Within any paid campaign be it search, display, email or social media, the need to move beyond the click is more critical than ever.   By letting your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions, you not only compounded performance, but will uncover optimization opportunities.

Overview

The customer purchasing behavior dictates a path and that path is NOT linear. Therefore, as a marketer, you need to understand how and where and when potential customers research, compare, and make purchase decisions at different times and in different places. By measuring return solely based on the last click gives an incomplete picture and potentially misses important insights about how you reach your most valuable customers.

To achieve this, one of the many tools out there is the Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics which lets you look at interactions across different digital media and show how these channels work together to create sales and conversions. More important, this tool helps you make crucial marketing decisions regarding advertising investments at the macro level — what channels — as well as the micro level, for example what keywords and ad placements.

Chick the link to watch Google’s video on how Multi-Channel Funnels works:

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics

How does it work?

In Google’s Multi-Channel Funnels, there are five reports that identify what channels customers interacted with during the 30 days before conversion or purchase. These reports provide valuable metrics such as:

• Assisted conversions reveals how and when different channels had an impact on conversion
• Time lag helps understand time to conversion
• Path length shows you the number of interactions before a conversion
• Top conversion paths illustrates the routes your customers take

Why use Multi-Channel Funnels?

• View all of your digital marketing channels in one place
• Better understand the value of your marketing efforts
• See a complete picture of the steps your customers take before purchasing or converting
• Improve your marketing based on channel performance
• Make the right digital marketing budgeting decisions

Learn More

• Download: Product Fact Sheet
• Read: Getting Started Guide
• Watch: Walk-Through Video
• Watch: Product Webinar

This silly example of non-relevant content blogging that is brought to you by the ever interesting content seeker Ben Parr, who’s Facebook posting THIS LINK as, “Best article title I’ve seen all week” this morning. This is a great example of why content does not always HAVE to be about anything at all.

To expand on that, here are a few ideas on how to freshen up your blog postings whether you have a personal or even a business blog.  With these tips, I am sure you will not only show your audience your more approachable side, but also the opportunity to generate a new type of traffic.

1. Questionnaire
2. Holiday / Seasonal Posting
3. Funny Friday
4. Opinion Poll
5. Party / Event Calendar
6. Give Away
7. Weird News
8. Party / Event Photos
9. Top Request
10. Follower or Email Shout Out

So you see, blogging does not always have to be about conversion driving content.  In fact, by showing a little variety, search engines, users and searchers will see the difference and will be more willing to engage with you.

Here is an excellent example by the VERY popular free mobile phone text app, Textplus.  Their Social Media and Content Manager, Amy Higgins, manages the Textplus Blog by effectively using a mix of conversion and engagement content to achieve multiple business goals without sounding dry.  By identifying what drives engagement, downloads and new fresh content, Textplus is able to produce a brand blog that looks easy, fun and very approachable.  Well done Amy!

What tips or suggestions do you use to increase user engagement?  Maybe videos, referrals, games?  Let me know and I will post a list to my blog and twitter.

In Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Negative Keywords is probably the most powerful tool available for marketers looking to optimize paid search and increase revenues. In this posting, I will detail out the best practices to identifying, deploying, and profiting from negative keywords.

Negative keywords are keywords within a paid search campaign that PREVENTS your ad from showing up. For example, if you are promoting a mobile phone app, but not one available on the Android platform, you want to place ‘Android’ as a negative keyword so your ads do not show up when someone is searching for phrases like ‘mobile apps android’.  This ensures that your campaign targeting a more qualified searcher, improves budget spend and prevents ads from showing up in irreverent and possibly inappropriate searchers.

Here are a three top free tools to use to do negative keyword research and discovery.  These tools are to identify keywords and phrases which your prospective keyword could be matched  Remember, these keywords can be beneficial, irrelevant or even inappropriate depending on your campaign goals.

• Google Search Bar
• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Search Query Tool

Google Search Bar

Use Google’s search tool bar to identify top used terms and phrases for the keywords you are looking to bid on.  Essentially, Google’s thinking engine is trying to anticipate the keywords you are looking for based on your previous search behavior as well as top ranked searches.  Example, type in ‘Mobile App’  and Google will give you options in a dropdown below the searched term based on its thinking engine.  As a result, you now have a brief list of terms that can be used to start a negative keyword list ro even add to your bid list like, ‘Application’, ‘Management’, ‘Development’ etc.

Google Keyword Tool

Log into your AdWords account and you will find your new best friend for both your SEM and SEO research, the Google Keyword Tool.  Simply drop in one or more keywords and the Keyword Tool generates hundreds of related keywords and phrases for you (see the Keyword ideas column in the screen shot below)  In the screen shot below, you’ll see that I typed in the word ‘legos’. If you sell legos, you can use this tool to see what other people are searching in regards to legos and determine which of those keywords aren’t relevant to you. If you don’t sell batman legos or star wars legos, those would be great negative keywords to add.

Google Search Query Report

The Search Query Report is also within Google and is about the most powerful free keyword research tool out there.  This because the tool tells you exactly what people are searching to pull up your ad which allows you to optimize the campaign to include new keywords to the negative list or even to the bid keyword list.

Conclusion:

In any type of SEO or SEM strategy, what makes a campaign sucsessful is not always the size fo your media budget, it is the research you put into it.  As an example i recently spoke to a lovely young woman from Oracle by the name of Judy Charles who after a few minutes of chatting was able to gain a better understanding of keyword strategy and process.  This is not due to my educational skills or her obvious intellect, but what allowed us to exchange ideas was the fact of common sense in that by executing keyword research before a campaign has gone live, the campaign over all will benefit and therefor will more likely be more successful.

I hope this has helped you in your quest to improve your SEM strategy.  To help you further, here is a brief list of free and effective keyword research tools which will help your negative keywords as well as SEO programs:

• Quintura
• Google Trends
• Keyword Discovery
• Spyfu
• SEO SERP (Chrome Pulgin)

Please feel free to let me know of SEM and SEO tools that you feel make your campaigns and research successful.

With so many choices and channels to promote, advertising and sell your business online, it is critical now more than ever to understand where your audience is.

In any marketing initiative, success is measured not by likes, shares or even tweets, it is about turning searchers into customers.  However, even with a great product, solid marketing message and a slick website, most marketing campaigns fall short due to a lack of market knowledge.

To help in this search, here is a deeply informative Internet Growth Infographics for 2011 by the folks over at PingDom which breaks out the growth of the internet into multiple media channels to better understand how your potential customers are using the internet.  These channels are email, website, social media, mobile and internet users to name a few.

By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many Internet users are added each day, each week, or each minute? And with 2.1 billion humans creating over 2.4 billion social network accounts there is no limit to how many different ways there is to reach your audience, however, that is just the beginning.

For 2012, there’s every reason to think that the Internet, by any measure, will keep growing. As we put more of our personal as well as professional lives online, we will come to rely on the Internet in ways we could hardly imagine before. For better or worse, the Internet is now a critical component in almost everything we do.

I am sure PingDom will be back again early next year to wrap up 2012. In the meantime, you may also want to check out their previous annual summaries for 2008, 2009, and 2010 to get a clear percentage internet growth.

#Startupism April 2nd and 3rd at the Cowell Center:

What is #Startupism?  It is the Bay Area’s conference that consolidates all things Start-up focused to Inspire, innovate and interact.  for this conference, DrivenTide’s CEO has been asked to moderate the Startup Therapy Session panel.

Panelist include:

John Malloy – Managing Director – BlueRun Ventures

John is a General Partner and co-founder of BlueRun Ventures, formed in 1998. He was the first venture investor and board member in Paypal, for which he was named on Forbes’ Midas List of Top Venture Capitalists. Prior to founding BRV, John served in mgmt. and executive roles with Nokia, Go Communications and MCI.

Braden Kowitz – Google Ventures    

Over the past four years Braden has been focused on helping Google teams design and launch the first version of their product. He has led design for Google Buzz, Gmail, Google Apps for Business, Google Spreadsheets, OpenSocial, and Google Trends.

Ralph (Buddy) Arnheim - Partners – Perkins Coie

Buddy focuses his practice on the representation of emerging growth companies, venture capital funds and investment banks. He is widely acknowledged as a leading practitioner in the areas of corporate and securities law and corporate governance matters.

Scott Rutherford – User Voice

Scott is Co-Founder and COO of UserVoice. His path to the Bay Area was a depressingly typical one, starting as a DJ and musician before obtaining a PhD in Particle Physics while at CERN and then embarking on his 10 year (so far) adventure in the world of startups.

To learn more about the Startupism Conference click the link or join Jai Decker for the Startup Therapy panel

Please join Jai Decker and other top influencers in the travel/food and wine space for a day-long conference focused on bringing you the latest trends, changes and ideas that will make an impact on your business in 2012.

The PR Disrupted Conference brings together top thought leaders and enigmatic personalities to discuss pain-points, what works & what doesn’t in order to explore new ideas and disruptive and engaging trends in travel, food and wine. Yet with a compass focused on how content, public relations, marketing and social media are shaping the landscape.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Learn how to work with food/wine and travel bloggers more effectively!
• Learn how to create and optimize frequency messaging.
• Learn how to integrate technology into the food and wine experience!

For more information and details please RSVP @ PR Disrupted Summit. Follow us on twitter @ GraffitiPR and FB @ Facebook/PR Disrupted Conference

Monday April 23rd @ the J.W. Marriott Hotel Union Square @ 8am to 6pm

Why are Media and Press Kits so important? 

Think of media and press kits as 24 hour, 7 days a week PR service, but a hell of a lot cheaper.

No matter the website, channel or offering, media and press kits are critical to your busines as they can be built to drive your business goals.  These goals can be to increased sales, sign ups, advertising dollars or improve your site’s search engine quality score or rankings.  No matter the goal, buy having a customiziable section that provides simple pages with searchable relevant content will not only direct actionable influence to anyone who visits, but will also further your brand’s messaging.

These pages can drive an overall influence of why advertisers, press and investors should do business with your ccompany by providing rich and optimized content like the following:

• Who we are / brand
• Audience / reach
• Advertising / media kit
• What to expect
• Awards / wins
• Marketing solutions

After working with companies like CNET, NYT, IBM and others, we always recommend a site (no matter the product) to put together a simple and searchable About Us section.  This will not only give any prospective relationship (advertisers, partners, investors etc) a clear idea of what opportunities their site will provide.

Here is an example I did for CNET a long time ago, but I think you can get the picture.  It is a simple setup and can be updated every few months with new offers, promotions, writers.

http://www.cnet.com/about/?tag=ftr

http://www.usatoday.com/marketing/media_kit/index.html

Email us if you feel your site could benefit from this kind of website optimization or want to simply see how your About Us section stacks up against the competition.

Hello and thank you for clicking our link  the 2012 SXSW Party List!

We appreciate your interest in how DrivenTide can drive measurable success through channels like PPC, SEO and Social Media.   DrivenTide speeds online growth through optimization and integration of Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media PPC and Multichannel Analytics.

Goals of online marketing:

• Higher return on investment (ROI)
• Increased brand awareness
• Cost effectiveness
• Customer acquisition/ better conversion
• Long lasting & more measureable results
• Trust building / competitive advantage/ reputation management
• Improved visitor experience / accessibility & usability of the website

If you feel you are not getting the most out of your current strategy, contact us and find out how DrivenTide can help.

Hello SXSW Party Seeker!

Unfortunately, we here at DrivenTide will be missing SXSW this year for the first time in four years.  That said, here is the party list below in the hopes that you will use this list wisely and share its secrets gratefully.

The list has been updated as of 1:30pm PT and will be updated every day at around 12pm PT  Please feel free to add or send me edits to the list!

With love and a bit of shamless promotion, The DrivenTide Team!

Download List Here:  UPDATED 3/9 5pm PT

Good luck and remember, ‘Don’t Sell out, Sell Up!’

After reading a thought provoking article from Search Engine Watch concerning “Renewed Calls for Privacy Law Following Facebook FTC Settlement“ , i was presented with option to login via my Facebook or Twitter accounts to post a comment.  Now this would not have given me pause, but after a recent article by DailyTech in “Privacy Issues Put Spotlight on Third-Party Mobile App Developers”

where 3^rd party apps are pulling all kinds of scary data without your consent.

Now that said, when i took a closer look at Search Engine Watch’s “requesting permission” details I was surprised at what it is i am allowing them to have access to.  Here is an example of what I found when I read the “requesting permission” from Search Engine Watch.

The two areas which I found most concerning in their “requesting permission” selection ‘Access my basic information’ and ‘Post to my Facebook as me’.

Basic Information: “Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, lists of friends, and any other information I’ve made public”

Post to my Facebook as me: “Search Engine Watch map post status messages, notes, photos and videos on my behalf”

Now maybe I am a bit paranoid, but this level of access is WAY beyond that I would offer Facebook, but to give this access to a 3^rd party is out of the question.  What is odder is in this time of privacy concerns, there is no opt out or selection of what level of access I am able to give 3^rd party companies.

What do you think?  Are you aware of the access you are giving new submission or even to the companies who already have it?