weblo is also empowering users to sell ads on their Youtube, Blogger, Myspace, Orkut and other web profiles.

Facebook, naturally, is none too pleased. For one, they’ve got competition to sell ads on their own site now. For another, these ads directly integrated into users’ profiles are likely to feel very spammy. Or to use a Facebook rep’s words, “cluttered.”

Will they stay or will they go? Well, Facebook could easily boot Weblo off their site. But chances are you’d just see other people come up with similar apps and it would get very laborious to ban all of them. Besides, how do you tell your users that some content isn’t allowed on your site? Unfair as it may be to Facebook, people will bitch about censorship and all that jazz. So Facebook needs to come up with a plausible answer to the problem of profile advertising, asap.

Ironically, they could probably solve the problem by collaborating with their big advertisers on it. Have them spend some dough to test it out, offer a rebate on Facebook advertising in exchange, and see if it works. I’m betting it won’t. And this being the web, advertisers will eventually stop using the platform as word spreads that the ROI sucks. Theoretically, at least.

If the ads do work out and Facebook directed its big advertisers to it, then there could be some competition between Facebook and Weblo. But Facebook could ultimately win that fight by booting Weblo and encouraging users to add an official copycat app to their profiles. The best part of it, for Facebook, is that they get an unknown company to take the heat if the idea doesn’t work out. After the stiff reception Beacon got, the last thing Facebook wants is more negative publicity for their ads. So they can see with advertisers whether this is finally the solution and then boot Weblo (or just buy them out entirely?).

Perhaps that’s what Facebook planned all along…