Entries Tagged 'SEO/SEM' ↓

Looking to reach 22 million people? How about 29 million potential customers? Well, depending on who you trust, Facebook or Compete, you should be able to reach 20-30 million viewers by placing an advertisement on Facebook. According to Quantcast your ad could be seen by 90,000 unique visitors each month, that is to say if you don’t filter for your target audience.

Setting up a social ad on Facebook is very simple. After creating your Facebook account, click on the advertisers link in the footer navigation get started. You get the option to send your clicks through to your corporate site, your Facebook page or to create a new product page within Facebook. There are distinct advantages to keeping your click-throughs on Facebook before sending them to your corporate site including more detailed insight into the demographics of your potential customers (requires at least 10 fans) and the fact that Facebook product pages are now accessible by search engines to further broaden your potential audience. Creating a page takes only a few seconds but you won’t likely get the necessary 10 fans without putting significant time into creating a page that offers your visitors a reason to return and join in the social scene.

Clicking through the ad building interface, you select your target audience. According to Sugarrae, Alexa reports that 44.3% of Facebook users are in th US, UK and Canada. You don’t have the option to select more than one country so you will need to create additional campaigns to cover all three. Filter options available include geo location (in the case of th US this means country, state and city), sex, age range, educational status, political views and relationship status to name a few. As you slice and dice your target Facebook provides you with real-time estimates of how many potential customers you could reach. Selecting Colorado for example, drops the potential audience to 300k and selecting female only drops it down to 138k at the time this article was written.

The ad creating tab is extremely basic. You get a title, body and optional thumbnail. If you weren’t put off by all the bad press project beacon has received lately, you can also add social actions to your ad. Social actions work similar to the activity feed on every Facebook page, providing information about who recently interacted with your products and how.

The final tab in the ad wizard is the budget tab. After selecting CPM or CPC you can define your daily budget and per click or per thousand bids. Facebook offers suggestions to help you get good coverage. Basic tests I performed so far have indicated that CPC is slightly more affordable. Facebook seems to overestimate the cost of the clicks so using their estimates will tend to get you great coverage. I have also found that compared to similar ads running on AdWords for competitive terms, Facebook has a better CTR - likely due to less competition for those key phrases. As with any social networking site, viral content will really do the trick. Some early testers have reported that CTR on Facebook is so poor it isn’t worth the effort. While this may be the case for standard ads with boring content behind them, during my testing, interactive, viral content outperformed standard content by 2000% in terms of clicks even when using the minimum bid of $0.10 for the viral content and recommended bids for standard content.

That’s it! Once you have previewed and approved your ad, it will begin circulating in the ad space within an hour. Daily statistics in Facebook Insight (their analytics package) are updated every 12 hours so you won’t get to play around with Insight right away.  Enjoy!

I recently became a Darth Vader fan. Normally I root for the good guys, the white hats, you know - the team destined to win in the end, but I have recently felt the pull of the dark side on Twitter. Yesterday I came across a site that lists the top Twitter users and found that Darth Vader is ranked sixth. How intriguing to see that Scobleizer ranked number 1. Is Robert Scoble the sith lord? After becoming his follower he quickly dropped to number two, even after adding me as follow, so probably not.

The Twitter phenomenon seems to be holding steady. After rapid growth in July this year, the Twitter traffic is holding stead at around half a million monthly visitors. More than likely this just means the base of loyal Twits have already configured their settings and are using phones, messenger, widgets, applications and mashups to send and receive tweets. Twitter users are primarily in the U.S. and Europe according to eBiquity. Spend a little time on twittervision and you will notice a lot of panning back and forth between the two countries.

Although Twitter now nofollows all links, it is still a useful tool for business. Lee Odden touts it as

productive as a promotional tool for pointing to interesting things you’ve found on the web as well as a tool for building credibility and influence

I agree with Lee and have deployed Twitter selectively throughout my company with good success. And even if it ends up fading into technological obscurity you should still use it just to keep tabs on Vader. Speaking of D.V., it makes me nervous when he stays so silent. Something evil must be afoot.

Recently I have been slowly working my way through Lee Odden’s recommended reading list. I just finished John Battelle’s The Search and can see why Mr. Battelle has been so successful. He is a captivating writer and a pretty good audio book narrator not to mention a brilliant marketer and entrepreneur. Released in 2006, The Search provides a concise history of search and the rise of the internet billionaires behind Google and various other search related companies. It is amazing to think how far the web and internet search has come in the last decade and even more amazing to realize that most leading edge search companies agree that search is in it’s infancy and is likely no more than 5% of the true potential.

One of the more interesting innovations in search in the last few years as noted by Battelle is IBM’s WebFountain. WebFountain is a wobbly step towards the search holy grail that is clarity into the database of intentions. Unfortunately, according to IBM, although WebFountain is incredibly powerful and far more complex than the slurp and burp Google index of today, it lacks scalability. The WebFountain index generates 10 megabytes of data for every 1 megabyte it reads in. There are, it seems, many internet billionaires yet to be crowned in the kingdom of search.

Of course the database of intentions is tightly coupled to the fabled semantic web. The father of the internet, Tim Berners Lee recently did an interview at HP and spoke on his thoughts about the future of web science and the semantic web. One of the large problems Sir Lee addressed in the interview was how the wiki model is breaking down. He discusses how the open world editable concept behind wikis is slowly being deflated as they are forced to filter and limit control due to misuse and abuse and how the world needs to work together to eliminate this issue by making collective decisions that contribute to a successful meritocrasy. He also addressed the issue surrounding access and control of private systems such as MySpace. He believes that companies and sites that attempt to wall off their data and prevent open use and access will risk being abandoned in favor of open social networks that will allow people to access, share and control their own data. In the post interview Q&A Berners Lee touched on the white hot topic of centrally managed and openly accessible social networking data. As the web evolves it will be more about people interacting with people he explains. We need to move away from the document level focus and instead shine our light in the direction of people’s actions and the relationships between real things.

The solution to all these problems, Sir Lee posits, lies in the adoption of RDF, a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. RDF in conjunction with various other semantic web technologies like
GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) and a query language SPARQL. The likelihood of successful adoption of these technologies seems high given the group supporting the adoption and the fact that GRDDL is basically extended XML and SPARQL is syntactically similar to SQL.

It is an exciting time to be an SEO. In reality it is an exciting time to be an internet user. As we look back on 2007 in future years we will likely scoff at the rudimentary tools used by the cro-magnon man searcher of yesteryear.

As a geek with a DVR I don’t often contemplate the correlation between television and the web. What television show, commercial, movie or even “lower third” doesn’t include a domain name these days. I assumed consumers for the most part get ad blinded when it comes to the domain names as our society rapidly approaches the relentless state of advertising depicted in Minority Report. A quick trip over to Google Zeitgeist (aka Hot Trends) tells a different tale.

On a Saturday morning during college football season nearly half of the top 50 trends were related to football and with Thanksgiving still a not so distant memory a good deal of the other hot searches involved finding creative ways to get rid of the left over turkey. Obviously turkey doesn’t have much to do with television but Stephen King’s The Stand, The Incredibles and Battlestar Gallactica all do. All three of these shows were on television today (don’t tell me how Battlestar ended, I haven’t watched it yet) and all three made their way into the trend results. While watching one of these fine shows live *gasp* I saw an ad for American Gladiators, a rehashed version of an 80’s classic gauntlet style contest where the average Joe contestants take on finely tuned athletes in some very odd physical challenges. Being a huge fan of the original I was sucked in by the ad and thus headed to the web to investigate further.

Some initial probing turned up interesting results. Wikipedia #1 (ugh), YouTube #2 (aah, good times) and the “official” American Gladiators site turned up in the SERPs. Sadly, the only way I found the site for the new show was by adding “NBC” to my query. The NBC American Gladiators site makes me wonder about how dedicated NBC is to making the show a success. Hopefully this post garners some traffic because they will need a lot of television ads to make up for the lack of investment in the site if they plan on getting the show off the ground. Thinking back to the television ad there didn’t seem to be a web address. Maybe NBC is going for an internet disabled campaign this time around. Or maybe they feel they no longer need to promote online with the April launch of Google’s TV advertising division and they are just sticking with the larger television market.

The good news in all this is that Hulk Hogan is co-hosting the new show. The bad news is that not only is Hulk getting divorced but there isn’t anything interesting about the new show on the NBC site. As long as a reporter isn’t responsible for letting Hogan in on the details of the new gladiators show it stands a fighting chance (pun intended).

A few days ago I wrote about my early look at the new Microsoft Live Webmaster Tools beta. Microsoft has since removed the beta logo and officially launched the portal and associated forum for public use. Apparently the forum moderators are still passed out from the tryptophan because the same questions I had about the tool, “what do the little green boxes mean”, and “how in the world are you coming up with these indexed pages”, have both been left unanswered as of yet. Maybe Microsoft would have been better off following Google’s lead by leaving the beta suffix permanently attached to the tool so nobody could officially complain. It seems with Microsoft’s recent announcement about their search traffic goals that they would really want to put the best tools in the hands of those who power the internet - geeks. I recall reading an article about why Visual Studio has become so popular and why developers love to code for the Microsoft platform and it wasn’t because they had to work with substandard tools. Come on Ballmer, if you really want a juicier slice of the enormous advertising pie it is time to siphon some money off the bottom of the marketing budget and develop a razor sharp portal that will make Google users actually want to make the switch.