Performics Performance Marketing Blog: SEM, SEO, Social & Display

Social.icio.us Thursday: Managing Your Brand in a Social Media World

Posted by Micheline Sabatté, Product Marketing Manager, Paid Search & Performance Media

Today Performics hosted a Webinar for clients and prospective clients on the featured topic: “Managing Your Brand in a Social Media World.” This Webinar was part of the Performics monthly Webinar series, which are typically held the last Thursday of each month. They feature Performics team members speaking on special topics of interest, and showcasing thought leadership, product offerings and client success stories. Kirstin Peters (the senior manager for performance media) and I lead today’s session.

For those who were unable to attend the social media Webinar, here are some highlights of what you missed:

Social Media Usage Continues to Rise

·         eMarketer estimates that 44.2% of the U.S. Internet user population will visit social network sites at least once a month in 2009, according to eMarketer’s “Social Networking Worldwide: Ad Spending and Usage” (March 2009)

·         Facebook has emerged as the social network leader with 200+ million active users and the fastest demographic are people 35 years and older

·         Twitter is leading the micro-blogging phenomenon and eMarketer projects that the number of Twitter users will jump to 18.1 million in 2010, representing 10.8% of Internet users, according to eMarketer’s “Twitter Tally” (April 28, 2009)

·         Although  David Martin from Nielsen Online caused quite the stir and received challenges this week when he released a report saying that 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users (called “Twitter Quitters”) fail to return the following month, which implies a 40% Twitter retention rate and raises concern that the popular site will continue to accelerate at the pace its seen in recent months

Performics Wins ad:tech’s Best Performance Marketing Campaign of 2009

Posted by Sarna Goldenberg, Director, Marketing

Performics is excited to announce our ad:tech 2009 Best Performance Marketing Campaign award for our Cabela’s online-to-offline paid search campaign.  Our account team implemented a highly effective and measurable paid search in-store coupon campaign to push physical traffic into Cabela’s retail locations.  The ad:tech award is evidence of Performics’ methodically innovative approach to acquiring and converting consumers for our clients.

Why Marketers Should Care About Twitter

Posted by Eric Fisher, Natural Search Program Manager

·         Increase in Site Traffic:  Twitter can send a lot of traffic to your site in real time.  For instance, if you introduce a new product, press releases, or promotion on Twitter, you can watch in real-time as it gets re-tweeted throughout the world and traffic to your site around that product or promotion jumps.  As these "ReTweets" happen, more links are being built on blogs and other sites that drive traffic to your native site.

 

·         Boost Search Rankings:  Twitter is really a tool that drives people to a resource you have. It's essentially an accelerated link machine.  The concept of "ReTweets" allows the promotion of your message back to your content source. This snowballs into more and more SEO-valuable incoming links.

·         Inventory Liquidation via Promotion Codes Announced in Real Time:  Imagine Brand A needs to get rid of their old model [insert product name here]. A quick tweet, "Hey Beloved [Brand A]  Tweeters, we got 10,000 of these [insert product name here] left. Come to the <URL here> and type in this promotion code for $X dollars off."  The marketer would get an influx of traffic and inventory will be cleared.

Search Happenings

Posted by JC Longbottom, Associate New Business Manager

From the Engines:

·         Yahoo! hits earnings estimates.

·         Google whitepaper: Content Network performance trends.

·         Jeeves back in the UK.

·         Google: getting started in mobile advertising.

·         New features added to AdWords’ Search-Based Keyword Tool.

·         Google innovations: Similar images and Google News Timeline.

·         Google Me gives you some control over the SERP for searches on your name.

 Other Topics of Interest:

·         Twitter wants to make money through distribution deals, not a buyout.

·         Twitter to double monthly traffic.

·         How to rank well in Google Product Search.

·         Kevin Ryan: how to beat Google at search.

·         5 companies that should buy Twitter.

·         MySpace CEO to step down.

Some Fun Stuff:

·         Cops hunt Ninja after robbery bid.

·         Outlaw eagle suspected in mugging.

Social.icio.us Thursday: Creating a Content Strategy for Your Facebook Page (Part 2: Select Content Producers to Keep Information Current)

Posted by Micheline Sabatté, Product Marketing Manager, Paid Search & Performance Media

Two weeks ago in Part 1: Define Your Audience of Creating a Content Strategy for Your Facebook Page, we discussed how to get started with a content strategy by focusing on the importance of developing customer-centric content. We provided a simple three-step framework: (1) Segment your audiences, (2) identify their needs and (3) indicate the desired actions you want them to take. Direct marketers should be quite familiar with these concepts because they are the basic principles that they hold dear and true for driving successful results.

Well, in this week’s column, we will spend some time discussing how to maintain content on your Facebook Page. We will identify the two types of content, and focus on the internal processes and content production roles required to ensure that the information posted to your Facebook Page is current.

Evaluating the Google “Vince” Update

Posted by Paul Williams, Search Analyst (Natural Search)

Google changed its search algorithm this past January in an effort to emphasize search visibility for sites under what Matt Cutts declared as the umbrella of “words like ‘trust’, ‘authority’, ‘reputation’, ‘PageRank’, ‘high quality.’” While it has been stated that Google does not think about brands, several companies found an abrupt hike in natural rankings to Google’s first SERP (search engine results page) for a smattering of generic keywords. When isolated, these recent ranking changes appear to affect keyword relevancy for authoritative public and private manufacturers and purveyors.

Cutts has stressed that this change “doesn’t affect a vast majority of queries.”  In that much, we can be certain – it seems only the very broadest of keywords have seen growth for these strongly branded companies on the same day. Terms such as “beer,” “batteries,” “toys,” airfare,” and “contact lenses” have been identified as keywords that this algorithm update has affected. Performics investigated historical ranking changes, with daily registers of movements, to verify that these keywords and their respective Web sites saw improvement during the middle of January.

Mobile’s Great Expectations: Part 4, Capturing the Future

Posted by Paul Williams, Search Analyst (Natural Search)

Over the past several weeks, I have written several posts on mobile. Despite all of the innovations and implications of the rise of mobile, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed: natural search. Web sites that aren’t accessed through their APIs still need to be found (and for that matter, relevant applications still need to be found, too). Since so many mobile versions of search engine sites— and several search applications like Google Mobile and Inquisitor— have not yet implemented paid search, the value for natural search optimization is just as important, albeit in slightly different ways.

The need for new content creation that caters to this rising class of Internet users is increasingly apparent. Sure, several mobile users will access their favorite sites via spiffy applications that take advantage of their handsets, but they will still have the incentive to search the Internet as they did before. And if your Web site is a solution to a searcher’s inquiry, but no mobile content is available (or the page in question is designed strictly for PC browsers), that potential customer is forfeited.  In a sense, alternative mobile sites will become just as imperative as creating parallel navigation for Flash-only sites. Additionally, these pages’ reliance on optimized and actionable tags (for aggregation on SERPs) will determine the usefulness of that site to a newly fickle wave of searchers’ intents.

The Best Search Engines for Real-Time Sports Scores

Posted by Dan Malachowski, Product Marketing Manager (Search and Performance Media)

There’s a lot going on in the sports world lately.  This weekend I found myself watching baseball with NASCAR picture-in-picture while at the same time monitoring the NBA Playoffs and NHL Playoffs online and keeping an eye on the golf leader board.  In times like these, we need a search engine that delivers real-time sports scores in the clutch.  Here’s the engines that have stepped up their game:

Baseball: MSN

I prefer not to leave the SERP to get the “red sox score.”  Both Google and MSN tell me the score right on the SERP in a OneBox, while Yahoo! and Ask.com strike out.  I do like the Google box score, but the MSN listings hit in out of the park.  I can get the score and a quick snapshot of the standings and team news.  That’s why MSN wins the division and Google takes the wild card:

 

Search Happenings

Posted by JC Longbottom, Associate New Business Manager

From the Engines:

·         Layoffs expected at Yahoo!

·         Google Q1 earnings beat expectations.

·         YouTube will add full length movies.

Other Topics of Interest:

·         Internet to be only ad medium to grow this year.

·         Half of Microsoft employees use Google search.

·         Paid search marketing budgets rise in March.

·         Robots.txt: a deep dive.

·         Google to place ads in online TV shows.

·         Who has the most Twitter followers?

·         YouTube AdSense copyrighted videos.

Some Fun Stuff:

·         Kids these days.

·         Absolutely Brilliant.

Social.icio.us Thursday: Why Twitter is so Valuable to Google

Posted by Dan Malachowski, Product Marketing Manager (Search and Performance Media)

This is an extreme of example of something that happens every day on the major search engines and proves Twitter’s potential value to the search results page.  Last week, the Web was abuzz when Lawrence Kutner, Kal Penn’s character on “House,” was suddenly killed-off the show.  When Kutner died, “House” viewers turned to Google for answers.  In fact, 22 of the top 25 hottest keywords on Google the night the episode aired were related to Kutner’s death:

But all the people searching Google on these terms at this time weren’t getting the best user experience on the SERP.  The first page on Google contained no results relating to Kutner’s death: