SEM I SEO I PPC Blog

Our blog has moved to http://blog.semvalet.com/

2010-04-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

You will find more content and a better look and fell. Enjoy the new SEM Valet blog:

From SEMPO annual survey - what are companies trying to achieve with PPC and SEO

2010-04-02T17:23:00.000-07:00

I have always been curious to find out what agencies and companies were trying to achieve through Search Engine Marketing. The answers vary whether we are talking about Paid Search , Search Engine Optimization or Social media. The SEMPO annual survey gives us an insight into online marketers in the US:

For paid search (otherwise known as Pay Per Click):

For Search Engine Optimization:

For Social media:

As expected, Paid Search and SEO are mostly driven by lead generation and products sales where Social media has a much stronger brand awareness component.

State of Search Engine Marketing report 2010 - SEMPO

2010-03-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization just released it State of the Market survey for 2010. The long awaited report gives us an insight into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search trends, based on the input of 1,472 agencies and client side marketers from 68 countries. This year and for the first time, the report included a section on social media marketing.

Some highlights from the report:

1. Econsultancy and SEMPO estimated the North American Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry to be $14.6B in '09, up from $13.5B in '08. They estimated the market to grow by 14% in '10 to $16.6B

2. Companies continue to shift money from traditional advertising to SEM:

3. Google continues to dominate the SEM market:

4. Companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO and 37% more on paid search in 2010

5. More than half of advertisers say that Google keywords have become more expensive

Most companies expect to spend more on social media in 2010:

Paid Search and Google guidelines for copy goods and trademarks

2010-03-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

No later than yesterday, we received a business inquiry from a company based out of Asia. They have a number of web site which sell high quality copies of famous products to European products. This raised a number of issues we have not considered previously.

Before I start outlining the issues, let's imagine you are a start-up hungry for new business. A business opportunity like this pretty much meant we could make our first year of revenue, let alone expected earnings.

Beyond the ethical issues associated with helping companies selling fake goods, we took a closer look at what Google said about copy goods and trademark issues. We are not saying Google is the ultimate Net Supreme Court but they provided a decent set of principles.

''Advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.'' In other words, Paid Search advertisers are judged responsible for the ads they service. ' Google prohibits the sale or promotion of counterfeit goods''. The actions Google might take include disapproving or disabling ads and/or terminating advertisers. In the case of SEM agency, this pretty means the company might go bankrupt. This does not apply to Natural Search, which makes me wonder what happens to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies promoting fake goods web site.

The most interesting part is related to trademark policy. Since last year, Google reviewed its trademark policy and now allows US advertisers to bid on branded keywords even though you might actually be a competitor to the brand being advertised. There was some controversy at the time since it was felt this was not a fair practice. More companies are going to bid for branded keywords. In Addition, if you bid on your competitor's name, your competitors might return the favor. This is bad business for advertisers. Ultimately it creates bidding war, and let's face it more media spent on Google. The only caveat was you can not use negative or pejorative terms to bid on branded keywords. This applies to the US only. Outside the US, it is still against Google principles to bid for branded keywords (unless this is your brand of course).

To make a long story short, we declined the business opportunity on the basis of Google's fake goods principle but also trademark principle (the target market was the US).

We lost a potentially very profitable business but feel good about our relationship with Google and more importantly about the company's integrity in general.

PR 2.0 or the art of boosting your Search Engine Optimization through smart PR

2010-03-13T09:25:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a BusinessWire representative this week about PR 2.0 - For those of you who are not familiar with BusinessWire, they are one the global leaders in transmitting Press Releases to journalists, analysts, regulators but also search engines. Companies of all sizes have a subscription and pay for each release distributed through Business Wire network. The fees vary from $400 to $600 for each distribution.

Why do we care?

The art of PR has changed over the last few years. PR was traditionally seen as something that only Corporates can afford. It may require robust corporate messaging and PR professionals (i.e people who are comfortable picking up the phone from journalists). More and more smaller companies have been using online PR (digg, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to generate some buzz and customer engagement vis-a-vis their brand. Social media by definition is PR.

Social media can only be earned

What we tend to forget is getting customers to talk about your brand is not easy to achieve. It's one thing creating a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It's another one to get customers excited about your product and ultimately generate this buzz on your behalf. It is even more difficult to tie this back to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. These backlinks from your more loyal brand supporters are hard to earn. Particularly if what you offer is not really sexy and /or tend to be oriented towards companies.

Alternative tools to boost SEO

Back to my discussion with BusinessWire, I have found they offer a decent set of tools to create a comprehensive list of backlinks to your web site at a reasonable cost. They recently launched a new product called Enhanced Online News (EON). EON is an online platform where companies form all sizes can submit press releases to maximize SEO coverage.

This means small and medium companies can quickly post press releases that will be distributed to the BusinessWire network for a nominal fee. To ensure strong SEO results:

1) The press release title should be short with all keywords included at the beginning of the title

2) Targeted keywords in the release should be repeated a few times in the release description (just after the title). The tool then adds targeted keyword into the meta tags of the page. This is only available for the title meta tag for now, not keyword tags yet.

3) Companies should take advantage of the free banner area at the bottom of the page to include screenshot of the company web site or even banners

What I like most about this tool is it identifies two or three quotes from the release and alternates them on top of the release, so that crawlers always find something new to look at.

More editorial tips are included on the EON portal.

To me, this seems to be a good option to create backlinks in a short period of time at a reasonable cost.

If you have had experience using that tool, I would be curious to find out whether it worked or has not worked for you.

Does Google Local Business Center influence Organic Search Results?

2010-03-07T07:20:00.001-08:00

In a previous post about geo-targeting, we mentioned Google's latest attempt to break into local businesses. For small businesses, Google Business Center is another way to reach local customers.

Google Business Center is adding features everyday and it gradually becoming integrated into other Google products such as AdWords, Merchant Center and of course Google Map.

This is how Google Local Business Center looks like today. The example below is for a College Hunks Hauling Junks franchise in Atlanta. From a reputational standpoint, potential customers who enter this business name and location will be able to see it in Google map (under the organic search option). The little paragraph provides basic information including address and phone number.

By clicking on the map, a new window pops-up and shows the following information;

In addition to these gimmicks, businesses can offer coupon that will show up in the Google map window. By the way, you will notice that AdWords ads for this businesses come-up on both left hand side and underneath Google map.

The question that immediately came to my mind is whether this would have any impact on the Organic Search Results. Does a business registered in the Google Local Business Center is more likely to come-up in search queries? As I mentioned above, yes from a reputation standpoint (i.e. someone look for the business name). Probably not from a product standpoint. I have not seen evidence yet that this particular business came up higher in Search Engine Results Pages when a customer looks for 'junk removal Atlanta' let's say. But it certainly can't do any harm.

Writing good AdWords Copy - from Ogilvy to Google Lady

2010-02-28T07:51:00.000-08:00

If you have been writing Ad copies online and offline for some time, you know variations in Ad copy matters. In Paid Search in particular, visitors spend no more than a few seconds looking at organic search and sponsored results. Some studies have shown most visitors look at sponsored results in clutters, which means most of them will hardly read the Ad.

I was curious to find out what made a good Ad copy stands out for the competitors. In particular whether the good old principles of advertising still apply in the digital area. In Ogilvy's 1963 book 'confession of an advertising man', he laid out a number of tips to write effective ad copies. Let's see how many of these are still relevant today:

Tip 1 ''On the average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy'.
The headline remains the center price of any Google (or other Search Engine) Ad. It makes about 25% of total ad space allocation. Typically, it includes dynamic keyword insertion where search queries are added automatically to things such as the headline, display UR etc.

Tip 2''Inject news in the headline''
What might have been true during Ogilvy's time is a hard thing to do in Paid Search, given space limitations of 25 characters. But if you can find creative ways to make your headline sounds like newsworthy, go for it. Keywords such as ''announcing'', ''new'', ''available now'' have higher click-through-rates.

Tip 3 ''The two most powerful words are 'NEW' and 'FREE"
These words definitely attract more eyeballs. The value of adding the word 'FREE' is a bit ambiguous. Some industry observers like Google Lady recommend to stay away from any Ad copies which includes freebies. Since advertisers pay per click, you might want to stay away from freebies hunter. They will hard convert anyway. The third keyword that has great success online is 'OFFICIAL'. Its popularity is probably due to the fact there is a lot of junk on the web and potential visitors pay more attention to any credible Ads.

Tip 4 ''Other most powerful words include:'' This is Ogilvy's list,as published in 1963.

And here are Google Lady's favorites (February 2010):

Once we take out all e-commerce jargon such as 'download', 'free shipping'', the two lists look awfully similar!

Tip 5 ''Include your selling promise to your selling promise'
The selling promise became our value proposition but it's pretty much the same idea than 40+ years ago. Make your value proposition relevant, unique and differentiated. Don't forget that in an online environment, any competitor can track changes in headlines in less than 24 hours and copy it in even less.

Tip 6 ''Headlines should not contain more than 6 to 12 words''
It's actually probably closer to 3 to 5 in Paid Search given the 25 characters space limitations. But the idea remains the same. Your Ad copy headline must telegraph your value proposition and entice potential customers to read description lines. Don't forget the objective of your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your readers.

Tip 7 ''Do not use obscure headlines''
Obscure headlines, particularly ones with negative can be confusing to potential customers. I have always been interesting to find out how effective these Ads can be online:

As a summary, it's interesting to see that most Ogilvy's principles are still relevant today. I would think the primary differences lie in technology progress. Some semantics might have changed slightly ''download now'' but the biggest changes are:

Ability to dynamically create ads with customized keyword
New functionalities such as geo-targeting, day-parting (change ads depending on time of the day) and demographics targeting (for Google's content network for example)
Stronger immediate call-to-action. Potential customers are now one click away to buy products and/or sign-up services.

5 minutes with Obama's social media manager

2010-02-20T15:52:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was privileged to attend a roundtable with David Plouffe. David is known as the chief campaign manager for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. He is often credited for leveraging social media to organize a grassroots efforts, that eventually led to Obama's victory.

There was a flurry a questions but the one I asked him was around social media. When he started putting his campaign together, as early as 2006, there was not much social media activity. For example, Twitter was not even around. Social media had also hardly been used by politicians. In that context how did he figure out his social media strategy.

The first thing he mentioned is that he did not really. The social media campaign grew organically. He highlighted that social media pioneers were naturally gravitating towards support Obama's candidacy. It was then up to David's team to foster an environment where these supporters could express themselves. Initially David created a platform (Obama's web site primarily) where they could meet and exchange ideas. This quickly extended into other channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. David highlighted that the campaign did a good job in using genuine media such as videos (which look 'real') to give a flavour of authenticity to the campaign. What suprized him is that McCain's campaign did not make full use of social media overall even though McCain invented the concept of online fundraising in 2000.

David was also keen to stress that 'old school' techniques such as email marketing played the most active role in fundraising. According to the Guardian (UK newspaper), the campaign ''included a massive amount of classic door-to-door campaigning, harvested 13m email addresses. During the course of the presidential race more than 1bn emails were sent and people made 4m donations online. Total online donations topped a record $500m (£307m), with the average amount $85.''

It is likely the social media of his campaign was over-stated by the media. Nevertheless, he will be remembered as one of the first campaign managers who understood the concept of fostering community. Recently David announced he was working on another series of projects for Obama.

Do time and date matter in Search Engine Marketing?

2010-02-13T06:38:00.000-08:00

Of course it does. Some people argue the busiest time of the day are morning hours when people get to work and check personal emails etc. Others think lunch time is actually a good time for officer workers to relax and surf the web. Another bunch of people discourage any online marketing at night when people are probably less willing to convert. Have you noticed a lot of daily auction web site such as guilt.com send daily reminder an hour or so before lunch ... As far as day of the week is concerned, it is generally accepted that Monday and Tuesdays are the busiest days of the week and activity drops over the week end.

What does this mean for us Search Marketers?

Well it depends on the industry type, target audiences, services offered etc. If you sell widgets to office workers, don't expect much activity over the week end (even though these busy execs who work the week end might offer better conversion rates). A client of us sells financial services to individuals and their click through and conversions rates are pretty much consistent throughout the week. Their offering is not time/day sensitive and since most of their ads are on Google content network (real estate and personal finance publications for the most part), theirs ads come-up evenly during the week or week end.

Another client offers professional services to (mostly) women looking to remove clutter from their home. Mots of the ads are on the search network so they only come-up when people are actively looking queries in Google. The two graphs below show that they are more likely to click on PPC ads on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thursdays and Friday see a slowdown in click through. Activity picks-up again over the week end. One of the busiest time of the week is Sunday evening.

The second graph illustrates the bulk of the activity comes between the hours of 10am to 4pm. There is a peak during lunch time.

Google AdWords offers a tool that enable bids adjustment depending on the time of the day. By experimenting higher and lower bids, Search Marketers can increase their PPC at times that matter.

LinkedIn ads process and ROI

2010-02-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

So today we launched our first SEM Valet ad on LinkedIn. I was curious to go through the set-up process and know how effective these could be.

It took about 2 minutes to set-up a new ad. In one way, the process is mimicked on Ad Words where advertisers write headline (25 characters) and two lines of text (35 characters limit). The ad also includes a display and actual URL. The major difference is the inclusion of a link to my LinkedIn profile. This is how it looks like:

When it came to targeting, LinkedIn offers fewer options than Ad Words for instance. Since this is essentially a content network, there is little information available on search queries, keywords options, expected CPC etc.

This being said, LinkedIn has a decent set of localization and demographics targeting. I chose to focus on business owners in the US and Canada. Things like seniority, business function, age, gender etc ... were not relevant to us here. LinkedIn estimated that our targeting available market was 408,471 professionals. If 5% of them are on LinkedIn every day and 0.05% of them click on the ad (this is based on banner advertising industry's average CTR), then up to 10 people would click on the ad. I then decided to be conservative and put it in a $2 targeted CPC and $10 daily budget. In other words, my hope is to get about 5 clicks a day.

The LinkedIn ad settings look like this:

In a week from now, I should have preliminary data on early CPC and click results. Stay tuned!

We will experiment with Pay-Per-Click in social media (prediction #5)

2010-01-31T07:09:00.000-08:00

Overall, Cost per Click (CPC) is on the rise. New customers’ engagement on the opposite (which we can measure as Click through rate) is relatively stable. One of the things some of us will be tempted to do in 2010 is to launch small Pay-Per-Click pilot across social media channels.

They offer lower CPC and decent targeting. Engagement levels are expected to be quite low. Mention Facebook ads to advertising executives and most of them will run away ‘’I have never given a dollar to Facebook, they have to improve their ad targeting’’.

Well, I am going to give it a try anyway, perhaps running a small ($10 a day) campaign and see how it goes. Facebook offers the ability to target ads based on customers’ demographics such as location, age, birthday, sex, education, relationship, interested in etc.). But the primary reason why I got interested in Facebook is the ability to trigger ads based on certain keywords users enter when they update their status. For more information, you can read this great article from Business Insider.

Very recently, I also discovered LinkedIn ads. What I like about the LinkedIn program is an effective targeting based on user’s industry, function, location etc. The estimated CPC seems to be a lot higher than Facebook, but still lower than Google AdWords. I wonder what sort of click-through-rates one can get. But again, only experimentation will tell.

Stay tuned as I launch small pilots for both Facebook and LinkedIn in February!

We will test new segmentation and geo-targeting models (prediction #4)

2010-01-24T07:40:00.000-08:00

2009 already saw an extensive use of geo-targeting. Google AdWords in particular offers a wide range of options such as domain name (e.g. google.de), search term (e.g. hotel Mexico City) and IP targeting (only users located in one given area will see the ads).

This trend will accelerate this year due to a number of factors such as:

1) Higher Cost-Per-Click (CPC) that pushes advertisers to look for those long tail (and more costs effective) keywords
2) The release of SpeedPPC version 4 which makes building geo-targeting campaigns very easy. The latest software now offers multiple seeds keywords where in past it only offered dual keywords. While in the past, we might have used 'Car dealer' 'Atlanta' to create 'Car dealers Atlanta', we can now add a third element 'Georgia'.
3) The proliferation of the Google Local Business Center. Businesses can now register for free and have a presence on Google map (including offering coupons). What does this mean for their Pay-Per-click efforts? Businesses who are already using AdWords can now add their address in the ad. I will post more information as I test this new feature. Stay tuned.

In the interim, here's an example of an ad through the Google Business Center.

We will find out the impact of the Bing & Yahoo partnership (prediction #3)

2010-01-18T13:13:00.000-08:00

The latest rumor was that a U.S. regulatory decision will come in the first quarter of 2010. If approved, and many think it will be, Yahoo! will start fading out its organic and paid search platforms and substituting Bing, country-by-country. It is widely anticipated Bing will first start rolling-out in the U.S.

It is hard to tell whether the estimated 30% market share of a combined Bing & Yahoo will disrupt Google predominance in U.S. search. It is also difficult to predict what will be the impact of this new partnership for Bing and/or Yahoo advertisers. This being said, it would make sense to imagine all pay-per-click will be managed through a joint (revamped) Microsoft AdCenter. Advertisers might want to familiar themselves with it and stat anticipating an influx of impressions when Yahoo and Bing searches are combined.

More to come in 2010. I am looking forward to using an alternative platform to AdWords. Most advertisers are a bit reluctant to use 3 and plus providers. Making this into two large platforms might turn out to be an easier sale.

We will experiment with more AdWords ad formats (Prediction #2)

2010-01-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

In the past few months, Google introduced several new ad formats, including Sitelinks, Product Extensions, and Product Listings.

SiteLinks

According to the Google AdWords blog: ‘’Ad Sitelinks is a new AdWords feature that allows advertisers to extend the value of existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to content deep within advertisers’ sites. Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will display up to 4 additional Destination URLs in search-based text ad for users to choose from. By providing users with more options, advertisers can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of brand terms and other targeted keywords.’’

At this point, only a handful of large advertisers have been selected to test this new feature. Hopefully it will become more widespread in 2010.

Products extension

Another Google AdWords wonder, Product extensions allow advertisers to use existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight products directly in search ads. When AdWords text ad appears, and advertisers’ Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, product extensions show the images, titles, and prices of products in a plusbox under your ad.

Products Listing
A second feature for e-tailers, Product Listing Ads works with an advertiser's Google Merchant Center account to serve highly targeted ads that include richer product information directly in the ad itself - including product image, price, and merchant name. U.S. users searching on Google.com may begin to see Product Listing Ads more frequently on their shopping related queries.

While still new formats are being tested, they are designed to improve customer experience for web users. Advertisers should test them out.

AdWords headline can go beyond 25 characters.
Another small change Google introduced earlier in 2009 is longer headline. Google AdWords restricts the Headline of text ad to 25 characters. This is a good thing; it forces advertisers to be relevant while being concise. However a few bloggers reported they have been able to stretch this to 30 + characters. Apparently Google has been experimenting with it throughout 2009. I have been unable to find any post on the Google AdWords blog but I will continue looking. Longer headlines are particularly important for Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) when longer tail searches also appear in the headline. Up to now, DKI shortened longer tail keyword in the headline.

The use of long tail keyword searches will rise (Prediction #1)

2010-01-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

According to Marketing Charts, Searches containing five to more than eight words in length increased significantly among US users in fall 2009. Searches with one word amounted to 18.6% of all queries during the same time period (-2.3% compared to 2008).

It is hard to find some consolidated data for 2009 but it’s pretty obvious Internet users are getting more sophisticated at using search engines, and have learnt to make use of longer keyword. What does this mean for Search Engine Marketers?

Increased customer targeting and more sophisticated campaign builder tool such as SpeedPPC will help us design more granular campaigns. Campaigns that only run a hundreds keywords or less will not only become less relevant but also very expensive to maintain. As Cost-Per-Click increases year over year, less sophisticated advertisers will see their ROI decrease.

The good news is more resources (including a revamped Google AdWords learning center) will be available for Pay-Per-Click novice advertisers to jump on the longer tail keyword bandwagon. And those who don’t have the resources to launch ten to hundred thousand keyword campaign might consider outsourcing to Search Engine Marketing agencies.

5 Search Engine Marketing predictions for 2010

2010-01-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

It’s about time to wrap up 2009 and look forward to a more exciting 2010. Overall Search Engine Marketing (SEM) was less impacted by the recession than traditional advertising. Most companies came to realize that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click provide cost effective ways to attract new customers during tough times. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), in 2009, close to $15Bn was spent through the various search and content networks in North America. This number is expected to reach close to $17Bn in 2010 as more advertisers focus on accountability and ROI and small and medium businesses jump on the bandwagon. Repeat and new advertisers will see some major changes in 2010:

Prediction #1: The use of long tail keyword searches will rise

Prediction #2: We will experiment with more AdWords ad formats
Prediction #3: We will find out the impact of the Bing & Yahoo partnership
Prediction #4: We will test more geo-targeting campaigns

Prediction #5: We will experiment with Pay-Per-Click in social media

YouTube keyword suggestion tool

2009-12-20T06:51:00.001-08:00

The YouTube keyword tool was launched in March 2009. For those of you familiar with the Google AdWords Tool, it works pretty much the same way. Instead of using web queries as the AdWords tool does, the YouTube tool tracks keywords that trigger videos on a particular topic. These keywords can then be saved and used to edit 'tags' when uploading videos. The example below shows keywords that were returned by the tool in relation to 'search engine marketing. The tool generated 33 keywords. Some of them are a bit out of place but other like 'internet marketing training' or 'sem' can be useful. This tool is probably more directional and I would think it will become more targeted as the number of videos and queries on YouTube increase.

Another feature offered by the tool is the video id or URL feature. I looked for a popular video on 'search engine marketing' and the tool returned keywords YouTube users entered to find this video. The functionality generated 46 keywords.

Google Adwords new advertising exam - is this good news?

2009-12-12T06:50:00.000-08:00

According to Google AdWords blog, ''As part of our ongoing efforts to improve training materials and the Google Advertising Professionals program, we have updated the certification exam and learning center. The new test became available on November 13. The four main changes are as follow:

1) The test will cover a wider variety of questions. I took the old exam in which the breadth and depth of materials was already strong. I wonder why they would make it even broader. The previous exam has an entire section on campaign paid in non US currencies or mobile advertising. I would think these topics might not all be relevant to a broad audience. One possible improvement might be to offer a basic training supplemented by concentrations in particualr areas (such as mobile advertising for example).

2) From what I read in the various AdWords forum, the new test is a lot more conceptual. It requires a fair amount of thinking. The previous test was essentially interface questions for which mosts answers could be found by referring to the AdWords guide.

3) The passing score is now higher. It used to be 75% and is now 85%. The test is really no hard (see my previous post here) however it does require to memorize (or at least organize answers) to a lot of questions across a variety of topics.

4) The training center is now all in text. Previously you could choose either text or video. The tutorial videos did a very good job explaining the bits and pieces of each topic. For those people like who memorize visual elements better, it will be hard to read all this content, mostly on a screen. Too bad the videos are gone.

With this, good luck in passing the exam. Glad to know I don't have to pass mine for another two years.

Government 2.0

2009-11-01T18:24:00.000-08:00

I ran across this neologism for the first time while reading an interview by O'Reilly. The man came-up with web 2.0. I figured gov 2.0 had to be another revolution I did not want to miss. According to wikipedia, Government 2.0 is an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses. Integration of tools such as wikis, development of government-specific social networking sites and the use of blogs, RSS feeds and Google Maps are all helping governments provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful to the people concerned. More on this topic as I continue investigating what it actually means for us.

Digital Assets Optimization - how little things such as PDFs can make a big difference in SEO

2009-10-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I discussed how all types of digital assets such as videos, documents, podcasts etc ... can help add relevant content to a company website and increase the web site visibility to search engine crawlers.

One of the things I discovered is Google can ready PDF almost the same way it reads HTML. Companies that have a lot of product sheets, technical documentation, white papers etc should be made available online.

According to Search Engine Land, there are a few tips to follow. Here's a summary:

1) PDFs must be text based

2) Add a title to the document properties

3) Optimize the copy (the same way you would optimize HTML pages, i.e. at least 300 words per PDF and watch out for keyword stuffing)

4) Include backlinks in PDF

5) Ensure the file is no too big so that Search Engine can read it easily. If necessary break the PDF into various elements

6) Have one or two sentences describing what the PDF is abut on the very top of the document

For more information, go to:

Google Adwords for Small Businesses

2009-10-17T05:39:00.000-07:00

This insightful article from the New York Times is a great intro to Google Adwords (or paid search) for small and medium businesses. Anyone can create a paid search campaign by bidding on a handful of keywords. The danger is this space is highly competitive and small businesses should be looking at a more comprehensive campaign with thousands of longer, more specific keyword (keyword granularity). This will increase reach and minimize costs. Running a successful campaign takes a lot of time and expertise, as the author pointed out.

Inside Google Adwords

2009-09-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

I just discovered this blog from the Google Adwords team. Good stuff.

This is what you can find

The latest industry trends and information
Google insights and news
Relevant product information and updates

It gets a bit technical and for those of you who do not spend a few hours a week on Google Adwords, you may loose patience quickly. For the others, here's the latest article on Google new keyword tool.

Alexa gives you quick web metrics on the go!

2009-09-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I receive inquiries from companies that do not have any analytics capabilities (Google Analytics, web trends, Omniture) embedded into their web site. Often, they do not have a good sense of who is visiting their web site, for how long, what are the referring sources and so on ... I found out there was a way to get these analytics without installing any code in any web site. Alexa.com crawls the web and consolidates basics analytics for the majority of web sites. This is what I gathered for the web site hotels.com:

About 1,000 visitors researched the web site yesterday (09.12.09)
They looked at 4.4 pages on average
The bounce back rate (i.e. how many people left the web site after landing on the home page) was 31.3%
Visitors spend on average 4.7 minutes
There are 2,824 inbound links to hotels.com
Keywords used to find hotels.com were: hotels.com, hotels, hotel, cheap hotels etc ... Alexa.com also gives a set of visitor demographics:

The information is not as robust as let's say an Omniture report but this provides a good proxy to basic analytics. And it does not require installing any code into the web site. This is perfect for individuals who do not have access to companies sets of analytics.

Top 12 blog editing tips

2009-09-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

I did some research recently as I wanted to create a blog etiquette for a project I am working on. This is a summary of best practices and personal experience blogging. Hope it is useful:

1. Be transparent. You are not blogging anonymously .

2. Be truthful. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to blogging. Be accurate, and above all, tell the truth.

3. Be yourself. Your personality should show through in your blog posts.

4. Share your excitement. The best blog posts display your emotions. If you are excited about something, don’t be afraid to show it.

5. Be kind. Make sure your criticism is constructive.

6. Don’t cut and paste. Create unique content.

7. Link strategically. You should try to link out to at least one other site in every post. This could be an example of the point you are making.

8. Ask questions. You should try to pose a question at the end of every blog post to encourage dialogue.

9. Check comments. Before blogging, make sure the topic has not been discussed already.

10. Spread the word. Look for ways to talk up our blog (newsletter, conversations etc.)

11. Newspaper test. Make sure your comment passes

12. Appropriateness. Some questions or comments may not be suitable for an open audience

Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens

2009-08-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

This great article from the NYT talks about Twitter (and other social media) demographics. Suprizingly, just 11% of Twitter users are aged 12 to 17. The reporter challenges the idea that children are critical to new technology success. It also highlights how Twitter, which was initially built to stay in touch with friends is now becoming a platform to broadcast ideas or questions, or marketing a product.

Digital Assets Optimization - or the end of the 10 blue links - get your videos, tweets, images and applications out

2009-08-22T06:47:00.000-07:00

I was recently attending a presentation by Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media about Search Marketing 2.0. In his 15 mns enlightening pitch, Anton discussed the future of Serach Marketing. These are the kek take-ways:

1/ Organic search is no longer showing 10 or 15 blue links anymore. We should get used to that idea that nowadays a whole lot of other elements will come-up in organic serach. These are local results, videos, images etc ... As a result wer should start optimizing these assets to drive traffice to our web site. ''Digital Assets Optimization is gradually replacing Search Engine Optimization''

2/ In addition, Google might no longer be the default search engine for certain clutters of people. Google is really good at ranking an incredible number of web pages. However web crawlers do this on a regular basis (every week for example). As a a result not all Google searches are up-to-date. By opposition Twitter is constantly up-to-the-minute. Anton was making the point that Twitter might become a search engine for some people. Finally Anton discussed how some marketers use Twitter to gather voice-of-the-customer. By having access to the latest trends and language being used by its customers, the Four Seasons hotel chain was able to change some of its Search Engine Marketing keywords.

Overall an amazing presentation. Now let's get our Tweets, images, old videos out and let's start tracking Twitter to gather customer insights.

Where on the web is advertising more fruitful?

2009-08-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

I ran across this excellent article from the WSJ on web advertising. They argue that in a recessionnary economy, marketers would be foolish to move ads away from premium content portal (NYT, ESPN) to secondary portals (ad networks)

The extensive study from WPP shows:

- CPM for ad network can sell for less than $1

- While CPM for web publishers can sell for $10 upwards

- rates have began falling for display ads (by 17% this year)

- overall spending on online advertising will drop 3.2% this year

- ad network

The study does not mention pay-per-click marketing. It will be interesting to know where it provides biggest bang for the buck as Google decreased costs for content network (as opposed to search engine portals).

Twitter for media relations - top 10 learnings

2009-08-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

In a recent TechCrunch quick poll, 73% of respondents indicated they would not like to see journalists on Twitter. Only 18% said they should. 7% still wondered what Twitter was. It is hard to understand why journalists should not be allowed to have a Twitter account:

a/ To post link to their articles in perhaps a more engaging way than current media web sites

b/ To access up-to-the-minute news, announcements and conversations from the institutions or people they follow

Over the last few weeks, I have been experimenting with Twitter myself, as a way to reach journalists, from both national and trade publications. These are my key learnings:

1/ Quite a few journalists are on Twitter and this number is growing rapidly. MuckRack gives you a list of who is tweeting. Not surprisingly there is a fair representation of US national media such as the NYT, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

2/ However some journalists have a protected account (they will need to accept your request to follow them), signed up once and have not posted anything since then, or worse do not actually post at all

3/ Now on the other side of the equation, as an institution or individual, Twitter can be used to either disseminate news to journalists and as a established channel for crisis management. Remember when Domino's pizza management posted a video on youtube to respond to a stupid (but popular) video attacks from 2 employees? Well along the same lines, Twitter can be used to quickly intervene in a similar situation

4/ Some smart institutions and/or journalists out there use Twitter as a way to gather what soon will be called V.O.F., or voice-of-the-followers. As institutions/media struggle to understand they customer language, Twitter is a fantastic way to datamine all these conversations and identify buzzwords and trends.

5/ It is hard to use Twitter efficiently as a channel to reach top media. It is even harder to estimate the influence of a particular tweets

6/ However most current metrics that can be used to measure the 'impact' of a tweet are:

- number of click-though (see my previous post on bit.ly and it powerful metrics)

- number of re-tweets

- how some tweets generate new followers request

7/It is also difficult to measure the influence of the journalists that follows you. They can be influential but it does not necessarily mean they will read your tweets or have a positive attitude towards what you are saying. Some more grassroots bloggers/columnist may actually be your best allies in reading and re-tweeting your press releases (or other announcements)

8/ Twitter is just an additional channel, to complement media outreach, newswire, press conferences, web, blog activities etc ... so far its influence might be overestimated.

9/ This being said, it is growing quite rapidly. I was talking to the CEO of a large SEO agency in NYC and he envisioned Twitter becoming a leaner, more frequently updated search engine.

10/ We are all experimenting with Twitter and it is just difficult at this point to assess its potential to journalists. But I don't personally think it's a fad and believe most individuals and institutions should take a closer look at it.

Bit.ly powerfull tracking system

2009-07-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

I have been using tinyurl and bit.ly for sometime. The idea is to shorten long URL to a few letters and save space for more relevant information on Twitter/Facebook status updates. What I realized recently is both URL shortener had a tracking capability. By logging into bit.ly homepage, I realized that each shortened link has a comprehensive set of stats including:number of clicks, sources (email, facebook, twitter), region (US, UK , France etc ..) and historical perfomance.

I came to realize I did not set-up my google analytics correctly on the blog. There is clearly a discrepancy between traffic from shortened link to what I see in my google analytics dashboard. Thank you Bit.ly.

Another coll feature is the ability to go straight to bit.ly, create shortened link and post it directly to Twitter/Facebook without having to log-in to Twitter or Facebook.

Google adwords certification exam

2009-07-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

It feels good to be certified. After 15+ hours of online training and one live AdWords campaign, I decided to take the exam. The test consists of 110 questions over 1h15 mns. There is ample time to think. I would even say, there is even time to refer to google AdWords training documentation. In addition to the online videos, make sure you print all 9 chapters and organize them in a binder so that key topics are easy to find. I ended-up finishing the exam 20 mns before time was up. The questions are very similar to the quizzes you can take throughout the exam. No surprise here. It is interesting to see most questions fit into 2 buckets: 1/ Very easy. These are given frankly (for example: what does CPC mean?). 2/ The second set of questions is more tricky. I was reading a post somewhere saying they were typical from a Stanford mind. Not sure what this means but yes some questions are harder. You can argue there is not really a right or wrong answer.

Good luck with it, feel free to reach out if you need some feedback/help for the test.

Top 3 Twitter growth and measurement tools

2009-06-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

I was recently experimenting various ways to increase traffic to this blog. I have had a Twitter account for a while. Now and then, I summarized recent posts and inserted a tiny URL link to the blog. This drove a bit of traffic. However I quickly realized I needed a larger number of followers. Assuming a 1% click-though rate, I figured I would need at least 1,000 followers to get 10 hits a day.

Tool # 1 - Tweepme

In short, TweepMe is the 100% opt-in group of Twitter users who all chose to follow each other on Twitter. When a new member joins, every other member automatically follows the new member, and the new member follows them back. The process is gradual and happens over the course of weeks or months depending on the number of TweepMe members.

It's not free. I paid about $10 to join. I thought of it as an experiment. At first glance, it was slow. I was expecting to have 5,000 followers in the first 24 hours but then realized it would take months to get to that number. I think I have close to 1,500 followers rights now and it is growing fast. Traffic to the blog increased but not as much as I was expecting. I still think that for $10, it is all worth it.

Tool # 2 - TwitterCounter

Another good tool I recently discovered. Since this blog is mostly about measurement, I wanted to give an insight into this powerful tool. TwitterCounter is more sophisticated than most tools I have seen so far. It gives a comprehensive historical view of these 3 variables: number of followers, friends and updated. There is also a feature that looks at trend overtime and gives predictions. It's free and fun to use.

Tool # 3 - TweetGrid

TweetGrid is a Twitter search engine. I find the interface easy to use. I typed-in a number of keywords related to digital marcom (SEO, measurement, analytics etc ... ) and narrowed it down to a number of A-users which I started to follow. Hopefully they will follow me in return and drive traffic to the blog.

For more Twitter tools, check out this article from Mashable. I can't see the value of all of them but I leave to you to provide feedack to the ones you like best!

Marketing E-mails Expected to More Than Double in Five Years

2009-06-17T08:19:00.000-07:00

According to Forrester Research, U.S. consumers are expected to receive about 9,000 marketing email a year, which is an average of 25 / day by 2014. This advertising age article points out that close to 10% of them will not reach their recipients due to poor targeting and ISP spamming mechanisms. This touches on some of the points I addressed in the previous posts about email marketing and analytics.

Search Engine Optimization - Top 10 positive factors

2009-06-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

I ran across this this phenomenal article from seomoz.org:

Top 10 Positive Factors to increase serch engine optimization

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site's internal structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical communities
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linkink sites
10. Topical Relationship of Linking popularity

Good luck!

Search Engine Optimization resources

2009-06-12T14:52:00.000-07:00

Now that I have shared with you some of the highlights of the course, let me redirect you to some useful SEO tools:

- Archive.org: you can look at any web site look and feel over the years
- seobook.com: great resource to run keyword density
- yahoo.com: use the command: '' linkdomain:http://digitalmarcom.blosgpot.com'' (substitute with your web site own url) and enter in - the yahoo search box to find out how many web sites are linking to you
- linkdiagnosis.com: shows what links go to your competitors' web sites
- google: find out when was the last time a Google crawler visited your web site. type in ''cache:http://digitalmarcom.blosgpot.com'' (substitute with your web site own url) into the google search box

That's all for now. I will publish more resources as I get to use them!

Search Engine Optimization course in digital media at NY University

2009-06-12T14:24:00.000-07:00

Last week at NYU, I learnt about one of the most interesting topics in the web area. For one minute or two, let's forget about social media, pay-per-click marketing and so on. During this one-day workshop, I learnt about the various techniques to get your web site on Google's first page (i.e organic search).

These are my take-aways from this class:

- Only 10 to 20% of people click on paid ads. The remaining traffic goes to organic search
- Google ranks web sites using an algorithm of 254 elements
- Google crawlers can't read flash (make sure at least a section of the web site is in html)
- Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are 20% on-page and 80% off-page
- In other words, it's all about link building to your web site
- The SEO consultants mentioned that an average company might have 50 to 50 links to thir web site (and 10 for a smaller company)
- It's not really about quantity but more about quality of the web sites referring to you

Some optimizations techniques discussed in class (in no particular order)

On-page
1. Use anchor text for incoming link (eg: hyperlink will be 'digitalmarcom.com' and not 'click here' 2. Create good and self-explanatory titles (less than 40 words)
3. Add alt-tag feature to all images
4. Use clear image file name
5. 3 keywords max per page in order to avoid 'keyword stuffing'
6. A sitemap (or table of content with links to all pages' will help Google crawlers to organize your web site
7. Use no follow-tag for outbound links
8. Keyword density should not exceed 8%
9. Have a good ratio of anchor text and naked links (e.g www.digitalmarcom.com)
10. Link pages to each other within the web site

Off-page
1. Do not use link brokers. They can be cheap but most of the time, the links they sell you are of average quality
2. Solicit links from other web site and offer incentives (reciprocal building for example, free merchandise)
3. Only 10% of link building emails are returned. Be persistent!
4. A lot of social media web sites like wiki and facebook and have 'do not follow' tags
5. Blogpost, digg are ok
6. Use pingmaster to submit new posts on your blog
7. You can also submit your web site to registries like DMOZ, Giguides etc ...

And most of all, be patient. It takes a few years to move-up on Google ranking!

Taking Online-Ad Measurement Beyond the Click

2009-05-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

This great article from Advertising Age describes how Pay-per-click is only one of the metrics advertisers can track. I was suprized to learn that 2/3 of Internet users never click on a sponsored link and those who do tend to be younger and have lower income.

Pay-per-click is a model I like in the sense it gives me invaluable and measurable data on how customers react to a particular ad. It gives me the ability to change the format, editorial and offer and measure results almost instantly. However it does not provide much insight into customers change in attitudes or purchases intention.

Like any metrics, it is useful to have but has to be complemented by other behavioural data. One metric the article refers to is from the car industry. Research shows that the number of test drives booked online can be a good proxy for car sales. This metric can of course not being used on its own but provides a good complement to other Pay-per-click data.

Email marketing & analytics – Part 2

2009-05-20T20:51:00.000-07:00

Here’s the interesting part. As soon as the e-newsletter was sent out I started monitoring response rates 1h, 6h, 12h and 24h after the newsletter has been sent. This was sent to America, Europe and Asia so the 24h time span was necessary to guarantee all members had a chance to receive the newsletter.

The intention was to use the 3 most common email marketing metrics:

- Bounce rates
- Open rates
- Click-through rates

Typically, email-marketing software (such as the G-lock example below) provide these metrics. They offer a high level of granularity (to the extent you can have data for each recipient). Other metrics I look at are: forward rate, unsubscribe rate etc …

I also added 2 behavioral online performance metrics, drawn from traffic to the various blogs and websites we promoted in the newsletter.

I would like to go through each of these 5 metrics and discuss some of the limitations, as I stumbled upon some legitimate roadblocks, which makes success measurement quite complex to perform.

Metrics and limitations

1. My bounce rate was excellent (close to absolute zero). Only one or two emails were returned to sender. This did not come as a surprise since the database I was using was spot-on. The community was launched recently so we would expect all email addresses to be accurate. However one can argue the bounce rate is misleading in one way since it does not take into accounts those emails that might have been deleted silently by anti-spam system. On way around this is to use delivery monitor services such as Delivery monitor. This service allows you to track what happens to your emails to major ISPs.

2. The second metric I looked at was open rates. The open rate is often referred as a percentage of the numbers of emails delivered to recipients. It varies by industry, company, how well has the segmentation was performed (loyal customers are more likely to open all emails they receive form their favorite brands). The headline (in particular if there is a monetary offer) can also boost this rate.

Some of the limitations related to the open rates are:

- First it is a rough proxy for reader’s interest. It does not really measure whether the recipient read the newsletter or recall its content. I would use click-through rates and other measures to determine the ‘engagement’ of community members.

- Second, some email clients have a preview function where part of the email is being displayed (one the side or bottom of the email client). In other words, an high open rate might not take into consideration these recipients who did not actually read the newsletter.

- Third, open rates are calculated differently. The most common approach is to look at open rates as a percentage of email being delivered. Others looked at the same percentage over emails being sent.

3. The third metric I considered was the click-through rate. A CTR is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in the newsletter. I like CTR in the sense it provides a better measure of recipient’s engagement.

However, the primary limitation to CTR is it does give an accurate representation of positive shift in recipient’s attitudes and behaviors. In the case of my newsletter, having a number of CTR to let’s say a blog does not indicate whether recipients enjoy the blog content or have a stronger affinity for the community we are building. In the case of a purchase/ re-peat purchase driven newsletter, we will need to link CTR with actual purchase to evaluate the overall performance of the email campaign.

4. The fourth metric I took into account is the number of hits the various blogs and web addresses got in the 24hours after the e-newsletter was sent. Along CTR, this is another way to make a connection between newsletter and traffic generated. In this case, we will need to subtract regular traffic from overall traffic to come up with a good grasp of incremental traffic. CTR is easier to compute.

5. Lastly, one of the call-to-action in the e-newsletter was a phone number community members could call to attend a seminar. This proved to be a reliable success measure (even though it is hard to differentiate the incremental measure form the regular measure since community members could have obtained this phone number by other channels).

All in all, bounce rate, open rate, click-through-rate and other behavioral measures are great to have. Any email marketing software usually provides all of them. Just watch-out for some of the limitations that might bias results.

For more information on this topics, check-out this amazing resource from Email Marketing Report.

Email marketing & analytics – Part 1

2009-05-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

Recently I sent out the first issue of a monthly e-newsletter, which aims at enhancing member loyalty and relationship for a particular group of interest. The primary goal of the newsletter was to encourage members to attend a particular seminar, sign-up for our blog services and discover a new community web site. Members tend to be digital savvy and opted-in to receive newsletter. I used proprietary email marketing software and sent one HMTL version only to close to one thousand members. Due to time and cost constraint, neither segmentation nor newsletter customization was performed.

The lay-out of the newsletter was distinctive, simple and a continuity of the brands we were promoting. It allows members to gather information quickly. The headlines were designed to capture member’s imaginations and there were several call-to-actions spread-out throughout the newsletter (a combination of links and phone number to call). As I developed the newsletter, I have found the following sources really useful in providing some guidance on content, design and call-to-action.

- Email anatomy > Email experience council
- Email design > Email marketing reports
- Email copy tips > ClickZ Copy tips
- Email copyrighting > Email marketing manual
- Best practices > ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards
- Email call-to-action > Email marketing report

In addition, you can check out these organizations web sites: EMarketing Association, Direct Marketing Association. I personally also like the CMO Council and Marketing profs which regularly publish white papers on this topic.

Monitoring what people say about your company in the blogsphere

2009-05-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

Historically I have relied on Public Relations firms to provide a daily scan of articles on anything related to my company, competitors or industry. I also have set-up Google alerts. Recently I discovered a number of blog monitoring tools that are free and easy to use. I like blogs as a complement to my daily traditional and digital publications scans. Major publications like the Wall Street Journal have a blog that does not always comes-up in Google for instance.

Today, I would like to talk about Technorati.

Technorati claims to track more than 112 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media (posts, photos and videos). You can perform keyword searches across blogs and conversations, in more than 20 languages. A service to rank blogs was added recently.

When performing searches, I usually use my company name and its competitors. Sometime I will track down some particular words that are related to my industry. I can modify the date range in order to compare who is talking about what in a given time period.

Unlike its major competitor ( blogpulse), what I like about Technorati is I can also refine my search and select only articles published in the most popular blogs. This is referred as authority. The authority ranking gives me an idea as to how many blogs link to it. The Wall Street Journal has a ‘lot of authority’ for example. From a PR perspective, the authority is probably as important (if not more) than the number of impressions.

Finally Technorati also offers URL and tag searches. I particularly like the URL search function, which lists blogs that link to my company web site (you can also find out what these blogs say).

Using Google trends and adwords as a proxy for brand awareness

2009-05-17T16:11:00.000-07:00

I was recently tasked to measure brand awareness for various sub-brands and decide which ones were small enough to be included in our umbrella brand.

Without hard data on hand (and very little time to perform primary or secondary research), I discovered I could use Google trends and adwords to calculate the number of Google searches for one or more keywords.

This will ultimately give me a rough idea of how a brand is searched by customers. One could argue it is a simplistic digital view of measuring to what extent a brand is known by customers. Clearly the example below is for directional use.

Let's begin with Google trends.

Google trends compared the relative number of searches between various keywords. In the example here, I used two luxury car brands: 'lexus' and 'infiniti'. Google trends ranked the keywords and it clearly show a 'higher' brand awareness for lexus.

However Google trends only gives a relative scale ( 2 to 4). To actually get the number of exact searches, I had to use Google adwords. Google adwords gives us the number of searches per month over the last 12 months. This is an average and with a bit of maths and using the relative scale above, I was able to create a graph showing the number of searches for both Infiniti and Lexus over the last five years.

This is a rough estimation but with the data I collected, I was able to have a conversation with our regional brand managers. And decide whether to keep the sub-brands independent. It turned out there is a lot more to brand awareness than the number of online searches. But again, the proxy was a good starting point.

Monetizing Web 2.0

2009-04-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

I was reading the latest book by my long time hero Jack Tout 'In Search of the obvious'. In his book, Jack referred to two Web 2.0 campaigns that are considered most successful: the ''Burger King Subservient Chicken'' and the ''Snakes on the plane''.

He argued that despite the success of these viral marketing campaigns (.e. # of hits), no-one at this point of time has been able to measure tangible sales results.

This recent article from Advertising age ''ROI May Be Measurable in Facebook MySpace After All'' might give us a glimmer of hope. MySpace teamed-up with Comscore (Internet analytics company) & Dunnhumby to create a single source database. That way they were able to take a close look at how Internet ads affect offline purchases.

The first study they did was for a personal-care brand which invested ~$1MM on MySpace. Interestingly the found that only 1% visited an advertiser page on MySpace and half who did ended-up visiting the personal care web site. However the campaign was able to generate an incremental $1.8MM in offline sales. More details in the Advertising age article.

Why do we bother with marketing communication perfomance metrics?

2009-04-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Back to college, I remember the opening question my Marketing Communication professor asked. Is Marketing communication is an expense or an investment? 10 years or so later, I have not quite figured out a good answer to this. An expense. Maybe. If you consider this is a sunk cost. An investment. Most likely. If you think the return of your campaign is going to generate incremental net income. Measuring marketing communication is essentially driven by the quest to assess both efficiency and effectiveness.

Defining effectiveness and efficiency

Being effective means producing powerful effects. For example, a large banner advertising on a popular generic web site might drive positive attitudes and behaviors towards a brand. It does not necessarily mean this was the most efficient way to spend your advertising dollars. Being efficient means producing results with little wasted effort. In this example, a better use of advertising dollars might have been to have more smaller (and less costly) advertising banners on specialists web sites.

I use marketing performance measurement for a number of reasons

1/ To justify budget allocation (with a tendency to go for Marketing communications campaigns with highest efficiency). As much as I would like to stick to this rule I always found some Marketing Communications decisions being made for other reasons (prestige, relationship with a vendor etc...)

2/ To make us, marketing communications practitioners in the wider sense ''accountable''. How many times did I hear marketing communication was like a black box and no-one had a good sense where the dollars were going into. Financial transparency is often a good way to reinforce the idea that we own the marketing plans and respective dollars.

3/ To better understand and articuate reasonable key success factors for campaigns to come ahead. I have found this help both the company and various vendors supporting the initiatives.

4/ To add credibility to the marketing team. When possible, I try to add a measurement element to any large or small marketing communication initiatives, before I receive senior management buy-in.

In summary, in my experience, measurement makes it easier for the marketing team to figure what worked and what did not. As important, it helps to report results to senior management and justify next year's marketing budget.