Ideas and Concepts from Damian Davila
–
Robert Pattinson.
Kristen Stewart.
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart Dating!
–
You may or may not have an opinion about this.
However, if you’re in the online marketing business you should definitely start paying more attention to the celebrity entertainment industry.
Celebrity Style news are a strong source of Internet traffic.
Let’s review the impact of using keywords related to the celebrity entertainment industry.
Below are some of the questions, which almost all SEOs must have faced in the past from their clients.
1: Would you be honest with me?
Trust is definitely a big thing as some clients might have had bad experiences with a previous SEO consultant. It might be just a simple question but this question is probably the most important one out of all the other questions below. How many SEO companies are out there who are making money through clients without giving them anything in return? I am sure we can name few out of top of our head if asked to name the companies but let’s not name and shame them.
2: What sort of results have you got in the past?
This question is probably asked by every client at the start of the project. The best thing to do is have the set of best results on the website. To be honest it also depends on what they mean by results. A job of any SEO web design company is not just to gain rankings or traffic; they have to think about on how they can grow the overall business of the client through the Internet.
Continue reading “8 Frequently Asked Questions by SEO Clients”
Installing the Google Analytics code into your website is simple as I showed earlier on the post about how to install Google Analytics a a real state brokerage website. This clear step-by-step guide can be applied to any kind of website.
Why do we need to check if Google Analytics is installed properly?
Because you might be missing on key analytics data from your site!
Consider this discussion thread recently posted at the Google Analytics group in LinkedIn:
Continue reading “How to check if your Google Analytics is installed properly”
Back in May 2009, I wrote a review of the application LinkedIn Polls available on LinkedIn and how LinkedIn Polls can be used to do some great permission e-mail marketing polling.
I strongly believe that this LinkedIn application is a great way to gather data fast and to create actionable bar graphs that you can e-mail to your colleagues. More importantly it follows the fundamentals of permission e-mail marketing by making polls more personal, relevant and anticipated.
On this post I wanted to provide an example of how we can use LinkedIn Polls not only to meet the fundamentals of an e-mail permission marketing campaign but also to gather useful qualitative data from your respondents.
Continue reading “Keeping in Touch with Classmates via Facebook”
Measuring the success of your permission e-mail campaigns is often oversimplified. Marketing managers are often happy to see rising open rates and click-through rates. (If you have no idea on how to measure the click-through rates of your e-mail campaigns, here’s an easy tutorial using Google Analytics). The problem of being content with just measuring open rates and click-through rates from our e-mail campaigns is that we are victims of the brochure mentality.
What’s the problem with the brochure mentality?
The brochure mentality is the mindset that tells us that as long people get our brochure, open it and browse it for a while; somehow they will get “aware of our brand” or that they will “eventually act on it”. Notice that how exactly the readers of a brochure become aware of the brand or act on it is not really defined, it is just left to, yes you got that right, pure chance.
I am sure that newsletter services and talented newsletter writers will challenge the above statement. But think about it for just a second. When discussing with a graphic designer or an e-mail newsletter, how often do you discuss about the actual objective of your e-mail campaign defined in one sentence and whose success can be tracked with one simple measure?
I am not talking about how many people click on your “read more” link or how many people open your “Labor Day Blowout Sale!” e-mail. I am talking about how many people actually end handing you cash in exchange for the product or service that you offer.
Let’s take a look at what Avinash Kaushik has to say on this (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, p. 220):
Before you start your analytics, it is important to understand, at least at a high level, that there several important steps to the process of executing e-mail campaigns:
- Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.
I just quoted the first step out of 4 to emphasize the importance of this concept. If you’re a frozen yogurt shop, are you in the business of selling frozen yogurt or are you in the business of making people open e-mails? If you’re a humane society that protects animal rights, are you working hard towards increasing the number of people adopting stray dogs or are you working hard that people click on a YouTube video of a sad dog looking for a home?
Before jumping into e-mail (and social media, for that matter) campaigns, you’ve got to have a clear idea of what objectives you want out of it. A clear one sentence objective that can be tracked with one measure.
Here are some great real life examples that I have encountered during my online marketing practice:
Not so fast, monkey!
There are several e-mail newsletter services that work great (e.g. MailChimp), but before you sign up for any of them, do your homework. Even though some offer free trials, hold off signing up for them until you have figured out your one sentence objective whose success can be tracked with one measure.
Helpful Links:
For career sites, there’s no business like the recession business!
With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.
On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer reported that more than 65 million visitors have rushed to job search sites in June 2009. Most of the top 10 career service and development websites in the U.S. (ranked by unique visitors) have experienced double digit percentage increases in the number of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009.
June 2009 data from comScore pegged growth in unique visitors to career resource sites at 10% over the previous year, with seven of the top 10 sites seeing at least double-digit increases. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June.
“The top three sites in the category—CareerBuilder, HotJobs and Monster—have maintained their leadership positions for several years now, but there are also a few upstarts in the industry making some noise,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president, in a statement. “Certainly with millions of Americans reevaluating their careers right now there is opportunity for continued growth and innovation in this segment of the online marketplace.”
What are the most common search terms at career sites? Here’s the list:
These job search terms are closely aligned with the job categories of the list of over 3 million jobs that can’t be filled, released by Fortune back in February 2009.
Among all the excitement from career sites, there appears to be no discussion about this fact: the combined number of page views from the top career sites wasn’t even close to that of Craigslist back in 2007.
— craigslist.org — monster.com — careerbuilder.com
According to data from Compete, lately Monster has been able to start getting closer to the number of unique monthly visitors of Craigslist, however it’s important to remember that Craigslist doesn’t operate the large marketing and advertising expenditures that Monster does. Furthermore, the other 3 sites that showed healthy numbers of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009 (Careerbuilder, Indeed, and Hotjobs) have a long way to go to reach the monthly unique visitor numbers of Craigslist and Monster.
Welcome back!
Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.
Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.
But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:
With these metrics you will determine:
Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:
I’m a big fan of The e-Marketer Daily newsletter and on 06/26/09 I received two very interesting articles on the presence of U.S. Latinos on the web. The first one is titled Hispanics Online: No Mas E-Barrios and the second one is Looking at Hispanic Behavior Online.
The first article provides some interesting stats on Internet use in the U.S. by race/ethnicity.
Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013. The U.S. Hispanic presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.
Among marketing organizations, the competition to grab the U.S. Hispanic buck is intense. Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans, 76% target African Americans, and 38% focus on Asian Americans, according to a survey released in November by the trade group Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and marketing agency Mkgt. That’s up from 86%, 60%, and 35%, respectively, in 2003, according to the research.
This has a lot of implications for online marketers who want to be culturally sensitive, while being cost-efficient at the same time. The main problem, as Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, states, is that:
Hispanics have a lot of commonalities, and it’s OK to talk about a group that has these sorts of common roots and interests. It doesn’t work well to try to segregate people. I don’t think it works to say, “This is a site for Hispanics and this is a site for others.”
Forcing Hispanic U.S. Internet users into Hi5 (the most popular social network in Latin America and no, it’s not Google’s Orkut, that’s in Brazil) and Myspace versions in Spanish is not the correct strategy. It’s all about personal choice, let the user decide what’s best for him or her.
That is the reason why MySpace has both—I mean having people having two sites, one in Spanish and one in English—but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish-language site is for Hispanics only, or that the English-language site is for non-Hispanics only. There’s a lot of overlap.
Mixed context in English and Spanish that is triggered by contextual cues appears to be savvy strategy, according to Dr. Korzenny. The good news: when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Hispanics do appear to consume more digital content.
However, making any generalizations about U.S. Hispanics is always a mistake. The easiest example: location, location, location.
If you use the same strategy in Miami, FL, that you used in Dallas, TX, you shouldn’t be surprised to get mixed results. While U.S. Hispanics do share some commonalities, consider that Texas has a more predominant Mexican presence, while Florida has a more predominant Cuban and South American presence. Put it this way: imagine if you were to use Canadian slang to target a British and Australian audience, would it make sense? After all, they all speak English, right? That’s the most common mistake of companies that purchase one-size-fits-all, prepackaged marketing solutions.
Marketers should never throw out the window marketing fundamentals when dealing with U.S. Hispanics. There is no easy answer. Only one thing is certain: do your homework, research, research, research.
Welcome back, today we are analyzing the Internet Business Model from the leader in web attitudinal web analytics, the Canadian firm iPerceptions.
Here at idaconcpts, I have mentioned how their 4Q service can make the Internet a less scary place.
In this post I’m going to analyze iPerceptions Business Model.
iPerceptions (TSX: IPE) is a provider of web-focused Voice of Customer analytics. Founded in 2000, iPerceptions focuses on a goal of “improving and optimizing websites by tapping into the feedback of real customers in the context of actual online experiences.” Its mission is to revolutionize web analytics by fully democratizing the voice of the online customer. The vision of the company is to have customers speak for themselves and to ensure that they are heard at the highest decision making levels. iPerceptions focuses not on “what” customers do on the web, but “why” they do things on the web. It helps its customers understand who is going to their websites, the reasons for going, and how satisfied they are with completing their goals. The company provides innovative ways of tracking customer behavior and translating that information into usable strategic support that can companies can use to optimize their Internet channel.
Many knowledgeable and well-known technological leaders that bring experience and innovation to the company form iPerceptions’ management team and advisory board. These people include Jerry Tarasofsky (President, CEO), Stephen Berns (CIO), Jonathan Levitt (VP, Marketing), and Avinash Kaushik (author of Occam’s Razor). Its client list spans many different industries including hotels, automobile manufacturers, electronics, IT companies, and includes many large companies such as Dell, Toshiba, Reebok, BMW, and Yamaha.
While the company has yet to be profitable, its client list and management team are impressive attributes to this young company. The company has sound performance goals and prominent clients that rely on their services.
Next, here is an analysis of its e-commerce industry:
iPerceptions is an on-demand provider of web attitudinal, web analytics services and research for online marketers and Fortune 500 companies. iPerceptions’ solutions impact two traditional business intelligence practices:
1. Website Analytics and
2. Market and Customer Satisfaction Research.
Because iPerceptions’ solutions overlap with many companies in different areas, it is hard to differentiate iPerceptions’ services from others. Each competitor in the web analytics field seeks to differentiate from others by offering a unique approach. Therefore, given the infancy of this industry, there are no true substitutes, but rather, competitors with different approaches.
Competitors (an abbreviated list):
Is iPerceptions’ business, a profitable one?
iPerceptions’ revenue margin has consistently been about 50% of sales for the last few years. Its operating expenses however are very high, exceeding its annual revenue. These high operating expenses are mainly due to sales and marketing, administrative costs, and research and development. These types of expenses are often elevated in a young, growing company that is actively trying to improve its product and gain market share.
iPerceptions current model is to charge a single fee for full service. However, in order to continue utilizing a large operating budget it is important to acquire alternative sources of revenue. Some potential possibilities could be:
Conclusions and recommendations:
With the entry of Google Analytics, the web analytics market has simply exploded, because now anyone who wants to have access to data from their website can have it for free. Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s anticipated free web analytics tools will only expand the options that practitioners have at their disposal. But access to the tool and data, although empowering, does little to ease the problems related to figuring out what a company’s success metrics are and how to perform web analytics correctly. This is mainly why web analytics solution providers such as iPerceptions still stay in business.
The main obstacle of iPerceptions is the need for a more sustainable business model. While the major expenses in R&D and sales and marketing are necessary to keep up the first-mover image of iPerceptions, these expenses are not sustainable in the long run, unless alternative, and more importantly fixed sources of revenue are created. Therefore, it is recommended that iPerceptions research the following alternative channels of revenue:
1. Partnerships with hosting companies: Hosting companies such as GoDaddy compete fiercely against their competitors to differentiate themselves as the better provider of hosting solutions. Differentiation is achieved through the offering of a variety of pre-installed plug-ins that range from blogging tools (e.g. WordPress) to mail management tools (e.g. MailChimp) to e-commerce tools (e.g. Google Checkout). iPerceptions could make a similar offering with its 4Q online customer satisfaction tool.
2. Consulting magazine: iPerceptions already holds a wide array of information about web analytics. The company could use some of this information to create an online (or offline) magazine that offers some content for free to create a base of readers. If the reader following of iPerceptions becomes large enough, then the company could sell advertisement space to potential advertisers or marketers. Another alternative is that iPerceptions could charge a monthly or annual fee to readers that would like access to premium content without any advertisement.
3. Industry reports: iPerceptions could release industry reports and sell them online. The cost of creating an online store for web analytics reports is quite low, however iPerceptions would have to analyze whether making reports available online for a fee does not give away too much information about its iPerceptions Satisfaction Index (iPSI).
4. Online workshops: iPerceptions could experiment with live web-seminars to corporate clients as a way to expose clients to the array of services it provides. By providing a live web-seminar to key personnel inside organizations, iPerceptions could tip the balance in the decision of whether or not the potential client should hire the services of iPerceptions. The low-cost of a live web-seminar could provide an inexpensive way for the key decision maker to make a more informed decision about hiring iPerceptions, while providing extra revenue at the same time.
Adding extra sources of income in the internet business model of iPerceptions has a positive impact on the scope, that is the market segments to which iPerceptions offers customer value and the range of products that contain value. The customer value component improves because iPerceptions will be able demonstrate that its customer value is distinct from that of its competitors. Given the infancy of the web analytics field, this is a challenge for all competitors, new and old. Another important observation is that the revenue source component improves in the new Internet business model because the described alternative sources of income should have higher profit margins because of their scalability. The price component is indicated as a positive change because the company would improve its value for the customer’s dollar on the consulting side of business by implementing the alternative sources of revenue. In the final analysis, we believe that there will be important improvements in the relationship between iPerceptions’ revenues and the underlying costs of generating the revenues (cost structure component). This is the main objective of the proposed Internet business model, to expand the customer audience of iPerceptions, in order to divide the fixed costs (R&D and marketing) over a larger base of customers and revenue. iPerceptions needs to take advantage of the low marginal cost of adding an extra customer. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt that R&D and marketing expenses become more efficient and accountable so that is that there is a better understanding of how they contribute to generating revenue. iPerceptions has the right management and board of advisors to implement this business model, however it needs to act fast to be able to survive to current recession of 2009 as companies are downsizing in their expenditure of consulting services.
Here’s a slideshow that summarizes the presented Internet Business Model Analyisis of iPercetpions:
The top question that people ask me when people find out about my online marketing and web analytics blog, is how I came up with the name idaconcpts. I really like words that are similarly written and understood in several languages, and ideas and concepts are two of them. I played around with different variations of these words, until I realized that what my blog was truly about was putting ideas and concepts into e-commerce. Therefore, putting these ideas and concepts would be put to work into commerce, or would put the “e” in e-commerce. Hence, idaconcpts.
One of the best things of writing at idaconcpts.com is that I have a passion for analyzing photo sharing websites and my readers seem to share that passion with me.
Over 34% of the readership at idaconcpts follows the posts about the BIG 5 of photo sharing: Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide. Please note that I am limiting myself to websites (as opposed to desktop apps such as Picasa). At the same time there will be debate about:
And my answer is that they are all great questions that I will tackle on future posts to come!
In the meantime, let’s continue the analysis of the BIG 5, which started back in November 2008 with the post Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly and continued with the follow-up post Revisiting Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly. In this posts we analyzed the traffic to these photo sharing websites through Google Ad Planner and Google Trends. Today we will take a look through another great web analytics called Compete.
Compete is an awesome cloud computing web analytics tool that allows you access website activity info from any website. The first killer feature of Compete is that it allows you to compare 5 websites side by side. Even though Google Trends and Google Ad Planner do offer this service, Google Trends‘ information is quite limited, and Google Ad Planner’s information is limited to a handful of websites.
Here a couple snapshots of Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide using Compete:
The second killer feature of Compete is that it allows you to take a look into the subdomains (finally!) of entered websites. Google Trends does not (as of 05/29/2009) allow that feature, it only allows you to take a look at the web analytics of the home page.
Remember point 2 above? With this tool I can finally tap into finding out how much traffic from walmart.com goes into photos.walmart.com:
Finally, Compete allows me to post these simple little graphs, which previously I had to take a snapshot using Skitch and upload to my blog. I still love Skitch, but this saves time!
What about an updated analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide using Compete?
Dear reader, you already have a start with the post Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly and its follow-up post Revisiting Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly. Now with Compete, you can slice and dice the data in no time!