In the September 2009 issue of Serengeti’s Newsletter, Nan Dawkins discussed some of Serengeti’s social media offerings and outlined 5 Warning Signs That Your Agency Lacks Social Media Expertise.  If you missed the newsletter and would like to hear her words of wisdom you can click on the giraffe in the top left corner or go directly to our newsletter sign up page.  (I’ll send out a “catch up” newsletter to everyone who signs up by COB Monday Sept. 14th).

Serengeti Communications is hosting a dinner featuring Charlene Li as the guest speaker during SES San Jose this year and you can have an opportunity to win 1 of 2 seats we are giving away for the dinner.

What’s the catch?

Well, we’re looking for two companies who manage the most vendors to help them get their online marketing strategies accomplished.  So if you have one company to do your PPC, another for SEO, someone else to handle your online PR and yet another company to do Social Media or Analytics, we want to hear from you!  The form is really simple to fill out, we just want to know how many vendors you work with and for what (not who they are).  We’re curious as to the average number of vendors that one company has to deal with to handle their online marketing initiatives.

The two companies with the most vendors will be our winners.  If there are several companies who have the same number, we’ll put them into a fishbowl and have a drawing.  We’ll be announcing the winners on Friday August 7th, so spread the word!  If you are coming to San Jose for Search Engine Strategies or even live in the area and run your business from around San Jose, let us know about how you manage your online marketing strategies!

Win A Seat at a Private Dinner Featuring Charlene Li

Well, maybe not a day, maybe 8 years.

When I was home for Thanksgiving this past week, I had a chance to enjoy one of my guilty pleasures.

Be Warned: The next few lines may contain the nerdiest thing you have read in a long while.

I’ve saved most all of my old issues of Fast Company and Business 2.0 and when I have spare time, I like to peruse the old issues. I know, I know, N-E-R-D-Y.

But, in my defense…marketing, like much of business, tends to be cyclical. So, I think it is interesting to look at the business trends and emerging business trends from the past, sort of a print version of the Wayback Machine. And, it’s not only the articles and ideas that I find interesting, but also the advertising.

In fact, here’s one of the best ads that I came across was in the October 24, 2000 issue of Business 2.0.

How great is this ad?
“Do you think a hunch about data relationships will improve browser-to-buyer conversion?”

But, here is the best part:
“Your disjointed and incomplete eMarketing data has had you playing the guessing game for too long.”

Back in 2000, way before the great analytics growth explosion, when (WebTrends) Executive
Summaries consisted of nothing more than a few (some meaningless) metrics…

…Coremetrics had the guts to call attention to the fact that eMarketing is trackable and that marketing decisions should not be made based on hunches or worse, bad data.

The fact is that analytics have improved by leaps and bounds in the past 8 years. But, the sad fact is that despite that, many marketers are still making important spending decisions based on their gut-feelings and bad data.

And maybe, some of that is caused by the overwhelming amount of analytic data that is available now. There is a big difference between data and information. Because data whether meaningful or meaningless, without context is really no help. But in this economy, in this recession, very few companies have the luxury of experimental marketing or, in words of Coremetrics, a ‘VP of Guesstimation.”

Part II – Marketers – Where is Your Bailout Plan?

In working with many companies over the years, it seems that marketers fall in to one of three categories:

Marketing Guru – You know your KPIs, your ROI and manage your campaigns to maximize ROI.  Your boss loves you.  Your budget is not in jeopardy.  In fact, by proving a positive ROI even in this economy your budget may have been increased.

Marketer – You feel that you are doing okay, but sense things could be going better.  You are currently sort of paying attention to analytics, but aren’t sure how to understand the data to make better decisions.  Beware, your budget may be on the chopping block.

Old School Marketer – You’ve ignored all of the hype about online marketing, choosing to continue to focus on tradtional channels since that has what has worked (you guess) until now.  Maybe you’ve even tried some banner ads or other ‘experimental marketing.’  You’ve seen some reports, but you’re not really sure what to make of them.  Danger, danger – say good-bye to that marketing budget.

Marketing gurus are the exception to the rule.  Don’t feel bad if you are not there yet.  It takes a bit of a mind-shift and some discipline, but you can get there.

Most marketers fall into one of the other two categories – somewhere between knowing that you could be doing a better job to feeling completely helpless, worrying that your budget, or even worse, your job is on the line.

The first step is to take action – embrace analytics.  There are tons of great resources; books, blogs or even companies you can hire.  Once you understand how to use analytics to take the pulse of your marketing efforts, you can benchmark how they are doing and improve them.

By accepting and understanding analytics, the move from ‘Old School Marketer’ with an evaporating budget to a ‘Marketing Guru’ with a growing budget is only a matter of discipline.  And by being able to prove that by spending some money, you are making more money (positive ROI), you will see your marketing budgets grow rather than disappear, even in a bad economy.

Over the past few years working with many clients to understand how effective their pay-per-click campaigns are (and often figure out how to get them to perform better), I have compiled my top 10 list of ways that many marketers blow their budgets on PPC.

1. Ignoring Match Type Options – When you just purchase key phrases, without applying any match type, you inherit the ‘broad match’ settings which means that your ad shows up on the results page when any of the words in the phrase are searched on.

This has the two-pronged negative effect of either driving unqualified clicks or driving down your CTR which in turn drives up your CPC.

2. Ignoring Landing Pages – Many marketers feel that creating custom landing pages is just too much work.  Instead they send all pay-per-click traffic to their home page.  This is tremendously frustrating to those visitors who arrive at your site after just searching on specific words on the search engine.  They now have to begin their search again to find what they are looking for on your site.  You will see that many leave your site immediately, unwilling to search again.

3. Not Implementing Conversion Tracking Code – I am still amazed at the amount of companies who just won’t add conversion tracking code to their thank you page (the code provided by the search engines or provided by your analytics package).  Without this information, you can pretty much guarantee that you are throwing away a large percentage of your pay-per-click budget.

4. Bidding Too Little for Keywords – This may sound strange, but if you don’t pay enough for a keyword you will find yourself at best ‘beneath the fold’ (which is disappointing because many people don’t ever scroll down) or worse, on page 2 or 20 of the results.  This is just one more way of driving up your cost per click by driving down your CTR.

5. Using the ‘Set it and Forget it’ Mentality – This may be my biggest pet peeve.  Managing successful pay-per-click campaigns is not a one-time task.
Effective marketers pay attention (analyze, modify and improve) campaigns often.  Campaigns that are dormant, throw money away uselessly by continuing to spend money on keywords or ads that don’t work and don’t optimize spending on what works best.

6. Ignoring Negative Keywords – Unless your offering is free, thinking about applying negative keywords to your campaign is probably a good idea.

I could be wrong, but the last time I checked Omniture was not a free analytic solution.

7. Ignoring Ad Scheduling – Although it takes a little more work to analyze your campaigns and determine when the conversions are happening, it is well worth it.  Armed with the knowledge that your conversions take place Monday – Wednesday between 9 am – 4pm, allows you to modify your campaign so you spend more of your budget when the traffic that you want to attract is online (and pay less for traffic that does not convert).

8. Not Breaking Out Content Targeted Traffic – Okay, I was wrong earlier, this is actually my biggest pet peeve.  Unless you create a separate campaign with separate, unique destination URLs for the Content Targeted traffic, it is very difficult (even impossible depending on what analytics package you are using)
to differentiate the search/search network traffic from the content targeted traffic.  And, even though you can pay less for the content targeted traffic without breaking it out into its own campaign, you still should take the time to break it out into its own campaign.  Because, what you may find is that the traffic may not be as qualified in terms of conversions (sales), but it may generate good leads that just need additional remarketing to eventually convert.  (And, you may find data that leads you to create specific Site Targeted campaigns that really perform great).

9. Ignoring Click-Fraud or Invalid Clicks – I know that researching to determine click fraud can be time consuming, and arguing with the search engines can be frustrating and potentially even a dead-end.  I am not saying that you should spend all of your time or focus on this, but I do think it is worth paying a
little attention.  ClicKTracks has a great Click Fraud report.  But, you must know when it is potentially click fraud versus just a poorly performing ad.

10. Ignoring the Quality Score – The quality score is definitely a moving target and it recently has changed again.  But, if you understand your quality scores by simply improving your ad or your landing page (or weeding out non-performing keywords), you can dramatically lower your cost per click.  And, if you do this across the board for all of your OK or Poor quality keywords, the savings can make a huge difference.

There are few places where I feel more stupid than in an auto parts store.  Because…when I am in an auto parts store that means that there is something that is VERY basic in my car that needs fixing.

I hate knowing that everyone in the store knows more about everything in the store than me.  And I hate not having any idea of how much things should cost.

As I stood at the counter of the NAPA auto parts store this morning, trying to figure out how to purchase a gas cap to replace the one I lost, it occurred to me that many people feel the same way about finding a digital agency as I do about buying auto parts.

SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Analytics are topics that are rich with jargon and self-proclaimed experts who want you to think that there is no way that ordinary people could be successful and that the only way to be successful is to hire someone to do all the work (e.g. outsource it to them).

After many years in the working in the industry, from traditional agencies, to consultancies, to an analytics provider, I know this is not the case.  So, just like a good auto part store will help you find the tools you need, take the intimidation out of a foreign situation, and explain what you need in plain English – so should a good digital agency.

So, if you need a gas cap, I can’t recommend NAPA auto parts highly enough.  Not only did the gas cap cost less than $7 (which I assume is a good price), but the salesperson did not even make fun of me when I asked the difference between the locking and the regular gas cap.  He kindly explained to me that, ‘Well, the locking gas cap….locks.’

If you need a good digital agency, contact us – we can explain to you how your current campaigns are doing and train you on how to do better.

I had a great day at work today.  Not something many folks can say on a Monday.  But, I did.  I had a great conversation with a client about this topic today. A smart conversation with smart people.  And, at the end of the conversation, we were much happier about setting realistic goals.

I’ve mentioned before that Unique Visitors are not ‘everything’ after reading Jakob Nielsen’s article Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click (where he argues that the focus on the metric of ‘Unique Visitors must die’).

The reasons that Unique Visitors is not a metric to base goals on are:

Tendency to be inaccurate
Some log file analyzers use IP address or IP address teamed with user agent to count a unique visitor. This over-counts when visitors return from a dial-up connection (new IP address) and under-counts when accessing a site from the same network (same IP address for many people).

Cookie Issues

We’ve all heard the debate of how often people do or don’t delete their cookies.  This definitely impacts the validity of the unique visitor count.  Worse than this, however, is when a site uses a persistent cookie to define a unique visitor, yet only sets a cookie on the homepage (believe me, this happens a lot).

The fire hose issue
Unless you have a fire hose filled with money to continually pour into pay-per-click and other online advertising – the odds of month over month significantly growing the number of unique visitors is extraordinarily slim.

But here’s the kicker…
Increasing your unique visitor count is actually counterproductive.  By wanting to only grow the number of unique visitors, you are attracting useless traffic to your site.  If these unique visitors don’t return, you essentially are paying – one way or another (pay-per-click, time spent optimizing your site, time spent creating content for your site) – for visitors who will never engage with your Web site nor start a conversation with your company, never encourage their friends to see your site, or purchase your products.

We are a true digital shop, so it is a point of pride for us that what we do for our clients online can’t be put into the PR box, the advertising box, the direct marketing box, etc.  The Web blurs these old distinctions and if you don’t get that, well…good luck out there on the vast digital plain. 

Because of this orientation, I (along with many of my colleagues in the digital world, I’m sure) often find myself suppressing just the tiniest bit of an eye roll when a client brings up “the PR firm” or “our ad agency.”  So, it came as a big surprise to me last week when I found myself wishing I had a PR firm at my fingertips. 

It was mid morning when I got a call from an old friend (not a client) who found himself in the middle of a very nasty, very divisive, very public debate.  As he explained the situation to me, I immediately went into digital mode, looking for the Forums and Blogs that were most likely to light up as the day unfolded. 

As I rattled on helpfully about what people were saying online, he interrupted me: “Nan! The press is outside.  What do I say?”

Initially, it was a question that didn’t throw me.  At this point, I already had a handle on what was happening on the Forums, so I quickly spouted off some questions he was likely to hear from reporters.

“Ok, ok.  Got it.  But…but how do I answer?  What do I say?”

Uhhhh…..Messaging?   Ouch.  I don’t even like that word. 

In fact, upon hearing it uttered, I might normally have been tempted to go on a long rant about old models of one to many communications, letting go of command and control, the end of media gatekeepers, etc. – all which would have been spectacularly unhelpful to my friend, who was facing a slew of reporters and whose words would no doubt echo (within minutes of speaking them) on the Forums I was so busy monitoring.

Let’s be honest.  I don’t know anything about the finer points of talking to conventional press in a crisis.  And PR firms wouldn’t have a clue as to how consumer generated media was impacting the situation (much less what to do about it).  Fortunately for my friend, he went with short, sweet, and true, and it all turned out ok.  But, the spotlight doesn’t always result in such a just outcome.  We were lucky.

What’s my point?  We all know this: The reality is that none of us (digital shops, PR firms, ad agencies) truly have a completely integrated, online/offline service offering (despite the hype in some agencies’ marketing materials).  And that’s a problem that we’d all better figure out a solution to — soon. 

In the meantime, I’m going to stop my eye rolling and start insisting on more and better communication with my clients’ PR firms.

I am new to Serengeti Communications, but worked at AOL for seven years. One risk of admitting you work(ed) for AOL is that friends, family, people sitting next to you on an airplane, all assume that you know everything about the Internet and by association, computers. I would get phone calls asking me how to connect a router or forwarded SPAM asking if it was legitimate (no Mom, the million dollar offer from the Chinese ambassador isn’t real).

Even though I was employed by what was once the largest Internet provider in the world, I realize now that I actually knew very little about how the industry truly functions. In the month that I’ve been with Serengeti, I’ve learned more about how today’s Internet works…what drives it, how users engage, and what sites/tools to watch.

For example, I had completely underestimated the power of Search. When you have millions of users, as AOL does, Search isn’t quite as crucial, but to smaller businesses and non-profits, it is vital.Also, I never fully understood the blogging craze. I barely read any, much less posted my own entries. Now, I’m reading, posting and subscribing. I see how blogs not only share your voice with the online community but are also very effective traffic drivers and Search magnets.

Lastly, I see the potential and power behind social media sites such as Facebook and StumbleUpon, beyond posting my latest photos or “poking” friends.

This is just a smattering of what I’ve absorbed in four weeks. I can’t wait to see what kind of emails and calls I get from friends and family once they realize that I actually do know how it all works, sort of.

It’s been a while since we did a simple round up post over here, and since I’ve just spent the better part of Sunday working on a presentation (which will be posted to the Serengeti Communications Resources section after I’ve presented it on Wednesday), I felt that now was the ideal time to step back and write about items of interest in and around the Serengeti Communications team, and the work that we do.

In case I’ve piqued your curiosity regarding my Sunday endeavors, the presentation is titled “Social Search: The Next Steps” and will be delivered at Search Engine Strategies in New York City at 5:30pm on Wednesday. This last session of the day suddenly looks like it’s going to be well attended, as it was announced on Friday that Erik Qualman, the Global VP of Online Marketing for EF Education, and an expert Search Engine Watch blogger, will now also be on the panel. If that suddenly makes you want to rush out there, make sure to say hello, and make sure to only ask me easy, simple questions.

Former Business.com, and Yahoodler, Jessica Bowman wrote a great post last week on what a company should expect to spend on an SEO audit, and what you should expect to get for your money. Don’t forget to check out our services section where we talk about our Audit services.

On March 29th, spare a thought for me and Nate, as we’ll both be running in the Suntrust National Half Marathon, which will wind its way through the streets of Washington, DC. Normally, I’d stand no chance against Nate, but given that he’s having rather painful IT band issues, and apart from the occasional calf pull, I’m in good health. There’s a chance that I can take the bragging rights for the office (at least until Nan and Stacy complete their next Iron Man Triathalons later in the year).

Finally, as you know (if you’ve been keeping an eye on the Serengeti Team page), we’re a growing company – having added 25% of our staff this year already. Over the rest of this year, we intend to continue that growth. So, if you’re interested, have a skillset, and a mindset that you think would fit in with our team; you can contact us at info@serengeticom.com.