Archive for January, 2009
SES London 2009: Interview of Napsters Jeff Ferguson
Yesterday I caught up with Jeff Ferguson, Director of Online Marketing at Napster and got his insight on his upcoming session at SES London: “Pay-for-Performance: Winning Strategies for Advertisers and Agencies.” Check out our conversation below.
[Manoj]: Why do you think there is such a difference in terms of the compensation model between Paid and Organic Strategies?
[Jeff Ferguson]: The difference is due to the type of work needed to make them happen and how the results are measured.
With Paid Search, it’s easier because you’re managing an ad campaign and there (usually) isn’t a lot of heavy lifting that doesn’t look like anything else besides running an ad campaign.
With Organic Search, there are so many more activities involved that look nothing like the activities that Paid Search even touches. Sure, there is plenty of keyword research and campaign monitoring, but SEO usually has a whole other layer of efforts that looks more like programming than media planning. Plus, even during the stewardship phase of an SEO campaign, you’re still very much in a “pray for placement” situation that does not allow for an entirely direct correlation to the efforts the SEO team has put into the campaign.
[Manoj]: What do you think the ideal compensation model should be for agencies and consultants focused on Organic Strategies?
[Jeff Ferguson]: From an agency standpoint, I think Organic agencies are really looking to get their initial work covered and then move into something that is more akin to a running maintenance tab rather than a true pay for performance situation. As a client, you always lean towards pay for performance, but even then, we’re always a little suspicious that we’re being charged for traffic we would have received anyway.
Ultimately, I would think that a contract that involved a setup charge, a low, maintenance retainer, and a performance bonus based on mutually agreed upon baselines and increases would satisfy the concerns of all involved.
[Manoj]: How important is it for agencies to leverage both organic and paid strategies together in order to achieve success for their clients?
[Jeff Ferguson]: You really can’t do one without the other and anyone who tells you different doesn’t know their gig – it’s that simple. Even if you have one agency, two agencies, or doing one part outside and another in-house, it is paramount for the teams to work together on planning and sharing of data, or you’re wasting money on the entire effort.
[Manoj]: Can you discuss the importance of a strong web analytics framework in order to truly measure the performance of all mediums?
[Jeff Ferguson]: You simply can’t live without it in this business and anyone who says they can is fooling themselves. I’ve spoken to plenty of new businesses that are enjoying the benefit of a popular product and stomp about stating that they have no need for the level of detail provided by a good analytics package because business is “just fine.” If they’re doing “just fine” without one, then they should know that they could be “great” with one in place.
I can’t stress enough the “performance of all mediums” part of that question because I know there are so many companies out there that either have no clue at all where their traffic is coming from or are so fixated on pixel fires that they don’t do the math and figure out that they are double or triple counting the activities.
[Manoj]: Do you find that there are any big differences between SES in London vs. SES in New York or San Jose?
[Jeff Ferguson]: This will be my first SES London, so I’m looking forward to seeing what besides the scenery could be different at the two shows.
SEW Experts: Battling Click Fraud is Important for All Involved
Every pay-per-click advertiser sees the presence of click fraud, as does every search engine. We’re just disagreeing about the numbers. In today’s SEM Crossfire column, “Battling Click Fraud is Important for All Involved,” Frank Watson and Chris Boggs remind us that both sides need to acknowledge that a certain level of click fraud exists, and work together to diminish its impact.
» Full story
SEW Experts: Best-Kept Secret in PPC? Part II
Last week’s discussion of Google Conversion Optimizer generated a flood of user questions. It seems the promise of simplifying the time-consuming, complicated chore of regulating keyword bids is especially appealing to advertisers. In today’s Profitable PPC column, “Best-Kept Secret in PPC? Part II,” David Szetela responds to reader questions, and clarifies a few things.
SEW Experts: 2009 is a Year of Change for Travel Search Marketing
The economy is forcing travel search marketers to change the way they approach online marketing. The travel vertical is already one of the most advanced groups of search marketers, but the industry has been under more pressure in recent months to make their campaigns count. In today’s vertical search marketing column, “2009 is a Year of Change for Travel Search Marketing,” travel search expert Elisabeth Osmeloski outlines a few ways travel search marketers, and marketers in other verticals, can get back to basics in these challenging times.
» Full story
Advanced Google Analytics - Zero Visits and Search Page Referrer
Posted by willcritchlow
About a month ago - back before Christmas and before my brilliant trip to New Zealand - I wrote a post over at Distilled about how to track referrals from the second page of Google using Google analytics. It was one of my more popular posts - and since I discovered the trick, I’ve found it quite handy on our own site, never mind client sites. It relies on using a filter to separate traffic based on the "start" parameter passed in the referring URL from deeper Google pages. It looks a bit scary to set up, but I tried to include screenshots so you just step through the process bit by bit.
If you are interested in advanced uses of Google Analytics, you may also be interested in:
- the post that inspired my method: a clever approach to tracking PPC traffic (which also solves an old problem I was having)
- a post from earlier this month from Joost’s site: an alternative to my method above that, instead of filtering second page traffic out into a separate report, appends details of the page to a custom user-defined parameter.
Although I think knowledge of these methods is useful, my main point today is to share some insight that arose in the comments of my post. John raised a question:
I got it working, and created segments for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th page. I’m a little confused though - When I apply this segment to keywords, why do some keywords (usually longtail) show up, but have zero visits? If there were zero visits from that keyword, why would it show up in Analytics in the first place?
An example from Distilled analytics showing 0 visits for political reputation management over a short timescale
I wasn’t sure on the answer to this, but I had seen the same thing so I dropped Avinash Kaushik a line to find out (he’s the analytics evangelist for Google and everyone here should be reading Avinash’s blog and following him on twitter - one of the smartest guys I know in the field). Sure enough, Avinash came through with the answer and I thought it was useful enough to share with everyone here. There are two likely scenarios when you may see a keyword appearing in a report and showing zero visits:
- If someone makes more than one visit to a site within the same "session" (i.e. within 29 minutes without clearing cookies) and each visit comes from a search but on different keywords, then both keywords will be included in the keywords report - the first with 0 visits and the second with 1 visit. This is done, apparently, in the interests of balancing between on the one hand, avoiding discarding data (the fact that the first keyword sent you a visitor) with the need to make the total number of "visitors" reconcile. It’s a tough call, but this seems a pretty sensible way of handling things - but as users, it’s important for us to understand what these decisions and trade-offs are
- If you have analytics connected to an AdWords account, then cost and impression data is pulled into analytics from your advertising campaigns. In this scenario, you can see keywords that have had impressions but no clicks which will show up as keywords in a report with 0 clicks.
Sorry that this post has been a bit of a collection of interesting things found elsewhere rather than any new insight. I hope you’ve found it useful - my understanding and use of Google Analytics has improved in leaps and bounds recently so I wanted to share some of the tips with you. I’ll leave you with one more - from Joost again - a fantastic tip on tracking traffic you get from Twitter.
Technorati Tags
Do you like this post? Yes No
Archives
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- January 1970
Pages
Blog Roll
Meta