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If you’re in internet marketing, metrics and data are your part life (or at least they should be.) Permit me to be overly buzzwordy, but using data driven decisions to increase ROI should be a goal. However, understand and interpreting data is what separates the good from bad decisions. In the fast paced world of the internet, people are all to eager to jump on the latest fad in fear that we might miss some incredible opportunity.

Compete, Inc. has released information that shows that Facebook now directs more traffic Google. If you haven’t been paying attention for the past year, every month somebody declares that Facebook is the new Google, and as a person that has chronic ‘this-is-too-good-to-be-true’ syndrome, I don’t buy it.

Here’s why, and this is a shocker, because it’s not a data driven decision. It’s also nothing new, and it’s been said before. People using Facebook or social media aren’t looking to be sold to, they are looking to see what their friends are up to. Aaron Wall said it best, Social Media traffic does not buy.

When people search for something they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. So while Social Media gets more traffic, it doesn’t convert. Traffic by itself is worthless. I’d rather have 1000 unique visits per month with a 10% conversion rate than 10,000 visitors with 0% rate.

B-b-b-ut branding… conversations with the customer… my excuse to use twitter at work!? Sure, those are good points (ok, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad), and any company’s marketing mix should include Social Media efforts, but as lead generation activity, SoMe falls flat compared to search.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go get all these buzzwords off me.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ‘3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.

I thought I was doing a good thing. I appeased the mighty Google god; I listened to Matt Cutts; I made W3C-compliant pages. But Google hates me for listening just as much as they would hate me if I disobeyed all the rules. Either way, what it amounts to is that I can’t try to make a great page or a horrible page.

While I’ve been away a long time, I have not been out of the loop — quite the contrary. I started a search marketing internship and have been learning quite a lot of information from my new bosses. One thing I have found out about the mysterious world of SEO is that I knew a lot more than I thought I did – but oh, do I have a lot to learn.

After diving into this position, eager to learn as much as I could one thing has become abundantly clear: I don’t get Google, and I think that’s their intention. For one thing, let’s start with a concept known as LinkJuice. I’m not sure where the term originates but every time I hear it I flash back to high school and hear Nelly’s “Pimp Juice.” Yeah, I both hate the term and laugh every time I hear it. LinkJuice basically is this weird value that Google and other search engines associate with links to and from other sites. If you have an incoming link from, say, Microsoft.com, the value is quite high and your search engine ranking supposedly improves. However, if you have a link from, say, buycheappills.com, there is no value coming in and it does nothing for you.

Where this becomes controversial is in the concept of paid links. Way back when SEO got started, bad SEOs, or “black hats,” tried to game the system and would exchange links for cash. Google realized this and quickly started to crack down on it. One of the ways this is combated is using “nofollow” which basically removes any of the aforementioned LinkJuice. So, to be a good guy, if you were given money for a link you were supposed to use “nofollow” so that a domain wouldn’t get any juice it tried to pay for. The idea is that it’s supposed to keep the Web honest.

Well great, but now you’re getting into some gray areas. Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media points out that if Apple were to send you a new Mac Book to blog about, that constitutes as a paid link. However, if Mom and Pop bakery is handing out free cupcakes and you tweet or blog about it, it isn’t a paid link. Obviously Mom and Pop don’t intend to get links (or at least for this argument they don’t), but they are giving you product just the same as Apple. So really what Google wants to go after is intent – but how do you measure intent? Moreover, at the Google I/O conference, Google handed out free G1s to attendees who went out and blogged about it or sold it on eBay. Isn’t the LinkJuice and publicity Google got from that paid? As far as I’ve read, there was no “please make every link ‘nofollow’” from Google.

As if to add further confusion about the way Google works, rumors have it that they are considering changing how they value “nofollow.” Currently, if you have three outgoing links on your Web page then each link gets 1/3 of the available LinkJuice. If you use “nofollow” on one, then the remaining two get 1/2 each, and so on. The fear and rumor is that Google is changing it so that no matter what you use “nofollow” on, the LinkJuice doesn’t redistribute. In other words, if you have three sites and one uses “no-follow,” then the two remaining sites would still get 1/3 each instead of getting 1/2. What’s the big deal? Well, if you’re going off the earlier example of paid vs. non-paid links, somebody is getting hosed.

If you go to mom and pop bakery, review their cupcakes and blog about it, they’ll be getting less of the normal share of LinkJuice and a portion of your LinkJuice goes into thin air. It effectively demerits the authority of your site. It’s confusing because it’s my understanding of “nofollow” that it was supposed to allow Webmasters to give the most applicable share to content generated sans fees or gain by the author, basically “honest content.”

The past few weeks of research and work combined with the few events that have or might take place have left me wondering exactly what the heck is the whole idea behind this game. It’s been said by Seth Godin that your content is your SEO, and that is certainly true. An SEO shouldn’t be trying to game Google and scam the system but Google does ask you to do a few things to provide clean honest content – and then ignores it and treats all SEOs like they are evil. Leading me to ask: What the Google?

Time Warner just doesn’t get it. Recently, the cable and internet provider announced it’s tiered data plans. The base price on which bandwidth you want. For $15 you get a 1GB bandwidth. If stream more than 3 hours of video a month, you will quickly reach that limit. Ultimately, you will be paying $150 a month to get “unlimited” use of the internet. Ridiculous, right? You’re not alone, even the government is scratching its head.

Thankfully, the government is starting to take notice. New York Rep. Eric Massa is attacking Time Warner’s tiered data plan calling it ‘AIG-style Greed.’ Massa points out that they can’t justify this cascading plans on the grounds that it is needed to remain profitable, it shows in their SEC filings. To me there are only a few reasons in my mind to consider regulating an industry, and one of them is a monopoly. Time Warner’s business model is still profitable for them, and the decreasing cost in providing internet connections means that it is under no danger. As Wired points out, Time Warner’s costs are going down by 12% this year, and subscribers are up 10%. What this is, is pure unfettered greed on Time Warners part. These tactics are nothing short of stupid. It’s another example of how big media corporations fail on developing innovative solutions to a changing market.

If you’re thinking about switching internet service providers, more power to you. However, it might not be an option for a lot of consumers in out lying areas who only get high speed service through Time Warner. Even if you have the option think about what it means for business. If you stream video, you essentially pay for it with ad revenue. That is, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are making money off of you by justifying higher price ads. This is not uncommon to how regular TV ads work. The more viewers of a show, the more money it is to buy an ad.

So what happens when people stop watching streaming video? They go back to cable, where Time Warner gets a better share of profits by being able to up-sell you on DVR’s and cable packages, not to mention make profit from the networks. So if you’re a network executive you should be really ticked off that Time Warner is going to start killing off your internet viewers. Whether or not you realize it, TV’s future is on the internet. Networks are able to control the entire channel, there’s no distribution costs to providers like Time Warner.

You can see where this is going. Time Warner can’t make a profit off streaming video as its business model is. So like print media it has decided to pass the cost to the consumer instead of trying to innovate to match the times. The difference is that given how needed the internet is, and the ubiquitous-ness of it, Time Warner knows it has the consumer by the short hairs.

This just echos everything we have seen from big business over at least the past decade. Companies need to understand that consumers control the market. It is no longer the case of “you buy what we make.” Give the consumer what they want! With social media, web analytics and the plethora of data available companies hsould have a much better idea of what will work than they ever have. Just in case they don’t get it, start with this simple rule: Pushing the cost to the consumer to make obscene profits doesn’t work! It might work in the short-term, but in the long-term you are doomed. If you don’t believe me ask: AIG, Chrysler, GM, OPEC, and about 75% of Wall Street. Truly innovative solutions are enormously successful. Capping bandwidth isn’t innovative, it’s an archaic reworking of the AOL-model of charging by the hour for internet use.

Read : Wired – Congressman Wants to Ban Download Caps

As I have pointed out before, one of the best things about marketing on the internet is the ability to watch the results of ads and to see what is working and what isn’t. However, as Andy Atherton at Advertising Age has pointed out, that’s really not the big selling point anymore. It’s not very surprising that the biggest selling point to market on the web is that it reaches the most customers. Yet companies still spend 95% of branding money in offline channels. It seems really odd that companies fail to act on web advertising with more capital. Now, there are those that notice it. Certainly, if you noticed CNN or the NY Times homepage this Monday were covered with a banner ad at the top half for Apple, and we have discussed how Porsche capitalized on mobile advertising.

As Atherton notes, the internet advertising industry has grown faster than any other medium before it. It still has ways to go. Is it the uncharted territory of high dollar web campaigns that have companies sticking to traditional but declining mediums like radio and print? Possibly, but I believe that is also that the people with the know how and chutzpah aren’t out there yet. In a medium that is just barley 15 years old it means that at most, online marketers have probably a decade of experience under their belts. Which might seem like a lot but, given how fast the industry and medium has developed it really isn’t.

Online marketers are continually struggling to find out what works because they have so many options. We now know pop-up ads are a quick way to irritate the customer, but how long did it take to find out something thats so obvious? It isn’t like TV had been, your option was a commercial or sponsor a show, the end. Banner ads, text ads, flash ads, viral video, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The list can go on, and just because it works for company A, doesn’t mean it will work for Company B.

Online marketers are now faced with the largest demographic of any medium, and they don’t know how to handle it. You are now starting to see colleges offering degrees in eMarketing and eCommerce and even still these degrees can change frequently. You will start to see companies advertise online more but not because they are figureing it out, but because print and radio and to a lesser extent TV aren’t working as well as they should.

Advertising Age: Digital Marketing: Is it time to forget Measurement?

The following is an excerpt from coursework I did analyzing and explain Search Engine Marketing and Web Metrics. The report analyzes and makes suggestions about one of eBay’s competitors, Amazon.com, based on observations, and should be taken at face value. It is meant to be an example of possibilities.

Amazon, one of eBay’s global competitors has been in business just a little bit longer than eBay. Started in 1995 by Jeff Bezos and two other friends in his garage, Amazon has become an incredibly large company, reaching sales of almost $150 million by 1997 (Rivlin, 2005). Originally concentrating on books, Amazon has managed to branch out into many other products and even launched its own product, the Kindle, a reader for electronic books. (Stone, 2008),

Amazon’s history has been a mixed one, while having incredibly large sales figures and grown at an enormous rate, they didn’t turn a profit until 2003 (Rivlin, 2005). It wasn’t in Jeff Bezo’s plan to have a profit on the first year of operations though, the founders expected not to turn a profit for 4-5 years. (Stone, 2008), It managed however, to turn a profit and remain in business in a time when the dot com bubble was bursting and companies were going under.

Amazon has moved from selling books, to selling all kinds of items, and to enabling users to make sales for themselves. Amazon has also purchased other companies like IMDb (Bloom, 2008), or the Internet Movie Database. It would seem though that its core product has been books. Though the Internet age has been changing the printed media industry, Amazon isn’t resting on solid sales of these items to last forever. The forward looking company has its e-Reader the Kindle. According to Amazon’s web page on the Kindle, the e-Reader can wirelessly download and purchase books with many titles being available for $9.99.
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Nobody thinks Porsche’s are cheap. By and large to most people in this economy, they aren’t. What Porsche has been fighting is the notion that they are unimaginably so expensive. A notion that might be over emphasized by the fact that most of the 911 models come in over $90,000.

But what Porsche did was target mobile phone users, typically young and tech savvy users with ads on Weather.com and various Yahoo sites. The result? 22% of Porsches ad generated traffic was from mobile ads.

At least in terms of metrics it was a success.Where the metrics show is in the click-through rate. It averaged 6 times higher than Porsche’s non-mobile efforts. Personally, generating significant click through rates for ANY mobile campaign is grounds for celebration.

What do the mobile results mean though?
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There are some basic things that most eMarketers pay attention to when watching the metrics and analytics of a website. I’m going to talk about a few today and try to add a few each week. You will be able to follow the metrics by monitoring the “metrics” tag. This week I would like to talk about bounce rate, unique visitors and referral sites.

Bounce Rate: Bounce Rates is the rate in which people view one page and then leave you site. It is listed as a percentage. If you have a bounce rate of 75% that means that 75% of the users that visit your site only look at the page they came in on before they leave. According to analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik, “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.” Now, there are somethings to take into account here, if you only have a one page website, your bounce rate will be 100% (duh!). You might also have a high bounce rate if you only have a few pages. For instance, without including the blog my web site only has 3-4 pages, so there isn’t a whole lot of reason to stay on my page for the casual viewer. However, if in 6 months my blog bounce rate is still 75%, I should be worried. Right now my bounce rate for the blog is about 53%, which isn’t bad all considering how new the blog is.

Click to read on about Unique Visitors and Referral Sites
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