Marketing on Internet Road 

Being a new strategy, Social Media impact on budget plans is a good way to test hoe it perceived and to what extent companies are looking to invest in it.

MarketingSherpa just published the results of a survey in which companies were asked on their plans regarding Social Media while constructing the budget for the coming year.

The concept and the underlying assumption were simple: companies will allocate their marketing budget to Social Media activities based on their current perception of the value (return on investment) that they are to gain from Social Media.

As depicted in the following chart, the majority of companies that were surveyed plan to increase their investment in Social Media (!). Only 27% of the companies answered that Social Media is not a priority and is just an activity they employ on their "spare time".

Taking into account the fact that Social Media is not here too long, the results of the survey show that many companies reached a point where they see value is Social Media marketing, either already or planning on witnessing ROI in the near future.


The confidence in Social Media is more emphasized by the fact that 49% of the companies that were introduced with the survey reported they are going to increase the investment in this channel in a conservative manner. This fact alone shows a belief in realizing that Social Media will show significant results in the mid to long term.


The entire article from MarketingSherpa can be found here

The importance of corporate guidelines for Social Media in general and in blog posting (and commenting) specifically is growing constantly as more and more companies learn how to use Social Media as part of their Marketing mix.

The following guidelines of Do's and Don'ts for blog posting and commenting are based on this section from the Social Media strategy kit:

• Do write on areas of your expertise and post topics you are knowledgeable about
• Do be respectful of those that read your posts and comments and make sure nothing might seem critical or annoying to anyone.
• Do use a tracking system for all links posted, preferably by using a shortening service such as bit.ly.com.
• Do initiate and invite meaningful conversations in a professional, non-criticizing manner.
• Do create a posting agenda for your blog topics and aim at ensuring frequent posting on your blog.
• Do monitor the comments posted on your blog posts.
• Do respond to any comment in a professional manner.
• Do be polite and respectful when posting comments on other people’s blog posts.
• Do ensure that all content associated with you is in-line with the company's guidelines (general and social ones) and is consistent with your work.
• Do share content that invites response, that promotes comments and that is open-ended.

Don’ts

• Don’t start a conversation without being able to respond and react to comments.
• Don’t lose focus on the topic you’re posting or commenting about.
• Don’t publish criticizing content unless done so in a constructive way.
• Don’t over moderate your comments. Allow for both positive and less-positive comments to be published.
• Don’t use overly meticulous or difficult language that sounds unnatural. Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in a professional circumstance.
• Don’t create a blog post without taking SEO into account (e.g.: use of keywords).
• Don’t take your company brand for granted and don't abuse it. Understand that it is a privilege to be promoting your company brand across the social networks.
• Don’t mislead your audience. Any link placed should be relevant to the destination of the link.

WSI E-Services will be glad to discuss your Social Media needs and share the strategy kit with you as part of you social media marketing strategy.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

The set of Content reports in Google Analytics is a very valuable one and can teach you a lot on what is going on in your website. Just by clicking on few of the default links on Google Analytics you are able to receive a huge amount of insight, analyze the situation and take actions that will improve your visitors' experience on your site as well as drive them down the path you wish them to take.

With all the efforts around SEO, Pay per Click, incoming links, social media and so on, we might forget that sometime it is not enough to bring the (correct kind of) visitors to your site. We want to them to follow the path that we drew up for them in our site architecture.

We obviously wish to see which pages are interesting to our visitors, are they following our navigation and internal links to see more content on our website, which of that content and more.

Google Analytics set of Content reports is an amazing resource to teach us exactly that and to answer those questions and more. Personally, I love those reports and I'm analyzing them on a regular basis to see what's going on, what needs to be done and if what we have done has the correct effect on our visitors.


Start your analysis by clicking on the "Content" link on the Google Analytics menu. The default report is the Content Overview, where you can get a high-level impression of your site's content. A lot of valuable information, but this is only the starting point. Click on "View Full Report" under the "Top Content" table. Now it's starting to get interesting:



Apart from presenting all the statistics on the pages that were viewed in the period of time being analyzed (with totals on average time on site, bounce rate and more) we are getting a breakdown, sorted by the pageviews, of the pages of our site and how our visitors interacted with them.
For each page we are able to see how many times it was viewed (pageviews), how many unique pageviews this specific page received, what was the average time our visitors spent on that page, the bounce rate of the page  and the percentage of exists that took place from this page.
Each of the parameter is amazing and can drive us to take decisions and actions, but it is strongly recommended to look at the parameters also as a whole, per page and by comparison between the different pages.

But hold on, this is only the beginning. Clicking on a specific page will take us to a Content Detail page of this page. This page will present you again with the details you had seen as part of the pages' information on the "Top Content" report along with some in-depth analysis options on the right site.

Let's start with the first link: "Navigation Summary" for this page:


I truly love this report: per the selected page we are getting an overview of where our visitors came from to this page (left side) and where did they go from after visiting this page (right side).
First, we are getting a split between the percentages of visitors that landed on that page (the first page they saw on our website) and those that came from other internal pages on the site (and of course - the list of those page and the click percentages of those source pages for driving the traffic to this specific page).
Then, we are getting a similar split for the those that left this page: the percentages of exists from our website from this page (if it's a content page and not the end of a conversion goal - why they did leave?) and for those that continue navigating our site - to which pages did they go (are those the pages we wish them to visit? are we missing a call to action to drive them down the conversion funnel from this page? is our navigation as good as we need it to be?).

Clicking on each of the pages' links on the report will bring up the same report, this time for the page you just selected by clicking on its name:


You can analyze each of the pages by clicking its name from the same report, or by following the steps all the way from the "Top Content" report and then on to the "Navigation Summery", or you can chose your pages from the right-hand drop down that reads "Content" just below the presented graph. Click this drop down and select any of the pages that got visits during the analyzed period. The report will change as per the page you are selecting.


But hold on, there is more (much more actually): you are further analyze the "flow" of the visit. Select the "Entrance Paths" report from the left-hand drop down below the graph. Now you are able to see more details on the visits that took place, originating in the page you are analyzing.
Say that you have designed one of your funnels from the home page, to an information page on a service you are offering and then you wish to visitor to contact you (and you placed a nice big bold call to action for that). Is it working? Are you visitors following this path? This report should help you to see the flow of the visit.




This report is organized in following way: on the left side (read "This Page") is the page you are analyzing (e.g. your home page). The table to the right of that image contains the list of the pages that the visitors visit following that page (same as shown in the Navigation Summery report). Only now we have another table to the right that shows us to which pages the visitors went after those 2 steps. Simply click on any of the pages on "Then viewed these pages:" table and the table of the right side will change to reflect the pages visited after those two steps. Starting to understand why I love those reports so much?


To complete the review and analysis of our content and pages, let's check the last two reports that Google Analytics puts under a section named "Landing Page Optimization" (as it reads on the Content Detail page.

The first one is the Entrance Sources report. Part of the analysis we wish to run on our pages contains the aspect of where did those visitors arrive from (externally)? This is what this report is for.


Similar to the Top Content report, this report presents the same parameters, only organized by the source from which the visitors arrive to this specific page. Combining this data with the previous analysis can show you if there is a difference in behavior by the source of the visit and take decisions accordingly.

The last part has to do with the keywords that brought visitors to our pages and this is presented in the "Entrance Keywords" report. Same parameters but organized by the keywords that were the trigger to drive traffic to this page. Again, analyze to see if there is a difference in behavior and if you are getting traffic from the keywords this page should receive, some that you didn't think of, some that are irrelevant to this page, anything else?



Remember once again to look at those reports (actually, look at all of your Google Analytics report) in a holistic way. You can find a lot of insight from a specific repot, but to get actionable insight and really understanding patterns and possible causes, cross-check different aspect and dimensions from the different reports. You will learn much more by following this approach.



With a special expertise and focus on Web Analytics, WSI E-Services will be more than glad to help you analyzing your Google Analytics' content reports and helping you to take the right decisions for maximizing your online presence.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

Search Engine Marketing has a huge advantage over traditional means by the fact that everything is measurable. Google Analytics is the tool that will enable you to measure how your SEO, Pay-per-Click and any other online campaign and initiative is doing.

The extent of information you can extract from Google Analytics is amazing. Practically any detail about of your website and your online presence is collected and can be analyzed to understand the status and to take actions.

Google Analytics is the tool that will help you tying all of your Search Engine Marketing, other Internet Marketing and even off-line traditional marketing together. If you are deploying an effective “integrated marketing” strategy, Google Analytics is the one source that will connect all the dots and will tell you how are you doing and where.

Proper analysis of data from Google Analytics will help you answer difficult questions such as (the list is much longer):

Where are your site visitors coming from?
Which marketing initiatives are the most effective for your business and website? 
If you are running an e-commerce site: Why and what points are visitors abandoning your shopping cart? 
What do people do while visiting your website? Which pages are the most interesting to them? On which pages they mostly leave your site?
What keywords and from which search engines visitors use to get to your website?

Out of the list of dimensions in Google Analytics, an important one deals with your search engine marketing campaigns and efforts. Keep track on future posts where we will review other dimensions.

Looking at only 2 of the very basic reports that will get you going for analyzing how are you doing with regards to the search engines. In order to enable you to start with Google Analytics we will refrain from using technical and/or too complicated aspects of Google Analytics. Instead, we focus on the basics reports and features; those that you are getting "out of the box" with Google Analytics with no need for any customization, segmentation and so forth.


Traffic from search engine marketing sources:

The What: Traffic that you got to your site from all the sources.
The How: Click on "Traffic Sources" link on the menu (default page will be the "Overview" one. You will get a dashboard with a graph showing the trend over the analyzed period (default - last 30 days) along with percentages analysis of the different sources: Direct Traffic, Referring Sites and Search Engines. You wish to focus on the Search Engines part so click on the link. Now you get a report that shows again how many visits came from people searching online on on which search engine. Per each search engine in the table you see four factors that will give you more insight on each of the search engines.
If you are running a Google Adwords campaign(s), before diving into the dedicated reports for Adwords (which I believe anyone who is running Adwords is doing...), you can take another small step to learn more: click on the right-hand drop down above the first line (left to the "Visits" title) and choose "Medium". Now you will have a report that divides Google to organic search and "cpc" (which means your PPC campaign) and get more data to analyze.
The Why: Are you getting visitors from search engine? What kind of visitors? Which of the search engines is your "best friend"? What percentage of traffic are you getting from search compared to direct traffic (people that types the URL of your site directly in the browser or used a bookmark)?


In-depth Keywords analysis:

The What: Keywords used to drive traffic to your site.
The How: Click on "Traffic Sources" and then "Keywords". You will get a report with all the keywords that shows you how many keywords were used in that period for how many searches to your site, and then the full list of keywords (ordered by the number of visits they drove) with four important factors per each such keyword.
The Why: Are visitors finding your site and its pages using the keywords that you have optimized them for? Are there keywords that drive traffic to your site that you haven't identified before (and you wish to optimize your pages for them now since they are valuable...)? Are more people finding you by the name of the company ("branded keywords") or by your products and services that you offer ("non-branded keywords")?


If you haven't installed Google Analytics on your site yet, make sure to do it as soon as possible. If you have, start looking at the basic reports it gives you. You will learn a lot on your online presence by simply looking at the default reports once a week.

Should you need help with that, make sure to check our offerings on Google Analytics and Google Analytics setup.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

We are getting a lot of questions like "What is this LinkedIn?" or - from a different angle - see many people having a profile on LinkedIn that has no/little/outdated information. LinkedIn is of paramount importance to your business and your Social Media Marketing and here is why.

First, let's take a look at LinkedIn numbers:
More than 20 million business users registered; more than 150,000 managers and executives log in each and every day; estimated to have more than half a million SMB's; More than 200 industries represented all over the globe.
With those numbers, a free listing (at least at the basic level), regardless of the value, is worthwhile to have you and your business appear on.

To touch upon the question of "what is it", LinkedIn is a business social network and community that enables you to present your professional profile (note: your personal one and your company's one as well!) in a manner that you can connect with your existing network and use this network as well as the power and capabilities of other professionals and companies that you wish to connect with.
Watch the video, presenting "LinkedIn in Plain English" to understand that basics of this social network.

There is no doubt that LinkedIn has great value to your business, but be careful - just signing in and having your name appear there is not enough. Just like any other marketing effort and social media marketing specifically, it dictates a bit more effort to bring it at least to the first level. From there, you can decide depending on you available time, resources and preferences how much you wish to update it (note on that: LinkedIn enables automated connection with your other Social Media networks, so with a short time investment on setting things correctly, you can have your LinkedIn profile updated when you are updating other social communities such as your Blog or your Twitter account).

Let's look at some of the values LinkedIn can bring to your business:

• Contribute to your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy: Search Engines LOVE LinkedIn and because of that, proper optimized profile on LinkedIn will be presented high on the search results page of Google when there is a match. Many times, people that consider doing business with you will "google" you first and they will expect to find your profile on linkedIn. In addition, your profile can contain up to 3 URL's that you can use to promote your website and blog. Those are valuable links that contribute to your backlinks. Taking another small step and connecting your blog RSS fees to your profile will automatically present your new posts on linkedIn.


• Thought Leadership and Brand Credibility: On top of the fact that you can promote your blog posts for thought leadership (see our previous posts on that), there are 2 additional aspects on LinkedIn that should contribute to this fact: your profile and the Q&A module. Written properly, your personal as well as your company's profile should help you be perceived as a thought leader. However, the more important feature is LinkedIn Q&A where you can answer questions that relate to your industry posted by others and gain the required credibility. A side effect you will gain is another help with SEO since you are entitled to put URL's in your answers (see how Internet Marketing is all about integration and everything is connected?). Furthermore, you can initiate a discussion on an article you have written (with a link to the page on your website of course) and get some more exposure.


• Lead Generation. Bottom Line: Search for potential prospects or better yet - use your network to find some. Statistics show that when connecting via LinkedIn, you have 30 times more chances of getting a response compared to old school methods like direct mail or phone. Don't forget, you can read this potential prosepct's profile, which will make you much more ready for whatever it is you wish to offer her.

And here are some additional ways you can use LinkedIn for your business:

• Do market research and gain knowledge with Polls
• Share survey and poll results with your contacts
• Ask questions in Questions and Answers to get a feel for what  customers and prospects want or think about your industry, market and business
• Publish your LinkedIn URL on all your marketing collateral, including  business cards, email signature, email newsletters, web sites and  brochures, so prospects learn more about you
• Join groups and associations related to your business and industry and gain knowledge of the burning matters as well as do some valuable networking
• Research your prospects before meeting or contacting them
• Request LinkedIn recommendation from happy customers willing to  provide testimonials
• Buy a LinkedIn direct ad that only your target market will see
• Post job listings to find qualified talents
• Post your presentations on your profile using a presentation  application

In conclusion, LinkedIn is a valuable resource to you and your business. When done correctly, you are up to gain a lot of values. Should you be in a need for help to establish your presence, personal profile and company profile on linkedIn, contact WSI E-Services and we will be glad to assist.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.