We’re delighted to announce a series of new updates to the Brand Monitor™ platform, and to give you a heads-up on some of the exciting features we’re working on!

Weekly Activity Email and Enhanced Downloadable Reports

In addition to your daily email alerts, you can opt-in for “Weekly Summary” email alerts. The email alert gives you an overview about your brand activity for the last 7 days. It includes:

• Weekly Buzz.
• No. of New Posts.
• Brand Sentiment.
• Traffic Breakup.
• Top 5 Tweets, Blogs posts, News stories and Forum Posts.

Enhanced Downloadable Reports

We have included few more graphs to the downloadable excel report:

• Top Country Breakup
• Gender Distribution Breakup
• Age Group Breakup

Advanced User Management System	Download Graphs as Image/PDF files
You now have more control over user access permissions. The enhanced user management system allows you to: Add/Remove and manage users. Add/Remove access to search buckets for each user. Add/Remove users from groups.	You can now save any of the graphs in Brand Monitor as JPEG, PNG or PDF files. This enables you to save each chart with the current data and date range selected. Now it’s much easier to use the Brand Monitor charts in your presentations and reports.
Miscellaneous Updates
UI Update for Date Range Selection It’s now much easier to select the data range you want – the date picker user interface has been replaced with an enhanced version. It has both pre-defined ranges and custom date range selector. Features We’re Working On [Coming Soon!] Stronger workflow integration An updated and refereshed Brand Monitor UI

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

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We’re delighted to announce a series of new updates to the Brand Monitor™ platform, and to give you a heads-up on some of the exciting features we’re working on!

Enhanced Daily Alerts, Reports and other Functionality Improvements

• Brand Monitor™ now has a new “Deep Dive” section under “Reports” which gives you a more detailed media breakup for each search bucket along with sentiment analysis. In phase two of our “Deep Dive” release, we will add advanced filtering functionality here.
• Daily email alerts will contain data with a “high relevance score”, which means more focused and useful data into your inbox.
• You can now set a default relevance score for each search topic.
• Brand Monitor now has a new Tag Cloud for each search topic, with new filters for discovering keywords for each media type.

Geographic and Demographic Reach

You can now discover the geographic and demographic reach of each search topic, via the dashboard and report pages.

The geographic breakup will show you the number of posts accumulated from each country. The demographic breakup has gender and age group graphs.

• The geographic data is further broken into individual states in USA.
• Demographics include an industry breakup for each gender.

In phase two, we’ll be adding in-depth state-wise geographic segregation for more countries and optimizing our charts.

LinkedIn Integration

Similar to Facebook integration now you can manage your LinkedIn profile via Brand Monitor™.

After adding your LinkedIn account you can see your connections’ status messages, application updates, profile changes, group activities and Q&A posts.

• Comment or like status messages
• Sentiment analysis on status message
• Use filters to view specific type of LinkedIn network updates: status message, connection, application, profile update, group activities or Q&A posts.

Features We’re Working On [Coming Soon!]

• Advanced LinkedIn and Facebook Integration
• Advanced Geographic and Demographic reports

We’re committed to updating Brand Monitor™ every month with new features and capabilities. Try out these new features and let us know if you have any suggestions for us!

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YouTube has been the revolution in the Internet for sharing videos covering different topics. There are 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minute on YouTube making it the second largest search engine in the World. It has become vital for business to gain market value over the Internet and YouTube has the right mix with its varied topics.

YouTube has a reputation of being the place to look for funny videos. It is the second place to go after probably ‘Googling’ it. Most videos generate a one-time audience response, as very few people look for the same video again. Since YouTube plays such an important in search results and ranking, it cannot be overlooked. To reach out to your audience and to keep them coming back to view the videos again, here are some rules to be followed :

1. Creation of a channel specific to the videos
2. The video has to be optimized with the desired keywords and involving in the community discussions is vital
3. It is also essential to upload new videos frequently
4. It important to keep in mind while creating the videos that viewer would come back to view the videos only if the videos are informative, original and interesting
5. Share the video across the social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter using the sharing options provided by YouTube using the share option provided. This helps increase visibility and better search engine optimization
6. Embed the videos in the blog. This generates higher views for the blog as well as reaching out to the desired target audience

YouTube has become feature rich with its recent launch of trending topics, to provide more real time value and ease of use for the user in finding information on trending topics. This new addition has made YouTube all the more attractive making it vital for business to get a share of voice in the online market as the volume of search in YouTube is growing at an increasing pace.

Contributed by Vishnuram Muthukumarasamy

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The reason why Google Analytics (GA) is sought after is that you can track website traffic for a complete process defined in an online business model. One can set the ultimate target as the goal for GA tracking and GA will track every step of the process until the defined goal.

However, the problem is that GA does not reprocess historical data.  GA will only start to track goal conversion data from the day you set the goal in GA. Nevertheless, here is a simple way to track goal conversions without setting goals in GA for historical data as well. To do this, here are some conditions:

1) You should tag your entire website by the proper Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). At any rate, pages from the landing page to the goal conversion page must have the proper GATC.

2) Here are two examples:

Case I:

The URL of the goal conversion page should be different from the other pages.

Example of unique URLs are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

Here the URL from the Sign up Form to the Final Goal Page has unique URLs: ‘www.mysite.com/sign_up.html’

The ideal path should be as follows:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/thanksone.html

Case II:

The page title should be different for each step despite the unique URLs.

The page name is mentioned between title tags of the page e.g. <title> Page Name </title>. For example, you can check the website www.position2.com where the home page is titled:

<title> Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Company – Position2 </title>

Therefore, the steps to take for different page names are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – Your Air Ticket

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – Registration Form

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – Thanks for signing up!

Here is how you can get goal conversion values in GA:

1) Go for Advanced Segments

2) Create new segment ‘Goal Conversion’ for Case I above. Use the thank you page request URI ‘/thanksone.html’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

For Case II, use the page title of the thank you page ‘Thanks for signing up!’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

3) Choose two segments such as the one from Default Segment and another from Goal Conversion. Apply it to the report.

4) You will see the output as:

Here you can clearly see that out of 1,123 visits, 67 visits were converted. We found 98% accuracy of achieving goal conversion numbers through the Advanced Segments approach. You can apply this segmentation to all reports excluding goal-reporting suit.

Contributed by Bhagawat Jadhav

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We can use four keyword match types for PPC campaigns:

1. Broad: Display your ad if your Keyword is anywhere in the Search term

2. Phrase: Displays your ad only if Search Term and Keyword are in the same order

3. Exact:  Displays your ad only if the Search Term exactly matched with the Keyword

4. Negative: Your ad will not be displayed if a negative Keyword is included in a search term. These keywords help us control broad and phrase match keywords. We can use Negative keywords in all Broad, Phrase and Exact match types.

Glossary

Search Term: word used by the user

Keyword: word bid on by the advertiser

The grid below will help you understand the various terms used by the top three search engines:

Identifying Search Terms and Optimization:

There are different ways to optimize keyword match types, here I will explain how you can track Search terms (exact keywords) triggered by broad and phrase match keywords for different search engines:

Google Search Query report:

1. The search query report gives us the Search Terms that are triggered by phrase and broad match keywords

2. Identify the Search Terms that are used by the users and that are not there in your campaigns

3. Separate them in relevant and irrelevant categories.

4. Again, cluster the relevant keywords into different clusters and add them to relevant adgroups

5. You can add these relevant keywords in all three match types

6. Irrelevant keywords can be added as negative or excluded keywords

7. You can add negative keywords in all three match types, depending on the keyword

Yahoo:

1. Yahoo doesn’t provide a report for Search Terms triggered for broad and phrase keywords

2. You can track Search Terms used in Yahoo by using a URL parameter

3. Keyword={OVRAW} – use this as a URL parameter to capture Search Terms

In my next post, I will explain how you can track keywords from MSN and how to track Search Terms using Google Analytics.

Contributed by Sudheer Dayanand

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A significant portion of the process of managing PPC campaigns is keyword bid management. The sheer volumes of keywords, its interaction with each other and the highly competitive search engine bid environment makes it a challenge worth automating!

The Position2 AutoBid Engine can predict keyword positions for each bid and provide recommendations to maximize the revenue. This short article covers the overall framework of our engine.

Most companies start off its bid management with a heuristic rule based bidding model. The next level is adding statistical and probabilistic analysis to the historical  information. The biggest challenges in this are:

1. Identifying variables to model and how each of these variable have a effect on other models? This include – Conversion rates, click through rates (CTR), Click/CPC history, average position & discounting.
2. How to model variable for keywords which do not have sufficient data ? Long tail keywords may have very few impression let alone clicks and conversions.
3. How relevant is historical data ? The speed at which the internal marketing focus, competition, consumer preference & search engine algorithms change, makes it difficult to work on very old data.

Even after modeling each keyword, the choice of taking a risk of one keyword against another always remains. Should all keywords be treated at par or should you risk a higher bid for a keyword which is at its tipping point? With constraints such as budget limitation, what is an optimal solution to maximize revenue?

Once these engineering challenges are solved, the question that persists is the value of simple bid management or using manual intervention to improve quality score by improving ad-copy and landing pages.

Our AutoBid Engine automates the tedious process of bid-management and frees up our analysts to focus on improving the quality of keywords, adcopy and landing pages. It goes beyond rules-based bidding and employs ROI portfolio optimization techniques to maximize profit and volume over user defined criteria.  We will be opening it for customers as part of our newly launched product offering.

Here is another article that you might find interesting -  http://searchenginewatch.com/3626132

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