Bryan Connally
Staff Internet Marketing Specialist

Some background info on Google +1:

• - Google has stated that “+1″ for websites will be used as a social signal to help determine a page’s relevance for a particular search query and ultimately its ranking. This will likely be rolled out in a controlled manner so that Google can ascertain how the new signal might be manipulated. It is therefore unlikely that it will have much effect on the rankings in the short term.

• - Google has also stated that the “+1″ for websites may cause “Google to crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click.”

• - A page’s +1 activity will show up visually within the SERPs which could potentially increase the click-through rate of individual search results. In the beginning, Google only showed +1 within the SERPs to users that were logged into their Google accounts and had opted into the +1 program. In recent days, however, the +1 has begun to roll out for all users, regardless of whether they are logged in or not.

• - There has been some indication that Bing will be using the +1 button as a ranking signal. This, however, is very preliminary and may change.

Risks & Benefits:
As in the case of the Facebook “like” button, the Google “+1″ button does not have a negative counterpart. On Facebook, there is no way to “unlike” or “dislike” something. The same goes for “+1″. There is no “-1″ option so the downside is minimal to nonexistent. Therefore, there is no potential risk for a small subset of disgruntled customers to hijack the technology for their own means.

One risk of the technology is that if a brand were to implement the button and subsequently attain very few +1s relative to their competitors, this could be used as an indicator by search engines that a site is less relevant than others within the same comparison set  (at least against those competitors that are participating).

Another potential risk associated with the +1 button is forcing users to choose. For many users, the Facebook “like” button is the method for sharing web content in a social manner. Very few users are going to both “like” and “+1″ something. It is redundant. The negative risk in this scenario is that involvement with either one is diluted across twice as many social technologies as before. It is our feeling that Google will normalize growth rates for Google +1s and Facebook Likes to compensate for this, so the risk is again minimal. We tend to believe that a site  not participating is probably more detrimental to rank than diluting overall involvement.

Bryan Connally
Internet Marketing Specialist

2009 was a big year for Facebook. In May, comScore reported 70.2 million US unique visits for Facebook (up 97% year over year) passing Myspace .com for the first time. Later the same year, UK based analytics firm Hitwise tweeted that on December 29th Facebook had more unique visits than Google.com. This effectively made facebook.com the most visited site in the US for several consecutive days. While marketers are still debating social media best practices, no one can deny that Facebook is becoming a more important marketing medium every day.

How do start advertising on Facebook?
Of all of the ways you can choose to start advertising on Facebook, PPC is probably both the quickest and the easiest. To begin you will need to decide whether you want your ads to link to your company web page or something on Facebook (like a Page, Application, Group, or Event). Much of this depends on your business goals (lead generation, sales, etc.), but more on that later. Next, you will need a compelling 110px X 80px image for your advertisement. Once you have uploaded the image, written the ad copy, and setup your account (with billing info, etc.) you can literally be up and running in as little as a few hours. The thing that takes the longest time is usually waiting for Facebook to approve your advertisement.

How is PPC Different on Facebook?
Deciding to undertake PPC on Facebook is not exactly the same as doing PPC on more traditional channels like Google, Yahoo, and Bing/MSN. While in theory it is structured very similarly, in application it can be very different. One of the biggest differences tends to really change the way you architect your campaigns. On Facebook, keywords take a back seat to more general, albeit powerful, targeting options. While you can target your audience by location as with other channels, you can also target by relationship status, interests, education, workplace, sex, age, and language. You can still target via keywords, however, manipulating these categories is really the primary method of segmenting your audience. Remember, users do not search on Facebook.

Is Facebook advertising right for you?
Determining if Facebook is right for you is really a question about business goals. Facebook is best for branding, public relations, building buzz, and keeping your customers engaged with your company. It is not really designed to be a lead generation or order driving channel. However, that is not to say that Facebook is incapable of driving incremental revenue, only that it is not as simple as ‘segment, click, and convert’.

Unlike banner advertising, which is really a push method, and PPC advertisements, which are really more of a pull method of advertising, Facebook PPC is a little bit of both. The demographic targeting really allows you to target your viewers with such precision that you can craft very personal messages, but you still have no idea what stage of buying cycle or frame of mind they are in. Instead, you are making inferences about their wants and needs based on demographic and psychographic information.

So how do you drive incremental revenue via Facebook? If you have a fan page or a group for your company on Facebook, you’re half way there. If you update your page frequently (or even if you just have your site RSS feed post to your Facebook) driving fans via Facebook PPC can be a very effective use of your advertising dollars. Not only do your fans keep informed about company news but we find they often convert at later dates. As your fan page or group reaches a kind of a critical mass it can add an additional stream of revenue that can provide a nice boost to your company’s bottom line.

What Facebook needs to do better
While Facebook as a network is already very advanced especially for users and social networking, the interface and tools available for advertisers are still very much in their infancy. There are several things that Facebook PPC needs to fix before it can expect really compete for serious advertising dollars.

First, Facebook (unlike its more traditional PPC rivals) has no pixel technology to track conversions. Therefore if you decide to advertise on Facebook and direct users to an outside site, you have no way to seeing within the Facebook interface which advertisements or campaigns led to sales and conversions. While you can ascertain the general performance of the channel so long as you set everything up correctly in your analytics package and track things carefully it is hard to evaluate the performance of more granular aspects of your campaigns like ad copy and offers.

Second, Facebook’s reporting capabilities still have a long way to go. As of right now, the reporting is often delayed by 24 hours or more and even then the data does not exist in the account forever. Instead the most you can see is the last couple of months. If you are not diligent about exporting your reports and keeping them organized on your desktop your data will eventually be gone.

Conclusion
At the end of the day Facebook is like every other new channel and medium. While it is a game changer, it also has certain strengths and weaknesses that first need to be understood and then leveraged. Only in doing this can companies successfully integrate it into their overall marketing initiatives. If you are thinking about experimenting with Facebook now is definitely the time to get started. I fully expect Facebook to become a more and more important medium in this coming year.

Bryan Connally
Internet Marketing Specialist

While many of clients I work with already have established and highly successful PPC campaigns, they are still looking for more ways of driving additional traffic and revenue. Since most of the time these clients already run highly targeted campaigns with proven ad copy and robust conversion rates, finding additional sources of traffic and revenue can be a challenging proposition.  It is at this time I usually suggest implementing some sort of Call Reporting solution as an important part in identifying undiscovered areas of potential.

How Does Call Reporting Work?

Call Reporting is not only quick to setup, but it is also easily integrated into your current PPC campaigns. Basically, call tracking works by placing a unique phone number on anything from a landing page to a PPC text advertisement.  When the trackable number is called, important call data are collected, such as the duration and time of day of the call, and made available in a special report accessible at anytime. Depending on the robustness of your call tracking solution, you can also track the geographic location that originated the call, the outcome of the call, or even record the conversation. Since call reporting doesn’t have any major upfront cost, it is a powerful and inexpensive way to measure the ROI of any online advertising initiative.

Why is Call Reporting Important?

Along with some of the features mentioned above, Call Reporting is also important for tracking customer contacts that otherwise might not be tied back to the paid search channel. There is significant evidence to support the fact that many users may find your company by a PPC advertisement or online search, but use another channel to actually contact your business. This is nowhere more important than for businesses with local storefronts or clients that have geo-targeted PPC campaigns.  In fact, The Kelsey Group has reported that 86% of search engine users search for local products and services online.  Furthermore, according to a study by TMP Directional Marketing in conjunction with comScore, the two most common activities following an online local search are a phone call or a visit to a local store.

Not Just for Local Businesses

Call Reporting, however, is just as important for both large and niche B2B clients that are primarily interested in lead generation. This is true for several reasons. By implementing Call Reporting on your website, you provide visitors multiple ways to contact your company. Research shows that while many B2B visitors may be interested in your services, they are often not yet willing to provide their contact information to a web-to-lead form. By allowing them to call a number you setup, you provide them with the ability to call at a time of their choosing and in the method they prefer. Internal Parallel Path data has also shown that this can be an important contributor to overall campaign ROI.

Is Call Reporting Right for my Business?

It is not necessary to be a large multinational brand or have an extensive network of local brick and mortar stores to be an ideal candidate for Call Reporting. Rather, we suggest it for nearly all of our clients. Call Reporting is an established technology that, regardless of the level of functionality you need, whether it be full service tracking down to the individual keyword level or something more basic, Parallel Path can guide you in selecting the solution that is right for you.

Bryan Connally
Internet Marketing Specialist

Most marketers and business leaders these days have a similar set of questions on their mind. The majority of these questions revolve around how to most successfully market their products and services in the current economic downturn.  For marketers that use online channels to accomplish anything from ecommerce sales to lead generation, there is a powerful tool that can help not only maximize results, but also minimize both cost and time.

Google Website Optimizer: An Introduction
This tool is called Website Optimizer, and it is Google’s free website testing and optimization tool. Website Optimizer is a robust A/B and multivariate testing application that enables webmasters and marketers to increase the overall performance of their websites through the systematic testing of any element that exists in HTML code on a particular webpage. This can include calls to action, sales copy, testimonials, fonts, headlines, point of action assurances, product copy, product images, product reviews, forms, or anything else that your team thinks is worth testing.

Getting Started
The process begins by identifying and selecting the specific pages and page elements to be tested. Website Optimizer will then generate a series of code that will need to be installed before the experiment can be launched.  After launching the experiment, Google Website Optimizer will divide the total incoming traffic and direct it to various permutations of the original page based on the elements specified in the test. The results will then be recorded until a statistically superior page combination is identified. Throughout the testing process, website optimizer will also provide you with real-time reporting on the performance of each individual element, as well as the combination of elements. This allows you to see the best and worst performing pages as well as individual elements that might be hindering otherwise good pages.

Some Examples
First, in tough economic times, the loyal customers that you have known and marketed to for years have a tendency to very quickly change their buying habits. In order for marketers to effectively speak to their customers’ evolving needs, they may need to change benefit propositions, product positioning, sales copy, incentive, pricing, or more. By using website optimizer you can target each of these elements on a landing page or website and test variations against the original. Website Optimizer enables all of this in real-time, without expensive surveys or focus groups, and the results are statistically significant. By utilizing a website optimizer initiative, marketers lose literally nothing and stand to gain everything.

Second, regardless of the overall state of the economy, marketing plans that may have been in the works for months or more cannot just be scuttled at the first sign of slowdown or even a recession. The problem is that if you are undertaking a new marketing blitz or product launch during this time, success can be much more elusive. Essentially, businesses need a lot more data at a time when potential clients and customers are curtailing their expenditures and reducing their engagement with businesses. This fact drastically reduces the margin of error for your marketing initiative and demands that you gather enough data in a short enough period of time to make the kind of actionable decisions that will lead you and your company to success. The well planned deployment of Google Website Optimizer initiative provides exactly this.

Lastly, it is important to realize that Google Website Optimizer is worth using even if your business has not witnessed a general slowdown or is not planning on launching a big, new marketing push. Even if you business is steady, and your customer’s habits have remained constant, a slow economy is the perfect time to implement Google Website Optimizer. Through its use you will learn a great deal about your customers that you may not have known before or previously taken for granted. The data provided by this tool can really help companies streamline their business and cut anything that is not contributing to the overall marketing goals. It is these kinds of incremental improvements that can translate into big gains over the long term.

Remember the age- old marketing adage that we have all heard many times before; in a bad or troubled economy, the last thing a business should do is cut its marketing and advertising budgets. In fact, all things considered, marketing budgets should be increased.  As we all know, this is not always financially feasible, however, with Google Website Optimizer you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing budget without having to increase your marketing expenditure. This, in a nutshell, is what makes it perfect initiative for a down economy.