If  you’re the CMO or VP of Marketing, what KPI’s do you really need to see so that you’re reasonably well informed about the performance of your organic search program against the half-dozen other channels you’re responsible for?

I had a great question from a client this week wondering if they should move from 2 KPI’s to 3 for their high level dashboards.

Hey Chris, quick question: other than traffic and revenue, what do you
think a good third high level KPI should be? The number of keywords driving traffic,
pages indexed vs pages submitted? Or are those too granular?

This is one of those questions that can spark an amazing discussion. I asked the rest of our team to weigh in, and here’s some of their thoughts.

• Dollar out, Dollar in. Organic investment (agency fees & in-house cost) vs the return.
• Conversions: newsletter sign-ups, whitepaper downloads, etc.
• In some cases, bounce rate (or other engagement indicators) may be relevant, depending on the strategic goals of the team.
• % of traffic from Search vs. direct or referral (break this down further to traffic from natural search)
• Ratio of non-branded vs. branded terms that are driving traffic
• Engagement mentions and social signals.

It’s tough to pick one more without flooding your exec with data they’re not likely to understand anyways.

In the end we decided on # of keywords driving traffic (and conversions thereof), which supports both general optimization, their content creation strategy and their community building efforts.

What about you? If there’s only 3 organic metrics you can show to the C-Suite or your Board of Directors, which ones do you pick?

There’s two types of conversations we can have about social media, and measurement in particular: strategic and tactical.

They need to happen in that order and you need to understand the difference. This post is a tactical one.

If you don’t already understand the need for a clear strategic understanding of your business, your online presence, customers and competitors both online and off, and what your businesses’ primary goals are across all units and departments, go take the time to figure that out. (Reading Groundswell might be a good start ).

Tactically speaking, how do you start measuring social media? Is there enough social stuff out there to make it worthwhile? What numbers do I show to our CMO and CFO to get any time or budget at all to be able to monitor, participate and grow a social media presence?

Here are some examples of ways to see right now, in any business, what impact social media might be having on your organization.

1. Traffic from Referring Sites

This might seem like a no-brainer, but see if you’re getting traffic (and links) from social networks, blogs, forums and other communities. See which sites are sending traffic (sometimes a proxy for buzz) and which are sending more engaged visitors than the site average or more conventional traffic sources (time on site and pages per view)

2. Conversions from Referring Sites

Again from the Referring Sites report, you should have conversions tracked through goals, events or e-commerce. See which sites are sending quality traffic. You can see #1, 2, 3 and 4 are all sending solid traffic which is doing a pretty good job of converting. (The #1 source is their own blog, which is just rocking out!)

3. Create a Custom Segment for Social Media

This will make your life much easier. Find the top 10 or so social media sites sending you good traffic, or which you’re targeting to participate in, and create a segment for them. Follow them, and you can start by using the conventional traffic metrics if you’re not measuring other social media metrics.

4. Check Google Blog Search

Just stick your head in once a month and see how many results show up. Try your branded terms, product names and the names of high profile individuals at your organization.

It’s not rocket science, just making better use of the data you already have.

In a nutshell, it gives advertisers the ability to move their tweets up in the timeline. As the New York Times article says:

Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.

AdAge posted an example of an @Starbucks promoted tweet.

Example of a Promoted Tweet from @Starbucks (via @AdAge)

To begin with, the ads are being offered on a keyword focused CPM basis. There is a maximum of one sponsored Tweet will be shown on a search results page. Right now Twitter ads are limited to one per search results page, and will be shown only on the web interface. Watch for application, search engine and general API release to come once they have a grasp on how to score tweets based on resonance.

Will my Tweets Resonate?

Central to the new program is the concept of resonance, using organic popularity to help tweets which are popular with people already become great ads. Conversely, it’ll help them to dial down or remove non-relevant ads.

You can compare Twitter’s ‘Resonance’ concept to a blend of Google’s Quality Score and what makes up a good piece of linkbait. Here’s how @biz explained it in the official release.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

What this means in practical terms is that if you buy a promoted tweet that no one cares about, it’ll dissappear. To resonanate well, your sponsored tweets (and your normal tweets) will have to be popular. The success of your Twitter ads will depend on metrics like Retweets, @ replies and perhaps most importantly, how often your brand replies to those @replies.

It took Twitter four years to release a business model, so they’re going to take their time getting this right before it’s rolled out to more advertising.

More coverage:
Jeremiah Owyang: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem
AdAge: Twitter Has a Business Model: ‘Promoted Tweets’
NYT: Twitter Unveils Plans to Draw Money From Ads

One great B2B content development strategy can be publishing transcripts of webinars, podcasts or conference calls. These transcripts can easily run into thousands of words, and pagination can be a good choice for readability, however it quickly becomes a duplicate content issue. One client recently had a webinar transcribed which ran into 14 pages. To start with, that potentially creates 14 sets of Meta Data to be written, and 14 different places where people could link. While the content is broken into pages around the themes within the webinar, it’s all around a topic which is quite niche to begin with.

This is a classic case where existing best practices would have tried to focus the authority on the first page, and attempted to reduce the duplicate potential of the other pages by using a combination of links, 301 redirects and the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Now we can use a much more straightforward solution in the canonical link tag.

In the example I mentioned before, you would implement the tag across all 14 pages. The tag has the effect of telling the search engines "this is the preferred version, and the one we like the most". It also transfers signals like PageRank to the canonical (preferred) URL. The tag would look like this:

 <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/first-page.html" />

This will help focus link juice and authority, as well as help deal with possible duplicate content issues.

As I write this there’s an automated countdown clock in another browser window counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until millions of people will flood the internet in search of the perfect Facebook username.

On June 12th at 12:01 a.m.  EDT Facebook will go crazy. Everyone who was previously assigned a user name made up of random numbers (id=123456789) will be able to obtain a username similar to what LinkedIn offers. (Official announcement here)

I can now shed my previous Facebook identity (120400011) become facebook.com/chris.davies, or if that’s not available perhaps w.chris.davies to match my LinkedIn account.

They’re limiting the potential for name-squatting by preventing pages made after May 31st and profiles after June 9th from signing up for a username, so if you’re not already on Facebook, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be ableto claim usernames on, June 28. In the mean time I’ve already had questions from several clients about how they should handle this.

Best Practices:

1. Make a reasonable effort to get a good vanity URL for your pages and/or your profile. It won’t be the end of the world if you don’t lock down facebook.com/firstname-lastname. Don’t stay up all night, but if you happen to be up at 12:01 a.m., you might want to flip on your computer.
2. Your best choice is your proper name as you usually use it, with no spaces. I’m going to shoot for www.facebook.com/chrisdavies. Remember, you want to keep it short, memorable and easy to communicate, like a verbal business card.
3. For brands, go for the most commonly used form of your name. For Enquiro, that means using facebook.com/enquiro, and not the full name of our company, Enquiro Search Solutions. Don’t worry if someone’s squatted on your brand.
4. You can prevent your registered trademarks from being registered as usernames. You can do that by filling out this form.
5. Update your other social networking profiles to reflect your new-found vanity URL.

Resources:

Usernames for Facebook Pages

Username Eligibility FAQ

Info for Intellectual Property Rights Holders

Today it seems we’re going back to the 90′s with a large banner across the top of the homepage.This screenshot was taken on a Canadian IP address without being logged in to YouTube. (For readers outside of Canada, Rogers is a telecom company which just released the Android phones in Canada. They’re also the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in Canada) 

 And when the banner expands it takes up nearly all of the above-the-fold real estate. I’d be very interested to see the stats on the ad.

Gord has mentioned before that Rogers was a little behind when it came to search. I’ll refrain from commenting right now, but I’m sure that there are some strong opinions about the wisdom of this move by both Rogers and YouTube.

Thoughts? Is this really a good option for monetizing YouTube? If you’re an advertiser, would you want to display here?

Google Can Do Anything, Why Can’t It Make A Twitter?

Google knows what it’s good at. Like any smart company, they focus on what they’re good at and strategically outsource the rest. They also know that there are areas where other companies outperform them or develop technology faster then they can. They’ve done it before. (And they’ve also tried to make a Twitter with their failed service Jaiku, which was also originally a Finnish startup acquired in 2007)

Let’s take a look at a short list of things Google bought:

• Video: YouTube was acquired by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion
• VOIP: Google Voice was born as Grand Central, and acquired in July 2007 for $95 million
• RSS Management: FeedBurner was a June 2007 acquisition for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100 million
• Email Security: Postini was an important purchase to help GMail have a hope of becoming a useful enterprise email solution as a part of Google Apps. The price-tag was $625 million.
• Aerial Image Capture: ImageAmerica specialized in high resolution photos and used a propretary technology to correct distortions and make it more suitable for mapping. Google acquired it in July 2007.

And don’t forget about Blogger, the 1999 startup by Pyra Labs and co-founded by Evan Williams, now with Twitter. Google has a strong record of buying technology where it hasn’t yet created the in-house expertise.

What Would Acquiring Twitter Mean?

We’ve seen a common theme amongst algorithm updates over the last few years, pushing for more timely, yet relevant results. Twitter Search takes that equation and goes almost as far to one side as possible….as timely as possible. But what they’ve discovered out of that is that freshness tends to create relevance which matches the intent of many queries. The use of hashtags for event or group based tweets seems to take care of the rest of it. The issue with these results is that the relevancy only exists while they’re under the umbrella of Twitter. It’s a single tool, and Twitter-style results on as large an index as Google holds would be chaos.

What Google wants out of Twitter is more likely a combination of data, technology and a testing framework. Google wants to understand the intent behind the query, and freshness is an exceptionally difficult variable to test. We’ve seen various SERP changes and algorithm updates which push various ‘fresh’ elements into the results: blog results, news, and even Twitter profiles and status updates. What Twitter has is a ready-built window into millions of queries with freshness built in. Google wants to learn more.

Google also wants to help keep Facebook down, and encourage competition in the marketplace. Part of what helps Google dominate is the fact that habitual use of Google as our entrypoint for the internet has been wired into our brain. If Facebook looks to be threatening Google’s place as our start page, then it makes competitive sense to work with the next largest competitor likely competitor.

I don’t think Google’s efforts to eschew possible anti-trust action would be helped by acquiring one of the fastest growing online properties. With Chrome growing market share, the Yahoo ad-deal and no reason to suspect Google’s market share of core search will drop any time soon, they can’t afford to dominate many more online arenas without making some serious efforts to encourage competition.

 For Twitter, a partnership would mean resources beyond another few hundred million. It’d mean research support, technical support and publicity. It would make raising further funding easier, help with development of a true revenue model and guidance to help move beyond tech-savvy people in North America.

I don’t see Google acquiring Twitter. It’s too risky from an anti-trust standpoint, and would discourage more true competition in the market. Twitter doesn’t really want to be bought, as least not yet. And I think the biggest synergy will come from a strong partnership. At the very least, Google will benefit by using the information to improve it’s search results, and Twitter will benefit in terms of capital (human and monetary) and a quiet helping hand in the competitive landscape.

We would like your input in an online survey, in order  to understand more about  your experiences when making business purchase decisions, and/or going through the process of short-listing vendors and business solutions. By completing the survey you’ll be adding valuable insight into an area of business that is undergoing tremendous change.

The survey will take you 15 – 20 minutes to complete and you could win a $25 Starbucks card to thank you for your valuable time.

Also, you’ll be able to register to be invited to Enquiro’s 2009 B2B webinar series, consisting of six high-powered free webinars delivering cutting edge insight into what’s happening in the world of online business-to-business marketing.

Click here to go directly to the survey and thank you for helping us to create world class research.
 

Today’s linking tip also comes to us thanks to Google WMT. When you have a page or post on your site which manages to attract some quality links, that’s going to help that page rank well for whatever you’ve written about (and what the folks who have linked to you said). The next step is to revisit whatever you’ve written, take a closer look at what links are on the page and make sure you’re sending link love to the pages where it makes the most sense.

Click on Links and then on Pages With External Links

I find it easiest to download all external links into Excel (or the spreadsheet program of your choice).
 
 
 

Subtotal the links (at each change in page, count) Sort the list by external links in descending order.
 

 

Skip your homepage (that’s another discussion) and work your way down the list and take a closer look at those pages with many incoming links. When there’s a chance to help the user by linking to another relevant page on your site – preferably a high value page that you want to rank well organically – drop in another link.

Doing more with the links you already have is one of the easiest linking strategies you’ll ever find. This is one very handy tactic to help improve the link structure of your website.
 

The What Works for Business Contest is designed to help shift the focus from what’s wrong with the economy to what businesses can actually do to survive and thrive in 2009. Business.com wants to reward businesses showing ingenuity and resourcefulness during these uncertain times.  They also want to share business solutions that have worked for others with businesses who are struggling to find answers to tough questions.  

Have you solved a business challenge? Submit an entry describing your solution for a chance to win $10,000 and a year’s worth of publicity for your business.

How does the contest work?

Simply submit a short description of ANY challenge your business has tackled. An expert panel of judges, including Enquiro’s own Gord Hotchkiss and Bill Barnes, will narrow down the field to 50 finalists. Then winners across 10 categories will be determined by popular vote in December.

Am I eligible to enter?

If your business is located in the U.S. or Canada and enters by December 3, you are eligible to win. You can enter as many times as you’d like.  Just make sure each entry describes a new challenge/solution.  

What are the prizes?

One business will win the grand prize of $10,000 and nine other category winners will receive $2,000 each. All winners will receive a year’s worth of publicity from Business.com and partner sites.