According to Mashable.com (one of my favorite blogs that I read every day), 80% of all online businesses and corporations are not tracking Social Media ROI or perhaps don’t even know how!
Probably not surprising to most, but to me it was a real shocker. Corporations, big business and little businesses are spending money to BE on social media and have someone manage it, To advertise on it, to sponsor tweets, to sponsor blog posts etc.
Even less encouraging, more than 40% of respondents said they didn’t even know whether they could track ROI from their social tools. This is worrisome because it indicates that industries and professionals are adopting technology without actually taking into account how it will impact their business and what value it will add. – Mashable.com
Facebook considers itself worth $6.5 Billion dollars, Twitter at least 1 billion and other properties like Myspace being declared at being worth 65 Billion dollars, does anyone else detect a huge bubble soon to burst?
First off, if you’re going to do social media advertising, setup campaigns, specific landing pages and goal tracking within Google Analytics. Ensure you track 100% ROI. If the property doesn’t make you money, don’t continue to invest, simple? I think so!
Eventually, systems will get more sophisticated and people will stop using these as they’ll realize their money is better spent in more trackable and realistic returns. I think in truth, the reason Facebook has no built-in tracking system to their PPC program like Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have is because they’d hate to loose the advertisers who would quickly realize it’s lack of return.
What web browser should die hard internet marketers who earn their income online (or who are starting to) use? Which will grow with you, do everything you need and not leave you high and dry when it comes down to business?
First off, over the last year, I’ve tried the following and given them all equal opportunity as my full time web browser.
Internet Explorer
Firefox
Chrome
Safari
Why I love Internet Explorer, But Didn’t Choose It.
I love it, because I have to. When "Mr. First Time PC Owner" opens the box to their first machine, they see this shiney blue "E" on the desktop or start menu. These newbies don’t know any better, and rarely know how harmful or harmless entering their credit card is or buying or subscribing and their anxious to try everything. Internet explorer is still the most widley used so, it’s the browser I glance at every site with to check to make sure it works, and all my precious buy-now’s work!
Why It’s not my daily browser. You’ll be hard pressed to find reviews that don’t say "crashes", or "Slow" or similar. Viruses still find their way in easier, and it still doesn’t pack the features other browsers do.
Why I Love Safari, but don’t use it.
The day Mac Safari was ported to Windows was a day I’ll never forget. I literally installed it on every machine I owned. It was exciting! It was faster than any browser I’d ever used (yes, at the time even Chrome). It had this set of curtains kinda thing with all my favorite sites on it, and I loved the look & feel…
But while it did load some sites FAST, other features were slow and half the best plugins that make internet marketing a walk in the park DONT work on Safari, at least not yet…
I think every marketer will agree with my suggestion. The winner is Firefox hands down.
Why I Keep Chrome, Even With it’s Faults
Chrome has some definite growing pains going on. Being it’s first year (couple weeks ago ), It still has tons of features that make me say "Damn it! Why’d I use chrome again!" but I’m still using it… Why?
Chrome is definitely fast, but without easily being able to install all the browser plugins that make SEO & online marketing easier, it’s simply not useful as your "general browsing" browser. It also doesn’t have the "recently closed tabs" feature which means if you close something it’s hard to find! It’s bookmarks folders often crash when you’ve got a ton and a serious internet marketer has hundreds of bookmarks. Aint that right?
Why keep using it? Good question! Managing multiple Gmail accounts, or multiple adwords accounts, webmaster centrals, analytics etc… Using Firefox & Chrome I can have both open. In fact, the homepage for my Chrome browser is my analytics. Ironically, I’ll bet Google properties never have problems with Chrome because they’ve built both and probably test those sites first.
Why Firefox Is THE BEST Online Marketer Browser
It works on Linux, Mac or Windows regardless of operating system.
I’m going to leave it right there for now, but there’s probably some strong reasons why folks choose one vs the other. My personal reasons are here.
(Update: Sept 25th – P.S. I forgot how many popups there were on the internet until I started running Internet Exploder(explorer again.
I felt it only fair to run it for a few days before writing this – sure wish I hadn’t!)
Before I go and reveal every juicy strategy to discovering the tools necessary to dig into every element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign, let me go over the elements we’re looking for. I’ll show you with the tools I’m about to reveal, you can see EVERY element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign.
First off… If you knew…
Where they were getting their traffic from
What terms they ranked for
What keywords they pay for in PPC
What keywords they’ve INCREASED or decreased spending on
What landing pages they’re landing them on (and what copy testing they’ve done)
What social media marketing they’ve done
Who links to them and what press releases have gone out
How old their site is
Alexa, and other web stats…
Would you not easily be able to find unsaturated markets, or repeat successes of your competitors? I think you would! What if I also showed you how to have Google alert you about your competitors, even in the middle of the night?!?
Keywords From Competitor PPC Campaigns
To this day, the best way to find anything online is via keyword search using the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing) and that’s still how people find most things online. Chances are, if i asked you who your top competitor is, you’d already know. Or, at least you would probably know who the top business in your industry is online.
Keyword Spy Pro can download the entire Google Adwords (PPC advertising) campaign from a website, the landing pages they used, the ads they used and even the organic keywords they rank for. You could easily spot weaknesses in their rankings, in their ad campaigns, or simply duplicate them for the exact same successes.
Using the example above, we we’re able to get 50,000 ads from enterprise.com, 14,064 keywords and 560 competitors as well as around 50 of their top landing pages, their ad spend and ad budgets and pricing as well. Using this data, you could easily find which keywords and which landing pages have had increased budgets recently and use those as your blueprint.
Landing Pages & History
All the tools I’m about to show you reveal different landing pages. How long has that page been live? How much editing has been done? How far back does that go? You see, if you could tell that they’ve tried using the word "free" in their headline, or "cheaper" but ended up using the word "affordable" and sticking with that for the last year… Perhaps you wouldn’t need to do the same testing!
Using archive.org’s impressive spiders, and other big search engines have amazing cache tools you can use to find old pages, examine changes over time etc.
Social Media & Visibility
Wouldn’t you love to see a snapshot of a site and instantly know… "Hey, are the using any social media? Is anyone talking about them?" or what about just finding out just how much of an authority they really are? I love this tool, I hunted for years for something like it so i’m sure glad that I found it. It’s called SiteYogi , and it proposes to be the spiritual leader/guru of finding out how YOUR site is doing. However, *I* use it for digging up info about my competitors not my own sites!
This tool shows you:
Syndication
Validations
Social Bookmarks
Ranking
Backlinks
Indexed pages
And way more!!!
Taking a snapshot and comparing it to multiple competitors can really show you what your up against, dig up press releases, etc. It really shows you how much social, news & other powerful resources are being used!
Digging up Organic Search Data
There’s really no tool that compares with quite such detail and precision than that of SEOBook’s "Seo For Firefox Plugin". I’m a huge fan of it, and the tool to be quite honest has allowed me to extrapolate huge reports for corporate clients and provide juicy detailed competitive analysis that ultimately lead to the distruction of major top 10 results! Meaning we were able to get a #4 spot for "Car rental" using Google at one time just with this kind of data alone.
There’s no way I could list every feature this thing will reveal but let me explain how it works. First, you install the plugin into Firefox (Duh!) and then, select your settings in the tools menu of Firefox, enable it by clicking a little SEO logo in the bottom right of the browser and perform a search in Google. It instantly brings back things like the PR of each site, cache date, yahoo links, .edu links, age, alexa directories, diggs etc. I’m not listing it all.. but It’s wild, and quite simply the best tool on the market.
All this data can be found anywhere, and that’s true. However, directly against the search results themselves? No. More so, I *love* the export to CSV feature where you can actually excel sheet all this data. Absolutely amazing.
Competitor Link Data for SEO
They’ve got 24,000 links? What kind of links are they? What anchor text and where are they on the web? Ah, for that my dear friend I show you a tool that is the best at sleuthing out exactly which links are where and how they’re set up. The very best, in my humble opinion.
They’re coming out with a new version… That’s why to use it currently, you have to go to classic.linkdiagnosis.com, but I suspect if the classic version was the best link analysis tool I’ve ever seen, the next one will be even greater!
Search Results in Other Countries
Using redflymarketing’s special firefox extension, you can even observe what other countries see in their Google box. Being based out of Canada, I often use this tool to see if the ranking boosts I’m seeing are better in the USA than Canada or vice-versa for my clients. It lets you see other countries too.
Very powerful for seeing where your competitors are doing better or worse in the rankings, but also other competitors that may be focused more on US, UK, Canada that are marketing to a global audience.
Monitoring, Tracking and Further Analysis
Is it possible to watch all your competitors in a given market, even while you sleep? YES! Today I’m going to show you how you can monitor what they do, pretty much live to some degree. First off, I’d suggest looking at Google Alerts but setting it up to monitor your competitors using type – Comprehensive, how often – Once a day, and deliver to your email address with the search term either their domain, their brand or the product your concerned about, or all of the above.
There are other monitoring tools, but Google’s lets you go back and delete or change preferences of these alerts using your Google account. There’s many email alert systems that you’ll be stuck subscribed to for years that you’d pretty much have to cancel your email account and get a new one to get out of receiving.
RSS Alerts & Blog Alerts
Your competitors could be talking about YOU… Or perhaps you want to hear what OTHERS are saying about your competitors and their products. Maybe you’ll over hear the one feature everyone wishes they would fix, giving YOU the opportunity to come up with something the market truly thirsts for.
To track everything said in blogs and RSS around the web, simply visit Bloglines and in the top right, do a search for whatever you like. Perhaps enterprise.com (the domain of a competitor) or their product, etc…
Then, find the RSS icon as shown below… (See? I Put a big arrow to it for you!)
Then, go and visit feedmyinbox.com (bet they don’t even know it’s a great competitive intelligence tool!) paste the URL and your email address in there and recieve updates any time something happens on the web via RSS or Blogs! Pretty kewl, eh?
Competition Updates On The Go
Using Xfruits , you can even send RSS via voice, sms, text message to your cell phone, email or anything else! RSS feeds now encompass search results, blog updates, competitor website changes (sitemap.xml?) and tons of other things. I bet there’s ways of monitoring the competition with these tools even I haven’t imagined that you now have at your fingertips!
Do me a favor
If you found something AMAZINGLY juicy, something useful something you needed here. Please Digg, facebook, stumble upon something it!
Please tweet it, or something. Because we sure could use the links as we’re just building up the site and getting it going.
I’ve made convenient social buttons at the bottom of the post that should make it only ONE click to "digg" etc.
Your seeing this all over the web right now as it’s becoming a hot story, because it’s interesting how many eyeballs and ears apple’s already grabbed somehow.
They’ve got our cell phones (millions of iPhones) they’ve got a percentage of the computers (every designer doing web-dev) and they’re gaming for our web browser (Safari now available for Windows, Linux & Mac!).
How many people using iPhones, blackberry’s, and HTC touch style devices visit your website every day? It’s a good question you should ask yourself if you’ve thought of redeveloping your site or creating a mobile version.
Each and every market is different. With technical sites, it’s obvious there will be tons of mobile devices searching for a quick answer to something they don’t feel like firing up a PC to find the answer for. With non-technical sites, like fishing info or RV tips, should you bother?
The answer may lie in your statistics. If you use Google Analytics, there’s one way you may be able to find out how many your getting and whether it’s worth re-deving or creating a new version for these folks.
Step 1 - Go to "Advanced Segments"
Step 2 – Create a new custom segment.
Step 3 – Select "systems" on the left nav under the Green "dimensions" area there.
Step 4 – Drag the "screen resolution" green box to the area on the right (see image above).
Step 5 - For the "Condition" drop down box (you can see above it says "matches exactly") change that to "Matches regular expression" and you’ll get a value box pop up after that.
For years people have had this all wrong, I knew it and for those other experts or really experienced folks it’s been a nice bit of padding between those who have studied and eat their wheaties every morning, and those who don’t.
On September 15th, Google used their relatively new "Webmaster Central" channel on Youtube to broadcast a 14 minute video detailing everything you should know about duplicate content. What’s true, what’s not etc.
No time to watch a 14 minute video? I know how you feel!
The gist is this. Having a print version, or a 2nd or 3rd copy of a page will not cause any penalty. It might only rank one of the 3 versions, but if they’re both the same or very close, who cares, right?
Heck, you may have seen this before:
It’s not a penalty. That’s what they’re saying and I fully agree.
You’ll find the dangerous Google slap of having entire pages or domains being deleted from the index comes from copying other sites COMPLETELY without any user benefit. No change in navigation, code, etc and there’s other factors that come into play too.
Basicly, if you’re not trying to spam they figure you shouldn’t worry. But at least they took the time to clear that up in a really indepth video.
What’s weird about this video is that it’s not the infamous Matt Cutts , who traditionally posts all the Webmaster Central videos on their channel. This is kind of interesting. It’s also quite a bit longer than Matt’s few second quips solving various things that plauge the non-technical webmaster.
Makes me kinda wonder why they went out of their way to address this one, although, working with a client this week who was working so hard to prevent hackers and others from seeing stuff, I can only imagine what that must be like for Google. They’ve probably got tons of webmasters trying to create these printable versions and tools like Wordpress constantly "accidentally" making dupe pages, and stressing people out. Google’s saying the same message they have for years… "Hey folks! It’s cool, just don’t be evil.."
I talked to 3-4 different friends yesterday about conversion tracking. I asked them if they were running conversion tracking, or even just Google Analytics and was met with some interesting questions.
If I asked 3-4 people I consider internet marketing experts ( and I don’t use that lightly ), what are the chances your competitors are doing it? Not very likely!!!
So, my last blog post explained how to track conversions from Refferers and from search keywords. Why is that so very insanely powerful?
If you could give me $1.00 and I gave you $5.00 back, how many times would you do it?!?
Fact is, check your IQ level if you said anything lower than INFINITY! Knowing exactly what causes a conversion from any source is insanely powerful.
If you knew that every time you posted on a certain website, you got a 5% conversion rate, how often would you?
If you knew a certain keyword phrase that converted at 11% how much money would you sink into Google Adwords?
Enough said.
It’s funny, the chances that your competitors have goal tracking setup, know how to use custom reporting and are gunning for the top producing keywords is probably pretty slim.
Reports look like this:
You can track leads, chats, sales and know exactly which campaigns are working and which aren’t. See my last post if you want granular detail on how to set it up.
I was about ready to give up on Google analytics today. I’m still thinking about it, but it’s something I can work with for now. I’ll tell you what stopped me, at least that’ll help some people.
Haven’t you ever wanted to track a sale to a reffering address *OR* A conversion to a keyword that came via SEO vs PPC. How can you tell which keywords are most effective, and which aren’t if you can’t tell which ones are SELLING!?!
Allan, the PPC specialist I work with would be pretty useless if he couldn’t target and improve on ONLY the words & phrases or targeted sites that convert best in his PPC campaigns. He’d tell you that to your face.
I did my job, I setup goals and everything! It appeared as if this feature didn’t exist. But I found it.
This thing appears complicated and weird looking at first… But it’s actually pretty simple all things considered. It’s pretty easy to "get it" within a few seconds if you know these basics. Drag something from the blue area called "metrics" to the blue boxes along the top of this display. Then, drag something green from the "Dimensions" box on the left, to the green "dimension" box in grey background centered there in the middle. Or throw in some sub-green dimensions or some secondary metrics.
Play with it until you get what you want. What I wanted, and was easily able to get using this tool was where the sales were coming from.
SEO Return On Investment. Tracking search engine visits to sales.
In seconds, I found by dragging the "Completed Goals #1" from the metrics "goals" section to the platform, AND dragging the "Traffic Sources ->Keywords" to the section below would tell us what our top converting keywords were.
Other websites advertising (Facebook, Twitter etc..)
Is your twitter campaign making you money? What about that facebook advertising you did? I found the answer with the custom reporter tool, and you can too! Drag the "Completed Goals #1" from the metrics "goals" section to the platform area in one of those blue "metrics" boxes. Then, "Traffic Sources ->Source/Medium" to the green "dimension" box in grey background centered there in the middle.
This simple walkthru should help you dramatically if you’ve got your Analytics setup properly.
If you find this stuff useful, sign up to my newsletter. I give this stuff away free all the time, and you really wouldn’t wanna miss it right? PLUS – you know you won’t remember to visit this page often. I don’t spam and I will never send tons of messages.
Whether you’re looking to distroy the competition in any given market, or starting a business or building existing businesses, it’s the key to success all around. Heck, If this were the pee-wee herman show, i’d say "Hey kids! Today’s word is… FOCUS!!!"
Today I sat down and realized that I had 43 domain names that I was working on all at the same time, trying to game success from each and every one of them. I’ve now made it my goal to sell off a ton of them and focus on a handful.
So that’s also why you’ll find one of my favorite sites on The Warrior Forum for sale today. More to come soon too.
But, back to focus for a sec here <wink>.
If you’ve got a ton of domains or websites or even a site with tons of products for sale. Consider, narrowing your focus. It’s interesting how many different examples there are of studies where a donut shop in LA had 200 choices, another had a few dozen and the one with the few dozen won.
Yahoo VS Google… 1998…
One big fat search box VS 177 text links on the home page? We know who won that battle. Simple sociology (the study of people in groups) the fact is that giving people LESS choice always wins.
Focus…
I was watching some Corey Rudl the other day (One of the first highly successful online marketers) and he said something that I’d totally forgotten about… "Don’t give people too many choices.." Don’t sell multiple items on one page, have an opt-in box, upsell them later.
People should do one of 3 things at a website.
#1. Buy your product.
#2. Signup for the newsletter (and you SHOULD have one)
#3. Get off the site.
Today I see huge press around Google changing it’s look and feel by changing the size of it’s search box.
Kinda reminds me of the searchbox on Microsoft’s Bing engine. Yeah, sure it doesn’t have the pretty and picturesque pictures like the MS version does, but isn’t it Odd that Google woudl change the size of it’s search box just randomly one day?
I think so.
Then there’s CNET , PC World , and even The New York Times all discussing this monumental event. Even The Wall Street Journal decided to pipe in their $0.02 on this huge world turning story. Kinda has to make me chuckle to myself this morning as I sip a nice south american coffee.
I think Google is copying Bing. They see bing is slowly gaining numbers probably in part due to the fact that Bing’s engine isn’t bad. I won’t say much for search quality because I tend to agree with Matt Cutts there, but regardless… .Their site is nice, and the search box is nice and BIG… Bigger than Google’s until today!
I can’t wait to raise up my companies and my 33 domains as big as Google’s so one day when I change the size of my opt-in box the world goes WOW! Dan’s crazy, look, there’s room for 4 more charachters on his email box! Hey, everyone! Go look over there!
Until Next Time
Daniel J Deyette
What web browser should die hard internet marketers who earn their income online (or who are starting to) use? Which will grow with you, do everything you need and not leave you high and dry when it comes down to business?
again.
Before I go and reveal every juicy strategy to discovering the tools necessary to dig into every element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign, let me go over the elements we’re looking for. I’ll show you with the tools I’m about to reveal, you can see EVERY element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign.
For years people have had this all wrong, I knew it and for those other experts or really experienced folks it’s been a nice bit of padding between those who have studied and eat their wheaties every morning, and those who don’t.
