Times are tough.  To say that the economy is bad is an understatement.  So, in absence of actually trying to do a good job,  here are seven ways to create job security for you and your marketing team in 2009 using the tried and true method of smoke and mirrors.

1.  Traditional media is dead.   Says who?
You can’t improve what you can’t measure.  Measuring the success of traditional media buys like print, TV, or radio spots is difficult.  Perfect!!  You have done your job by running the campaigns.  Now, it is the sales department’s responsibility.  If no sales come from those campaigns, clearly it is not your department’s fault.

2.  2009 Media Plan = Unwavering
Sure, lots of time was spent in 2008 determining what was working and what was not, and shifting your spend to focus on the most effective campaigns.  But…let’s face it, that was exhausting.  You know that media plan you created at the end of last year for 2009?… commit and stick to your guns. 

You have done the marketing research that you were expected to do and that everyone has approved.  How much could the landscape really change during 2009?  And, if there are problems, hey, they approved the plan.

3.  Google – Are you being evil?
We all know that historically pay-per-click has been one of the most cost-efficient ways of marketing.  But, it is 2009 now.  Think of all of the challenges…click fraud, rising keyword costs, increased competition.  It is certainly the search engines fault now if your campaigns are not successful.

4.  Very, very important – Make enemies with IT
It is MUCH easier to blame the enemy. If executives want to hold you accountable for ROI, data, or analytics stand tall and point the finger at your enemies in IT.  You would have certainly had the proof to show how successful your campaigns were if only IT had helped you out.

5.  ROI – So very 2008
Explain to your executives that ROI is an overused, overrated metric.  Just because you can track things, doesn’t mean you should.  There are many more important metrics (see #6).

6. 2009 – Choose your metrics wisely
There are so many metrics available to you these days, and plenty that most executives will have no idea what they mean (read…cannot question whether good or bad, successful or not).  Hits, bring them back….meaningless minutia with an explanation laden with technical jargon, PERFECT!! 

Geography, another good one… usually pretty inaccurate but everyone enjoys this stat as they can mentally try to figure out who they know that may be causing this traffic.  Mobile Devices….okay you and I know it probably accounts for less than 3% of the traffic, but isn’t it cool that people are looking at our site on their iPhone.  We are so cutting edge!

7.  Analytics – Wait, why bother?
You did not get into the interesting, creative field of marketing to be tied to spreadsheets, come on.  And besides, who really cares about the numbers.  If executives ask for reports or numbers, explain to them that they are not asking for Web design ideas from the accounting department…so, why is there this double standard?

I hope this list has been helpful.  These are just the top ideas that came to mind.  Feel free to let me know if there are more that I have missed.

Good luck in 2009!

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.”

Last week, I attended the eMetrics conference in Alexandria, VA. Yes, for once a local conference…meaning no flying time. This one was a little bit different for me, as it was totally focused on Analytics and Metrics, rather than search, but was still very worthwhile.

Unfortunately, due to a busy schedule here, I was only able to attend a few sessions, but those that I did attend were enjoyable and informative. If you’d like to read my write-ups on these sessions that I did over on Li Evans of Key Relevance‘s blog, here are the links:

• eMetrics – Navigating a University Website
• eMetrics – The View from the CMOs office

…and, if you were interested in the answer to the question of how many adult conference attendees you can fit in the back of a standard taxi…

Jim Sterne, Mike Grehan, Simon Heseltine & Andrea

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.

Last week for Toastmasters, I gave an interpretive reading of a section of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book.”  As I was preparing for this, I started thinking about how this applies to the work that we do at Serengeti Communications.  I came to the realization that this is exactly what our Analytics team does on a daily basis.

Let me explain further: With interpretive reading, you have to get inside the author’s head, understand the motivations of the various characters, and how external factors have affected them and continue to affect them throughout the reading.  You work to understand the flow of the plot, and identify those parts of the reading that you need to highlight through your messaging (tone, pauses, speech pattern, etc.) - in order to really sell the plot.

With analytics, it’s exactly the same.  Our team gets inside your site (you can imagine a matrix-like scene at this point if you’d like), and through the data…understands how your users get to your site, what they do once they get there, and what motivates them to place an order? What part of the process has a leakage issue?  Where should the selling point be?  How are the users responding to the current messaging?

As you can see, quite a lot of similarities.  So, if you’d like an interpretive reading on your site, you know where to go.

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.

We all know how important metrics like average time on site, number of visitors, visitors by
segments and of course, conversions are. But, there are some other less known metrics that
really can provide some great insight.

Internal Search
The best way to find this information is to set up your analytics to report on what visitors
search on when they get to your site.

The first thing to do is make sure that your search is set up to be trackable. To do this,
just do a search on your Web site. Look at the URL that displays when the results display.

You should see something like (if you have searched for dvd):
www.mydomain.com/searchresults.asp?keyword=dvd

If your results simply show:
www.mydomain.com/searchresults.asp
ask your programmer to switch the form submit method from a POST to a GET (this should be a
quick, simple change).

Once your search results are trackable, then just configure the report.
WebTrends – Paramater Analysis Report
ClickTracks – Internal Search Report
Google Analytics – Site Search

You may be suprised at the big disconnect by what you think visitors call your product or
service, or what you want them to compared to what they actually do.

Robot Traffic
You will need to analyze your log files to get this information. ClickTracks has a good
Robot Report that breaks down your site by individual pages and tells you the:
Number of Visits (Best metric to see how well your site is being spidered overall)
Frequency of Visits (Best metric to see how your SEO results are improving)
Date of Last Visit
Days since Last Visit (Can be confusing because 0 is actually the best result)

Here is a site in dire need of some SEO

Geography
Most analytics packages have some report that tells you where visitors are coming from
broken down by country, state and even further (DMA). Obviously, you must take this

information with a grain of salt due to the limitations of how this information is gathered
(by IP address which can resolve back to an ISP). But, as local search gains more
popularity, it is worthing spending a little time to drill down to a more local level.
Information gleaned from these reports can be used to improve your local pay-per-click
campaigns.

For more information on local search, if you are in the Philadelphia area, you may want
to sign up for Simon’s Local Search session at SearchCampPhilly

To celebrate the upcoming Webinar Wednesday focusing on Analytics, I’m proposing a little contest.

Over the years, not only have I compiled many, many, many monthly analytics reports, I’ve also worked with lots of different marketers, reviewing their monthly reports.

These reports can be very ‘canned’ or highly customized. The reports can serve one purpose (just get it done so it can be checked off the to-do list) or multiple purposes (gut-check how email, PPC and other online marketing campaigns are doing, as well as understanding usability issues.)

What I am proposing, is that you submit your best monthly report to me at jbrazelle@serengeticom.com before the August 27th Webinar on analytics. I will chose the best report and the winner can choose from the following prizes:

Option 1 – Free admission to the Analytics Wednesday Webinar (kidding, everyone gets that).
Option 2 – Free one-hour consulting about analytics configuration, what is important to measure, or you decide.
Option 3 – A Surprise!

The winner can choose how much of the report to share in the post dedicated to the winner.

So, if you are currently a marketer, an analyst, or even a business owner who puts together a monthly analytic report, please feel free to send it on!!

As more marketers are being held accountable for their budgets, proving ROI on campaigns becomes essential.  In order to track ROI, you must be able to track revenue on your Web site.  This is not nearly as complicated or technically difficult (in most cases) than you may think (or have been told).  

There are three ways to track revenue on your Web site:

1.  Using Analytics
2.  Using Search Engine tools
3.  Using Both – Comparing analytics to search engine reporting

Using Analytics
Regardless of whether you are using a java script based analytics programs or analyzing your Web server logs, tracking revenue is completely possible if you have two things:

1.  A unique ‘thank you’ page that displays only when a purchase is successful 
2.  Access to make modifications to your Web site

Without a unique page that only displays when a purchase is successful, you will always ‘over-count’ revenue.  Often times, shopping carts are built using one form that posts back to itself.  You can tell if this is the case because the URL does not change from one step of the checkout process to the next. 

The problem with this is that you never get an accurate count of successful purchases or cart abandonment since the URL is the same.  If your shopping cart is built this way, it is worth it to ask your developer to either add parameters for each step or implement a unique ‘thank you’ page.

If you don’t have access to make modifications to your Web site, you can still track revenue but it will not be as accurate as you will simply be assigning a dollar value to a goal page.  Here is how it is done in Google Analytics and in ClickTracks

Log File Analytics
To track revenue using log files, you will simply have to pass the order total parameter and the dollar value of the sale into the query string of the URL.  As long as your developer knows .ASP (or .ASPX) or .PHP, this should be a relatively straight-forward, quick change.

Or, you can use what is called a beacon which is an invisible image that is used to capture data that is normally not found in log files.  Here is an explanation for doing this with Google Checkout.

Java Script Analytics
The beauty of java script-based analytics is that you can track anything that you want on your Web site.  You just need to plan for it ahead of time, and have the ability to place custom java script on the ‘thank you’ page.  Each analytics package will have a slightly different method (code) for tracking revenue.  But, it should be well documented in the instruction manual.  (A quick search on ‘tracking revenue in webtrends java script’ resulted in this pdf with instructions on page 15).

Using Search Engine Tools
Both Google and Yahoo generate ‘conversion tracking’ code that you can simply copy and paste onto your ‘thank you’ page.  This article also has good instructions for generating the Google Conversion code.  You just have to scroll down to the section ‘Using AdWords Conversion Tracking.’

Also, Nate had written a good article about the improvements that were made to the conversion tracking earlier this year. 

For Yahoo conversion code, click here.

Using Both – Comparing analytics to search engine reporting
I am always an advocate of this method, using both.  Without a ‘gut-check’ in place, it is way too easy to make decisions with bad data  (which we mention over and over).

Understand first that the data from your analytics will likely never match the search engine data 100%.  In fact, depending on the time frame that you are analyzing and several other factors, the discrepancy may be as much as 15%. 

But, by tying your analytic data in with what the search engines report, you will be able to get a very comprehensive picture of what is working and what is not.  And it will be clear what changes need to be made to make your PPC (and other campaign) efforts as effective as possible.

If you are new to PPC or Analytics, feel free to join us on Wednesdays this month for ‘Webinar Wednesdays.