Hubspot Study Suggests Blogs Best Social Media for Leads

A new study from Hubspot, who canvessed 167 small to medium sized business owners and executives,  is both encouraging and confusing.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!

Introducing Step Ahead Social Media Stars

We meet a lot of people in our daily work, some who really get social media and, of course, others who don’t. But we are always happily surprised when we come across small business professionals who have really been successful in using social media and Web 2.0 tools to market themselves and drive business.

So we decided introduce a fun feature on our site where we highlight some folks we consider to be “social media stars” in the interest of inspiring all of us about the power of social media. Once a month, we’ll introduce you to a business person (on the small to medium size side) who has truly embraced these tools and ask them to share their experience and advice. Hopefully, we’ll all learn a thing or two!

Each person selected will receive the badge above to post on their Web site to show off their designation. If you’d like to be considered, please send me an email to lmettler@stepaheadinc.com explaining how you use social media for business and how it’s been successful for you.

First up for January is Stacey Crew, organizing expert, who blows me away with her super savvy online activity!

Does Yahoo Hate You? (then why won’t they listen?)

After giving  Google some limited praise last week for the additional reporting stats on their partner networks, I thought it only fair that I balance things by showing how it compares at Yahoo.

And, well, it’s not good!

Not only does Yahoo not allow you to see the stats from the search partner network, they don’t even allow you to opt-out of the partner network! Instead you can block up to 250 domains.  Unfortunately the search partners are SO numerous, and SO spammy that it’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to keep up with them.

As we have better and better website analytics reporting all the time, from Google, Webtrends, Omniture and so on,  it becomes easier to judge where best to spend your advertising money.

I’ve been using that PPC engine from GoTo, through Overture, up to the present YSM brand, and while things at Google, and even Microsoft AdCenter, have improved, the quality from Yahoo has dropped significantly.

For example, this is from one of our client’s reports from last month:

As you can see, the top referring domain on one day was Shopica.com, which sent over 4 times as much traffic as Google. What do you mean you’ve never heard of them? They’re 4 times as popular as Google.

Unfortunately, as we couldn’t see a single lead, booking, inquiry or anything as a result of that traffic, we put Shopica on the blocked list. However, it takes Yahoo a while to update, so the next day, we got even more visitors from them. And, even more impressively, all the visitors from them came in a one hour period:

Wow!

No doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that Shopica get a cut of all the ad money that I pay to Yahoo for that traffic.  As does Nexplore, who were the next day’s bonus traffic:

Not as impressive, but considering we’re paying around $1.75/click for some of these terms, not to be sniffed at either.

I spoke to my Yahoo Account Manager, who was very polite and understanding, and agreed it was “junk” but said that there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Oh, and no refund either.

What I don’t understand it why doesn’t Yahoo just let us opt out?

Yes, the reach is far greater with all of these sites in the network, but if the end result is a waste of money, people will just stop advertising.

As we learn more and more about the quality of traffic from different sites, it’s hard to justify spending $10,000+ a month (as this client does) on “junk”.

It’s not that we don’t want to use Yahoo, it’s we don’t want to use Yahoo’s partners. Cut them out and we’ll still spend the same amount – only we’ll get more qualified visitors and Yahoo will get to keep more of the money.

Everybody wins, right?

Some (Limited) Praise for the Google AdWords Changes

In the latest round of updates at the end of last week, Google announced that they would (finally!) be adding more detail about where your clicks are coming from:

“Previously, these pages divided statistics into two categories: search, which included Google and search partners, and the content network.
Now, we show one set of statistics for Google and another set aggregating search partner performance. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web. ”

This is a major change, comparable to when Google started showing where exactly your ads where coming from in the Content network.

That was a huge step forward, and one that made sense for Google. Previously advertisers were skeptical about throwing money down a black hole which included some very, um, shady Made For AdSense sites alongside the high quality sites they may have wanted to target.

However, these latest changes don’t go far enough. Yet.

We can now see how Google stacks up against the other search partners, but not how the individual partners (Ask, AOL, etc) are performing individually. Rich, over at Destilled is asking the question, “Have Google Shot Themselves in the Foot?”, and it’s a valid point.

Here’s the data for one of the accounts we manage:

(I removed the campaign names for anonymity for my client)

As you can see, in each case the cost per click for the search partners is higher, up to 25% higher, than it is on Google, but even more importantly, the number of conversions (final column) are way down. So I’m paying more, and getting less. That is why all the Search partner ads are now set to ‘Off’. I’d rather spend where it is working.

So, what happens now?

Well I suspect that that many others will follow suit and shut off the complete search network, for example, see this thread at Webmaster World:

“At first glance it looks like 90% of my conversions are from google search only not the network.”

“Wow, just split stats on an account. Bye bye Search Network!”

“We totally disabled Partners in a few campaigns after seeing 100 to 200% higher conversion costs.
No wonder they didn’t show this data for so long.”

And if that happens, I’d have to assume that Google will be forced to show the search network in greater details, if only due to pressure from their partners. If AOL is performing well, for instance, they’re unlikely to be happy about being cut out due to the deficiencies of other sites.

However, for now we have to deal with what we have, and I’m at least glad that I’ve been able to learn this much.

How about you? How do your stats measure up across the different sites?

Google Adwords – Tweaking All the Way to the Bank

Google announced on Monday that the Quality Score Improvements would be going live this week, with what they claim are tweaks which will benefit both advertisers and search users.

Well, they would, wouldn’t they!?

The changes, removing the ‘Inactive for Search Status’, real time ‘Quality Score’ and new ‘First Page Bid Estimates’ seem to me to be more about generating extra revenue than improving quality.

Even among those SEMs who work with AdWords for a living there is a lot of confusion about what is going on. A lot of the targeting improvements seem, well, arbitrary at best. For instance, here’s one of the search terms from an account I manage (click the image to enlarge):

It’s not ‘Great’, but a fairly solid 7/10 ‘OK’. Even some nice words of encouragement,

“What should I do?
Keep it up! Your keyword, ad text, and landing page quality are high.”

So, how is the ad performing? Let’s see:

Hmm, the ad is not showing. Must be the bid then, right?

Well, no:

Estimated bid to show on the first page:	$1.25	Based on the quality score below
Your bid:	$1.75	Max CPC

I have an keyword that is rated at 7/10, and I’m bidding 40% more than Google estimates I need to to be on the first page, and yet, “No Ad is Showing”.

No wonder people are confused.

If Google is not showing the ads, then they’ll lose money then. Well, I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

I’ve been watching my keywords pretty closely this week to see what would happen, and Google’s main suggestion seems to be that I raise my bids. Funny that.

How about this one for instance:

That’s an exact match keyword, which fits the site perfectly, has a historically high click-thru rate and used to average less the $1/click. Google now says “Bid is below first page bid estimate of $25.00″. $25! And yet yesterday, it was in the 1.5 average position.

That’s an extreme one, but we’ve seen maybe 30-40% of our keywords being told they should raise the bid according to the first page bid estimate. If that is happening across other peoples’ accounts, and it appears that it is, then we are going to see the average cost of bids being pushed up. Nobody wants to be on the 2nd or, gasp, 3rd page of results.

I’ve been working with Pay Per Click ads for a good number of years now (hence the GoTo swag shown above), and I think we’ve been down this road before. This is why many people switched to Google AdWords from Goto/Overture in the first place, because the constant battle to be in the top spots drove the cost up and up. Google was a breath of fresh air. They really did reward quality instead of who has the deepest pockets. After all, if Ad1 was paying $1, and Ad2 only $0.50 but had 3 times as many clicks, then Google still made more money. Everyone was happy. That is why I’m worried about the potential bidding wars this may lead to.

Particularly if the Yahoo-Google deal is finalized and approved.

Maybe I’m wrong. It’s still very early days and these may just be some kinks which will have to be worked out. But given Google’s near monopoly and unwillingness to listen recently, I can’t say I’m overly optimistic.

---

Are you an AdWords Advertisers? Let me know what you’re seeing or what you think.

5 Ways to Engage Social Media Now

It’s the new year and time for new thinking. If you’ve been considering trying out some of the new Web tools to help promote your business, what better time to get started?

Below, I’ve outlined 5 ways to get started using Web PR strategies now.

1) Set up a business profile on Facebook — Facebook’s new business pages (officially called Facebook Pages) are pretty easy to set up. Then send out an email to everyone you can think of — friends, colleagues, customers — and invite them to become “fans” of your Facebook page. Use this avenue to spread the word about whatever you want: new products, news, discounts, upcoming events and more.

2) Get connected on LinkedIn — Networking is key to any business, so why not add online networking to your arsenal of tools?

3) Start a blog — Setting up a basic blog on Blogger.com (like mine) is fairly simple. Pick a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and then brainstorm a list of ideas for posts. Make yourself post an entry at LEAST once a week. Email everyone you know about your blog and invite them to subscribe to your feed.

4) Set up a Pay Per Click account on Google — You don’t have to do anything fancy here. Think about what words potential clients would search for online to find you and set up a monthly budget to bid on those key words.

5) Monitor your company online — What’s being set about you and your company? Set up Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) for yourself and your company name and start watching what’s being said. If you find anything incorrect, post a response. If you see something negative, take note (don’t engage the writer in a verbal battle) and see how you can counteract that with messages you are putting out to the public.

If you need help with these and any other strategies, my company, Step Ahead Web Strategies, would be happy to help you take these to the next level. But give it a go on your own first and see how you do.

Search and Be Found … If You Pay a Little $$

Well, for part two of my post on “Search and Ye Shall (Hopefully) Be Found,” I thought we’d delve into the world of paid advertising on the Web. Sometimes, despite all the optimization you do to your Web site to ensure you’re coming up high in the search engines, you still just won’t show up when a person searches for certain key words. Some key words are very popular and apply to many companies, and it’s difficult to work your way up the ranks, at least to page 1 or 2, in the search engines.

Real estate would be a good example. There are a plethora of realtors and homes for sale in every city in the United States, and trying to get your site to show up tops above others (let’s say you own a small realty company in the city you live in) is going to be tough. BUT, there is one way around this problem. Pay for it!

That’s where Pay Per Click comes in. These are the listings on Google, for example, that come up on the side and highlighted on the top. This is essentially a way for you to bid on popular key words to try to show up even if you’re not ranking that high “naturally” (nonpaid). You only pay the bid price when someone clicks on your ad (you get to write a short description related to the key words that were searched to try to get people to click on your ad).

There are many factors that go into this, like the amount you’re willing to pay, how popular your ad is, etc. So I highly recommend, again, letting a good Internet marketing firm help you with your campaign, like our good friends at the SIMS Agency. They can help you set a realistic monthly budget that will get you some good ad placement among key words that fit what your clients are searching for.

If you want to be where people are looking, I highly encourage you to set up a pay per click campaign to be sure you are showing up.