Are SEO’s and PPC experts more effective at driving referral traffic to a web site from Twitter than SMM specialists? That could be the conclusion based on data I’ve collected from a series of polls, so far.
A few weeks ago I started running some lists on this blog. My goal was to thank so many great contributors for posting relevant and useful information which would be useful to anyone engaged in online marketing. Some people are established, and well known. There were five lists SEO, PPC, SMM, Links, and Cross-Channel (meaning they fit in 2+ categories).
I’ve known many of these people for years, since before I started Eightfold Logic. I used a vote driven format, because I know polls always draw attention, but also because I thought their might be some interesting data to report. After a couple of system crashes, I’ve finally completed compiling the data and expect to begin publishing the results next week.
While I’ll publish the detailed lists later, I wanted to share out some interesting summary data in the meantime, and get your thoughts and input on a surprising result. Perhaps most interestingly to me: why is it that tweets by SMM specialists in support of the list of Social Marketers generated the lowest click through rates?
This first chart shows how many unique individuals posted, or reposted, a link on Twitter promoting each channel’s list. As you can see, the greatest volume of unique activity was for the Cross Channel and SEO lists. This total is not the number of tweets, but rather the number of unique individual who tweeted about the lists, and used Bit.ly for url shortening purposes. I selected just the bit.ly tweets as it’s simple to track.
This is where it gets interesting. Despite the unique activity levels for the SMM and PPC lists, the Social Marketer’s self-promotions drew the lowest average number of referrals per tweet. Could it be that SEO’s and PPC’s are the most effective Tweeters?
I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts as to why this is.
It’s been quite interesting watching the response to the lists about online marketers that I started published two weeks ago. . There have been over 3,000 voter submissions in the last week. That’s a lot more than I ever expected. Additionally, I’ve received many text messages, voicemails, DM’s, blog comments, and emails with suggestions of who else could be included on the lists; I appreciate all these notes.
Some people also chose to send me their own names for inclusion. One person appears to have submitted their name for inclusion ~50 times! Fortunately for you, I’m not publishing your name, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are. You’re claiming to be an Internet Marketer of some skill: Do you honestly not know that it’s easy to determine if traffic repeatedly originates from the same places or computers?
Other than the notes from a couple of manic individuals repeatedly suggesting themselves, lots of people sent me some great suggestions. I’ve been trying to follow-up on them by reading things by and about these contributors. There are some valuable resources I’m discovering, or re-discovering. Thank-you! Some of the useful suggestions are found in the blog comments of the appropriate posts.
The suggestions I’ve received go to the point of the series. It’s not been about who gets the most votes, but, that said, I will publish lists thereof. The attention seeking has been for all these valuable contributors whom I wanted to recognize via this forum. Some of the people on the lists are already well known, and justifiably so. Others are not well known yet, but they provide great information about different facets of online marketing, and should be a resource that anyone with any level of interest in the space can turn to for insights.
I do appreciate all the attention that these lists have generated, and hope that people will share the results widely – that only goes to accomplish the goal of providing these people recognition.
As for the voting; it’s been really interesting to see whose inputs are heavily valued, despite their not being common industry names. It’s also been extremely interesting to observe which channels have been driving the most traffic via social media, and other sources, as well as observing which channel’s traffic has the best user behavior once they visit the site. I’ll likely have a few posts coming out reporting on user behavior trends. Quite interesting really! For instance, as it stands right now, the day of the social media experts tweets drove the lowest RT and clickthrough activity per post or mention. Perhaps that’ll change before the lists close…
Finally, there have been two individuals who received no votes. (Bet you want to know who, eh?) I was shocked at who they were, and presume it’s because their communities did not overlap as heavily with the search or social marketplace community represented here. Hopefully they’ll learn about these lists before I close them.
In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the lists of great contributors (or voted), please do so now at:
Over the last few days I’ve been publishing lists of people I read or whose online marketing comments I find useful / interesting. I hope you’ll add all these individuals to your bookmark list of people to turn to when you need advice across various search and online marketing disciplines.
The challenge with putting together any of these lists is to make sure that you don’t forget anyone. I have missed some along the way, and once I realized the error I added them to the appropriate list after publication.
There’s also some great contributors I wanted to note who write scant amounts themselves, but rather highlight great resources for others to read. Finally, there are some individuals who mainly contribute via public speaking engagements; they’re perhaps the most difficult to reference, as it’s hard for non-attendees to understand the context of the contributions.
On each of the earlier lists, I’ve had comments from people about why “XYZ” wasn’t on the list. In some cases it was an obvious error, in others, it’s because they fit on so many lists that I was saving them for this final one. The most obvious name in this category was Danny Sullivan. As I wrote in my first post, he really should be on everyone’s reading list! He contributes across so many areas, I could have included him throughout, so instead of listing him five times, I saved him for this list.
Today’s final list in this series is about amazing cross-channel contributors; I’ve tried to include mostly people who didn’t fit the other lists. Being on any of these lists reflects a very broad range of contributions to the industry. This list in particular is of people who have made contributions spanning multiple areas of online marketing. These people write authoritatively, OR, they provide commentary about areas of interest and point their listeners or readers in the direction of great, meaningful content. In the latter case, they’re like great filters for all of us, pointing people to the essential nuggets they should keep track of, but sometimes miss.
As this is the last list in the series, I’ll be closing voting on all the lists within a week, and then getting around to publishing some interesting results, with links to the places to find the best contributor’s content.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me: Richard Zwicky - zwicky@, tweet me @rzwicky, or leave a comment below.
If you’ve missed them, please read further down the blog for the prior lists of great online marketing contributors across SEO, PPC, SMM, and link-building!
Last week I began a series of posts to answer a question I keep getting asked by people entering the industry, attending conferences, or even veterans looking for new sources of information: Whose writings I have found useful, by discipline. On Friday, the post was about PPC experts, and on Thursday, SEO thought leaders. If you haven’t read those posts, please do, and please read what these people are saying.
By now, I hope you’ve read the other posts you’ll know the point of this series is that it’s easy to list off a few names, but there’s an incredible span of knowledge out there and experts in many different areas. Everyday single day, there’s great new content being published, and I want to share with you whose contributions I regularly find to be useful and valuable. While they may not all publish regularly, what they do share is practical and should either makes you consider something new, or provide you with insights as to how to do something ever better!
Of my list, who’s your Top 5, and who am I missing out on?
Unfortunately for some, it can seem to be when you put your trust in the wrong hands. On Monday, (May 2, 2010), a well-known SEO - Rae Hoffman, also known as sugarrae, wrote an excellent piece demolishing a poorly informed “insights into SEO” type article about why Big Brands don’t Rank. I’m not going to dive into the details of that article; if you haven’t already done so, you can read it for yourself (and make sure to read Rae’s as well to understand how off base it was).
The point is bad SEO analysis and advice continues to plague online marketing, and unfortunately some of the bad advice sometimes comes from individuals or firms that could be considered authorities. Bad advice of the kind published in the Big Brands article on Monday immediately undermines credibility of quality SEO, and makes all businesses more skeptical and cautious about investing in this area of online marketing.
The reality is, proper SEO is not bullshit. It’s not witchcraft, and great SEO’s don’t really practice their dark art doing things to web pages and web sites that are beyond the scope of anyone without years of insights and training. I know tons of great SEO’s who don’t have years of experience, and some great SEO’s who have operated under the radar, unrecognized for years. There’s also some well known individuals associated with the industry who are not great SEO’s, but they are great marketers. The reality is:
Great SEO’s don’t care about just driving traffic; they work to drive up conversions, or increase branding.
Great SEO is not just about the html on the page, it’s also about off-page (links), and the on-page content which drives conversions or awareness.
Great SEO is not an IT project; it’s customer acquisition, branding and sales. Why does marketing let it be shoved into the status of an IT project? That’s a warning sign of a company that doesn’t understand the value of marketing online.
Great SEO is a component of Online Marketing. Just like PPC, social, links, display, email, and even your own web site.
Most great SEO’s won’t provide a 5-minute analysis that will solve all your site’s issues. Your site is likely far too messed up for a 5-minute solution!
Great SEO is not a one-off job. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is not credible.
Many great SEO’s won’t be found on “Top Ten” lists. Not because they’re not qualified, but because they don’t market themselves that way, and generally, they are too busy. (Plus most top ten lists are just linkbait)
A lot of great marketers write “Top Ten” lists: They want attention because it drives customer acquisition. Aaron Wall recently published a “Top Ten SEO’s” list, and lots of people blogged and tweeted about it, arguing about who was, and wasn’t on the list. The point was it drove lots of attention and traffic to Aaron’s site, which is what he set out to achieve. Great online marketing, and SEO for “Top Ten SEO’s”!
I could write out / share a lot of information and details around each of these points about great SEO, but there’s not much point. There are lots of great articles filled with very useful information published about SEO each day. Even better, there are great SEO’s out there who can provide you credible insights to act upon, and who can help your entire marketing strategy become much more effective.
Bad SEO, and poor quality advice is trouble. It’s trouble for everyone associated to online marketing, because bad advice and experiences makes companies gun-shy about investing again. When companies pull out of SEO they do so not because the channel doesn’t work, but because their implementation was badly done. When you pull out of SEO, you’re undermining yourself and marketing your business without a strong foundation. SEO is about more than just html, it’s about conversion optimization, site architecture, and optimizing the user experience: it’s sales and it’s marketing. Get rid of all that, and you’ve just thrown most of your business potential out the window.
You might wonder: what do I know? Well, After having spent over 10 years in this industry, I’ve had the chance to see, hear, and observe a heck of a lot. I’m lucky enough to be invited to speak at a lot of conferences worldwide, not because I’m always the most exciting speaker, but because I have relevant information and a lot of experience. I earned that experience doing online marketing for B2B sites with less than 100 search referrals / month (to start), and B2C ones with over 750,000 search referrals / day, and more importantly: thousands of conversions per day, (when I was done).
So what do I know? Maybe not much. But I do know this: SEO is NOT Bullshit.
To end 2009 we’ve updated and added to Enquisite’s Suite of search marketing tools and products. In fact, there are three major enhancements available to you today, plus a new product in pre-release:
The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
A Fresh New Look for a New Year
Feature Enhancement: Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
A really cool new product in pre-release
The Enquisite Performance Dashboard
We’ve added a new Enquisite Performance Dashboard to provide you with an at-a-glance overview of all your website’s critical search activity metrics as well as a summary of the performance data for each of your campaigns.
Marketers keep saying that 2010 is the year of the Dashboard, and if the prognosticators are correct, we’re kicking it off right with the first phase of a vital new report to help you understand what facets of your online marketing campaigns are driving your success.
By starting your day with a quick glance at your dashboard, you’ll be able to see trends in your search activity on a site-by-site basis, and know which campaigns you need to focus on for improvement and which ones you can refine to further enhance the performance of your business.
We recognize that everyone always wants slightly different information on their own dashboard, or to be able to pull information from one application into something else. We’ve got API’s for you!
A Fresh New Look for a New Year
When you next log into the Enquisite Performance Suite, you’ll immediately notice a dramatic improvement in the load speed, and look and feel of the platform. We are constantly listenening to your feedback on how to make the application easier to use, and have incorporated these suggestions into the new user interface. Among the many improvements of the new design, the new taskbar will greatly simplify the process of building and managing your campaigns. The overall navigation of the application has been streamlined to make the application easier to use and to improve your overall experience with it. Of course, none of that matters if the application doesn’t get faster too.
Enquisite is the fastest real-time analytics application on the market. Search marketers want to spend most of their time improving SEO and PPC campaigns, not analyzing and reporting. You need insights to act quickly. Enquisite is the only real-time search intelligence and decision support application on the market. With Enquisite, you don’t need to spend 80% of your time figuring out what to do, you can spend that time making a difference to the bottom line of your business!
Transferring Segment Data from Optimizer to Campaign
In our last release, Enquisite provided you with the ability to export segments created in Enquisite Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign. In the current release we enhanced this feature, giving you more options to where you export segment data from Optimizer to Enquisite Campaign.
This feature is found within the “Longtail” section of Enquisite Optimizer, which allows you to segment actual search referral traffic in real-time. Within the Longtail, you can partition actual search referral data on the fly by a variety of dimensions, including geographic location, referring search engine, actions, and conversions. Once you have created a segment of search referral traffic, Optimizer allows you to find the specific keyword phrases of searches from users of that segment that led them to your website. The feature now allows you to take these keywords that you discover and directly import them into either a new campaign or an existing campaign within Enquisite Campaign.
With this new feature, you can now quickly and easily take your analysis of past search referral data in Enquisite Optimizer and use it to better craft your future organic search-based campaigns within Enquisite Campaign.
A really cool new product in pre-release
As you are aware, Enquisite is a company founded on innovation. The very first beta product iteration back in 2005 included our patent-pending technology to extract, and report on keyword referral data based on the position the keyword was listed to browsers in the search engine results. That reporting was a break-through for search marketers hoping to report value more accurately to their clients, and also making it possible to be more sophisticated in optimization strategies. Now, with Google’s Personalized Search updates, that technology is more valuable than ever to search marketers.
That was our very first beta version. We’ve now got many very distinct patents-pending, some of which are incorporated into our Auditor, Optimizer and Campaign products. We’ve never sat still, and have continued to innovate to drive value for our clients.
This brings us to our latest product which we plan to release in Q1 of 2010. In the short term, this initial phase of the product will be available to partners as we ramp up. It’s a very cool, simple to use application which addresses the links pillar of SEO in a novel and fundamental manner. This product doesn’t compete with analysis apps like SEOmoz’s Linkscape. In fact, we’ll be incorporating some of SEOmoz’s data into ours to help your analysis: it offers search marketers something completely different, and incredibly valuable.
If links, and link-building are important to you, (yes they’re important for everybody), then you’ll need this product, or you’ll quickly be left in the dust by your competitors.
We’ll be announcing more around this new product as it approaches release in the New Year. If you want to be part of the pre-release as we move forward, let me know, and we’ll add you to the list as soon as possible.
So now, as of May 19, Enquisite Campaign, a monetization platform for organic search, is available. The application is a huge leap forward for the entire industry, and while some will seek to attack or ridicule the unknown, the unfamiliar, the big, or the challenging, we’re incredibly proud of it, the potential it represents, and the power it brings to SEOs, agencies, and to their clients.
Campaign is a platform to help SEOs, interactive agencies, and advertisers accurately calculate the performance and economic potential of any campaign opportunity, build more effective quotes, and run search campaigns more efficiently effectively. It provides visibility and understanding on where opportunities lie, identifies where uncharted and unearthed opportunities can be mined, discovers what’s been was missed or ignored, and calculates whether or not the opportunity is worth pursuing. It also provides detailed value reporting for organic search, just like the detail that already is available for paid search. In short, it changes the discussion relating to the value of an organic referral. Search agencies and their clients no longer need to debate the value of services. The discussion now center on performance, ROI, and incremental value generated.
There are a lot of features in Campaign that go beyond the original vision. These came from internal feedback from all members of our organization. Further, some additional features coming out within the month reflect early user request. Interestingly, skeptics of the model (who were also friends) whom we persuaded to try the system, despite their arguments that it couldn’t work, discovered that once they actually used Campaign, not only did it perform, but the business models ingrained into the system provided them incredible power and flexibility to evaluate opportunities, bid more effectively, and manage campaigns more efficiently. Every one of them is now an advocate! Some look at campaign as a new way to bid for, and win business; others look to it as a means to audit existing efforts, improve internal processes and efficiencies and to prove the value of the services they are delivering to their clients. Imagine, when a contract comes up for renewal, it’s possible to eliminate the discussion around “what was the value delivered?” With Enquisite Campaign, you know the value delivered, and by using it you will find new and better ways to deliver even more.
I am very proud that everyone at Enquisite has contributed to making Campaign possible and a reality. Some directly by coding the application, and others by providing feedback and suggestions. But, meaningfully, everyone has contributed to what we really think can be a “game changer.”
Together, we are proud to bring Enquisite Campaign to you. We look forward to your continuous feedback to make it perform even better for you and your clients.
As you probably remember, we released the first full version of Enquisite back in August. After our initial release, we didn’t miss a beat-we got right to work on tweaking existing features and adding new ones. I’m happy to tell you today about the first of a series of new features, all centered around the concept of turning data into action.
The first new feature we’re going to discuss is the Potential Analysis. I’d like to thank Andrew Shotland for providing an original version of the formula upon which we ended up basing the math behind this analysis feature on.
The Potential Analysis is found within the Longtail report in Enquisite. It looks at search phrases and calculates a value based on the following variables;
- Referral rates - The number of referrals for a given term
- Conversion rates - The number of conversions a particular term generates
- Page views - Average page views/visits for the phrase
- Time - In seconds, the average time/visit for the phrase
- Bounce ratio for the phrase - The number of sessions driven by the phrase where the visitor left a page or site without visiting any other pages before a session timeout occurred or the total number of sessions driven by the phrase during an interval.
- Activity - in relation to the other terms, and outcomes
Two things worth pointing out:
- A bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a session timeout occurs (we set this to 15 minutes).
- There’s a known issue when it comes to sample size. The larger the sample size, the higher the accuracy of the analysis. In other words, the more referrals, the more accurate the analysis.
Potential Analysis runs automatically and is displayed next to the appropriate column in your Longtail reports. By default, it’s turned on to show you the potential of your keywords. The way it works is simple. There are four levels of potential: High; Medium; Low; and None. A keyword with high potential has a good chance of keeping visitors on your site longer, looking at more pages. Keywords with no potential have virtually no chance of keeping a visitor’s interest.
But why does this matter? Well, for one thing, it helps you make better choices. If you’re interested in selling advertising on a page and are wanting to optimize that page to gain visitors, isn’t it good to know which terms are worth optimizing for? Think about it from a longtail perspective: If you have multiple variations of a phrase driving all traffic, the Potential Analysis will show you the phrase that will have the best ROI for you-in one simple box.
Now think of potential in relation to actions or conversions. Using Potential Analysis, you’ll be able to decide which phrases to optimize (or ignore) even if you have multiple converting phrases arriving on a particular web page from search referrals. This kind of analysis will help you take the guesswork out of the process and make quicker, more effective decisions.
Welcome to 2009… where, like last year, I’m tempted to use the first line of this space to repeat my refrain of “I’m sorry for not writing more often.” I really am. And while I won’t go so far as to swear that I’ll write more blog posts in 2009, I do think that my schedule will make it a bit easier to get some blogging done.
I think that this year will be different, for a variety of reasons-the most interesting of which I should be able to share with you sometime after mid-January. Keep your eyes on this space, as a lot of last year’s hard work is soon to be unveiled.
Exciting things are happening around Enquisite, not the least of which is the recent addition of several new major features being added to Enquisite Pro. Over the past several months, we’ve completed 3 updates: first came the Opportunities Report, followed by the Potential Analysis functionality, and just last week, Map Overlays. Rather than describe all three right here, I’m going to let the suspense build a bit-I’ll give you the scoop on each feature individually in upcoming blog posts.
But first, a sneak peek at the next major update we’re tackling: our new Links report. Rand Fishkin has been eagerly (and somewhat patiently) waiting a seemingly infinite amount of time for this one-and it’s almost here. Though it’s still in production, we’ve shown it to a few folks and the general reaction to it is that they’re blown away. The Links Report will be delivered over the course of several iterations, with additional functionality being added as programming on it is completed. The first piece you’ll receive will be reporting, and the second starts into analysis. Right now, everything is on track for this to start coming out during January.
Anyhow, Happy New Year to everyone. You’d better strap on your seatbelts-we’re all in for one heck of a ride in 2009!
A lot of people focus in on how to get refunds from Google or Yahoo for Click Fraud issues. Google doesn’t always call it click fraud, they often call them invalid clicks, and when they catch “invalid clicks” they pro-actively discount your bill accordingly. They don’t catch everything, but they do try hard. Yahoo! does the same thing, but less obviously. They don’t actually show you how many invalid clicks you’ve received, they just don’t appear to bill you for every click.
In both cases there are defined processes for requesting refunds or more commonly, credits.
Completing the documentation to request a refund isn’t simple, trivial, or a speedy process, (unless you have PPC Assurance where it’s a one click process). In fact, it’s quite complicated. Rather than confusing matters by outlining processes for both Google and Yahoo!, I’ll focus on Google. They’re the 800lb gorilla which everyone cares about.
In Google’s case, to file a request for credits for clickthroughs you believe you were improperly billed for, you need to identify all the original referrals, which means figuring out which entry in your log file is the original referral, and isolating the unique Google Click ID (gclid). You then need to document everything possible about that click, as in the course of an investigation, Google’s team might ask you for a lot of data. Be prepared. They are just trying to be thorough.
One issue you’ll face is how to claim what. The obvious documentation on the web deals with “Invalid Clicks” Unfortunately, invalid clicks don’t always mean the same thing to you as they do to Google. Not all invalid clicks are Click Fraud. To you an invalid click might be a referral for an incorrect keyword match. These do happen, but you’re unlikely to notice them in a large campaign, as too many terms are flying across your screen. This type of mistake actually gets handled by a different department at Google. Challenging to navigate, that’s for sure.
It’s not that Google actually sets out to make it difficult to claim back a refund, or to get a credit for mistakes. Simply put, Google’ a big organization with responsibilities for different issues assigned to different groups. They are trying to be as efficient as possible, but these efficiencies don’t necessarily make processes simpler for you, or your clients. They simply need to be thorough.
Is it worth your while to manually track down all the errors? It depends on your cost per click, and your volume. Is it worth doing so automatically? Definitely. At a cost of 1% of campaign spend, knowing what’s going on, when things go wrong, and how to deal with them is invaluable. Knowing you can recoup more than that means the ROI is pretty simple to work out.
Observations from the Receiving End - Surprising Results in Poll Lists
August 4th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky
It’s been quite interesting watching the response to the lists about online marketers that I started published two weeks ago. . There have been over 3,000 voter submissions in the last week. That’s a lot more than I ever expected. Additionally, I’ve received many text messages, voicemails, DM’s, blog comments, and emails with suggestions of who else could be included on the lists; I appreciate all these notes.
Some people also chose to send me their own names for inclusion. One person appears to have submitted their name for inclusion ~50 times! Fortunately for you, I’m not publishing your name, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are. You’re claiming to be an Internet Marketer of some skill: Do you honestly not know that it’s easy to determine if traffic repeatedly originates from the same places or computers?
Other than the notes from a couple of manic individuals repeatedly suggesting themselves, lots of people sent me some great suggestions. I’ve been trying to follow-up on them by reading things by and about these contributors. There are some valuable resources I’m discovering, or re-discovering. Thank-you! Some of the useful suggestions are found in the blog comments of the appropriate posts.
The suggestions I’ve received go to the point of the series. It’s not been about who gets the most votes, but, that said, I will publish lists thereof. The attention seeking has been for all these valuable contributors whom I wanted to recognize via this forum. Some of the people on the lists are already well known, and justifiably so. Others are not well known yet, but they provide great information about different facets of online marketing, and should be a resource that anyone with any level of interest in the space can turn to for insights.
I do appreciate all the attention that these lists have generated, and hope that people will share the results widely – that only goes to accomplish the goal of providing these people recognition.
As for the voting; it’s been really interesting to see whose inputs are heavily valued, despite their not being common industry names. It’s also been extremely interesting to observe which channels have been driving the most traffic via social media, and other sources, as well as observing which channel’s traffic has the best user behavior once they visit the site. I’ll likely have a few posts coming out reporting on user behavior trends. Quite interesting really! For instance, as it stands right now, the day of the social media experts tweets drove the lowest RT and clickthrough activity per post or mention. Perhaps that’ll change before the lists close…
Finally, there have been two individuals who received no votes. (Bet you want to know who, eh?) I was shocked at who they were, and presume it’s because their communities did not overlap as heavily with the search or social marketplace community represented here. Hopefully they’ll learn about these lists before I close them.
In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the lists of great contributors (or voted), please do so now at:
Search Engine Optimization Professionals
Pay-Per-Click Marketing Experts
Social Media Marketing Specialists
Link Building Masters
Amazing Cross-Channel Online Marketing Contributors
I’ll hopefully start publishing results next week.
Richard / @rzwicky
Tags: link building, linking strategies, links, marketer, marketers, Marketing, metrics, ppc, search, SEM, SEO, SEO Link Building, Social Link Building Marketplace, social marketing
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