Internet Marketing Archives

Adobe: Facebook’s referred revenue-per-visit grew quarterly, but Twitter and Tumblr dipped

Written by: Kaylene Hong, Asia Reporter for The Next Web.

may be getting harder for Facebook to stand out among other social sites for ad revenue, given the increasingly crowded space, but Adobe’s latest social media intelligence report for the first quarter of 2014 found that revenue referred from most social channels to retail sites dropped quarter-over-quarter, except for Facebook.

Facebook’s referred revenue-per-visit rose 2 percent quarter-over-quarter, while Twitter and Tumblr’s figure declined by 23 percent and 36 percent respectively. Year-over-year though, Tumblr’s referred revenue-per-visit was up 55 percent, followed by Facebook at 11 percent and Twitter at 5 percent.

Adobe noted in its report: “While Pinterest and Tumblr are doing better than last year, they’re still unable to provide consistent referred revenue outside of the holiday shopping season. Facebook, however, continues to provide value year round.”

It’s worth noting for comparison that Shareaholic’s Q1 2014 numbers reflect a more positive outlook for Pinterest, with data showing that Pinterest’s referral traffic share grew 48 percent quarter-over-quarter, up from 4.79 percent to 7.10 percent. Meanwhile, Shareaholic also found that Facebook’s referral traffic share grew from 15.44 percent to 21.25 percent, while Twitter remained essentially flat — moving from 1.12 percent to 1.14 percent.

Adobe’s report also found that Facebook’s ad click-through rate jumped 160 percent year-over-year and was up 20 percent quarter-over-quarter. However, its cost-per-click declined 2 percent year-over-year and 11 percent quarter-over-quarter, with Adobe attributing it to a strong performance during the holiday season in the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, Facebook ads with embedded videos are gaining traction. Adobe’s report found that Facebook video plays increased by 758 percent year-over-year and 134 percent quarter-over-quarter after auto-play for videos was introduced last quarter, while engagement with video posts rose 25 percent year-over-year and 58 percent quarter-over-quarter.

Senior analyst Joe Martin said: “Facebook is back at the top of the mountain… It was declining for some time, but now it’s at about 75 percent of retail referrer traffic, for example. All the other networks are still growing, but the majority of referring traffic is still attributed to Facebook. That means that Facebook’s adaptions for marketers are working.”

Adobe taps on aggregated data from Adobe Marketing Cloud to produce paid social data. Its overall estimates are based on 260 billion Facebook ad impressions, 226 billion Facebook post impressions, 17 billion referred visits from social networking sites, as well as seven billion brand post interactions including comments, likes and shares.

Charts via Adobe

Read Full Story: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/04/22/adobe-facebooks-referred-revenue-per-visit-grew-quarterly-but-twitter-and-tumblr-dipped/

Traditional Media Might Be Old, But It’s Not Dead. . .Yet

by Samuel Greengard, Contributing Writer at CMO.com

As CMOs and other marketing executives attempt to navigate the intricacies of today’s fickle and fast-changing consumer marketplace, it’s apparent that technology plays an increasingly critical role in driving strategies and tactics.

But somewhere between mobile, social media, and other digital channels lies an easy-to-forget reality: Old media hasn’t exactly disappeared. Indeed, television, radio, and print remain viable and effective tools for promoting a brand and capturing mind share and market share.

Sorting through this complex environment is a growing challenge–and one that requires a clear perspective. As Brian Babineau, senior vice president of content strategy and activation at Arnold Worldwide, told CMO.com: “Great scale and awareness can still come out of traditional media vehicles. Some of the most innovative advertising campaigns that have a digital, social, or content play have, at the core, made great use of television and other traditional tools to help bring the campaign story out to a larger audience.”

How can CMOs best navigate the chasm between old and new media? What goes into making effective decisions about how to define a strategy and allocate dollars? And how can an organization adopt an approach that leads to maximum synergy and bottom-line results? While there’s no template for producing results, one fact is perfectly clear: Success increasingly depends on using both old and new media effectively–and often in complementary ways.

Said Alton Adams, U.S. lead for the Customer Strategy and Growth Practice at KPMG Consulting, in an interview with CMO.com: “The goal is to ensure that you’re maximizing your marketing reach and not leaving certain customers behind because they have an affinity for old media.”

Mobile is no longer just ‘fashionable’…it’s strategic!

From the Adobe Digital Marketing Blog:

Most people know that mobile is the way to go. Mobile sites and apps make it easier for most brands to communicate to their customers who are constantly on the go. But we wanted to dive a little deeper into the discussion. So in November 2013, Adobe Campaign ran a survey focused on “SoLoMo” (Social, Local, Mobile) strategies, where 741 marketers were surveyed worldwide. The survey results were impressive, and a quick snapshot can be summed up in an infographic.

5 Mobile Marketing Musts For 2014 from CMO.com

Cross-screen commerce has become a focus for many brands. Consumers are looking for convenience and instant access to their favorite stores and products. As mobile technology has grown increasingly “smarter,” so has shoppers’ reliance on their devices for more of their retail needs.

In a report from Nielsen, 91 percent of adults have their mobile phone within arms reach 24/7; with that kind of immediate dependence, online retailers and mobile marketers should be prepared with a cross-screen commerce strategy. But while the marketing concepts and strategies for mobile are similar to those for desktop, the tactics are not.

Beginning this year, marketing teams need to think more aggressively about mobile and multiscreen. They must also reach beyond just downloads as the main performance metric. Downloads are easy–2014 will be about mobile monetization, and marketers will need to go the extra distance to find success.

Following are five essentials mobile marketers should take into account to leverage multiple devices for driving purchases and lifetime value.

Importance of Email Marketing

Email marketing has become the most preferred internet marketing tool of varied businesses. When done in the right manner, this method of marketing can generate the right business leads for online businesses. Among the many facets of email campaign that requires careful attention from businesses effective engagement with your email lists deserves the highest importance. Given below are some helpful tips for organizing a successful email campaign:

Create segmented email lists for better management

In order to better manage your email lists, create email lists based on the different types of consumers. Demarcation of your email lists will help to improve your engagement with the target consumer base; it will enable you to create personalized emails that will best address the needs of your clients. This will help to build trust with your target market as they will be receiving emails which they will find to be useful. By implementing such a personalized approach in your online marketing campaign your business will fetch higher returns.

Send friendly messages to your clients

The first point of contact between businesses and potential clients in any email campaign is the welcome message. A cold welcome message reflects badly on any kind of email campaign. The welcome message should make the email receiver hooked on to your business the moment he starts reading your mail. The aim of the email campaign should be to make each and every potential customer feel important and valuable in order to further connect with them. Your message should contain something interesting that will immediately draw their notice like gift coupons so that they will be driven to know more about your services and products.

Send confirmation mails that will generate more business

Every buyer expects confirmation emails after making their purchase from the online stores. Since this kind of email is important to buyers, it shouldn’t be just a typical confirmation email. Your confirmation email should contain information that will lead to additional purchase by the customer from your online business. This is usually achieved through suggestions of similar products which the buyers might be interested in purchasing. Based on this tactic, many online businesses receive additional orders every time this kind of confirmation letter is send to their consumers.

Build strong client- business relationship through reward programs

Incentive programs form an important part of online marketing promotions as they help to build a long lasting relationship with your target consumer base. Reward programs are wonderful opportunity for businesses to showcase their appreciation for their customers. This is another approach that your online business can use for making your business grow. The offer of loyalty rewards to customers will further serve to enhance your brand name as well as strengthen the relationship between your business and customers. Reward programs will encourage your loyal clients to continue to support and utilize your diverse and varied services and products. They will always look into your emails as they will contain valuable information that will always help them.

Evaluate your emails thoroughly

In order for your hard work to pay off, you need to test your emails before you send them out to your prospective customers. The various advertising pitch and enticing schemes that are part of the email marketing promotion might become useless if your receivers fail to understand them. Various email elements like font size, images, headings, link placement, text message etc need to be thoroughly evaluated before they are send out. This will ensure that your clients receive well written business emails that will immediately connect them to your online business. Such a step will save your email campaigns from being futile as the purpose of any email campaign is to connect with your potential subscribers.

By building your email campaigns around these important approaches, your business will reap numerous benefits in the form of long lasting relationship with your clients.

Avoid Out-of-Date SEO

To create good website content, you may try to follow all the usual SEO techniques to get a top ranking in search engines. But even after implementing all the SEO techniques you know, back linking the website with other popular sites, social networking sites, etc., you may see that your website rankings are not appearing in search engines. There can be many reasons behind this problem, among which using outdated SEO techniques is most important.

While learning about SEO, you might have followed websites that talked about older search engine optimization guides and tips which were once highly popular. But with the flow of time, technology is getting upgraded everyday and so is SEO. There are certain things that you always need to consider while optimizing a website for search engines.

First and foremost, you must always remember that while creating a website never ever create a duplicate website thinking that more than one website will help you to drive double the traffic to your website. Absolutely wrong! Whenever you are creating a duplicate site of an original, search engines will raise the issue of duplicate content. In some cases, search engines may suspend these websites as well. So, ultimately your search engine ranking is held back. In addition to this, the quality of your website content is also neglected whenever there is a problem of duplicate content and your website(s) will be held back in Google rankings there as well. This is a serious problem with many top notch companies, and it is always suggested that you should focus on only one website with quality content in it to win good search engine rankings.
Unlike earlier SEO concepts, meta keyword tags are not as important as they used to be today. Search engines don’t depend on these keywords/tags these days. Basically, these keywords are irrelevant in modern SEO techniques. Keywords are used today in websites only to highlight to other similar websites what you are targeting. If you are not bothered about your competitors, instead of wasting time incorporating meta keyword tags, concentrate on quality content while improving your website with modern SEO techniques to get good search engine rankings.
Many people think that submitting websites to search engines helps in earning good rankings. But this is not the case. Simply link to it and your website will be in the top rankings if your website really reads well and has original content. Your website will get more and more exposed with the number of links you bring to it.
Now, link building doesn’t mean stuffing links only in one particular anchor text. Search engines prefer to see various kinds of anchor texts hyperlinked with various sources. So, look for variations in anchor texts as well as links to increase your website’s visibility in search engines. While linking, always remember to link your brand name.
Search engine ranking and page ranking are something totally different. Even if you get a higher PageRank, it does not necessarily mean that your search engine ranking is also high. Getting a good PageRank indicates that your links are effectively working and websites are driving relatively good traffic to your website. You need to spend time on your website to earn good rankings, not just worry about PageRank.
The last (and also a typically outdated) concept is to place link directories in your website. These link directories do no other effective work other than simply cluttering the website with irrelevant links. Instead of incorporating link directories, it is better to link to social networking sites.

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Reasons to Invest in SEO

There’s never a time when your website couldn’t use a little more love at the search engines. After all, is there such a thing as too much traffic?! From time to time, you’ll notice some onsite factors that are a clear indication that you should start spending more time on your website before things get out of hand. Many of us see our websites as a backyard garden, something that we’ll tend to one of these days but just never really get down to doing.

Here’s a quick list of issues and tips for fixing up your website.

Dead Pages with Links Pointing to Them

During the course of maintaining your website, you will add new pages, update pages and remove pages. You may have removed pages because you stopped offering a product line or service. However, each page of your website can have external pages pointing to it, and search engines like to use these links as a signal about the quality of your website. When you have dead pages, you will generally have a new page that has come up in its place. You can set up a simple page redirect via your .htaccess file or via your CMS to ensure that the links you already have don’t lose potential and that your visitors have a seamless experience.

Slow Loading Pages

When your website loads slowly, it makes a difference in the end user experience. It also makes a difference in search engine rankings. If search engines notice your website can’t take the load, they will stop sending you as much traffic as you would like. The simple answer to fixing your speed problems is to get a better hosting company. The technically correct way of figuring out why your website is not working the way it should is to do a test on the loading pattern. You can run a test at tools.pingdom.com. Pingdom will give you a stat on how long each part of your website takes to load. The initial time taken is generally because of the programming code/logic. If you have a high first-byte time, you need to ask the programming team to clean up their code by caching or optimizing. You can also add a subdomain to store images, CSS and JavaScript files. This will make the load time quicker as you won’t have overhead data in your requests.

Checking Alternate Keywords

When you’ve optimized your website for a few keywords and have hit the sweet spot at search engines for traffic from those terms, you can always do more from there. A quick method to ensure that you are not leaving out ancillary products for your competition to snatch up is to look at your keywords log. Look at what phrases your customers are looking for when they visit your site, and see if you can create a product or service that would be useful to them. Quite often you will notice that people search for slightly similar terms to your products, and search engines will send you traffic thinking that your website has the required services available. It would be wise to invest some time and effort into making the most of that traffic and having something that your customers can use in those niches as well.

Mobile, Social and More

If you haven’t already created a mobile experience for your users, you need to look into that soon. Mobile browsing isn’t just a fad anymore. It’s here to stay and it’s everywhere. People are looking at your website from their phones, and they need to see the data that is relevant to them quickly and easily before they move to alternate providers. Social websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are a great connection point. There’s nothing like hearing the pain and pleasure points so quickly from your end users and making changes to ensure that you are ready for the next big wave that people are looking for. The new media options available today allow us to hear what people want in an instant. If we don’t adapt to those demands, someone else will.

SEO for Your eCommerce Website

Google supports a number of Schema.org-based classes and properties. What this means for your website is that the level of control you have for your store is pretty awesome. In case you’re wondering what schema’s are and how they help your website, schemas are open-source class implementations that integrate into Google search results. These schemas help show things like photos of a page author, star rating for a product, location of a store, phone number and so on.

Let’s take a look at new implementations from Google and how they can help your store convert more customers.

Using the new tags allows you granular control over your products and lets you leverage the strength of Google search into your product feed. There are as many as 25 different attributes you can use to describe your product and get into Google’s search feed with better results.

The new attributes also allow you to link products to each other and describe physical properties of products. For example, you could have isAccessoryOrSparePartFor, isConsumableFor, isRelatedTo or isSimilarTo. Plus, physical product properties can include color, depth, height, weight, width and itemCondition. These properties allow you to provide structured data about the dimensions, appearance and condition of your products.

This is just a sampling of the attributes available from GoodRelations that can give you far more control over your product list. Another potential benefit of using snippets in your pages is being on the good books of Google. There is no denying the fact that when you see a photo of the page owner, a star rating or a list of reviews for the product, the conversion rate goes a lot higher.

In the long run, these Schema integrations have excellent benefits for the end user. For example, a single page with a list of all products and prices for a product would certainly make life easier for your customer. Whichever way you look at it, there are exciting times ahead for consumers and retailers alike with the integration of these new schemas and granular information being available for products.

Effectively Reaching Your Customers via Email

Reaching your customers via email is an inexpensive yet effective way to increase traffic to your website. That being said, you need to make sure to follow a few basic strategies for making the most of your mailing lists and outreach efforts.

The first thing people will see when you send them an email is your “From” name and email address. Since most emailing programs and websites allow you to customize your header settings, make sure your name clearly communicates that it’s coming from your website. For example, if your website is Mark’s Marketing Magic, make sure your email goes out as Mark’s Magic Marketing <mark@marketing-magic.com> or the equivalent for your website. It is also especially important that your email ID is not a Gmail or Hotmail address. That’s the last thing people expect to see from an established brand.

Use the subject line effectively as well. When you send out an email, do not use something generic like “Buy These Products.” Instead, use a phrase that’s more specifically targeted. And form it in an attention getting way like “James, these Magical Marketing strategies will surprise you!”

Get to the point. Long emails are not particularly inviting or easy to go through. With a limited attention span, most people will skip through a large portion of the email. As a rule of thumb, try to keep your emails to about five hundred words and spread the paragraphs apart so that it’s easy to scan and read. The focus of the email should be expressed clearly in the first two paragraphs with links to buy or respond before the first “fold” of the email.

Test before you send to minimize the chance of your message ending up in the recipient’s spam inbox. Many email service providers look for words like “free,” “buy now,” “get it here,” etc., to check if a mail is from a spam source. Most mass email programs have built-in tests for Bayesian spam filters and spam words that should be an essential step in email preparation. Also, the more unique your email looks, the lower the chance for being sent into spam limbo.

Filter mail users, which can be done with most of newer programs, based on opens, click-throughs, privacy requests, unsubscribe requests and sales. When people buy your products, make sure you thank them. And don’t email them again with another pitch!

Include an appropriate method for contacting you and sharing the email with others. Your footer should contain a number of options including methods of unsubscribing, easy forward-to-a-friend links, and contact-the-sender functions. In your email signature, clearly include your name and details.

Make sure to test your email tactics over time, and remember that email can be the cheapest and most effective method of reaching your customers. It is often ignored as it involves some work. But keep using it, and you’ll be surprised with the number of repeat customers you’ll find in your database.