If you’re considering running paid search ads for your business, it’s important to take the time to ask yourself the right questions and do some research before diving in. This may be an obvious statement, but it’s important to stress given some dangerous assumptions that get made about paid search.

For example, a jelly bean store might assume that paid search for them means making sure their ads are seen every time someone searches online for “jelly beans.” But that searcher might be wondering how the delightful candy is made or when it was invented. Or they might be looking for t-shirts with jelly bean drawings on them or for online stores that sell and ship jelly beans in bulk. Does this jelly bean store want pay for a click on their ad from one of these online searchers? This is a question the store needs to answer before they spend their money on very broad paid search terms.

With that, here’s the general set of questions and research that needs to be carefully completed before you can find success in paid search engine advertising.

What’s the goal?
You’ve decided to invest in advertising your business online. There must be a reason behind this.

• Was it to drive overall brand awareness?
• Or to gauge interest in a soon-to-be launched product through email signups?
• Or to increase new sales (whatever a “sale” is for you)?

Whatever you answer, you should revisit it at every step along the way of this process to make sure your decisions align with this end goal.

Know who you’re targeting
This should be a pretty simple one, since you know your business best, but it’s not to be taken lightly. This is an important time to get reacquainted with your audience. If your goal was to increase sales for your business, then ask yourself what you know about your typical new prospect:
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This question has come up frequently as of late because many clients use Google Analytics for their business. In fact, according to Wikipedia, 57% of the top 10,000 most popular websites use Google Analytics. Many companies are quite accustomed to the features of Google Analytics and they cannot help but wonder if the Google Analytics Premium is for them.

To help answer this question, let us define the Free or Standard version. Google Analytics Standard is for websites that produce fewer than 5 million pageviews per month. If your organization has an active Google AdWords account, then your account gets unlimited monthly pageviews. Google Analytics Premium is advertised as an Enterprise Solution.

Benefits of Google Analytics Premium:

• More processing power without limits
• Advanced analysis
• More custom variables
• 24/7 customer support

Below is a table of condensed differences between the Standard and Premium version at this point in time. This list may change with version upgrades.

The Google advertising team hit the nail on the head by stating Google Analytics Premium is an Enterprise solution. Small and mid-size organizations do not produce enough data to meet Google Premium data processing standards. Small and mid-size organizations are not always utilizing custom variables. Small and mid-size businesses are not necessarily implementing any attribution modeling as their marketing channels tend to be small in volume and channels.

The only item that Google Analytics Premium can offer non-enterprise businesses is the 24/7 support. For the most part, all the information to solve issues with Google Analytics is freely available on the internet if you “Google it.” Spend some time searching, you will find your solution. Everyone can agree that Google Analytics Premium is really cool, but if your website is not processing near the Premium data limits, the cost benefit analysis may lead you to stay with the Standard version.
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As many of you already know, the Instagram Photo Sharing app has taken the world by storm over the past two years. Boasting 30+ million users even without an Android app (which was now just recently released), Instagram has been getting everyone’s attention.  This includes Facebook, who just purchased the company for right around $1 Billion.

With Instagram having been named Apple’s App of the year for 2011, then acquired by Facebook (there may be some big integration plans in the future), and the new addition of the Android app that is continuing to massively boost their user base, it’s important to understand how to utilize the app in intelligent and creative ways to help boost your brand’s relationship with its consumers.  Take a look at these 4 tips that can help get your brand on the way to building a strong Instagram community!

1.  Post engaging content & know your audience

Instagram revolves around one main concept, and one thing that makes it such a huge success: the pictures! People love looking at different photos, and it requires minimal effort to analyze an image (as opposed to reading a body of text).  With over 250 million photos posted a day, it’s important that when posting images to Instagram you are selecting ones that are visually stunning, original, and most importantly ones that your consumer base can relate to in some shape or form. When using Instagram you want your users to react to your image (whether they like or comment on your image) to help spread your photo and build your Instagram network. Red Bull does a great job of posting relevant and engaging content on their feed frequently.
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I will come out and say it, I hate dashboards! Today’s business Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are changing so rapidly that dashboards become obsolete very quickly. Dashboards provide end users with summary metrics that are supposed to lead to accurate decisions. However, miscommunication between the dashboard creator and end user could cause inaccurate decisions. Dashboards miss the communication that is so critical between the analyst and the decision maker.

Web analytics platforms come with easy to configure dashboards that are created in seconds (example above). So what? An amateur looking at a dashboard without full knowledge of how data is collected and summarized is more dangerous to an organization than a monkey with a grenade.  Dashboard end users are getting a summary of data; they are unable to see the statistical significance behind the numbers needed to make business decisions. In most cases, you need multiple views of data to conclude a decision you are making that will affect your business.

As an example, the image on the left shows that conversion rates are going down. Anyone looking at the image will state that February conversions are lower than January. However, users do not realize that it takes 3 months to make a trend. In March, conversions increased and are now trending upwards. Analysts understand that data has seasonality, caveats, and needs to reach statistical significance before it can be used in analysis.

Data You Can Use
Organizations need to work with analysts who can turn data into action. Analysts make reports easy to understand, visualize, and provide clear outcomes for decision makers. If you leave decision makers trying to guess, they will steer towards not making any decisions. Thus, lots of wasted time and effort in the organization. Analytic insights are about knowledge that leads to fact-based decisions.
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Now that the new Facebook Timeline has officially rolled out to all personal profiles, guess what’s up next? That’s right, brand Pages are now the next on the list for a Timeline makeover!

The new Timeline for brands has officially rolled out today (Wednesday, February, 29^th 2012), and some of the big brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Livestrong are already taking advantage of the new features of the Timeline. With that said, there’s no need to rush right in and hit the publish button. Facebook isn’t making the Timeline for your brand page mandatory until March 30^th, 2012, and with the new preview functionality for Page admins you can fully adjust your brand Timeline before you push it live.

Let me fill you in on some of the new features of the brand Timeline, and some steps you can take to launch your new brand Page on the right foot.

Say Goodbye to your Welcome Tab, and Hello to the “Sticky” Feature.

Before the new Timeline, brand Pages would develop custom tabs that the user would land on when they first visit the page (Before they like it).

Well, with the new Timeline, the welcome tab is now obsolete. It’s O.K., don’t freak out just yet! All tabs are still active on the page (but relocated), and the new Timeline for pages have a brand new “Sticky Feature”, which I believe is even more effective than the old welcome tab.

The Sticky feature allows you to select a piece of content to display on the top of your page feed for 7 days, giving you the opportunity to feature any marketing message you would like in that area. You can direct people to one of your tabs, showcase an event, new product, or basically anything your little heart can think of.
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Pinterest is the fastest ever growing social media website. It was the fastest site ever to surpass the 10 million user mark. Of those users, 80% are women and 55% of those women are aged 25-44. Pinterest users are spending on average 14+ minutes a day and 98 minutes a month on the site, which is only lower than Facebook and Tumblr (ComScore). These are the numbers.

Does your brand’s target audience fit into the above mentioned demographic? If it does, you should definitely consider opening a Pinterest account. Women are flocking to Pinterest and using it to create recipe books, inspiration boards, plan trips, search for clothes, plan their weddings, and find and share fitness tips.

Getting Your Brand On Pinterest
When setting up your brand on Pinterest, you will want to make it personalized. Create your own inspirational pin boards that don’t include your products, but can go along with your theme.  Show the consumers that you’re more than just a brand and that you get inspiration from elsewhere.  Pinterest is not about self promotion, it is about sharing what you love or are interested in.

Now, you’re a business, so its important to present your products on Pinterest in a light that users will repin. Use creative photos of your products, recipes, documents, etc. Don’t just use stock images that are boring, Pinterest is meant to help in the creative process so Be Creative! You will want to consistently be posting (we recommend 50% brand, 50% community outreach). Don’t just post once a week, post every day. “Like” other people’s pins; it’s a community, so be active. The more you post quality items on Pinterest, the more likely your items will be repinned.
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What is the best report in Google Analytics? This is the million dollar question with a very simple answer: It’s the report or reports that tie back to your bottom line. Google Analytics, when instrumented properly on your site, collects valuable information about your site visitors. However, the reports are not pre-equipped to measure your business goals. That is why it is important to have a web analytics partner.

A web analytics partner will help your team translate your business goals into Google Analytics KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They will set up the system not only to capture your goals but valuable information around your goals. Web analytics insight comes from a full 360 degree view of what is happening around your goals. For example, if you are a large online retailer you need to understand how many pages people view, and if they review specs and features of products before they proceed to the shopping cart and check out. Having reports that help your business decision makers understand the steps users take in order to purchase, provides your team with better decisions.

Great Google Analytics reports provide your team with information about how well you’re doing. These reports help your team gain knowledge about your customers. You are spending money to get people to your website, why not get the most information about them while they are there? The best Google Analytics reports tell you how well you’re doing and provide knowledge that you can use to test or optimize your site!

Retargeting or Remarketing–you may have heard these buzz words before, but do you know what they really mean? You should! Below I will describe to you seven typical retargeting tactics and how to best use them to reach your low hanging fruit: customers and prospects most likely to convert or take an action on your website.

First off, there are two main types of Retargeting: On-Site and Off-Site. On-site is typically used as a retention tool, to keep your prospects engaged, coming back to your site, or even to upsell/cross-sell them; the target is people who have already visited your website. Off-site retargeting, on the other hand, is used as a prospecting tool and adding new customers to your sales funnel that have not already engaged with your website. Below are the several tactical components that fall under each type of Retargeting.
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On-site

1. Site Retargeting – This specifically targets individuals who have visited certain pages of your website. By placing a tracking cookie on their browser, you can later serve them ads on other websites based on the content they consumed on your site. Ever see an ad pop up that has the exact shoe you were looking at online yesterday? With a coupon to come back to the site and purchase it? Yep, that’s site retargeting. Common uses are to entice a user to come back to your website with a special promotion, a reminder that they abandoned their shopping cart, or just to keep the brand top of mind.
2. SEO/SEM – Here, if a user arrives on your site via a certain keyword through search engines, you can later serve them an ad when they are again browsing in the network. Knowing exactly what they were searching on when they came to your site allows you to be able to target them with appropriate messaging later on.

Every organization wants to achieve success in digital marketing. There is nothing better than reporting a 300% increase in conversion. In order to get there, you need to take the necessary steps. It starts with an approach towards web analytics that is designed for success.

Let me first define web analytics: it’s the collaboration between analysts, web developers and management on the collection of web data for the purpose of analysis and optimization.

Having experience in implementing some of the best web analytics platforms such as Omniture, Google Analytics, WebTrends and Coremetrics, I know that no out-of-box solution fits your exact business model. All web analytics platforms will start collecting data when implemented, but that data isn’t necessarily reflective of your company’s business goals or online KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). This is why web analytics is a collaboration between multiple teams, to measure the KPIs that matter to your business. It is valuable to have a consulting partner who is able to suggest the best way to obtain the KPIs that matter to your company’s bottom line.

Once you start obtaining data from your site, it is time to analyze and make a hypothesis. It is important to collect the most fact-based data from your web analytics platform, otherwise your analysis and hypothesis are going to fail. This is by far the most important job of the web developer and the analyst, making sure your data is accurate. No analytics platform data will match a competitor’s system, as they collect data differently. However, conversions should match 97%-99% accuracy of your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system or database.
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If you have a website that requires users to register or login to take action, it’s time to consider implementing a social login option. That is, the ability to login to a website via your existing Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or other account.  A recent social identity study reveals a few compelling stats supporting this:

• 90% of consumers will leave a website if they forget their user name and password
• 86% are bothered by being asked to create a new account on a website, and most will then leave the site or not return
• 41% of users would prefer social login over having to create a new account (35%) or even using a guest account (24%) (the same question in a study 1 year prior returned the reverse results in terms of order of preference)

What’s more, 78% of social login fans share site content with their social network. So not only does the social login option increase the likelihood that visitors will interact with your site and prevent them from leaving, it can also help encourage your customers to promote your site.

Think about every opportunity you might have for this, even in regards to content that doesn’t exist yet. Can people leave comments or write reviews on your website, and if not, can you find a way to integrate that kind of feature? Giving users opportunities to interact with your site and engage with your brand is important itself, and social login would be the cherry on top to help get them to participate.

And can visitors purchase products from your site? If they see an option to login through, say, Facebook, eliminating their need to even think about a password, they’ll be more likely to jump into their account and buy. Beyond that, once they’re logged in, you have opportunities to allow them to easily share what they purchase or what they want with their social network. Tack on an incentive to them to share with friends for even better response.
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