I found it interesting this week to read What Celebrities Make For Twittvertising, which discussed the heavy payouts celebrities receive for tweeting about various products and brands. After reading this, I couldn’t help but think about how this relates to valuing a Facebook fan, so I decided to have some fun by identifying ways to truly value these celeb tweets…

Read the entire article on the Search Engine Land Blog…

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It seems like just a few months ago we were getting ready for the 2008 holidays, which makes it even harder to imagine that the year 2009 is quickly coming to an end. If you’re like many marketers, you’re wrapping up 2009 and already planning ahead for 2010.  As you’re closing out your 2009 files and looking for ways to add some structure to your pre-holiday workdays, take a few moments to follow these 10 tips for marketing success.

1. Do Some Analytics Housekeeping

The end of the year provides you with a great time to do a little analytics housekeeping, taking a step back and making sure that you’re basing your decisions on good data-something that’s extremely important and can also be somewhat difficult.  The first thing to do is ensure that your analytics and other tracking tags are present on every page of your site, so that you don’t miss out on an ounce of good data.

Next, test your conversions to make sure they are tracking accurately.  Literally ‘do the math’ to ensure that your analytics program tells you the same thing as your back-end CRM and e-commerce systems.  This might take some time, but it’s an investment in your analytics for the future, while also forcing you to do a ‘gut-check’ of your checkout process (or other conversion event).  A likely bonus is that you may find usability improvements.

2. Set Goals with Timelines

Setting goals is great, but setting a goal without an attached timeline is a risky proposition that could cost valuable time and money. Set your performance goals for your campaigns and monitor their progress throughout the prescribed timeframe.   For example, set a goal to decrease your cost per lead by 30% before the end of 2010, then monitor throughout the year to see if you are on track to meet your goal.  If your campaigns don’t achieve the goal or make sufficient progress, revise them or reexamine your goals.   Make sure your time frames are reasonable and give the campaigns time enough to perform, but if you don’t see improvement, don’t be afraid to shift the spend.

3. Create a Maintenance Schedule

Speaking of setting goals with timelines, ensure that one of your first goals is to take the time to improve your marketing on a daily or weekly basis.  The fact is that most of your marketing can be improved if you just spend a little time finding and fixing the things that are not working.  Certainly, there never seem to be enough hours in the day, which makes it even more important to plan and make time for analyzing, optimizing, reporting, learning and communicating.  If you make the time to do a little preemptive marketing maintenance, you’ll save time in putting out fires later on.

4. Analyze and Optimize Your PPC

Not all campaigns are created equally, and this is especially true of pay-per-click ads.  Rather than letting your ads run on autopilot, breaking even or being somewhat profitable, now is the perfect time to take a closer look at your PPC program.  Reorganize or remove your campaigns that aren’t performing well, tighten up your ad groups, tweak your ad spend and weed out the keywords and campaigns that simply aren’t working for you.  Trimming the PPC fat now will save you from getting a PPC stomach ache in the future.

5. Understand and Improve Your Creatives

The best way to understand and improve your creatives is by analyzing campaigns side by side across all search engines.  In this view, you’ll see consistencies among the top-performing creatives.  For example, is there a particular offer that does well, or is there a style of writing that seems to be resonating with the audience and drawing more clicks and conversions?  After reviewing these consistencies, optimize or rewrite any poorly-performing creatives.

6. Report on Measurable Actions

Sure, there is no shortage of metrics that you can report on, but just because it’s in a report doesn’t mean it has meaning to your marketing efforts.  Determine your business goals and then map them into measurable actions.  For example, if one of your business goals is to increase the number of interested clients on your mailing list, you’d want to track the number of people who sign up for your e-newsletter, the number of times your newsletter PPC ad is clicked on, and so on.

By mapping your goals to measurable actions, and then tracking the actions, you’ll have the information you need to determine if your programs and campaigns are on-track.  Use this information in your monthly and quarterly reports, as well as relying on it to help drive both daily and long-term marketing decisions.

7. Stay up to Speed

In case you haven’t noticed, in the world of online marketing, things change fast.  It is likely that social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook weren’t even on your radar (or were just on the edge of it) as you were planning for 2009.  Take the time to research the social networking resources, webinars, conferences and other offerings out there that may have an impact on your online marketing.  Ensuring that you’re plugged in and staying current will increase the chances of your marketing success.

8. Perform Regular Audits

On at least a quarterly basis, schedule time to step back and look at the big picture.  Review all of your marketing programs and how they fit together.  Are there additional opportunities to cross-promote a particular offer, or are your campaigns concentrating on one marketing message, but ignoring others?  Take the time to see what is working, what is not, and what has changed.  By reviewing and re-evaluating your goals, overall strategy and day-to-day tactics, you’ll be taking the right steps toward marketing success.

9. Accurately Attribute Credit

For many marketers, the thought of attribution is one that is overwhelming-marketers think that you must have the perfect attribution solution before you should even take the first step.  This simply isn’t true-some attribution is always better than no attribution.  Every day you postpone using some attribution model, whether it’s an even model, an even with exclusions model or a model that was custom-designed for your particular business-is a day that you are basing your marketing decisions on flawed data.  Don’t go another day without some sort of attribution model firmly in place.

10. Prove your Value

In this still-volatile economy, there’s a lot to be said for reminding your company of just how valuable you are to them and their bottom line.  As you’re making changes to your campaigns, shifting spend to save money and reworking creatives to increase conversions, make sure to take clear notes to share with your supervisors and other team members when the time is right.  By consistently improving your marketing and showing the results in clear business terms, you will easily be able to prove your value to your company.

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There have been numerous reports published over the years by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft that attempt to prove how the use of display advertising, when combined with search, can increase your overall campaign performance.

A recent report published by iProspect, Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Integration Study was featured in an article for MediaPost titled Study Confirms Display Ads, Paid Search Work in Concert. Robert Murray, iProspect’s CEO is quoted in the article, saying “Internet users are more likely to engage and/or eventually make a purchase from brands with which they are already familiar.” Display ads help breed familiarity. The article also reports findings that suggest that of the people that react to display ads,  31% of those people click on display ads, and 27% go to search engines to do a search related to the ad (brand, offer, product).

At ClearSaleing, we have been tracking the relationship between display and search for over 2 years. We assemble advertising into what we call a purchase path, which is the chronological sequencing of display impressions, ad clicks, organic visits and direct visits that lead to conversions and/or non-conversions or abandoned paths. When we analyze the purchase paths of our clients that use display and search advertising, and specifically look at the types of searches they do after being exposed to display, we learn something very interesting.

Based on our observations, the combination of display advertising and paid search can indeed reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA). Our analysis shows that the most common type of search by a user after being exposed to a display ad is a branded search. We have found that with some of our clients, upwards of 50% of the searches that occur after being exposed to a display ad are brand searches.  A brand search is a search for your company name, a misspelling of your company name, or a typo of your company name that leads a consumer to click on your sponsored listing (your PPC ad).  Brand ads are almost always the cheapest PPC ads that you can buy. Many companies have trademark restrictions on other companies bidding on their branded terms, and for those that don’t have trademark protection, they are still likely to pay a very low CPC when compared to their non-branded PPC ads.

For example, if you were in the auto insurance business and are not running display ads, the most common search for your products is likely “auto insurance,” which is a keyword with a per-click cost between $15 and $30+ historically. Our research shows purchase paths that are all search-based typically start with a general term, and often include a second search for a non-branded term, and then close with a branded term. They also go from a general term to a branded term and then convert. The CPA, when considering the entire purchase path in this case, typically runs in excess of $30 to $60+.

If this advertiser ran display ads in addition to search ads, the search the consumer most often does after seeing that display ad is for a brand term. When we measure just the cost of the advertising in these converting paths, the cost for a banner impression is just fractions of a penny, and the cost of a click on a branded term is typically no more than $.25. Therefore, the cost of these converting paths can be as low as $.25 versus a cost of $30 to $60 for the previously stated search-only converting Paths.

By adding display to your campaigns today, you will create new paths for your consumers to navigate, which are much cheaper than search-only paths, and this can allow for your CPA to decrease and searches for your cheaper brand terms to increase.

Originally published here on Search Engine Land website

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When I speak to lead generation marketers at conferences and shows, the first thing I tell them is to get beyond a Cost Per Lead (CPL)  metric and to tie their closed deals back to the lead and back to the ads that produced the lead. Once they’re able to do this, they can then judge the performance of their ads in terms of profit and loss versus deeming an ad to be successful just because it produced a cheap lead.

One question that often arises from lead gen marketers is, ‘How do I optimize ads when I have a long sales cycle?’ This question comes from two types of companies:

1.       Those with long sales cycles and few conversions over the course of a year, like an individual realtor.

2.       Those with long sales cycles and a higher volume of orders, like a large B to B, such as SAP.

The challenge that affects the first group is that they don’t have enough conversions during the course of the year to have enough statistically sound data to judge ads solely on the basis of their ability to produce profit.

The challenge that the second group has is not as difficult as the first group. When launching new campaigns or ads, however, they still have to wait for weeks, months or longer for the sales cycle to be completed.  In the meantime, how should they determine if their new ads are having the desired impact or not when it is too soon to be able to tie conversions and profit back to the ads?

In the absence of having conversion data to make optimization decisions, the next best method which satisfies the two examples above is to develop a lead scoring system or lead scorecard. A lead scorecard is a method for assigning value to a lead to determine how qualified that lead is. It could be represented in terms of an actual score (10 being most qualified, 1 being least qualified) or it could be scored according to the stage of the sales process that the lead resides in (New, First Call, Completed Demo, Sent Out Proposal, Closed Won/Lost).

An online ad is good if it produces a qualified lead. An online ad is bad if it produces an unqualified lead. A qualified lead is one that is from a company or person in your target market, they have the means to afford the product/service you’re selling, they are looking to make a decision in an acceptable timeframe, and they are responsive to your sales team’s phone calls and correspondence.

With your lead scorecard in place, you can now begin to make optimization decisions based on the quality of a lead that is generated from your advertising versus simply looking at the cost per lead or waiting until enough sales have occurred to make a statistically sound decision. For example, a realtor should determine that an ad is successful if the leads that came from it took their phone call, setup a face-to-face appointment to see houses, were approved for a loan, and were looking to buy in a reasonable timeframe.

When you are a lead gen marketer, each sale requires two things. First, a lead must be generated, and secondly, the sales person has to do an effective job of selling. If you find you are generating a ton of qualified leads, but are not converting enough to sales, you most likely have a sales problem and not an advertising problem. All lead gen marketers can ask is for their advertising to produce qualified opportunities. If we focus on CPL, we are ignoring quality and are solely focused on quantity. It is important to remember that leads do not pay the bills. Qualified leads, when combined with a skilled sales team do. Make sure you are generating qualified leads and have the right sales team in place, and you will be a successful lead gen marketer.