Can viral marketing campaign really boost sales?

Can viral marketing campaign boost sales? If I would need to provide simple yes or no answer than my answer would be no. The biggest problem with most of viral campaign is how to balance viral effect with expected business results. You need to make message so attractive to the user that she would decide to pass it on to her colleagues ad co-workers. Internet users are bombarded with messages – to stand out they need to be very strong, fresh, often shocking or extreme.

People are also more eager to pass to friends if they don’t see them as advertising message. The less-advertising like the message is – the better chance for viral effect. In the chase of optimizing the message to get strongest viral effect marketeers often loose sight of objective of campaign.

It’s not that difficult to achieve strong viral effect. Consider following message: “I will give $50 to every single person that will contact me by email. You can contact me yourself, you can tell your friend about this offer.” Provided that you trust that message is real – I bet you will take offer and pass it to many of your colleagues. Perfect viral campaign – right? It depends on what do I want to achieve – if give away all my money than yes.

It’s the most difficult in B-to-B world, especially when the target are managers and executives. Even if the message is attractive, it may create interest from people that are not your prospect customers. Then – the interest and traffic created by campaign will be of very low quality and will not boost sales in any way.

Good and quite rare example of balanced viral effect with effective embedded marketing message is campaign of LiveVault company. The Backup Trauma Institutecampaign that is starring John Cleese was discussed and presented often as marketing case study.

It’s done in Monty Python style that is often appealing to the target group of the LiveVault customers (IT managers, age 30-40). The movie which is core of the campaign is presenting in fun way the benefits of the LiveVault backup solutions. The marketing message and attractive movie is joined perfectly.

Even for this succesful campaign I bet that majority of the interest is coming from people that will never have interest in buying such solution (I know I’ll not buy myself). With this in mind it’s important to construct call to action right. Make sure that it’s appealing to the people that are your real target. It also needs to be easy to manage from your side for all the people that are not prospect customers. So – don’t ask everyone to call your call center as part of your campaign – you may have problems coping with load and customers that should call may not reach you.

More about other pitfalls of viral marketing coming soon. If you have good examples of viral campaigns – successful or unsuccessful ones that share similar traits – please share them. Your comments are very welcome.

Banner ads – advanced targeting idea

There are lots of opportunities for banner targeting and I don’t plan to catalogue them. I want to share with you ideas that I’ve found very useful and is often overlooked. It’s targeting at specific customer. Especially if you are working in enterprise market where you have limited number of key customers that can be highly effective.

Typical enterprise customers are seen as coming from single domain or range of IP addresses. Both are easy to target within ad server. Now – put yourself into shoes of employee of corporation. You would be nicelly surprised seeing ad that features your company imaginery and message that speaks very directly to you.

It can be holiday greetings (for Chistmass or Hanuka) or highly targeted promotion or special offer. Imagine you are coming to your bank or flight booking engine seeing such tailored message and offer. It can also create viral effect as the employees can be passing “See this!” messages to each others. Especially if you make it light, fun and appealing.

Do you have your own examples? ideas? feedback? Comments are welcome!

Why are all links to my blog gone?

I usually write about things I understand and know pretty well. I share my feedback and ideas. Here is something I’d like to get your opinions on. Do you know search engines well? Do you know Google well? Does the term – Search Engine Optimization ring a bell for you? Here is my situation…

I do blogging for some time now and am quite activelly posting, commenting and linking. When I’m commenting I put link back to my blog. Recently I wanted to check the pages that link back to my blog. As part of their blogroll but also all others. So I’ve turned to Google for it.

• The Google search returned 0 results. That was really strange. Especially that I know many of the links back as I got traffic from them – I see them within my referrers report.
• Google report was especially surprising as on Google’s own blog search I got some links back. Not too many but certailny they were missing from regular Google search. What does it mean? That blog links are not regular links?
• As a test I’ve searched also MSN and I got 75 results. The number sounded more reasonable but still I haven’t seen links which were coming from comments I’ve made…

Why do I care? Number of links pointing to my site makes difference when Google ranks my site in natural results. If Google sees many links – my site should show up higher in results.

Any ideas why this is happening? Why Google doesn’t see links that they even see in their own blog search? Why the links from blog comments are not recognized by search engines? All comments welcome!

Answer came from Matt Cutts blog – Google updates links and refreshes web all the time. However updates of PageRank and uploads of new links happen roughly every 3 months. See more on this in Matt Cutts post.

Web 2.0 – worth only 5c?

In one of last posts I’ve checked the prices on Google for buying keywords related to web-design and web-marketing. Back then I’ve looked also at the keywords related to web 2.0. To  my surprise I’ve found that there is hardly anyone interested in purchasing them.

Out of around 100+ related keywords proposed by Google there were only 3 that have any kind of interest from advertisers. They were: “web 2.0″, “mobile web 2.0″ and “web 2.0 conference”. Even then the interest was minimal. All the others were almost free to grab (for the lowest google price = 5c) as there was noone buying them.

It’s a bit surprising as the interest in web 2.0 shown by search traffic on google is increasing. It’s not exponential growth but steady growth is there. You can see this trend on the right – screenshot taken from Google Trends.

Still – clear advice for those of you who want to make living out of selling advertising on your bolgs is – stay out of web 2.0.

I invite you to read also my older post on buying keywords related to web-design and web-marketing. All comments and feedback are welcome!

How will my banners perform on this site?

You don’t need very sophisticated analysis to see whether your banners will fare well on certain site. A lot you can tell by taking good look at the site itself. Here is couple of things to consider:

• is the page loaded with graphic?
  If it is than you will have hard time getting noticed. Your banners will not stand out and will not be noticed. If google.com would serve banners – they would be very effective as there are hardly any graphic elements. On the other hand – www.msn.com is quite loaded which makes it easy to miss the banners
• how task oriented are site visitors
  Banners are most effective on the sites where people are not very focused. If you have website where people check stock market results – they are very likely to not pay attention to distracting signals. Same would likelly happen on the sites where people play online games. Better for spotting banners are portal where people are coming to check what’s new and interesting. In the middle are search engines – in some cases people want to find something quickly, in some others they are just exploring.
• are banners appearing right on first screen
  That one is quite obvious – people don’t often scroll down on the pages. If your banner is not visible within 1024×768 screen – it’s likely to be missed. Pick the sites where your banners will appear on first screen.
• is the subject of the site connected with topic of your ad
  That’s very basic rule of banner effectiveness – staying relevant. If you have site on weight loss than it’s good place for weight loss programs but maybe also also for exercising equipment. Google does it really well with content targeting.
• are banners separated from the content of the page
  If banners appear only outside of the text of the page and are part of the page frame they are easy to ignore. If this is the case your banners will net be very visible and noticed. Blending ads into the main content ensure that visitors see them as part of their browsing.
• does the page has lots of animations?
  animation is asking for attention and distracting from other page elements. Try showing your banner successfully on the following page. Again – on such pages your banner will not stand out enough to be noticed.
• usage of colors on the page
  If you show color banner on black and white page it will be very visible. The opposite is also true – if the page is very colorful than your banner will not be noticed. small idea – big monochrome banner can stand out on colorful site. In general – the sites that use little variety of color are better. It’s easier to prepare the banner that will be noticed.
• formats of banners
  Internet users are more and more banners immune. It means that they learn to ignore things that looks like banners. There are also software packages helping to avoid downloading and showing banners. Your non-standard banners should be more effective and website you are targeting needs to support it.

I hope that answering these questions will help you to decide whether to advertise on the site or not. All your comments are very welcome!

Sep-11 – memories of websites

It’s been 5 years from Sep-11 and WTC attack. I remember the day very well. When I’ve learned about this I was in the office. It was really strange moment when news broke out. Normally I would say that the world should speed up in such case. But not here – it seemed like everything has stopped. People started to crowd in groups and tried to search for information on news websites. But all the Internet seemed to crash.

The websites were so overcrowded that you couldn’t see almost anything. When people tried to refresh and reloaded – little pieces of information were revealed – sometimes chapter of story, some title, shocking image. It only increased the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

It was long and slow day – I couldn’t do anything but search for information and try to understand what happened. Despite the issues – Internet was clearly the best place to get news and start getting picture of the situation.

In the pictures that you see right in this post you can see screenshots of websites – BBC, CNN, New Your Times – that were so difficult to see access at that tough day. Click on them to see the full size screen. Thanks to www.archive.org and its wayback machine we can look back into that day – from perspective of main websites.

Checking and comparing website traffic

It’s out there already for some time but still worth to remind. I’m referring to Alexa which is offering rich choice of metrics and statistics of websites all around the world. You can use it to check traffic of your site as well.

Alexa is gathering data via special toolbar that people install on their machines that gathers data on their browsing behavior. This way Alexa has neutral way to see and compare traffic on sites worldwide. Due to nature of this method it’s not 100% bullet-proof. However for majority of sites with significant traffic it provides good estimation and ranking.

I was happy to see that Alexa provides some data on my blog traffic. It’s good sign of Alexa coverage of Internet browsing actually. You can see my traffic data here.

Starting with Alexa is easy – just type in the site you are interested in and click on “Get traffic details”. There is nice opportunity to include other site traffic on the same chart and compare. You can also browse categorization and see top ranking in each category. Check out most visited travel sites out there. I was very surprised to see how traffic is declining for all travel sites. I can imagine that Sep-11 tragedy has hit the travel industry. Interesting enough the decline is quite rapid this year as well…

Enjoy comparing and bencmarking! All comments and feedback is welcome! 

The real cost of buying Google keywords

Have you ever asked yourself – how much money does search keyword in your business area cost? This cost is important if you sign up with AdSense to start earning money from your blog/website… Also if you want to purchase ads to lead people to your site… In these cases the cost of keyword determine how much you earn or spend.

Well – I’ve checked it for my area – web-design, web-marketing, business-blogs, search engine marketing related. Here are some results that might be interesting also for you.

Background – how it works
Google AdWords mechanics of selling keywords makes it difficult to get simple cost number. Majority of keywords can be bought for as low as couple of cents and at the same time for couple of dollars. When you order keyword you set maximum cost you want to pay per click. This cost is used to determine your ad rank (how high your ad will appear on the list of paid ads). You don’t pay the max cost but rather lowest possible cost to achieve this rank. Max cost is not the only factor to determine rank – also ad quality is used there (click through of your ad and quality of destination page).

Results
Here below are 10 keywords best matching subjects of blogs, search engine marketing, we design and web marketing. First table shows the list of prices that will allow you to get the top rank for the keyword. Paying this money will give you top spot:

keyword	cost
business blogs	$4.80
search engine marketing	$9.86
web-design	$6.63
web-marketing	$6.08
web site design	$11.79
web page design	$5.62
web designing	$3.41
web design software	$3.27
web designs	$3.99
web marketing	$6.08

Table below shows keyword and minimum pricing that should allow you to get into one of the top 3 position. This will not give you top traffic but at least decent one.

keyword	cost
business blogs	$0.5
search engine marketing	$1.7
web-design	$0.7
web-marketing	$1.1
web site design	$1.1
web page design	$1.1
web designing	$0.2
web design software	$1.1
web designs	$0.2
web marketing	$1.1

Keywords related to blogs are quite cheap (50c to get into top 3), followed by web design ($0.7 to $1.1 for top3) and web marketing ($1-$1.5). Most expensive is search engine marketing ($1.5).

The most expensive are keywords with specific geographical info – “florida web design”, “web design boston” or “oregon web design”.

Web 2.0 case
During the cheks I’ve also looked at popularity of keywords related to web 2.0. I got some surprises there – I invite you to my post on web 2.0 keywords.

You can play around with the keyword analytics checking it for your industry and space. Google has tool open for public that does just that. Google documentation for AdWords is pretty good and helps to start as well. All your comments welcome!

Now that you know how much keywords cost – you can check my post with calculation – How much money can you earn with Google AdSense?