Make Money Online

A world in which customers walk through the door of a business and get a coupon especially crafted for them is much closer, thanks to Foursquare.

The application, which has become the dominant player in the world of mobile, geo-specific check-ins, has unveiled a set of analytics for businesses which will put a name and a face to loyal customers.

The dashboard, which is still in alpha, is debuting for 30 select customers before a bigger roll-out. The dashboard gives businesses a look at who is checking in, breaks them down by when they come in, gender, and number of visits. Businesses will also be able to see which platform customers are using to share their status.  If your visitors are heavy into Twitter or Facebook, you can follow them there. Other types of information tracked includes: total check-ins, unique visitors, male-to-female ratio, and top visitors.

Writes Zachary Wilson of Fast Company,

“With priceless data like this, it’s easy to imagine a blow-up in participating venues coming soon. More businesses means more users, more users means more businesses, and suddenly Foursquare is the Facebook of check-ins.”

Foursquare plans to add additional real-time information for business users, including weather updates. Potentially, this dashboard could be used by large chain businesses (like a Wal-Mart or Starbucks) from a central location with a view of all of their outlets in real time.

“We’ve been talking with quite a few [large corporations] who are excited about the potential for this,” said Tristan Walker, Business Development at Foursquare, in an interview with Mashable. “Once we can add purchase information on top of check-ins things can get pretty interesting.”

This valuable information helps Foursquare give itself even more distance ahead of competitors like Gowalla, and the addition of a newly designed iPhone app will give FourSquare an additional bump in users.

As the dashboard and analytics are tweaked, based on the alpha tests, plans are to introduce the service to the 1,000 or so registered businesses currently running specials on Foursquare.

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Foursquare Offers Up User Data with Check-in Analytics

Unless they are prefaced by dollar signs, numbers are not sexy, which is why social media experts have spent years avoiding them. Like the cool kids, they often seem more interested in being invited to the party than delving into what the party is for. The argument is often that numbers and metrics only serve as distractions to engagement and dialogue.

As a model matures in order for it to maintain a business role, make no mistake social media is about business, its impact needs to be quantifiable. Forrester Research estimates that social media will make up 3% of overall interactive marketing spend in the US in 2010 with the highest delta of growth in any channel over the next four years. As social media’s channel grows so will the pressure to quantify.

Brian Solis, author and principal of the FurtureWorks agency, recently posted a well written piece about the Maturation of Social Media ROI on Mashable. In it he tackles the main crux behind the issue that many CMOs are spending against social media without being able to quantify a return on those efforts. Brian believes this is:

“A direct result of not tying activity to an end game, the ability to know what it is we want to measure before we engage. Doing so, allows us to define a strategy and a tactical plan to support activity that helps us reach our goals and objectives.”

Warm and Fuzzy Metrics

It used to be that simply being invited to or crashing the social media party was enough. Companies hired interns to catalog content and rushed to create Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter accounts, often because everyone else was doing it.

Then came what I like to call “warm and fuzzy metrics”. Words like engagement, participation, and involvement became key terms for defining online interactions with consumers. Similar to views in CPM, these terms are measured in volume of followers or retweets. Influencers sprouted from this tactic as a way to amplify that volume; after all you wanted to have the best DJ at your party.

Then came terms like trust and affinity; these were less fuzzy in nature and involved a brand’s core group of followers.

Of the warm and fuzzy metrics of social media ROI, only customer service is tangible. Both in terms of the increased ability for people to rate and review products, as well as the opportunity for customer service teams to engage and provide proactive response.

If your company is just participating in social media than maybe the fuzzy metrics are enough. If your company is running social media campaigns and considers social media a marketing channel than fuzzy metrics are a great way to get your budget slashed. It is no coincidence that, according to MarketingSherpa, inability to measure ROI, lack of budget funding, and management resistance are barriers to companies implementing social media campaigns:

For those who insist that “marketing is not sales”, I invite you to use that exact statement with your CMO and see how quickly your budget is diverted elsewhere. As David Vellante, co-founder of ITCentrix, Barometrix, and The Wikibon Project, cautions:

“I’ve seen multimillion-dollar print and television advertising initiatives get the green light because CMOs understood the media — and I’ve seen $10,000 social-media efforts scratched because execs didn’t get it.”

The Key is Return on Ad Spend

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is what many CMOs will look at when considering budget allocation against a marketing channel. By definition it has a tighter set of parameters than ROI because it doesn’t consider less fuzzy elements like branding or engagement. This metric for success is specifically looking for a direct dollar value generated as compared to the actual budget being spent.

If, as a study by Bazaarvoice indicates, 80% of CMOs expect upwards of 5% of their revenue to come through the social media channel then the spend against generating revenue better be tracked.

According to Fast Company, Dell made over $3 million in revenue through the Dell Outlet account on Twitter.  But, considering much of what happens in Dell’s Twitter account is coupon or offer driven, what was the true ROAS of hitting that $3 million? Never mind the additional cost of coordinating social media tactics and messaging within a company as big as Dell which, as Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger for Dell Inc says is challenging, “Executing against all those [social media] strategies will take a lot more effort and collaboration between many departments within the company.”

More telling is a recent report by Omniture on the impact of a social media campaign for National Geographic. While the campaign was seen as a success, in the report the Omniture analyst states that traffic from social media is 20x less likely to purchase than average visitor.

Laying the Foundation

What rings true for Dell is true for both large and small business interested in participating in social media.  Collaboration between all stakeholders is necessary in order for a campaign to reach its potential.  Here are the steps you need to take to lay a proper foundation for launch.

1. Know Your End Game: As Brian Solis said defining your end game is necessary in order to be able to quantify results.  Know what are you trying to accomplish and how you want to try keep track of it all.
2. Define Your Metrics: What metrics do you need to track to quantify results: Leads, Registration, Sales?
3. Check Your Tracking: I can’t tell you how often a new client doesn’t have the right pixel/cookie set on the right confirmation page. If your success metric is sales make sure you’re not just tracking leads. This requires testing.
4. Set Expectations: Benchmarking is great way for you and your CMO to have realistic expectations from a campaign. Fireclick and Coremetrics are two tools that can provide benchmarks based on industry averages related to conversion rates, cart abandonment, and other valuable data. They also allow you to pull data from a specific vertical.

Intelligence Gathering

This is where you gather the numbers that will let you know how your campaign is doing and where the dollars are. There are a lot of tools out there that will provide pretty dashboards but few that provide useful data. Here are some of the tools I recommend:

1. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the defacto analytics system in most companies. You can track visits, page views, bounce rates, etc. Be sure, if sales are a key metric, that the ecommerce portion is activated.
2. Hitwise: Owned by Experian, Hitwise relies on ISP data of approximately 10 million users in the United States alone. Although an expensive solution, their Clickstream data provides some of the best intelligence on upstream and downstream traffic to your website.
3. Coremetrics: Along with their benchmarking services Coremetrics offers an analytics suite whose main differentiator rests in what they call their LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles. This is essentially an analytics expansion on the concept of customer types.
4. Fireclick: Owned by Digital River, is a streamlined version of many of the tools available for free through Google Analytics but in an easier to customize interface. The main advantage here is their Advanced Marketing Suite which ties you into other vendors and components in the Digital River portfolio.
5. Radian6: Radian6 is a buzz monitoring software that allows you to monitor certain keyword sets and capture data round them. The data includes such things sentiment, engagement, reach, and inbound links. It also allows you to port that data to your CRM.
6. HubSpot: In some ways HubSpot is more of a site optimization tool than an analytics tool. It does compile interesting sets of data around competitors and around reach as well as lead identification tools.
7. Omniture: I have a love/hate relationship with Omniture. Used correctly, with sufficient internal technical resources as well as buy-off from the marketing team on consistent use of campaign hierarchy, SiteCatalyst along with the other Omniture, is an amazing if overly complicated resource. It is however a very expensive one and there is a reason that Omniture holds yearly conferences on how to use their product.  They have a great Facebook app measuring toolset.

Making Sense of it All

Having the tools to capture the data you need is great but numbers are of little value if they are not actionable.  Here are some guidelines to avoid drowning in the data:

1. What to Do When the Numbers Don’t Match: First of all get the notion of the numbers matching out of your head. The numbers between two analytics systems will rarely, if ever, produce an exact match. The objective is to look for trends in the data and ignore anomalies that are not statistically relevant. If the data matches within 10% or less variable then consider the data to be inline. If the variant is 11%-49% then it might be worth doing some due diligence. For instance are all the pages that should be tagged, tagged correctly? If the variant is greater than 50% then something is wrong with the setup itself or with one of the systems you are using.
2. Spotting Trends is Vital: One of the most common mistakes I see is when business get excited about high sales numbers while completely ignoring the fact they overspent to get those numbers. Sales matter little if ROAS is in the negative. Trends are a great way to spot deltas which often provide indicators of the health of campaign. Sample key trends are:
   1. number of new to file customers
   2. number of transactions
   3. changes in repeat customers
   4. number of customer referrals
   5. uplift in other marketing channels
3. 3) Looks for Wildcards and Outliers: Sometimes you are so focused on the campaign data that you become blind to important clues. My favorite personal example of this was during the measurement of a campaign that Jones Soda ran with I Can Has Cheezburger in 2008. If you looked just at the number of sales that directly came from the I Can Has Cheezburger website the campaign numbers barely broke even.  However, when we looked closer at the analytics data we saw 12,000 additional posts created because of the campaign. When attributable sales from those posts were factored in sales showed 172% month-over-month growth and 42% year-over-year growth!With the amount of distribution sources available in social media always take time to see if elements of your campaign have been distributed beyond the initial sites you targeted. It will allow you to spot new opportunities to expand your campaigns.
4. Cross-channel Cannibalization and the Last Cookie in Debate: Most advertisers use cookies to know which ad network to pay and which marketing channel to credit for sales. Shannon Paul, community manager for PEAK6 Online and OptionsNewsNetwork, had a great post on this debate here. Cross-channel cannibalization is when the marketing costs/efforts of one marketing channel are not considered because a different marketing channel is being given credit for them. This impacts both budget allocation and proper allocation of costs. Since social media buzz often serves to uplift other marketing efforts they are most impacted by improper allocation.For example, a social media click originating from a Twitter focused campaign refers a customer to the site but a coupon affiliate closes the sale by providing a coupon to the customer. In a “last cookie in” system only the affiliate in this example would get credit for the sale. In an ideal world both the first and last referrer of a customer would be cookied so that you would know which channel is referring new customers and which is closing them, thus properly giving credit to both channels and minimizing cannibalization. Awareness of the complexities of tracking multi-channel efforts is key in order to properly coordinate award of credit to all involved channels.

Final Thoughts

If you are managing a social media campaign or are a business eager to launch into social media, remember to embrace the numbers. Numbers are sexy -they help spot costs and inefficiencies you could avoid; help identify opportunities you could be missing; and often determine which budgets will be renewed.   The dollar signs are there, you just have to know where to look.

Read the original here:
Sexy Numbers: Measuring ROI in Social Media Campaigns

I’ve learned to take IT consulting firms’ predictions with a grain of salt. Sometimes these firms come up with provocative stuff for the purpose of selling their consulting services and research reports. They may not always have a real understanding of where things are going.

One firm that’s consistently accurate and level-headed, however, is Forrester Research. Forrester has been around for over 25 years and they’re well-respected. That’s why I found their latest blog about the coming of a new computing age of particular interest.

Forrester’s Josh Bernoff uses the recent launch of Apple’s iPad as motivation to discuss the growing problem of incompatibility between the current rash of devices (Android, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, etc.) and web connectivity. “Your site may not work right on these devices,” says Bernoff, “especially if it includes Flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.”

Bernoff says this phenomenon is just part of the problem. In addition to device incompatibility, there seems to be more closed than open systems on the Web, no doubt for competitive reasons. Facebook’s applications, for example, only work on Facebook.

“Web marketing has grown since 1995,” says Bernoff, “based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization – it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized. Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines.”

The result is something Forrester Research labels the “Splinternet.” The firm believes the end of the cross-platform compatibility web era is near.

Forrester offers as proof of the Splinternet’s existence the fact that technology standards once controlled by open standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will now be controlled by platform vendors like Apple and Facebook. On the Internet, advertising and user experience side, they suggest that cookie-based customization is being replaced by profile-based customization, and that standard ad formats will now have to be customized for sites and networks that are acceptable to the new devices.

How interesting – here we thought in our multi-option digital world that we were moving towards enhanced inter-connectivity and compatibility. It turns out the opposite may be true.

But Bernoff cautions Internet marketers not to jump off a cliff just yet. Instead, he says, “choose your devices carefully – investments in one cannot be transferred easily to others if you make a mistake. Rethink analytics, links, and measurement – — they’re just becoming available in the new environments.”

Still, I can see a lot of online marketers getting palpitations and sweaty palms right now.

More:

Google is thinking small as it continues to grow. The search giant is focusing on mobile in 2010, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke during a conference call (full audio transcript) on the announcement of Google’s Q4 earnings.

Before he got into the nitty-gritty of this year’s outlook, Google announced that revenue was up 17 percent in Q4 2009 ($6.7 billion) and up $23.65 billion for all of 2009 (for a net income of $6.5 billion).

Where does Google go from here? Right in our pockets, it appears. The release of the Nexus Phone made a splash, but Google is concentrating on the red meat of advertising and search to really make its mark in 2010, especially on mobile devices.

In 2009, Google saw mobile search increase 5 fold. The advertising that goes along with mobile search is even more specialized for customers. According to Senior Vice President of Project Management for Google, Jonathan Rosenberg:

“The new formats, the targeting tools and the reporting we are giving to advertisers (are) making a difference. Click to call, letting advertisers target specific high-end devices or carriers (we are) seeing improved monetization across mobile.”

This goes along with the trend Google has shown in strengthening its geo-specific local search results and the goal of getting answers to search result question to the user quicker. The feature is especially appealing to marketers as more consumers are using their phones to research the pricing on a possible item before buying.

Beyond mobile, Google is banking on a boom in its revenue from display advertising, which goes beyond the AdWords/AdSense model to more enriched advertising content.

Said Schmidt: “We have said is that our next huge business is display. If I were to talk about absolute numbers that would be No. 1. But smaller ones (revenue growth opportunities are) growing faster. No. 1 there is mobile. We have a lot of evidence that people are moving towards data-friendly mobile devices quite quickly. 2010 will be a year of significant mobile revenue growth.”

Display advertising is growing market for Google as the integration of DoubleClick, which was acquired in 2007, has finally been completed. Coupled with DoubleClick’s vast inventory the type of  reporting Google Analytics is able to provide is very appealing to marketers. Especially when combined with interactive, call-to-action display ads (ie, click here to do this, go to our web site or become a part of our social network), there is a lot of area for expansion for Google. Google has already rolled out more ad templates to make it easier for small businesses to get into the game and is eager to have video powered display ads as well through YouTube which is the de facto leader in the space.

So it looks like the new ecosystem Google is building for 2010 and beyond will focus on display ads powering the revenue picture in a what that AdWords has done since Google’s beginning, along with a more local-oriented, geo-savvy search on mobile, with faster and better answers and targeted advertising that gets as specific as the device being used as the search.

It’s a plan that can fit in the palm of your hand, but one that Google is banking on for this year and the years ahead.

Here is the original:
Google Q4 Earnings Point To Changes in its Marketing Focus

Successful marketing is built around accurate forecasting and benchmarking. In an industry like the affiliate industry which is not known for transparency, getting numbers to help you set accurate benchmarks is difficult. There are however resources that can help including: the ecommerce focused reports compiled by MarketingSherpa, eConsultancy’s affiliate marketing reports, and AffStat run by Shawn Collins co-founder of Affiliate Summit .

Recently NETexponent’s research division, AffiliateBenchmarks, has made available to the public our second annual survey of affiliates. You can see my post on last year’s survey here, when we had around 500 responses. This year, with help from our affiliate network partners, we got over 3500 affiliates responses, making it the largest affiliate survey to date.

Although I make it a point to not use the ReveNews forum for self-promotional content, I do believe that the interests, practices and expectations of the surveyed affiliates provide insights valuable to all affiliates wishing to learn successful practices, advertisers looking to forge lucrative relationships, networks, consultants and any other readers with an interest in online marketing practices and techniques.

The report is based on date provided by affiliates. It breaks down results based on the annual income of the participants. This allows us to outline the tactics and practices that highly successful affiliates are employing to get ahead in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

For example, those who are buying PPC keywords, utilizing flash and video widgets are seeing a much higher return from their affiliate programs than those who aren’t.  These insights are extremely valuable to all affiliates seeking new ways to improve their businesses.

Of the respondents 49% indicated they were new to the industry in the last two years.  This points to significant growth in the affiliate channel. However, it is apparent from the results that many of these newer affiliates are not yet taking advantage of the technologies and strategies that are helping more established affiliate succeed.

Among the other under-utilized opportunities beyond PPC search and the use of flash ads/widgets: new affiliates missed opportunities to gather up to date information from industry blogs in order to spot trends and failed to collect data on site visitors in order to promote the more relevant, higher-converting merchant programs.

For a limited time we’re offering all ReveNews readers a 30% discount off the price of the report! To get your copy of the AffiliateBenchmarks report click here and enter code RN30.

See original here:
Affiliate Marketing Research Provides Benchmarks for 2009

As a blogger and an ex-newspaper reporter I have an axe to grind with many of my peers. Please avoid the temptation to distort reality by quoting statistics and data out of context, no matter how linkbait worthy the intended headline or story angle might be.

What raised my hackles? I read this eWeek article and choked when I saw this line:

“Twitter boasted astronomical growth, up 1,170 percent from its negligible .15 percent market share from September 2008″.

I decided to check out the source, Experian Hitwise’s press release on social network traffic, and examine their report using my own calculations:

Twitter September 2009 social network market share of a whopping 1.84% is 12.26 times (or 1,226%) of it’s 0.15% September 2008 figure. This is derived by taking 1.84 divided by 0.15 (1.84/0.15).

Taking a leaf out of a grade school math book, the increase in traffic can be calculated by the following formula:

Percentage Increase = [(new figure - old figure) / old figure] * 100% which should be [(1.84-0.15)/0.15]*100% = 1,127% or an increase of 11.27 times over the previous figure.

So where did the 1,170% figure mentioned in Hitwise’s release come from? Beats me. Maybe someone was a little lax in checking their own stats.

Should we be concerned when a web measurement firm whose bread and butter comes from reporting data, reports it inaccurately? If the reported data is incorrect, how about the validity of the web data contained the report? What happens when a respected media outlet like eWeek publishes data verbatim, without running their own checks to verify accuracy provided by a newsmaker?

Quality control of data is obviously an issue.

Even more interesting is the 1,127% or 1,170% year-on-year growth figure attributed to Twitter’s growth. Everyone loves to see impressive numbers, especially if it’s in multiples of 100%.

Mark Twain popularized the phrase “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Statistics are powerful because they are viewed as logic based.  In school math was the only subject you could get a perfect score in, and that thinking has carried over into adult life. People like seeing statistics, no matter how skewed, because it makes them feel secure in the information they have been given. When delivered by a smart PR firm, marketing team, or in the media the data is often accepted without question. 

This is because most individuals (internet marketers included) are inherently bad at math and numbers in general. Whether by choice or circumstances, they just aren’t equipped to deal with data critically or intelligently.

I’ve seen more than a few isolated instances where writers cite 500% growth or 1,270% increase in profit, but does this mean anything?

Context is key if you want to make sense of data. A sales increase from $1 to $5 is an increase of 400%, and publishing an article announcing a 400% increase will get you more than your fair share of eyeballs. However, if you consider that $5 would barely pay for lunch, it’s a case where statistics, without appropriate context, can be manipulated to distort reality. What’s important when dealing with data is to look at information against the appropriate backdrop.

If your company is growing at 90%, while comparable peers in the same industry are growing at 300%, you’re lagging behind the industry. By “comparable peers” I’m referring to partners or competitors that are equivalent in size or can be mathematically adjusted to provide a meaningful basis of comparison.

Context and relevance and looking at data in a meaningful way means seeing a $1 billion revenue figure and a net profit margin of 0.5%. Or a 500% monthly sales growth figure from a baseline of $27 in sales. Do these figures mean anything? Only when they’re seen from the perspective of the big picture.

If you want to see the forest and not just the trees, don’t simply swallow the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” they are trying to spoonfeed you.

View original post here:
Are Reporters and Bloggers Guilty Of Using Weapons of Statistical Destruction?

One of the mantras guiding online marketing is to measure everything that matters and then optimize. The typical MO is to run as many CPC programs that you can afford or manage to create a baseline; do A/B or multivariate analysis to optimize; then prune low yield programs and further optimize on the ones with the best returns. But what happens when, despite adherence, to this mantra the historical performance levels of display ads starts to fall?

Recently, ComScore published a study (pdf) showing the number of US consumers who clicked on display ads had dropped by 50% in two years. While drastic the impact could be due to a decline in the number of CPC display and affiliate programs run over that time, however; other factors were implied in the study. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of people who clicked one or more display ads a month dropped to 16%, with about 37% of those users accounting for 50% of all clicks. In shorthand, that means 6% of internet users represent 50% of the clicks, and another 10% representing the remaining 50%. All this indicates a seriously diminishing audience.

While CTR is a standard measure in the online advertising business, these new figures suggest that focusing on click through optimization may be an incomplete or insufficient strategy. Since when has optimization based on only 16% of the user base been a truly encompassing plan?

What about the other 84% of the audience not engaging with display ads? What does it mean for advertisers? If you believe in an efficient market and that online advertising is ahead of the overall advertising industry as recent studies indicate – then something else is at work here. Do display ads, or any ad impressions based advertising, really matter?

On my company and our partners’ sites, we have seen significant traffic spikes to our home page/partner home pages while running CPC, CPM, or CPA programs. This suggests that people are not clicking but going directly to the advertised site. Our internal analytics system has tracked multiple exposures and non-ad clickers to a conversion on our site, verifying that the display ads themselves indeed play a role in driving frequency and/or engagement before an eventual conversion on our site.

So are display ads dead? I don t think so, but display ad CTRs are certainly suspect as a meaningful measurement. The new data and implications about branding, frequency, and engagement lead me to believe that we require a new line of thinking and analytics to measure the true value of such ad units.

Credit:
Display Ad Clicks Drop 50%, Marketers Cringe

Recently I discussed “CPSA” (Cost Per Social Action), a potential pricing model that recognizes the growing importance of measuring a “social action”. This model is a variation of CPA (Cost Per Action). Both CPSA and CPA are far superior to basic CPM, which measures the cost of impressions, or even CPC, which relies on the cost of clicks.

In the final analysis, all online advertisers should be adopting, at the very least, a CPL (Cost Per Lead) model. After all, what every advertiser really wants from an online ad is a qualified lead – a prospect who has a demonstrated proclivity to buy. That’s the type of lead worthy of an advertising investment.

The problem is that lately, the price of ad impressions on websites has fallen. It’s largely because ad networks have lowered the barrier to advertising by spreading costs across many sites. So advertisers can get tantalizingly more impressions, and maybe even more clicks, for less money.

But is that a good thing? The metrics of more impressions can be deceiving – the pricing may look attractive, but ads with minimal targeting produce unqualified responses. What’s the value of lots of responses if they do not turn into the right leads?

The answer to the dilemma is for website publishers to sell, and advertisers to demand, ad space that works harder. In short, ads need to help qualify the respondent.

An article in Forbes references a recent report that suggests “marketers will pay publishers an average price of $2.27 for each reader they can convince to fill out a form with their real name and e-mail address, along with a few bits of personal data such as their Twitter handle, phone number or answers to questions about their shopping habits.”

While over $2 CPL may seem like a lot of money, the advertiser is, in effect, paying for valuable data about an individual prospect. This data can then be used to do a better job of communicating product benefits and, hopefully, convincing the prospect to buy. Forbes says the “hefty price [of CPL] suggests publishers should consider abandoning cheap ads sold for guaranteed prices and should instead try to use space on their Web pages to convince readers to turn over their personal information.”

The implications of this are significant, however. Ads need to engage prospects, and prospects must want to ante up details about themselves. In an age of privacy concerns, this could be a tall order.

Still, if online advertisers want to make the smartest advertising investment, they’ll soon recognize that it makes sense to pay a higher CPL to get higher quality leads. In the long run, they’re likely to see a higher conversion rate, and therefore a higher rate of return. That’s why CPM and CPC are being questioned more and more – and why the online world could be in for a big change in perspective.

See the rest here:
Is CPL the Real Deal?

Remember part 1 and part 2 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster Smith? It’s been a while and I’m back to wrap up sharing what I was able to learn from this pioneer of e-commerce video.  I probed Gordon for details on the strategic, long-term approach he’s using to drive multi-channel sales with video.  In all honesty I did NOT learn of the rigid, measured direct-response strategy that I had expected. What I did uncover was how important trust is to a company that is, yes, financially precise and metrics-driven.  Trust, as it turns out, appears to be the main driver in the company’s early, yet large, investment in video.

Uh oh, is this “branded entertainment”?

Now as many of you know I’m not a big fan of traditional, mass media “branding” advertising.   In fact, I view most of it as a poorly executed, glorified art form — not a science.   It thrives on waste.  How many times have you been in a meeting and fallen back on the comfortable excuse of, “well… it did help brand us.”  Unfortunately, many marketing failures are labeled “branding wins” when, in fact, the man or woman running the show (CEO, CMO, COO/CFO) knows better.

In many cases, a campaign’s tactics failed to produce a tangible, strategic business output.  It failed.  You can call it a win but they won’t when you leave the room.

I mention it because most use of video on the Web has been rather gratuitous.  They call it “branded entertainment.”  It has a tendency to be aimless eye-candy that marketers hope gets passed around and… and… and well… create attention/awareness, interest, desire and action (with the action piece being completely un-tracked and rather blindly assumed).

In this tough economy we need new, improved (ie. trackable, reliable, PROVEN) strategies not glorified tactics.  Some call it marketing science and it’s time has arrived.

Now I’m not suggesting Gordon was or is wasting his marketing budget.  What I AM suggesting is that the direct response metrics were left unclear to me and, perhaps, with good reason.  Maybe DrsFosterSmith.com is too early on to really use them or — heck — reveal them to the world.

Increased trust as a valid goal

Let’s assume “better trust” or “more trust” among customers (new and old) is a valid business output.  How tangible is it?  How measurable is it?  Heck, should it even be measured at all?  Now we’re getting into dangerous guru territory where some believe ROI to be a silly pipe dream.  But what if we could assign some tangible behaviors that customers demonstrate to “increased trust?”

Even more wild — what if we just assumed that part of a holistic marketing strategy was a foundation that must be built without expectation of measurement?

Gordon says…

“… we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Why so much content?  Trust.  When it comes to pets and doctors (veterinarians) it’s not about price.  It’s not about color, flavor, speed, accuracy or anything that would be desirable (aspirational).  It’s about TRUSTING someone to help you take care of your pet’s health, well-being or a disease.  Trust matters — in this case perhaps more than anything else.

Measurement: The details

Says Gordon, the future is all about…

“… a blending of a branding relationship development type strategy along with an ROI measurement.  The ROI will be much more difficult to measure in some respects. Certainly we can use analytics tools to find out what people are clicking through on and if they have watched a video and what they did and so on. But frankly some of that gets so granular, you can have data overload, that you’re better off looking at the larger picture to determine what’s going on.”

Now typically these kinds of comments fly red flags with me… but I’m starting to wonder at this point.  Gordon continues as I push him for details on WHAT he measures, why and what it proves…

“Are our sales moving up? Are people spending more time on the site? What’s actually happening? If we then try to drill down to every little item — at some point it becomes impractical apart from what some speakers will tell you at the Internet Retailer or show.

The first thing I study when I want to find out how we are doing is… what did we sell yesterday? What were our overall sales? What products were selling?”

Now at this point I was really starting to wonder, I’ll admit.  This sounds like a BRANDING campaign and perhaps so… one aimed at creating or fostering trust.  Gordon continues…

“Yes, we will look at email returns. Did this email do well? etc. Are people clicking through? What’s our click through rate? Those high level metrics are important so you have got a clue. But at the end of the day, if you have got all kinds of clever little analytical measurements that are telling you what people are clicking through and where they are going… well if you’re not selling anything that doesn’t matter.”

So I think you work from the other end of the pyramid, the sharp point of the pyramid being, ‘Did we sell stuff?’ Then drill down as far as you need to, to find out how you got there. Then stop before you drive yourself crazy.”

Ok… Gordon seemed to come back to measurement as being a worthwhile strategy at the end but it left me scratching my head a bit — but in fairness to Gordon and the company that’s just fine.  It sets us up to ask more questions later

User / customer generated video

And what about user generated content (UGC) — specifically video?  It would seem ripe for opportunity in the pet realm with all those cute cuddly little creatures of all sorts out there.  To my surprise Gordon said no.  His reasoning was remarkably sound and, not surprisingly, all about TRUST.

“Jeff, we will likely not get too much involved in that.. and part of the reason has to do with us being owned by veterinarians and people having that trust relationship with us regarding the information that they get.

We want to make sure that there are no misunderstandings about the veterinary pet care information that we provide. A misunderstanding could happen if we would have, let’s say, a customer quote something that isn’t the latest veterinary information from research and so on… have another customer read that and go, ‘Oh yeah, I should feed my dog X because customer Y said that’s the right thing to do,’ and maybe they didn’t read three entries later our analysis of, you know, ‘That’s actually not a good idea,’ kind of a thing.

I’ll give you just a quick example of something simple. We were on television here a few weeks ago. We brought pets down to Chicago’s In the Loop with iVillage. Had our veterinarians on, the question came up, ‘Is it OK to give milk to my cat?’  Of course, I’m from Iowa.  We grew up doing that. And one of the vets said, ‘Actually, you know, it’s really not a good idea because they can have digestive problems. It’s really not what you should be feeding them.’

So little things like that that seem to be so common knowledge but incorrect are the kinds of things that we would not want to have on the website.

So we probably won’t do that. Our goal is to brand us… and not the other customers. We may at some point have a forum… where people can interact with us, but the scale of that, at times, it becomes so huge that management becomes a challenge. We just started a photo contest this past week. Right now we’ve got 5000 photo entries already in one week, and we’ve got to manage those and determine the winners, and so on.  And I think ditto would happen with a forum.

Now, sounds like a really good marketing message to say, ‘Gordon, did you just hear yourself? If you can bring that many people to your site, wouldn’t you want to do that?’

Well, we do want to have them come but we want to have them be provided accurate information and not just have a cool Web 2.0 interaction with them . We want them to interact with information. At some point we might do the forum so they can interact with each other — I would say there’s some merit to that — but management’s part of the issue for us.

Candidly I think DrsFosterSmith.com’s approach is either a little from the hip or he is just holding back a bit.  In either case I hope Gordon might share more details with us in months ahead.  We marketers are living in historically difficult times where new tools are needed for marketing in the new economy.  As my loyal followers know, I have a decent nose for sniffing out marketing waste and I’ll continue to share my research moving forward.

Still not got your fill of Gordon?  Check out this short interview he was good enough to give me recently while in Chicago.

Excerpted from:
Using Video to Drive Sales in a Down Market

Trust toward business has reached a new lows:  10% of Americans now say they trust big business (Financial Trust Index). 77% say they refuse to buy from a company they distrust (2009 Edelman Trust Barometer). But the truth is that before the current economic crisis people had already lost faith in business.  Contrast this with the mid-1950s, when about 80% of U.S. adults said that big biz was a good thing for the country and believed that business required little or no change.

Remember part 1 and part 2 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs Foster Smith? It’s been a while and I’m back to wrap up sharing what I was able to learn from this pioneer of e-commerce video.  I probed Gordon for details on the strategic, long-term approach he’s using to drive multi-channel sales with video.  In all honesty I did not learn of the rigid, measured direct-response strategy that I had expected. What I did uncover was how important trust is to a company that is, yes, financially precise and metrics-driven.  Trust, as it turns out, appears to be the main driver in the company’s early, yet large, investment in video.

Uh oh, is this “branded entertainment”?

Now as many of you know I’m not a big fan of traditional, mass media “branding” advertising.   In fact, I view most of it as a poorly executed, glorified art form — not a science.   It thrives on waste.  How many times have you been in a meeting and fallen back on the comfortable excuse of, “well… it did help brand us.”  Unfortunately, many marketing failures are labeled “branding wins” when, in fact, the man or woman running the show (CEO, CMO, COO/CFO) knows better.

In many cases, a campaign’s tactics failed to produce a tangible, strategic business output.  It failed.  You can call it a win but they won’t when you leave the room.

I mention it because most use of video on the Web has been rather gratuitous.  They call it “branded entertainment.”  It has a tendency to be aimless eye-candy that marketers hope gets passed around and… and… and well… create attention/awareness, interest, desire and action (with the action piece being completely un-tracked and rather blindly assumed).

In this tough economy we need new, improved (ie. trackable, reliable, proven) strategies not glorified tactics.  Some call it marketing science and it’s time has arrived.

Now I’m not suggesting Gordon was or is wasting his marketing budget.  What I am suggesting is that the direct response metrics were left unclear to me and, perhaps, with good reason.  Maybe DrsFosterSmith.com is too early on to really use them or — heck — reveal them to the world.

Increased trust as a valid goal

Let’s assume “better trust” or “more trust” among customers (new and old) is a valid business output.  How tangible is it?  How measurable is it?  Heck, should it even be measured at all?  Now we’re getting into dangerous guru territory where some believe ROI to be a silly pipe dream.  But what if we could assign some tangible behaviors that customers demonstrate to “increased trust?”

Even more wild — what if we just assumed that part of a holistic marketing strategy was a foundation that must be built without expectation of measurement?

Gordon says…

“… we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Why so much content?  Trust.  When it comes to pets and doctors (veterinarians) it’s not about price.  It’s not about color, flavor, speed, accuracy or anything that would be desirable (aspirational).  It’s about trusting someone to help you take care of your pet’s health, well-being or a disease.  Trust matters — in this case perhaps more than anything else.

Measurement: The details

Says Gordon, the future is all about…

“… a blending of a branding relationship development type strategy along with an ROI measurement.  The ROI will be much more difficult to measure in some respects. Certainly we can use analytics tools to find out what people are clicking through on and if they have watched a video and what they did and so on. But frankly some of that gets so granular, you can have data overload, that you’re better off looking at the larger picture to determine what’s going on.”

Now typically these kinds of comments fly red flags with me… but I’m starting to wonder at this point.  Gordon continues as I push him for details on what he measures, why and what it proves…

“Are our sales moving up? Are people spending more time on the site? What’s actually happening? If we then try to drill down to every little item — at some point it becomes impractical apart from what some speakers will tell you at the Internet Retailer or show.

The first thing I study when I want to find out how we are doing is… what did we sell yesterday? What were our overall sales? What products were selling?”

Now at this point I was really starting to wonder, I’ll admit.  This sounds like a branding campaign and perhaps so… one aimed at creating or fostering trust.  Gordon continues…

“Yes, we will look at email returns. Did this email do well? etc. Are people clicking through? What’s our click through rate? Those high level metrics are important so you have got a clue. But at the end of the day, if you have got all kinds of clever little analytical measurements that are telling you what people are clicking through and where they are going… well if you’re not selling anything that doesn’t matter.”

So I think you work from the other end of the pyramid, the sharp point of the pyramid being, ‘Did we sell stuff?’ Then drill down as far as you need to, to find out how you got there. Then stop before you drive yourself crazy.”

Ok… Gordon seemed to come back to measurement as being a worthwhile strategy at the end but it left me scratching my head a bit — but in fairness to Gordon and the company that’s just fine.  It sets us up to ask more questions later

User / customer generated video

And what about user generated content (UGC) — specifically video?  It would seem ripe for opportunity in the pet realm with all those cute cuddly little creatures of all sorts out there.  To my surprise Gordon said no.  His reasoning was remarkably sound and, not surprisingly, all about trust.

“Jeff, we will likely not get too much involved in that.. and part of the reason has to do with us being owned by veterinarians and people having that trust relationship with us regarding the information that they get.

We want to make sure that there are no misunderstandings about the veterinary pet care information that we provide. A misunderstanding could happen if we would have, let’s say, a customer quote something that isn’t the latest veterinary information from research and so on… have another customer read that and go, ‘Oh yeah, I should feed my dog X because customer Y said that’s the right thing to do,’ and maybe they didn’t read three entries later our analysis of, you know, ‘That’s actually not a good idea,’ kind of a thing.

I’ll give you just a quick example of something simple. We were on television here a few weeks ago. We brought pets down to Chicago’s In the Loop with iVillage. Had our veterinarians on, the question came up, ‘Is it OK to give milk to my cat?’  Of course, I’m from Iowa.  We grew up doing that. And one of the vets said, ‘Actually, you know, it’s really not a good idea because they can have digestive problems. It’s really not what you should be feeding them.’

So little things like that that seem to be so common knowledge but incorrect are the kinds of things that we would not want to have on the website.

So we probably won’t do that. Our goal is to brand us… and not the other customers. We may at some point have a forum… where people can interact with us, but the scale of that, at times, it becomes so huge that management becomes a challenge. We just started a photo contest this past week. Right now we’ve got 5000 photo entries already in one week, and we’ve got to manage those and determine the winners, and so on.  And I think ditto would happen with a forum.

Now, sounds like a really good marketing message to say, ‘Gordon, did you just hear yourself? If you can bring that many people to your site, wouldn’t you want to do that?’

Well, we do want to have them come but we want to have them be provided accurate information and not just have a cool Web 2.0 interaction with them . We want them to interact with information. At some point we might do the forum so they can interact with each other — I would say there’s some merit to that — but management’s part of the issue for us.

Candidly I think DrsFosterSmith.com’s approach is either a little from the hip or he is just holding back a bit.  In either case I hope Gordon might share more details with us in months ahead.  We marketers are living in historically difficult times where new tools are needed for marketing in the new economy.  As my loyal followers know, I have a decent nose for sniffing out marketing waste and I’ll continue to share my research moving forward.

Still not got your fill of Gordon?  Check out this short interview he was good enough to give me recently while in Chicago.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read the original:
Using Video to Drive Sales in a Down Market with Trust

• What type of content do you have? People interact differently on articles, forum, and video sites, for example, so think about how people will be interacting on your site.
• Where is visitor attention likely to be focused? You should place ads where your users are most likely to look, but as Ricardo Prada mentioned in week two of this series, make sure that they won’t get in the way of users trying to complete tasks on your site.
• How can you integrate ads into an area without getting in the way of your users? You can view a heat map we’ve put together showing where ads perform well, and keep in mind that above the fold ads and ads close to primary content tend perform better.
• Don’t forget to think about how advertisers would like to appear. If you can make your site more appealing to advertisers, while keeping the above tips in mind, you’re more likely to be able to attract advertisers and placement targeted ads.

Step 2: Set up custom channels

Custom channels will help you figure out how different ad units are performing based on a number of variables you can choose, like placement, size, and color. Create a channel for individual ad units and categorize them to see how they’re performing. For example, you can track your leaderboard and medium rectangle to see which performs better, and use this information in step four below. Custom channels will also allow you to track and measure results from your optimizations.

Step 3: Optimize your ad unit design and placement

The next step is to look at color, position, and size of your ad units and optimize these for user experience, advertiser experience, and performance. We’ve found that the medium rectangle (300 x 250), wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and the leaderboard (728 x 90) tend to perform best. You can also opt in to image ads to receive rich media and video ads, which tend to perform well too. It’s important that you implement your ads in a consistent manner and in a way that is desirable to advertisers. Use colors effectively. Blend ads in, but not too much that users don’t see them. Borderless ads tend to work well, as does highlighting the link and URL. Test different colors and placements, and then keep the changes that perform best.

Step 4: Maximize revenue from multiple units

We recommend adding multiple ad units to your pages, while still keeping the user experience in mind when deciding on placements. You can use custom channel reporting to determine which ad unit performs best, and structure your page to optimize performance based on that. The highest paying ad we have for your site will be shown in the first ad unit that shows up in your HTML code. If you have a leaderboard at the top, but learn with custom channel reporting that a medium rectangle halfway down the page is outperforming it in terms of CTR and eCPM, try putting the medium rectangle first in your HTML code. You can do this by switching the location in the HTML if you’re comfortable editing the code, or by changing the actual location of the leaderboard on the page.

Step 5: Track and measure results

The last step is to understand whether your optimizations have made a difference. Here, use the custom channels you set up earlier to generate reports on your different ad units. Generate reports on your custom channels and group results by channel (remember, this depends on how you’ve set them up) to see how different sizes, colors, and placements are performing. You can also look at placement targeting reports to see which ad units are receiving placement-targeted ads, and if they’ve resulted in improved performance.

We hope these steps and tips are informative, and strongly encourage you to take the time to try an optimization on your own.

Additional Resources:

• We’ll be re-hosting the optimization webinar from last month again on Thursday, July 23 at 11am PST. Sign up if you’re interested in attending.
• You can also see valuable information in Analytics after linking your AdSense and Analytics accounts.
• For more advanced optimization, you can use Website Optimizer to run live experiments based on ad placement, format and more.

Posted by Talia Brodecki – AdSense Product Marketing

Source:
Speeding up: Increasing your revenue potential

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successful as possible through tools such as Analytics and Website Optimizer. – Ed.

Online video has become increasingly popular and it is now recognized as a very powerful medium for delivering a message. As more and more media companies and advertisers are embracing online video, and millions of people are uploading their own videos every day, building a following and reaching your target audience can be very challenging. We developed a free analytics tool, YouTube Insight, as one way to help you do just that. Since the launch of Insight just over a year ago, we’ve been adding more features to help you better understand how the YouTube community is interacting with your video and grow your audience.

Just like there is a “science” behind programming on TV, content owners and advertisers are becoming more sophisticated about how to gain optimal exposure for their content on YouTube. So how do you master this “science”? First, let’s start with the basics. Monitoring viewing trends through Insight’s “Views” tab can help you nail down the best time to upload your new videos. For example, Mondo Media uses Insight to monitor and predict surges in views of their strongest videos. They then time the launch of new episodes with these “waves” of traffic, making it easier for their existing audience to discover new favorites. Using Insight to increase their momentum on the site is one of the practices that have helped Mondo Media become the 6th most viewed YouTube Channel of all time.

Insight has even more sophisticated features, like the “Discovery” feature, which shows you how your viewers found your videos (i.e., through search, an embedded player, related videos or viral sharing). Just like with websites, figuring out how visitors are coming to your videos can help you grow your audience. Using “Discovery,” the band Weezer was surprised to find out that many of their followers were actually techies and not indie rockers: a large number of people had discovered their “Pork & Beans” video on YouTube through the embedded player on tech blogs. This finding led them to optimize their marketing strategy and shift funds in their budget to tech blogs for promoting their summer tour.

Using “Discovery,” you can also see which keywords are driving views and then advertise against these keywords using YouTube’s Promoted Video product. You can see exactly how effective this method of promotion is and optimize your a spend in the future.

Understanding which parts of your video people liked can be difficult, so we created the “Hot Spots” feature in Insight to show you the ups-and-downs of viewership for every single moment of your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video, meaning fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Understanding which parts of your video your audience likes enables you to make better content. The better the content, the more likely it is that viewers will send your video to their friends, kicking off the cycle of virality and helping you grow your audience.

There are countless ways to use the data gathered from Insight to improve your YouTube numbers. Someone using YouTube to share a video of their vacation can just as easily use these tools as an advertiser working on a major campaign. And with our latest addition to YouTube Insight, you will no longer have to rely exclusively on the information you can get from the features described above. Last week we opened Insight, making your data exportable into CSV files. CSV files are open-format files that organize data so it can be moved and analyzed using common spreadsheet software such as Google Docs and Microsoft Excel. Now you can view and manipulate your data any way you like. Looking for ideas? Try comparing the view count for different videos side by side, mapping out where your viewers are coming from over time, or comparing discovery sources by country.

Good luck to all the hopeful YouTube stars among you!

Posted by Tracy Chan and Kenny Stoltz, YouTube Product Managers

Read the original:
Step into the spotlight with YouTube Insight

The chart below shows all TV commercials that aired on the Google TV Ads platform August through November 2008. Each dot represents an ad, and they are lined up from left to right in order of their %IAR as compared to what we’d expect given other factors (e.g., time of day, network, etc). The red dots on the left represent ads where more audience tuned away than expected. The green dots on the right represent ads where more of the audience stayed tuned than expected. The black dots in the middle are “normal,” meaning there was no significant difference between the audience retention for those ads versus what you would expect based on historical data.

The next question we wanted to answer was how well this historical data could predict the future audience reaction. If we can use the past to predict the future, then we can get closer to putting relevant ads in front of TV viewers. So we selected one ad with relatively high audience tune-away (red dot) and one ad with relatively low tune-away (green dot) to run side-by-side on national television to test our findings. In the graph below, the diagonal line shows where audiences reacted the same to both ads. The points above that line represent airings when more of the audience stayed tuned to the ad that had previously retained audiences better. We learned audiences reacted predictably to the two ads.

Through our analysis of tuning data from millions of set-top boxes, we’re getting closer to matching the right ads to the right television audience. It takes a lot of processing power to make sense of the enormous amount of data, but the insights to be gleaned are very powerful. Not only are we able to offer advertisers better measurement and more accountability for their TV campaigns, our goal is to also create a better viewing experience for TV audiences by showing viewers what they want to see.

Posted by By Dan Zigmond, Technical Lead for Google TV Ads

More here:
Tuning in to TV data

If you run an e-commerce site or use AdWords to direct traffic to your business’ webpage, chances are you’re interested in knowing what visitors to your site are clicking on, what content interests these potential customers and what avenues brought them there. The more you know about how people engage with your site, the better you are able to design successful advertising campaigns to help grow your business.

In Latin America, online advertising is growing as more and more small businesses initiate an online presence and publicize their efforts through search and display advertising. But less than 5% of web properties throughout Latin America rely on analysis tools to improve their website’s performance. Last week, our offices throughout the region hosted several Analytics-themed events to give agencies and other clients a better look at several Google measurement tools that provide people with the means to analyze their site’s flow of data, interest and readership in order to build a better advertising campaign.

In Mexico City, advertisers got together to learn about Insights for Search, Ad Planner, YouTube Insights, Analytics, Sitemaps and Website Optimizer, as well as DoubleClick tools. Presentations were designed to give companies an in-depth look at the Google tools that can be helpful for planning their marketing budgets during an economic downturn. Being able to measure data on what content interests people and where consumers are searching for information can help advertisers be more selective about how they invest ad budget. Since the great majority of consumers go online for information before making a purchase, the goal of the seminar was to familiarize advertisers with tools that can increase the reach of their campaigns, while giving them a better idea of what works and what people are searching for.

Meanwhile, our Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik visited São Paulo and Buenos Aires to speak to clients about web analytics and how to make the most of online marketing through analyzing metrics (check out his recent post on bounce rate for related information). Avinash made web analytics fun and accessible with colloquial comparisons (referring sites as ‘BFFs’), and demonstrated how to optimize a website’s performance with changes in color and layout, among other things. He was accompanied by Google’s Latin America managing director Alexandre Hohagen, Brazil’s country manager Alex Dias, and Argentina’s country manager Adriana Noreña at a succession of events revolving around web metrics and website optimization.

The response and interest from customers and agencies to all of these events was indicative of the huge need for metrics and the ability to track ROI for their marketing investments, especially during these difficult times. For more information on Google Analytics tools, check out the Google Analytics Blog, the Website Optimizer Blog and the Conversion Room blog.

Posted by Alfonso Luna, Marketing Director, Latin America

See original here:
Analytics in Latin America

After you have your brilliant idea and are bringing it to the web, there are some critical factors that your website must feature to help you, the search engines and the visitors.
1) Analytics Tracking – It doesn’t matter if you have Google Analytics, Omniture or any other tracking tool. You want to understand where your visitors are coming from, and what actions they are taking when they are on your website.
2) HTML Site Map – This is an HTML page that simply lists all the pages on your website. This helps the search engines know about all of the pages on your site including the URLs that may not be discovered when the bots spider your site.
3) Keyword Research – Make sure you are adding the words people are searching for on the correct pages of your website. Keyword research will help you understand what search phrases are likely to bring the visitors who will take action on your website.
4) Test multiple browsers – Not all visitors will be using one browser. Make sure your website is seen how you want it to in all browsers possible.
5) Monitor errors – Run spider simulators on your website. This will tell you what information is wrong, what links are broken, and notify you of any issues the search engines may have.

Go here to read the rest:
Top 5 Reccomendations To Do When Launching A Website