Last Friday, some fellow “Vigeteers” and I made our way down the street to the State Theater for this year’s edition of BlogPotomac, a one-day social media marketing event. Below are a couple of key takeaways from the day’s discussions.

Continue reading "BlogPotomac: Key Takeaways"

Last Wednesday, Microsoft launched its new search engine, Bing.com, with an aggressive advertising campaign rumored to cost between $80 and $100 million.  In just five days, the “decision engine,” as Microsoft calls it, surpassed Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the U.S.  As of today, according to VNU Net, Bing! owns 16 percent market share, much of which has come at Google’s expense. 

Personally, I believe growth in market share has more to do with the hype from launch and its creative ad campaign rather than the search engine experience itself.

Continue reading "Bing! Generates Buzz but Doesn’t Deliver"

Is email the “digital glue” that holds our online lives together?  Will email remain the dominant form of communication, or will it be replaced by new means of online communication such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikis, etc.?  How do so-called “Millennials” view email?

Continue reading "Middle School Marketing Recap: The State of Email Marketing"

Given the success of our one-on-one training sessions, we decided to host a group Google Analytics Training program at our Falls Church, VA headquarters.

This program is intended for users (marketers, business owners, or web professionals) who are familar with Google Analytics, but need assistance deciphering all it's features and data.  If you're looking to explore visitor behavior, make informed online marketing decisions, and generate custom reports this training program is for you!

Our goal is to not only help attendees explore and understand their data, but also ensure they're utilizing Google Analytics to its full potential.

We're capping the training to 40 people, so register today to guarantee your spot!

 

As I dig deeper and deeper into the Google Analytics realm I’m learning a whole lot more about traffic patterns, goal funnels, and conversion tracking, than I ever thought possible. I’m also starting to find, and take advantage of, some great tools that Analytics has to offer (that is, tools that aren’t easily accessible in the standard Google Analytics tutorial).

One of these is the utm_nooverride string.

When tracking conversions, Google Analytics will report the most recent non-direct source as the source of the conversion. For example, say you search for “skydiving in Virginia.”  You click on an ad for “1800Skyride.com” and browse the web site.

Continue reading "Nifty Little Analytics Tool"

This amazing post on why Google loves Denmark inspired me. What do people search for? What are we thinking? What does Google think? I started this thinking I would find some funny stuff, but I was not at all prepared for some of these results. Some of them are offensive, so be warned. Some are absolutely hilarious. All of them say something about human behavior online...

First, some general questions:

Why...

Continue reading "Search Behavior Proves Humans Are Just Weird"

Surpisingly, the post I wrote "Google Analytics just got WAY Better - API, Segments & Reports" still gets a lot of traffic. Weird, eh? Don't get me wrong; it's a mind blowing post ... but I didn't think it would have the longevity it has had. You know where the traffic is coming from? People searching and hoping for info on the Google Analytics API.

Well, good news! The private beta is no longer private.

Continue reading "Google Analytics API Now Open For Business"

Yup, it's true. Google will now be inserting (or, at least, testing)Tweets into AdSense advertisements. The first company to participate in the alpha testing was Intuit's TurboTax. My initial reaction to the news ranged from "No way will this work" to, "Maybe...?" to, "This disgusts me" to, "I respect the effort"... and I still haven't seen it in action. Marketing Voices Podcast has an interview with Intuit’s director of online advertising and internet media, Seth Greenberg (which you can listen to below),  and, despite my initial reservations, I found myself impressed with Intuit's approach,and Seth's attitude towards what he calls the "test."

"We're not changing the way we talk ... we're not optimizing for broadcasting, we're optimizing for individual relationship ... we're not trying to buy followers, we're just trying put out the same message that you probably wouldn't see in other channels."

Continue reading "Google Integrates Twitter into AdSense with Turbo Tax"

When creating keyword campaigns in Google AdWords I’ve always believed that using all three match types – exact, phrase, and match – for a single keyword would negatively affect your campaign. I thought that with this setup your own keywords would be competing against each other. I realized, however, that my beliefs had no solid foundation.

Continue reading "Finding the Perfect Match Type"

Last week we wrapped on another successful Google Analytics training session. I was sure not to repeat the mistakes of trainings past and snapped a quick picture of our very own Josh Chambers in full effect.

Be on the look out for details on our next Google Analytics training session!

Another month, another successful MSM meeting...Josh kicked off yesterday's meeting with a comment about Google's recent announcement about launching interest-based advertising on partner sites and YouTube. This means that ads being served will be based on a user's browsing history. Josh asked the group: Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Continue reading "Middle School Marketing Recap: Interest-Based Advertising"

I just read an awesome post by Paul Isakson entitled "Stuck in the Now." Here are a few great quotes:

I have a growing concern that much of our always-connected culture has become so caught up in the now that we're losing valuable lessons from the past and forgetting the importance of having a vision to work towards in the future.

Continue reading "Timeless Marketing & Advertising"

Is paid search predominately a research mechanism? Or do visitors have strong purchase-intent when clicking on paid advertisements? Does PPC predominately expose new visitors to your company? Or does it seal the deal? Out of the box Google Analytics doesn't return this data. Google Analytics tracks the last referring source and overwrites the previous. So, if a visitor is exposed to your company via PPC, but then makes a purchase during a later visit via organic search, the organic visit gets the credit thus blinding you to your PPC's conversion rate.

Here's what we did to try and get at this data (still not sure if it will work).

Continue reading "Under the Hood: Measuring Purchase Intent of PPC Traffic In Google Analytics"

Recently I’ve been focusing on finding Link and Display Advertising opportunities for several of our clients. The other day I came across an article in AdAge, by Noah Brier. Brier brought up a great point, explaining “…display advertising needs to be aware of where it lives. At least it should know what site it's on and what people are there for.” This is one thing I’ve been trying to perfect: finding the right placements for the right clients, and making sure visitos "act" on the site.

Credit: theavonne

The key success to display advertising efforts is not just about generating targeted traffic, but converting traffic. A lot of this has to do with the strategies we use, which Josh outlined in a recent blog post about the effective use of banner ads and microsites. But on top of that I've put in hours research and played around with a number of online tools. Here are the tools I've found to be the most helpful for identifying Link and Display advertising opportunities.

Continue reading "Link and Display Advertising Research Tools"

The future will not only be filled with silver jump suits and blue hair, but some pretty incredible digital experiences as well. A few weeks ago, I read/watched a cool Razorfish post about the Surface Table Gestural Interfaces they're working on with the MS surface tables. Last week, it was Microsoft's vision for the future. This week, it's Intel's Shape-Shifting material. These amazing products will change life as we know it. And, even if they don't . . . these videos are worth watching.

Continue reading "New Technologies That Blow My Mind"