In the words of Rajiv Parikh, Position² CEO,  “This award is a validation of Position²’s online marketing expertise and reinforces our commitment to creative excellence. We’re very happy to see the value we provide to our clients recognized and rewarded in a forum among our peers. We will continue to invest in our team and capabilities as we firmly believe ‘Surround and Intent Marketing’ provides tangible results for all our clients.”

The award was graciously accepted by Rajesh Sule, Position² Director of Worldwide Business Development. On receiving the award, he said “We’ve always been focused on delivering effective digital marketing collateral. Ensuring our creative visualization and execution is in tune with what end-customers are looking forward to is what gives Position² the edge, and it’s very fulfilling to see our efforts recognized.”

Position² partnered with Lenovo in mid-2009.

Visitor Progression

In Clicktracks, the funnel report provides data on visitor progression across stages – from start to goal. Each stage is defined not as an individual page but as a groups of inter-connected pages. It clearly shows which page groups enabled visitors to progress to a deeper level by measuring the progression rate. Example would be, if a page group is requested in 100 visitor sessions, and in 50 of those sessions, a visitor subsequently visited a deeper stage, the progression rate is 50%

Visitor Segmentation

Further, by creating different data segments using labels, it is possible to study how different groups of visitors reacted differently to different page groups. Infact, progression data for each label can be viewed by clicking at the label name at the bottom of the report.

For eg. Stage 1 can be defined as a group of landing pages. One can analyze which landing page had the highest visitor progression for all visitors. Also, which page had the best progression for PPC visitor vs. Email campaign visitor.

1. Home Page shown highest visitor progression.
2. Among the visitor segments to Home Page, Social Media visitors show the highest progression (Green segment)

Defining the Clicktracks Funnel – Best Practices

Any analysis is only as good as the data that is captured. Defining the funnel in the right way can make all the difference.

1. The first stage of the funnel should be the entry pages along with the home page
2. The pages should not be distinguished on the basis of their tracking URLs or parameters since that distinguishes a visitor source and not the page itself.
3. Use labels to create different groups of visitors and analyze visitor progression for each of these groups.
4. The page groups defined should share a common attribute. Eg. A group of Product pages or a group of Registration pages. One can also analyze if modifications made to a page has improved the progression rate.
5. A note to remember, if a visitor visits 2 pages in the same page group (Say LP1 and LP2), then the progression will be assigned to the first page group defined (the one on the extreme left). Thus interchanging the order of the page groups can change the funnel data.

Analyzing visitor behavior on a site can be a lot of fun and can provide powerful insights as to how visitors are consuming the website. It helps to have an open mind, free from assumptions and a powerful tool such as Clicktracks.

Contributed by Divya Krishnan

If you want to promote your business through social media and business networking, but still have your doubts on it, then I suggest you drop it.

Like I said earlier, if what you are doing is not fun then don’t do it at all. Promoting your business through the social media sites can prove to be very beneficial to your business and bring in a high ROI.

We often hear people say that promoting your business has to be taken seriously.  That is true, but who said that serious cannot be fun.

When businesses drop their feelings and hide behind their logos and not show their face, it brings in more fun, curiosity and excitement to Social Media. Getting them to do it is hard and not fun, but once they do it more business comes to them from consumers though having better trust in whom, it is they are doing business. A positive result in business is where the fun begins.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, My Space, etc helps create a network with friends and other people, with whom one can establish contact and not just share what’s happening in and around their little world, but also exchange some very important information, like important links, or create homepages, etc which could prove to be very useful in the future.

Sites like LinkedIn, which is a business related though, can also be fun too, where people can exchange contacts and important information on any events happening related to their business.

The entire premise of Social Media is based on drawing attention to something by using effective communication through social channels.  What draws consumers to something is fun. If it is fun and exciting, they will come.

So what are you still waiting for? Unless you give Social Media a try, you will never know what you’re missing out on.

Contributed by Pooja Giri

The above question will be answered in the following paragraphs.

With automatic bidding, the Search Engine Marketing systems (like: Adwords, Adcenter & Search Marketing) adjust the bids automatically to earn the most clicks possible within the given budget. It isn’t possible to set a specific CPC bid. However, we can set an upper limit on the CPC bids for the entire campaign. This is the CPC bid limit. Specify a bid limit and the Search Engine Marketing system will never bid over the specified limit for any single click.

If it’s important for us to control the cost of individual clicks on our ad, it’s good to specify a CPC bid limit. Say if we sell a product that costs $5.00, we may wish to set a CPC bid limit of $5.00 maximum, so we never pay more than the maximum limit for a click.

By setting a limit we have more control over our costs, but we also may restrict the ad position or the number of click the ads receive. If we choose not to set a click price limit, automatic bidding will function the same way as it normally does, choosing whatever maximum CPC bids it determines will earn the most clicks possible within the set budget.

If a lot more control is required from our end on a day-to-day basis, manual bidding for clicks will be the best advised process to go for. Nevertheless for long campaigns & low budgets, Auto bidding is very useful.

Here are 3 key points which will help us understand the working of Automatic Bidding

• When you place a bid, you enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for the item. The seller and other bidders don’t know your maximum bid.

• We’ll place bids using the automatic bid increment amount, which is based on the current high bid. We’ll bid only if it’s necessary to make sure that we remain the high bidder, or to meet the reserve price, up to our maximum amount.

• If another bidder places the same maximum bid or higher, we’ll place another bid. Our maximum bid is kept confidential until it is exceeded by another bidder.

Contributed by Leo V J

Share of Voice analysis

The iPad has drawn the wrath of a few critics owing to missing features such as a camera, flash and the fact that it cannot multitask. But the sleek new design and ebook features are definitely praise worthy. Overall, iPad had 2,900,000 twitter mentions, 106,816 blog mentions, 87,513 forum mentions and 83,513 news mentions.

Share of voice analysis

Overall popularity

The fact that iPad’s popularity has been decreasing is worth a mention. On the 27^th of January 2010, it had 898,000 mentions whereas on the 31^st of January 2010 it had 299,334 mentions. A 68% decrease in mentions in just 4 days. Are people losing interest?

Blogs

In the blogosphere, the overall sentiment was neutral at 49%. Positive sentiment constituted 32% whereas negative sentiment was a mere 19%. Negative sentiment towards the iPad is decreasing whereas positive sentiment is increasing. Country wise, U.S blogs talked most about the iPad followed by U.K and Germany.

Sentiment analysis – blogs

Sentiment trends – blogs

Top countries – blogs

Twitter

Twitterverse had a field day with the launch of the iPad. Globally, iPad had 2, 900,000 mentions on Twitter. While 74% of tweets were regular, 15% were retweets and 11% were replies. The popular phrases for iPad show that the most discussed keyword was ‘Grammys’. It was a popular phrase because Stephen Colbert touted the iPad at the Grammys to read out the song of the year nominees. Other most discussed phrases were ‘iPad tablet’ and ‘iPad may get video’.

Twitter popularity

The fact that iPad’s popularity has been decreasing is worth a mention. On the 27^th of January 2010, it had 757396 mentions whereas on the 31^th of January 2010 it had 159055 mentions. Will iPad die with the hype?

Popularity – Twitter

What is it?

Google Base is a free online database where you can post any information free of cost as long as it follows Google’s program policies. Products and services, recipes, classified ads, you can post almost anything you can think of. However it is a dream land for those who have a list of good stuff to sell and no forum to market.

How does it work?

It’s really very simple. Just open an account or use an existing account if you have one. Choose to submit a feed and look at the various options for feed types. If you already have an RSS feed for your product, you can submit this, but some information will still be missing, so it is advisable to construct a text file as per Google’s field pattern. This allows you to think and include keywords and key phrases for appropriate searches. After the content is ready, submit it.

What’s amazing is that you can register up to 10 data feeds in your Google Base account and almost one million items equally distributed between 10 feeds.

Google Base and SEO

Submitting your content to Google Base actually helps you get additional organic search engine traffic.

Algorithm for ranking Google Base products is more literal in Google Base. It is not as sophisticated as the algorithm for Google search. This should be taken into account while preparing your product feed. Points such as including factors relevant to your product especially the product name, model etc in your product title and description, become crucial. The keywords you are targeting should also appear in the title and description. The first 10- 15 words are quite significant, so must be used wisely. But beware; do not stuff the description with a whole lot of keywords as this could lead to your listing to be penalized.

Adding relevant images to your feed can increase your click-through rates. This is another important optimisation tip you can use. It will help you rank well in Google Base. Finally, Google product search uses seller ratings; customers leave feedback about their purchase experience with a company as on any online purchasing portal. So try and get as good a rating as possible as this will only positively impact your rating in Google Base.

Contributed By Shruti Kekre

The Google Wonder Wheel is one such tool which helps to build your keyword list and also gives you new themes and ad group ideas. The tool is an easy way to research your niche to find keywords that are current and relevant to your PPC marketing campaign. It not only gives you an endless supply of related search terms to look at, but also allows you to study competition.

Google Wonder Wheel by definition is a graphical wheel display of relevant search terms. Clicking on one of the search terms will open a new wheel of relevant search terms and so on.

The following is a step by step guide on how to use the Google Wonder Wheel tool:

Enter your key word or phrase and perform a search. After submitting the keyword you would like to search for, click on the “show more options” link on the top left side. The results will be divided in to two screens. Among all the options, that Google offers to optimize, the Google Wonder Wheel is the option you should look out for. Remember to check the other ones as well once you are done exploring this tool.

Clicking on the Wonder Wheel link will create a sun shaped circle of terms, which are related to the original search. You can navigate your way around relevant keywords and phrases to find more results. The power of the wonder wheel is that it is such a natural way to brainstorm and very much mimics using pen and paper or a white board.

Contributed By Shweta Gaonkar

The real-time search allows users to view live updates from social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook which impacts the search engine result page (SERP). Headlines from blogs and news websites can be viewed just seconds after they are published. For businesses real-time search can increase the efficiency of both big and small online companies.

With the launch of real-time search corporate websites need to be more active on social media sites since any conversations on social networks will consequently have an ongoing effect on search results.

Now companies and organizations need to care for sites like Twitter or other forms of user-generated content that are published in real-time. Companies that were previously involved in Twitter focusing on engagement for customers and leads, now have to also optimize keywords that are used in each tweet. What it also means to a company is that if your brand doesn’t tweet, it is going to lose on some search traffic.

Real-time search by Google has been one of the most important social media announcements for 2009. In a nutshell, it means businesses cannot ignore social media as it is an indispensable marketing tool.

For companies that want to jump into the social media bandwagon, there isn’t much time to lose.

Contributed by Shantanu Barman

Go Vertical

Going vertical is an effective method to lower your cost per click (CPC) and to improve the overall traffic quality. The quality also tends to be better because of the increased propensity for the buyers to use vertical search engines in their purchase decision process. This gives a greater opportunity for those who are with limited budgets to more effectively spend their money online and to get higher ROI.

Keyword Research

While doing the keyword research we debate constantly on what to use with regards to long tail keywords or the head phrases and which would perform better and get more results. Head phrases are generic and broad keywords. The search volumes for these keywords are very high but cost is also quite high. Torso keywords are with 2 to 4 words keywords. The search volume for these keywords are low as compared to the head phrases, but the cost is also low. Long tail keywords are the keyword phrases which are more than 4 words. The cost and the search volume is very low.

While developing keywords for your search campaign make sure you are in the shoes of searcher. The keywords should be related to the target market and useful to the searcher while searching for your product or service.

Quality Score

Google and Yahoo use quality score to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. If the advertiser provides the consumer with the best experience possible, then the quality score for the advertiser should be good.  If the quality score is poor, you should check the keywords, ads and landing page and re-cluster the ad groups to improve your quality score.

CPL than CPC / Suggestion: CPL over CPC

The ultimate objective of your search campaign is to lower the cost per conversion. So bid high or bid aggressively on converting keywords and bid low for the other keywords in the campaign. Even when you bid high, you get conversions within your target cost per conversion.

Happy Optimization!

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

Below are the ways to improve the quality score

• Increase your click-through rates. Always try testing your ads to improve click through rates. Always keep the ad settings to rotate while you are testing ads. This will allow the search engines not to show well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. As a result you will know the better performing ad which increases click-through rate, which means a higher quality score.

• One way to achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in each ad group. This will allow your text ad to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which results to be more relevant to the target user. This will help you to increase your click through rates.  It’s never late to organize your ad groups to improve your quality score. It’s okay to only have 5 or 10 keywords in each ad group. Adwords Editor will help us in this process to cluster the keywords easily and faster.

• Delete or pause non-performing keywords and ads. By doing this, your quality score improves as your account have only high CTR keywords and ads, all your non-performing ads & keywords are not active.

• Always check your keywords. As quality score depends on how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. Always try to use your keyword on your landing page.

• Landing page load times do matter. As quality score was implemented to have a great user experience.  Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. It’s very important to load your landing page within 3 seconds in all browsers, personal computers and Mac systems.

All your keywords in Google will have a quality score associated to them. If you have a quality score fewer than 7 then it’s time to change or test your ads to improve your quality score.  Always try to change keywords in to a different ad group or try changing ad messaging.

These changes will take time to get effect in your account. Might take couple of weeks to build history & improve the quality score.

Contributed By Ajesh B

Importance of forum posting in social media marketing

In order to get the best results through forum posting, it is important to keep the following four points in mind:

1. Search Forums of high Google Page Rank – To get the maximum visibility and exposure, you must post in forums that have high Google Page Rank value and visitors. Try to find forums that have active conversations and high page views. If you end up posting in forums that have very less traffic, it will not help you maximize your results
2. Make your presence felt – It is also important to let people know who you are, especially when you are out there to promote your brand or build business relationships. You can add a more personal touch and connect with people when you post in forums by using your own name rather than a fictitious or funny name that disguises your identity. Moreover, people are more likely to connect to you when they know who you are. Additionally, uploading your photo can also help to increase the responsiveness of people to your postings.
3. No Direct Marketing: Please note that you cannot talk specifically about your product or sell your product in forums, as direct marketing is not allowed in most forums. You need to select the category in the forums related to your business and start a general conversation with the forum members. You can slowly start sharing your business information once your presence is felt and accepted in the forum. This ensures that you improve your business presence and trust among the forum members. Eventually, this networking and relationsip will help your brand strength and work towards gaining search engine rankings.
4. Append a signature file and a link to your website – A signature file is a pre-written personal footer that is used as a closing line for emails. This usually contains the name and address of the sender or any other text that the sender wishes to have as his closing line. You can use your signature file when you post in forums so that people can contact you if they are interested in your product. Also, posting a link  to your website in the signature file may help drive traffic and brand visibility.

Discussion boards are generally a highly targeted group of people that are more receptive to your products and services. Therefore commenting on forums is an effective way to promote your brand.

Contributed by Seethalakshmi

A lot of variables have to be considered and if you get any one of them wrong your whole campaign will suffer. Variables include keyword choice, how you phrase your PPC ads, the web copy and design of the landing page, price and profit margin on the product/service being sold.  At the end, none of this can help the fact that anybody can click on PPC ads. People not interested in what is being offered can also click your ad. The reason for this is that PPC ads target keywords but not the demographics of the ad readers. At least, that was the case until Facebook set up its PPC advertising service and included demographic targeting as part of the package. Social networking sites are all over the internet today. It’s being used for much more than simply meeting new friends.

With demographic targeting, Facebook has effectively removed one of the causes of failure of pay per click advertising campaigns. A common complaint from many website owners is that their advertising is not reaching the right audience.  Facebook PPC ads are perfect for targeted audiences. With demographic targeting, Facebook PPC clients will be able to set up ads which would appear on the Facebook pages of people who are tightly defined as part of their target market. Advertisers can select from a number of variables such as age, gender, marital status, geographical location, hobbies and interests. When ads are as well targeted, copy writing becomes a much easier process. You have a much better chance of generating targeted clicks to their sales pages.

Some items you would need to keep in mind to create your Facebook ads

1. Decide on whether you want to advertise your own webpage or something on Facebook, like a Page, Application, Group or Event.
2. You can upload images of your product along with your facebook ads. Image will be resized to fit in 110px wide by 80px high box.
3. Create concise text messaging which speaks directly to the target audience you want to reach. Your facebook ad headline can have up to 25 characters in length and the main body can have upto 135 characters

The expectation is that Facebook is going to be adding enhancements to their PPC advertising service pretty rapidly in the near future. When you have over 200 million ‘members’ it can be incredibly powerful to slice that group into more and more targeted segments so advertisers will have success without breaking the bank. Should be interesting to watch.

Contributed by Shweta Gaonkar