There has been a recent uproar of dislike for these changes, (which will NEVER include payment, as recently rumored).  Recently a social voting based site, Sodahead.com, conducted a survey following the update and found that of the 1000+ participants, there was a resounding disdain for the update.  The results found that 86% of the participants did not like the changes, with women and teens being the most disgruntled users.  This may resonate throughout Facebook, as women and young adults, which teens are soon be, are their main clientele.  There are many people threatening to boycott and adopt twitter as their main social outlet.  Will you bite the hand that has fed you for so long and began the social media frenzy?  Many of their changes have been seamless, however, the Facebook timeline has stirred up privacy controversy, as most dread the possibility of being “Facebook Stalked.”  People enjoy knowledge, but hate to feel someone is being intrusive on their privacy.

So what’s next social media fans? Which do you prefer…Facebook or Twitter? Although change is not always favorable, we must understand that it is necessary in this ever-changing world.  Would you dare to leave the platform that’s connected you to old grammar school friends, distant relatives and that’s allowed you to spy on your ex-boyfriend or crush?  Most will be in outrage, only to settle back into the niche that has become a networking web—that is too valuable to eliminate from our daily desktop and mobile lives.  Updates are inevitable in any social media platform, but are these drastic enough to make you change you allegiance?  Take some time to share your perspective, unwavering support or simply release your frustration.  Facebook cares about what its users say, as we are their product and without our support, they don’t exist; let your voice be heard!

Foursquare is an up and coming social media outlet that has isolated the feature “check-in” and made it very beneficial for customers and clients.  Facebook has just recently begun allowing their customers to check-in at their favorite places for entertainment, fitness, food, etc. Foursquare is built around this very concept.  Word of mouth advertising between friends, family and those we trust is the most effective way to improve brand recognition and dominance. The opinion of our trusted circle supersedes that of a media advertisement for both the consumer and the business simultaneously.  Checking in on Foursquare allows people to check in to their favorite places, allow their friends to share the experience and see their “product endorsement.”

This public support not only encourages others to try this establishment, but also benefits the business.  Foursquare allows businesses to see which demographic they are reaching, the time that they receive their peak business, as well as their “likes” so that they can tailor their products and services for their primary customers.  Additionally, it allows them to offer special discounts to their most loyal customers—“the mayor”, as Foursquare calls it— encouraging repeat buyers.  I encourage businesses on both sides of the size spectrum to take advantage of this free marketing which allows a tangible and measurable market research opportunity.   Don’t be left behind because the return on investment from utilizing Foursquare has too much potential to not be checked-out.

To start, this is not an exhaustive list of steps you should undertake.  This is simply a guide to the primary considerations you should include in your social media strategy.  As with all digital marketing, each program (and channel) should include marketing goals – otherwise, your efforts may be destined to yield lackluster results.

Population (Follower Acquisition)

One of the biggest (if not THE biggest) challenges upon entering social media is follower acquisition.  Nothing is worse than creating a beautiful Twitter profile page and watching your follower count flatline.  As such, you need to have a follower acquisition plan before you go live with your program.  Some commonly used strategies include:

- Piggyback on Influencers: After determining who the social influencers are within your market, begin following their followers and a portion of them will (hopefully) follow you back.  Rinse your list of unreciprocated follows and repeat.

- Topics of Interest: Find the people actively discussing topics of interest to your company and follow them to see if they return the favor.  For extra traction, offer value in their current conversations (see Interaction, below)

- “Follow Us” Links: Make sure to include a link to follow you on all social networks on your website.  If it fits within your other marketing goals, you may consider including URLs on marketing materials as well.

Syndication

After you develop your initial follower base, you want them to become an extension of your marketing team, spreading your message to all of their followers.  In order to do this, you may need to be creative.  Many companies make the mistake of posting all their website’s blog entries on the social networks, failing to provide any conversation or added value to the followers.  One of the keys to syndication is content.  Provide valuable content (with some variety) as RT-bait (or share-bait).  The simple question to ask yourself: “Is the information I’m providing of interest to my followers’ followers?”  Phrased another way, are you posting information of wide interest?  As with Population, Syndication has some common strategies:

- Contests and Promotions: While syndication should occur beyond promotions, these can serve as a great benchmarking tool.  If designed appropriately, they’re the most shareable content you’re likely to provide (in the users’ eyes).  Consider syndication during contents/promotions as the target for other content.

- Keep it Short: One mistake companies often make is attempting to incorporate all of their message in each and every post.  Considering space constraints and limited attention span of social users, research shows keeping posts short improves interaction and syndication.  In the case of Twitter, make sure your posts can be retweeted (which will include your handle) without being truncated.

- Offline Information: If your company has physical locations, consider posting information for your brick-and-mortar locations online (especially in-store sales), as personal users will often syndicate this if they consider it of interest to their friends.

Interaction

Simply put, if you don’t plan to actively engage and interact with followers, save your resources and stay out of the social space.  If you don’t interact, you will lose followers (hindering any progress you make on Acquisition) and users will be less likely to interact with you or share your content (which affects syndication).  By engaging your audience in dialogue, you have significant opportunities:

- Customer Service: Able to address customer service concerns promptly and within a public space.  It’s a great way to show your genuine interest in your customers.

- Lifetime Value: Social media can be effecting at reinforcing the relationship between your customers and your company.  Especially in businesses where direct contact with customers is difficult, this is one way to turn a one-time shopper into a lifelong customer

- Acquisition-bait: If a user arrives at your profile page (regardless of platform) and observes that you regularly interact with your customer base, they are much more likely to follow you.  Compare this to a page with little “real” conversation, posting only blogs and articles.

- Ask Questions: This is one of the simplest steps you can take.  Especially when posting website content, consider what questions you can ask the readers.  For example, if you post a blog about taking the perfect digital picture (highlighting your product, of course), ask your audience to post their perfect pictures. 

Final Thoughts

I’ve provided 3 very broad areas to consider as part of your social media program.  All three are very important to consider at the outset and during management of your social media campaigns.  If you choose to remember only one of these, make sure it’s the necessity of interaction.  Without this, consistently growing your followers (and getting them to syndicate your content) will be an uphill battle. 

What do you consider most important in your social media program?

In order to utilize your analytics properly it is imperative to capture, analyze, and act on the depth of the data provided.

An emarketer.com article released in early 2010 provided the metrics senior Internet marketers considered most important. The data revealed over 59% of respondents thought the “Other” category (which included Return on Investment, Cost-Per-Click, Conversions, etc.) was the least important. Page Views, Click-through Rate and Time on Site were viewed as more significant. These figures indicate an inaccurate mindset within the industry. Return on Investment must be considered first and foremost to ensure profitability in your Internet marketing program.

Establishing Internet Marketing Goals

The most obvious benefit to engaging in Internet marketing is that everything can be measured. However, many managers fail to measure some simply, yet highly relevant metrics in their analysis. The first step in establishing an Internet marketing plan is deciding on performance objectives for the program. Without clear goals for your program (and the ability to measure them), account managers have no direction, leading them to make avoidable mistakes (paying for a large amount of traffic that doesn’t convert, for example).

e-Commerce Goals. e-Commerce goals are the simplest to identify – maximizing sales revenue while minimizing advertising cost. To determine Return on Investment, an e-commerce manager should understand the cost of goods sold (COGS) and subsequently the profit margin. Many managers utilize Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) as a simple metric to monitor performance (overall revenue divided by cost of the channel). However, those companies with manufacturing costs should consider the profit margin in their analyses. For example, if IDK Electronics (a hypothetical client) sells widgets at $100 and it costs $50 to manufacture each one, then a single sale yields a $50 profit. Your ROAS threshold would be a minimum of $2 (for every $100 of advertising spend, you need to sell $200 of widgets to recover your advertising and manufacturing costs). Your ROAS must exceed this break-even value to be profitable. Your ROAS threshold is the single metric that must be monitored to ensure profitability in your marketing program. Our hypothetical client (IDK Electronics) decided on an ROAS goal of $4.

ROAS goals serve as the foundation for all other analysis in your Internet marketing efforts. Keeping the ROI in mind will ensure your program is always performing where it counts – bottom-line profitability. Once you understand the need for being ROI-centric, it’s time to dig deeper into your program to determine what areas require improvement.

Analyzing the Data

After determining your goals and the key metrics to analyze performance, you need to identify the right set of tools to measure your program. The most popular Internet marketing tools include Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Webtrends Analytics and Coremetrics. Google Analytics is free and meets the needs of most advertisers, while the other services provide additional capabilities (at a cost).  For example, IDK Electronics (a hypothetical client) was spending in excess of $50,000 per year for a high-end analytics platform, but they only used it to track traffic and sales (capabilities offered by Google Analytics, a free product). Switching to Google Analytics provided them with additional budget to utilize in other areas of their marketing program. While the specific tool you choose is up to you, we recommend determining the right analytics package for your needs as opposed to the system with the most bells and whistles. A majority of websites successfully utilize Google Analytics to analyze their Internet marketing efforts. Please see the Rise blog for more information on analytics platforms and their capabilities.

Channel, Trend and Comparison Reports. After implementing your chosen analytics platform, it is important to consider how you examine the data. While the raw number of visitors, leads or sales might be interesting, comparing metrics (overall and by marketing channel) to recent trends and long-term performance provides more actionable data. There are several top-level reports we recommend examining on a regular basis:

-Channel reports provide a snapshot of how your various Internet marketing channels are performing.
-Trend reports provide performance data over a period of time.
-Time Comparison Reports provide insight into differences between set time periods (2009Q2 vs. 2010Q2, for example).

Time Comparison Reports are useful in examining long-term changes in the program (2009Q2 vs 2010Q2, for example). While trend reports provide a large set of useful data, they don’t account for seasonality and other time-based changes to the program (such as fiscal/budget periods). Time Comparison reports will be discussed will be discussed in more depth below.

Illustrations of these reports and their analyses are below (click on the tables to enlarge):

Channel Report Sample. The Channel Report above (for IDK Electronics) shows performance across all their Internet marketing channels for a given month. While both regional programs are operating at or above the desired ROAS of $4, Email and Paid Search are operating below the target ROAS in both regions. At the top-level, you’ll note that Display is the most profitable channel, delivering over $5 for every $1 spent on media. Comparing the US and Canadian channels, you’ll notice Paid Search is converting less in Canada (Conversion Rate of 0.65%) than in the US (Conversion Rate of 1.51%). IDK Electronics might consider creating a Canada-specific landing page to improve the Conversion Rate (and profitability) in that region’s program. We also recommend shifting the advertising budget to Display first (in both regions) due to its profitability and prioritizing the remaining spend based on ROAS.

Trend Sample Report. The Trend Report above (for IDK’s Display program) shows that ROAS has consistently increased in 2010, with only January operating at less than $4 ROAS. Much of the improvement can be attributed to cost control (decreasing the average CPC) and conversion rate. Moving forward, we recommend improving the conversion rate and CPC to continue the positive trends seen in 2010.

Time Comparison Report Sample. In the summary data above, you’ll notice some significant differences in the program year-over-year. First and foremost, the program operated below the $4 target ROAS in 2009 and well above in 2010. While traffic in 2010 was 21% lower than 2009, the conversion rate was much lower in 2009. The 0.9 point improvement in Conversion Rate in 2010 led to a 47% increase in Conversions (using 21% less of your marketing budget). Steps taken to increase Conversion Rate and decrease CPC were successful in significantly improving the profitability of the program.

Determining Profitability and Next Steps

While the overall profitability of a program can be broken down to a simple metric like Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS), there are many different factors that lead to the overall efficiency of your marketing effort. Now that we’ve established goals and determined the profitability of the different marketing programs, we need to dig deeper into the plethora of metrics to develop strategies to achieve our marketing objectives.

Few of us realized the powerhouse Google would become from these meager beginnings. What started as a search engine with the goal of providing the most relevant search results possible has now become an array of search utilities, enterprise products, a mobile operating system (among many other developments) and the single most popular Internet marketing platform in the world. Below is a timeline with selected events highlighted (click to enlarge). Find more detailed information on Google’s history here.

What Google development affected you the most over the years?

Broad Match Modifiers (BMMs) were released in July 2010 after a successful beta test in the UK and Canada. Broad Match Modifiers are targeting features that provide more specificity than typical broad matches, but are less restrictive than phrase matches. By placing a “+” in front of a word in a broad match keyword or phrase, only a query that includes that keyword (or a close variant) will trigger your ad.

Broad Match Modifiers provide an interesting opportunity for advertisers who traditionally use phrase matching to expand their volume without sacrificing traffic quality as significantly as traditional broad match. Those primarily utilizing broad match in their current campaigns must understand that BMMs will reduce volume if implemented in broad-matched campaigns.  However, they provide an opportunity to increase the relevancy of your advertising without reducing your traffic volume as significantly as phrase matching.

While the additional level of targeting afforded by Broad Match Modifiers is an exciting prospect, it is important to note that this change doesn’t solve an old complaint about broad matching – Google decides what they consider as synonyms and close variants to your target keywords. Therefore, it is still important to monitor search queries and maintain a list of negative keywords to prevent your ad from appearing unnecessarily. A possible solution might be a “modified phrase match”, where each word that makes up the phrase (no synonyms or variants) would have to appear, but allow them to appear in any order. This would afford advertisers with additional/total control while offering an option to increase lead volume.

We recommend testing Broad Match Modifiers in your program, especially in campaigns where the scope needs to be expanded or reduced. Have you started using Broad Match Modifiers in your program? We’d love to hear about any early results!

When you search in Google in the old index, you are not searching live on the Web; the results that are returned to you are most likely a couple of days to weeks old.  To better understand how searching works, watch this video: How Search Works

Google’s decision to create Caffeine was due to increased content on the Web. With so many people on the Internet frequently uploading videos, blogs, images, and Web pages they decided it was time for a new system. Google’s last index consisted of several layers, and it took weeks to update them because they would to analyze the entire Web. Caffeine analyzes smaller portions of the Web to continually update the index.

Besides Caffeine’s increased indexing speed, it will also rely more on keywords, and more importance will be place on exact matches in domain names. Another big change is that local results may be detected based on one’s  IP address even if they’re not logged in.

So what does this mean to the average Internet user? If you are searching in Google you will get fresher result and up to date information. If you are a content publisher that updates your site, Twitter, blog, or e-commerce store regularly you should receive improved rankings. This is bad news for those of you who aren’t adding content on a regular basis. You may start to see other sites pass yours in rankings based on the new indexing methods.

If you don’t update frequently, here are some things you can do to your website to avoid missing out on the Caffeine rush:

- Get an SEO friendly content management system that will allow for easy updates to your website.

- Add a blog to your site about the latest news in your industry and update it regularly.

- Add a link to your Twitter profile to your website.

- Post relevant pictures and videos.

- Get others to link to your site

Carrie Grimes, a Google software engineer is confident in the new system and stated “it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online and delivers even more relevant search results to you.”

This practical joke is a prime example of the fun people are having with Google and the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search option. People can influence search engines like Google to rank a page higher than others so that their joke page comes up as the top result when someone uses the search option “I’m Feeling Lucky”.  Officially known as “Google Bombing,” this practice can be dated back to 1999 when a search for “more evil than Satan himself” landed you on Microsoft’s homepage.  Google Bombing is becoming a long-standing tradition on the web as more and more people find ways to manipulate Google’s search results to put up hoax and joke pages. Another great example is when people Google Bombed President George W. Bush in 2003.  If you were to type “miserable failure” and click “I’m Feeling Lucky” it brought you to the President’s biography page on the White House website.

Google Bombing won’t always work for everyone. This can be the result of one of two factors. The first factor that can make your Google Bomb a dud is the location of where you are searching.  When someone enters a query in Google for example, the search results become more specific to the user’s location.  The other factor that can affect the results of a Google Bomb from working is personalized search. Google’s personalized search option generates search results that are partially based on a user’s recent search history.

Even though “I’m Feeling Lucky” quirks won’t always work for everyone, they are still out there and still very funny. On that note, Rise Interactive asks you to contribute other “I’m Feeling Lucky” examples or any other Google Jokes or quirks found on Google. Remember to keep it clean and have fun!

However, this is not a safe assumption. Many advertisers not only do not know their CPA threshold, they don’t understand its value or how to calculate it for their organization. As an Internet marketing agency, we bring value to many of our clients by helping them establish just this. Given that, we thought many of our readers would find great value in the insight and guidance we can provide in regards to setting your CPA threshold.

Your actual CPA is determined by dividing total spend for a given time period by the amount of conversions during the same time period.  In Internet marketing this most often means media spend/conversions.  If you are using an agency or third party tracking tools you may also factor those variables into the numerator of the equation. A company’s CPA threshold is unique to its product and/or service offering and can be influenced by a variety of factors including their internal goals, the value of the final sale, average order value, close rate and profit margins.

The following is an elementary example of how one might determine their CPA threshold. Let’s say a realtor is selling a property at a non-negotiable price of $1,000,000 and that she knows she’ll make $50K in gross revenue when the sale is generated. Based on historical data, she is confident that she will close 1 out of every 10 leads generated (she’s really good!) and decides to invest $10,000 in a banner ad campaign to promote the listing.  Given her close ratio, she can safely set her CPA threshold at $1,000.

In comparison, consider a cosmetics retailer who sells a variety of beauty products at varying price-points. Assuming the average order value is $40 and they need to maintain a return on advertising spend (ROAS) of 500%, it can be determined they should not spend more than $8 (40/500%) to acquire a new sale.

Once you have determined your company’s CPA threshold, you can use historical data and/or assumptions to evaluate whether various channels will be within the spending cap. Say, for example, the above retailer is launching a cost-per-click paid search campaign. Let’s assume the campaign will receive 7,500 clicks and 10% (750) of those will convert. Additionally, the total campaign cost is $5,000. By dividing $5,000 by 750, we can now see the CPA is $6.66 for this campaign. Because they have already established their CPA threshold is $8, they know that this initiative will successfully contribute to their marketing mix. By using the below formula, we also see that this campaign yields a ROAS of 600%, which also meets the advertiser’s minimum requirement.

Revenue/ Advertising Cost =ROAS

[40*750]/5,000=6 (600% ROAS)

As you can see, it is fundamental that every organization establishes their CPA threshold in order to establish a benchmark for your marketing ROI. It helps marketers to make quick and informed optimization decisions, as they can quickly measure the effectiveness of a campaign and make the necessary adjustments to regain their ROI if need be. Additionally, if campaigns are acquiring conversions within your CPA threshold, and therefore are effectively contributing to revenue generation, marketers can shift more budget to the said medium and capitalize on the investment.