For many B2B marketers, mainstream social channels a la Facebook (FB) and LinkedIn remain the proverbial Wild West of the contextual online advertising realm. While some early-adopters look to these platforms with intrigue and enthusiasm, others are handicapped by intimidation— skeptical of how rich and sophisticated these social landscapes might be. Between the two channels, LinkedIn and Facebook boast around 800 million registered users globally. We have tons of experience with B2B clients who are less spooked by the concept of marketing to users in LinkedIn, classically described as th [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Social | How To | How To: Facebook

Earlier this month, Google released Google +1 buttons for websites. This seems like a good occasion to celebrate social conversion on landing pages — and provide you with the links and sample code to implement it in your own post-click marketing. By social conversion, we mean a social-oriented action that a user takes on one of your pages: clicking a Facebook Like button, clicking a Twitter Follow button, or clicking a new Google +1 button. For example, any of these buttons: In some cases, this may be the primary call-to-action for a certain landing page: you deliver meaningful cont [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Social Media Marketing | Search & Conversion

One of the major headaches in multinational campaigns is solving the many web analytics issues thrown up as a result of operating across multiple subdomains, in multiple languages. Part of the problem is technical, but probably the most difficult issue you'll encounter is actually maintaining consistency in numbers across the various departments and agencies involved in multinational campaigns. Getting the right numbers into the right reports for the right people should be straightforwards but rarely is. Here are my top tips for making your multinational analytics drive success. Tip #1: [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Multinational Search

At SMX West last month, I spoke at length about what it means to manage PPC programs at large companies.  One of the topics I covered at some depth was using the various search engines’ targeting options to break keywords down into smaller bits of data to optimize them individually. This type of tactic can turn the ‘head’ of your portfolio into more of a ‘tail’ and makes it work more efficiently for you. But if you’re like us, and you have super-sized SEM programs, how do you tackle this in a manageable way that will drive incremental profit to your group or company, and make y [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: PPC | Industrial Strength

Link building in social-unfriendly verticals can be a heartache. At one point, before the reasonable surfer concept was implemented, it was possible for many websites in taboo verticals like poker, payday loans and pharmaceuticals to get by on footer and sidebar links alone – meaning links that never saw the light of a user’s eyes could still pass enough value to rank for the most difficult terms on the Internet. Now, that’s simply not the case, and those websites trying to get by solely on the same tactics are assuredly going to get swept away onto the second page of the search resul [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEO | How To: Links | Link Week

Much has been said about A/B testing techniques and the value that Website Testing can bring to website owners. In this article, I will not discuss what to test or how to do it, but how to analyze what you have already done. I have written in the past about the differences between A/B and Multivariate Testing and how to choose between them. Back then, I wrote that one of the advantages of multivariate tests is that you can analyze each and every interaction between elements in a much deeper level. However, one of the points that I missed is that A/B Tests are easier to be analyzed using [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | Google: Website Optimizer | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Had you exchanged pleasantries at a 2001 cocktail party, describing yourself as a search marketer, you’d have undoubted been met with a moment of uncomfortable silence and a blank stare. A decade later, it’s hard to imagine a company of any size, in any industry, that isn’t using SEO or paid search advertising to market its products or services. In fact, a company not pursuing these activities now is almost universally viewed to be at a disadvantage to its competitors who are so engaged. Well, marketing history appears to be repeating itself in the form of attribution management. I [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | Credit Is Due | How To: Analytics

I'm sure everyone has read about Google's recent algorithm change to penalize content farms by now. There's been lots of reports on who the biggest losers have been in terms of traffic loss, but for everyone who's lost – someone else has won! So looking at this from the alternative point of view, how can you benefit? Well firstly, it's important to look at where the content farm style of websites went wrong. Quite clearly, one of the common signs is that they created not just thousands, but in many cases millions of pages containing low-quality content. All with the primary intention o [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | How To: SEO