According to Hitwise, Facebook just became more popular than Google Search.

become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week

Not sure of HitWises methodology - why aren’t they comparing all Google’s web functions, including Maps and Mail? - but good on Facebook! For a site that didn’t exist in 2003, that is quite some achievement.

What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Not much.

Given the lock-in for return visits, it’s unsurprising that Facebook might receive more visits than a search engine. However, the most important aspect of different channels, as far as a web marketer is concerned, is: does the traffic convert to cash at some point?

Measure Success

Social Media Marketing, like SEO, is a tatic. However, if the tactic don’t translate into more business, then it’s a waste of time. Whatever channel you use, it is important to establish KPIs - key performance indicators - that measure the effectiveness of your tactics, and directly relate to the success of you business.

For example, one of the KPIs often mentioned in SMM is volume metrics, such as number of followers, subscribers etc. If we were to relate this metric back to our business objectives, we’d ask how does having a higher number of followers, or people claiming to be followers, result in more business? How many of those followers are really engaging with you? Or are they, literally, just making up the numbers?

I’ve seen social media companies fudge this aspect. Some play around with the term ROI, changing the “I” from “investment” to “influence”, or to “interest”, and use the number of followers as evidence of the level of interest in a clients services or brand.

The bottom line is the golden KPI. It can become blurred in bigger organizations, but for the little guy, it is crucial.

Volume Metrics Can Be Deceiving

Search marketers know that the volume game can be an illusion when it comes to making money.

“Jokes” may be a very popular keyword term, but it’s not making people any money because there is no commercial intent. “Second mortgages” is not a particularly popular term in terms of volume, but is lucrative as it has clear commercial intent. A high position for second mortgages in search rankings will make you money.

Conversely, how difficult would it be to get buzz around the term “second mortgages” via social media? Sure, with some inventive twisting and disguising of the true message it could be done, but really, it’s pushing water uphill. The social environment isn’t really suited to such a message.

Choose The Right Environment

The two channels are like apples and oranges.

Different environments work for different messages. Social media is great for generating awareness, getting people talking, and when integrated with an SEO strategy can be a great way of getting links. Primarily, it’s a brand strategy. However, because it is a social environment, there is less tolerance of overt commercial activity that in direct channels.

Typical social media measurements include:

• Business outcomes - can you link the campaign to specific interactions, such as sales?
• Influencer Reach - how many influencers picked up on your message and spread it?
• Audience Reach - how many visitors saw your message? Link this metric to…
• Engagement - how many of those people who saw you message contacted you, or took a desired action?

Conversely, SEO isn’t much use for building brand awareness or encouraging people to talk about your message. The environment is similar to direct marketing. It is well suited to direct response and commercial activity, as the intent of the user can be determined, and if that intent is commercial, then people welcome commercial messages.

What Is Your Business

Hanging out and being cool on Facebook isn’t a business

Business on the web typically falls into one of nine groups. Which is yours?

• Brokerage - bringing buyers and sellers together
• Advertising - displaying/selling advertising
• Infomediary - run programs such as ad networks
• Merchant - sell stuff
• Manufacturer (Direct) - make and sell stuff
• Affiliate - sell other peoples stuff and take a commission
• Community - leverage your community to sell something else
• Subscription - sell content/training on an on-going basis
• Utility - pay as you go usage

Decide which business you are in. When deciding on marketing and advertising tactics, ask yourself which environment is best suited to developing your business, then develop KPIs that support that business. You key KPI should be the bottom line - either this activity returns more money than you spend, or it doesn’t.

Original post:
Facebook More Popular Than Google: So?

Posted by Tom_C

I was at a recent client meeting for a new project and we were brainstorming ideas. After considering all kinds of wacky schemes, plots, techniques and tactics we came up with what is, in essence, a very simple linkbuilding technique. In the interests of openess I wanted to share it with you, I’m just nice like that.

This idea works best when you are working in an industry where the value of the items that you are selling is high, and the object is somewhat unusual, distinctive or customised. Examples of businesses which might fit this category:

• Antiques dealers
• Bespoke interior decorators
• Painters
• Bespoke aquarium builders
• Photographers
• Landscape gardners

If your site is within one of these niches then the basic premise is as follows:

“When your clients have purchased something from you which is unusual or distinctive they are often happy to link back to you. This is especially true for high-value items.”

A Real Life Example

Disclaimer: Distilled built and designed the Aquarium Architecture website but we are not involved in their SEO. The below is an illustrative example. Also, I love aquariums so it’s a win-win

Those of you who are paying attention will notice that I carefully slipped “bespoke aquarium builders” into the list above. The reason being that Aquarium Architecture are just such a company - they design and build bespoke high-value, custom-install aquariums. To give you a flavour of what I’m talking about:

Pretty aren’t they?

Anyway - while you’re all drooling over the nice pretty fish I’m going to talk about how they can get links out of the work they do. The website doesn’t have prices on but you can imagine the kind of money you need to get one of these aquariums. So the buying process is often a long and involved affair where clients will want to ensure every little detail is correct. Because of the intimate relationship which Aquarium Architecture have with their clients it should simple to build into their process at some point, asking for a link to their site. Obviously, this isn’t going to be applicable for all clients (the above image was taken from an installation in a professional footballer’s house, and he doesn’t even have his own website) but they do a reasonable amount of business with Pubs, Hotels and the like. These businesses DO

A few years ago Google’s chief economist Hal Varian explained that scale is over-rated:

We’re very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There’s a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.
…
So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Wednesday Google’s chief scientist Peter Norvig shared his view:

We don’t have better algorithms than anyone else. We just have more data.

And this is why you see so many hucksters hyping trash, committing fraud, scamming users, cutting corners, and working legal loopholes at launch time to try to grow marketshare *at any cost*

Build the scale and you have the cashflow and feedback mechanisms in place to test viral marketing strategies, improve conversion rates, increase real (and perceived) relevancy, and lock in users.

“In a July 19, 2005 e-mail to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote: ‘jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.’”
…
“Our dirty little secret… is that we actually just want to sell out quickly,” said Karim at one point. In an e-mail, Chen talked about “concentrat[ing] all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.” - Ars Technica

Welcome to the exciting world of innovation in online media!

Without brand you have nothing.

With brand even a wounded duck full of unauthorized scraped content like YouTube or Mahalo somehow manages flight, at least for a while. Then you only need to find someone dumb enough to buy the growth story and purchase the bag of smoke before the fire emerges.

Of course people don’t have to cut corners, lie, cheat, and steal to build a real business. Those are the strategies employed by people trying to sell value where none exists. You can do just fine by dominating a small niche THEN leveraging data to grow. It is not sexy. You probably can’t hype to the media. It might not lead to an 8 or 9 figure payday. But then you won’t have to describe your strategy as “whatever tactics, however evil.”

Read the rest here:
Usage Data vs Relevancy Algorithms

Imagine you asked to take a bet. The bet is for your entire net worth. If you win, you double your net worth. If you lose, it goes to zero.

Here’s the kicker: You have a 90% chance to win and only a 10% chance to lose.

Do you take the bet? (answer with how many digits in your net worth).

See the rest here:
What is the Rational Decison?

by Sage Lewis

WebWorkerDaily has a nice article on several very cool social media monitoring tools. If you aren’t monitoring the social media space for your brand name and probably your own name, you are leaving yourself open for potential damage.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

More:
A Roundup of Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools

A few weeks ago Ken Fisher wrote a popular blog post about how ad blocking software can have devastating effects to the websites that you frequently visit. Mr. Fischer describes how ad blocking software is responsible for showing false page view data to ad networks. As a result each ad is priced at a lower rate because the number of impressions are significantly smaller. The number of page views is an extremely important metric for websites that sell advertising based on a CPM price model. So it’s only understandable that Mr. Fischer and other online publishers will hold a grudge against ad blocking software.

While I can understand Mr. Fischer’s frustration I cannot sympathize. To be completely honest I use ad blocking software every day. In fact on at least one occasion add blocking software has been responsible for a pretty embarrassing moment. So you’re probably asking yourself why does someone who feels so strongly about marketing block advertisements? It’s simple really, I hate ads.

What? You hate ads? How can you write for Marketing Pilgrim and hate ads? In my opinion marketing is fundamentally organizing people around information. Interrupting people with abrupt irrelevant commands isn’t how you organize people around information. Instead speaking to them on a unique and authentic level is more effective and genuine.

Putting philosophy aside, in my opinion ads are the worst way to monetize content. Generally speaking an increase in on-page advertisements contributes to a degraded user experience. Which can lead to lower user retention levels and decreased page views. Online advertisements are also ripe with fraud and manipulation. Historically click through rates have been at around 2% for most online advertisements. All of these factors and more contribute to the extremely low return on investment.

Online ads add to a decreasing user experience by taking attention away from the site’s primary content and placing it on the ads. This is not the actions of rogue spammers, this is the fundamental method to making any substantial revenue from ads. An excellent example of this in action, is taking a look at Google’s own recommendations for ad placement in the Adsense program. Here we see Google advises users to place ads on every available white-space on the page. This is a huge contradiction for a company that was so widely praised for starting with such a clean user interface.

Most ad platforms have large potential for fraud and manipulation. This is is an issue that not many professionals in IM discuss publicly because, quite honestly, whether they are participating in the fraud or not they still stand to profit off of ad manipulation. To a great extent Google and some of the other larger ad networks have gone to great lengths to minimize the impact of this type of fraud. However, any potential for fraud creates an uneasy market place where advertisers and publishers are continually left wondering if they are being taken advantage of. Google doesn’t help matters by keeping the exact specifics of their pricing model a secret from both advertisers and publishers. What’s even more devastating about these fraud schemes is that they can manipulate entire ad markets not just the individual ads they are targeting.

We reported back in January that the average click through rate for Google Adwords is around 2%. This means that 2% of the site visitors are clicking through on the ads. Most businesses off the Internet wouldn’t be able to survive with a 2% conversion rate. The only way to make substantial revenue from ads on the Internet is to completely dominate the market and control the flow of information. *cough* Google *cough*.

Wow Joe what do you want me to do? Not make any money? Absolutely not! But I do think that more companies and content producers need to experiment with different business models that aren’t reliant on ad dollars. The mainstream media on the internet is already starting to experiment with pay walls and different premium membership options. While I generally agree with the old saying that information should be free, I do think there is substantial room to monetize parts of the web that are currently a free-for-all. For example there are many opportunities to monetize communities and forums that provide quality content and meaningful dialogue to its users. Another potential opportunity is product development. Content developers and publishers should work to create their own products aside from their content that they can offer to their regular subscribers for premium fee.

So next time you see a drop in your ad revenue don’t blame the users, blame the ads. They got you into this mess and they aren’t going to get you out!

Read the original here:
Cup of Joe: Why Ads Are Devastating to the Users You Love

There are quite a few spy tools on the market currently, some more heavily promoted than others. They come in a variety of flavors such as SEO spy tools, PPC spy tools, and some which do both.

Spy tools can be useful in an SEO and/or a PPC campaign. However, many of these tools essentially try to extrapolate scraped results which can lead to some fairly inaccurate results. Also, these tools occasionally come up with in-house metrics (of which they really don’t give you much useful info about how they arrived at the data the present from these “proprietary” metrics”) to help try and differentiate their offerings from their competition.

Spy Tool Reviews

There is a much more in-depth review, with examples, up in our members forum. Here, we will do overviews of some of the more popular tools on the market. Specifically, we will be taking a look at:

• review of SEM Rush
• review of SpyFu
• review of Keyword Spy
• review of Compete.com
• review of Ispionage

Value of Spy Tools

The idea that you are missing out on something is a core marketing tactic so even if you are comfortable with one tool chances are you’ve been tempted to go with another. Keep in mind, from a cost standpoint, the ROI you would take by just finding a few decent keywords to target will likely far outweigh any cost associated with these tools. Your business probably won’t collapse if you pick an A minus tool versus an A plus tool and none of these tools are able to make concrete decisions for you. What these tools provide are additional data points for you to consider in your own research.

We hope you’ll find these reviews useful. There are perhaps a few other services we missed given how many of these tools as there are and our primary focus on SEO. If these reviews are well received we could also review everything from Quantcast & Alexa right on through to AdGooroo, but we need to know if you would be interested in those types of reviews. If there are any other cool products or services you would like us to review just let us know.

A few disclaimers: some of these services have given us free review accounts, whereas we have paid for some of the others. And some of these tools offer affiliate programs, but all reviews were done without those 2 factors influencing the editorial. Most these reviews do not have affiliate links in them (I think SEM Rush is the only one which does have an affiliate link right now), and Aaron reviewed SEM Rush before they even had a public affiliate program.

Already an SEO Book subscriber?

• We license SEM Rush’s SEO data for our competitive research tool.
• The second post in this thread has some killer member’s only tips for getting the most out of competitive research tools.
• This thread is also awesome, and these three threads really shows how to use these tools in a way that really kicks arse.

If you can’t make $1,000’s from reading those threads then you certainly are not a professional grade SEO.

Here is the original:
A Review of Spy Tools

Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month. Although, some of their lower price points may provide good value depending on what you might use them for.

Compete Site Profiles

Here is how compete gets their data.

Here is a screen shot of their site profile overlay

It’s kind of like a semi-analytics program view of things which includes:

• Unique Visitors
• Page Views
• Average Stay
• Demographic Info
• Link through’s to Referral and Search Analytics (discussed further down)

Data is available in 7 day, 30 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year increments.

The audience profile tab is similar to quantcast and is only available to the verified site owner (unless the site has made it’s info public) and the sub-domain tab shows sub-domains associated with the main domain.

Enterprise users, where there is no standard pricing listed…also get access to category profiles and behavioral categories as shown below:

You also get the option to compare up to 5 sites at once in their site profile section

Those are the options in the profiles section. These statistics are far beyond what most traditional spy tools offer and can be very useful when comparing large sites as small sites do not fare very well with these types of data sets (this is not specific to compete, it’s pretty much industry wide).

Analytics Tools

Compete’s second tool set is the Analytics Tools set. Here you can search through Search Analytics (keywords) and Referral Analytics (sites referring traffic to the domain) as well as a variety of Ranked Lists.

Referral Analytics

This is pretty sweet as you can see what search engines the site’s SEO campaign is doing well in, as well as possible advertising opportunities for your site.

It also will show you Destination sites (where users go after landing on the site you are reviewing.)

In addition to messing around with some of the filters you can take a peek at historical data (trends, seasonal, etc) as noted here.

Ranked Lists

Compete offers ranked lists which you can filter in a few easy steps

Compete lets you look at ranked lists via 3 steps (one from each)

• Step 1 - unique visitors, visits, page views, time spent, monthly attention
• Step 2 - site ranking, ranking + unique visitors, ranking + all metrics
• Step 3 - top 200, 1,000, 15,000, 100,000, 500,000 domains

Search Analytics

Compete’s Search Analytics show keywords referring traffic to a site (or two) with some pretty neat metrics:

• Highly Engaging Keywords - Keywords that make up 40% of the total time index and have a referral share greater than 0.01%
• High Traffic Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of the search referral share
• Paid Keywords
• Natural Keywords
• Engaging Long Tail Keywords - Keywords making up the bottom 60% of search referral share, with a total time index of > .10
• Enthusiast Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of Average Time Index and a Search Referral Share greater than 0.01
• Long Tail Keywords
• Total Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term where the searcher came from…that made up the highest total time spent on the site for ALL visits.
• Average Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term which resulted in the most average time per visit spent on the site.

You can also compare 2 sites like so:

In Closing

The high price point of Compete might scare some users away, but consider that their data is not just relying on scraped Google/Yahoo/Bing results then extrapolated by some internal metrics. Compete is probably more useful to those who “compete” in really competitive markets with some sites as competition, although it can be useful to folks who may be involved in less competitive SERPS with smaller sites as competitors because they can use this data to investigate larger sites in their market, which may not be competitors but could yield helpful industry data.

Read the original:
Compete.com Review

iSpionage is a newer player in the spy tool market. They are much more PPC oriented than organic SEO oriented. They offer 3 tool sets:

• Keyword and Domain Research
• Keyword Monitor
• PPC Campaign Builder

Keyword and Domain Research

They index the top ten results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although I only saw G and Y).

They give you breakdowns of common spy tool elements such as:

• Competitors and Overlapping Keywords
• Ad Copy
• Keyword Specific Ads
• CPC
• Average Search Volume
• Average Rank
• And so on..

The one really neat thing they offer is overlapping keywords between Yahoo and Google for a particular domain. I’m not aware of another spy tool that does that.

Their database does not seem to be very deep but they are newer so that’s to be expected.

The do show overlapping keywords, total keyword count, and a monthly budget under their competition tab.

Here is another spot where they compare Google and Yahoo, this time for overlapping keywords between sites.

Keyword Monitor

This lets you search by domain name or keyword to get ideas for keywords to add into your campaign. You can also add your own manually after the keyword research option. Keyword Monitor will show you the following for your campaign + competition:

The impression share is not something I’ve noticed in most other tools and the other 4 metrics can be useful in determining which competitor might be a bit savior in the PPC game. Other metrics they will show you on the keyword level include whether or not the keyword has direct ranking affiliates, the average CPC/search volume, and total advertiser counts in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The tool also shows you related keywords you may wish to add to your campaign or just place on your watch list.

PPC Campaign Builder

The campaign builder allows you to search for keywords via a keyword or domain name input. The steps are as follows:

Keyword Clean Up

This is where you can weed out keywords that contain certain words, are duplicates, or have special characters. You can also choose to remove extra spaces if needed.

Keyword Grouping

Here you can set up ad groups and campaigns right from within iSpionage. It also gives you the option to create one ad group per keyword if you want to get that granular

Campaign Builder

Here you can input bid prices for Broad/Phrase/Exact match bids, set up your ads, and input the url. Then you can export for use in Google, Yahoo, or Bing PPC campaigns.

In Closing

iSpionage has some promise and seems to be much more into the PPC market than the SEO market. If that’s the case then they are taking on some pretty big players as many of the spy tools offer both PPC and SEO data sets. They have some unique features and it will be interesting to see how they develop their product going forward.

Here is the original post:
ISpionage Review

Keyword Spy offers 3 different accounts.

• Research
• Tracking
• Professional

The countries available within a Keyword Spy account are:

No other competitor really comes close to the breadth of their country offerings.

Keyword Spy Research Account

Keyword Spy’s Research account gives you access to the following data

• PPC Ads (ad copy, the keyword, estimated search volume, estimated CPC, the position last seen of an ad and it’s average position, total days seen/days checked. You can also see the ad url and destination url of the ad in addition to other keywords being bid on for that particular ad, as well as an estimated ROI.
• PPC Keywords - showing individual keywords, ROI, search volume, CPC, total profitable ads, affiliate ads on that keyword, days seen, last/first seen
• Organic Keywords - showing individual keywords, position in the SERPS, total search results, estimated CPC, and the URL
• Competitors in PPC and Organic results.
• Sub-domains

The research portion does *not* include organic or PPC overlap coverage, which kind of stinks especially when you consider the price point they charge.

You get access to their Top 1000 sites and keyword reports which can be previewed here.

You can search by keyword as well. A Keyword search will show you:

• PPC Ad Copies with Keyword in them
• Up to 1000 related Keywords
• Misspelled Keywords
• PPC Competitors
• Organic Competitors

You can filter with these metrics but you can only apply 1 filter to the results at a time. Which can be bothersome if you are doing large scale research as they limit the exported data to 50,000 keywords.

Research Account Metrics

• ROI- they compute this as (Days Seen*Percentage Seen/Number of Days Seen since Last Seen). Below is a screen shot of their formula. Again, this is based on the assumption that the PPC advertiser is shrewd and on top of things. I don’t particularly care for this metric. ROI to person A can be much different than ROI to person B for a variety of reasons.



• First/Last Seen- Last seen is the last day KS saw the ad (they scan daily) and First Seen shows the first day KS saw the ad (I believe its back to August of 09 as of this writing).
• Profitable Ads - Ads that are profitable based on their internal metrics (like ROI and such) out of total number of ads.
• Affiliate Ads - Ads that are affiliate ads (based on destination url) out of total ads found.

Screen shot of PPC keyword tab showing the above mentioned metrics:

Keyword Spy’s Tracking Account

The Tracking account option gives you real time tracking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for your PPC and Organic campaigns. This can be useful in checking out your coverage and competition across all three engines. You can also benchmark your data with the competition’s scraped data.

Of course, the question is do YOU want your campaigns being monitored by a spy tool that makes its money but showing advertisers their competition’s organic and PPC data??

You can read about more of their tracking/alert/coverage type options here, but outside of tracking and coverage you get:

• Landing Page Intelligence - shows current landing page, ad copy, and destination URL for a particular landing page.



• Organic and PPC overlap data (only between 2 sites) and quite frankly, this is much more research than tracking and should really be included in the research account IMO.
• Benchmarking in PPC/Organic Listings (below is a screen shot of the organic one, they are fairly similar)

So the tracking account is really more for tracking your campaigns across the 3 big PPC engines with some nifty benchmarking and gap analysis features but I don’t see it as being overly useful for smaller PPC advertisers, although the coverage options might be a good fit for those in competitive markets across Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In general, Spy Tools aren’t all that great at looking into smaller sites and markets simply because the resources required to be accurate with somewhat sparse data would be overkill and far to costly. This is why I do not really feel the tracking option is going to be a good fit outside of pretty big PPC advertisers.

Professional Account

The Pro account combines the Research and Tracking account features (up’s the overall trackable keywords, export limit, and query limit) plus gives you access to a couple new features:

• Affiliate Intelligence
• Affiliate Reports

Affiliate Intelligence

This tool gives you access to look at products and ads being used by 132 affiliate networks.

You can click through on any network and be shown their offers by URL with searchable affiliate ads for those products.

Affiliate Reports gives you access to big players in the affiliate marketing space such as CJ, LinkShare, Clickbank, ShareAsale, etc. Here you can access top affiliate products and top affiliates by product id and affiliate id respectively. You can also use affiliate product and affiliates id’s to search in the destination URL field to try and find additional products/ads they may be promoting.

Keyword Spy mentions something about “Anti-cloaking” technology but they do not elaborate on it. However, color me skeptical that these affiliate options are able to uncover properly cloaked links by top affiliates. So while this may be good for help in looking at potential affiliate products, as well as finding affiliates who do not cloak their links, I’m really not overly impressed with these features but they can be somewhat useful when first starting out.

In Closing

Keyword Spy is a feature rich membership and they have a deep database. For me, if I had to pick just one tool I would opt for either SemRush or SpyFu as both supply solid PPC/SEO competitive intel at a much more reasonable price. Although, if I were a serious PPC player their tracking account might be quite nice (still have reservations about giving a spy tool company my campaign data though.

Read more here:
Keyword Spy Review