How to Know if Your Web Marketer is Worth the Cost

SearchEngineLand's Matt McGee put together a great article for small business owners looking to outsource their internet marketing. What data can you use to know if your consultant is a good one. In a recent study we have some insight, but remember as with all numbers online, read in context of the entire study.

Aberdeen surveyed more than 200 companies with formal search marketing initiatives in place, gathering information on their strategies, experiences, and results. According to the survey, the top companies achieve these results:

* 108.24% current return on marketing investment
* 30.93% year-over-year change in brand awareness
* 29.78% year-over-year change in web site traffic
* 21.6% year-over-year change in web conversion rate

Another metric to consider not mentioned in the study is monitoring online promotions that are captured offline, such as a phone call that was made as a result of a viewer seeing a banner or webpage.

G1 A worthy competitor to the Apple iPhone

Check out what the experts say about the G1.

Google's Quality Score Secret Sauce

If you want to learn the secret ingredients for Google's Adwords Quality Score, we have the answer. Become the CEO of Google and you can become the world's greatest PPC advertiser. One question, why would you waste your time doing PPC when you are a billionaire? However if your resume does not qualify you for such a position, not to mention that the position is not open here are some of the latest enhancements to improving your Quality score courtesy of Inside AdWords Blog:

More precise Quality Score calculation. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. In the coming days, we’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position. This will result in more accurate Quality Scores, ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, and enable Google to show the most relevant ads to searchers by rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

Higher quality ads above the search results. To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so.

As Ad Dollars Shrink, Look For e-Effeciencies!

If there was a better model of tracking advertising efficiency, I'd wager that it was illegal. Unlike radio, television or print the dollars advertisers spend can usually be tracked with great certainty. What is even more mind boggling is the fact that for many advertisers, the web is only the gateway for offline sales, so that online sales data are usually the first fruits of your marketing efforts. According to Adotas, advertisers will soon begin utilizing advertising futures to better forecast the ROI of their spend.

Advertising futures are not quarterly game plans, but rather, longer term, six-month and yearly, positions on market reach. Every agency can advise their clients on the viability of taking advertising future positions today to ensure that brand mindshare does not dilute, but, rather, grows within the constraints of a smaller marketing budget. This future spend visibility in turn also provides guidance to agencies on their financial expectations and operational margins.

There is a significant difference between preferred pricing programs that most agency holding companies profess to and advertising futures. Preferred pricing programs are upfront agreements that scale pricing for media against actual spend achieved. That is, publishers will provide a preferred rate provided that agencies achieve a threshold spend with them. Whilst there are advertiser spend pooling effects that agencies can extract in negotiating preferred pricing, these are limited by the upfront pricing scale agreed upon. Full Article.

Attaching a Dollar Value to Marketing Efficiencies

In this downturn economy innovation, creativity and just hard work is needed to leverage every possible marketing vehicle that can yield the highest ROI possible. Traffic - be it offline or online contributes heavily to the bottom line. As marketers it is important to understand the efficiencies of a marketing vehicle. We must constantly ask ourselves the question: "If I spend what ROI will I get back?". Simple yet, the temptations to spend on marketing vehicles that doesn't contribute to the bottom line is so great! Bryan Eisenberge from the ClickZNetwork goes back to the fundamentals of marketing - what is the value for the consumer. It's something that we can control.

Bryan Eisenberg, The ClickZ Network makes a good point about understanding the controllable and uncontrollable factors in the market today. We don't have control over the state of the economy but we do have control of how we keep our customers satisfied.
In Bryan's article about how online marketers can weather the financial crises he iterates on being creative and innovative.



Here at Atomicleads.com we strive to give as much benefit to the consumer (end user), Sellers & Buyers to always come back for more.

Repeat Customers Are Moved By Brands!

While conversion rates will keep you in business, repeat customers will keep you profitable. What is the point of spending $XX in customer acquisition, if the only interaction you will have with them is that one sale or action? Learning to prime the pump as Robert Kiyosaki would say is essential to online marketers. A recent Website Magazine article gives good insights as to how to create a brand that will keep consumers coming back and developing a relationship with your company.

Video and Audio: Nothing is quite as engaging as a well-placed, well timed video. Embedded video is easy for consumers to view - a simple click and they are interacting with your website and your brand, either through your own video or from another source. YouTube is by far the largest library of embedded video options but there are others, including DailyMotion and MetaCafe. Podcasts and embedded audio files provide the same basic function and can be featured unobtrusively in a blog post or in a sidebar. Photos: Simply adding a photo gallery or photos in your blog posts will get your visitors more involved with your site. Photos can be linked to other, related pages within your site or even to galleries on other sites, including social networking profiles. FlickrIn is a Web app that lets you display tiled photos from your chosen flickr gallery as a small badge that you can embed in your site's sidebar.

Brand Creation and Management are the fruits of labor for any online venture. Keep that goal in mind.

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Internet Continues Assault on Television

Greg Sterling, the local marketing aficionado had a really good post regarding how internet video is gaining market share for viewers limited leisure hours. It's apparent that many of our partners and competitors have added video to their marketing lineup and are only at the beginning stages of understanding how to best use it. Sterling writes,

TV continues to be the medium where Americans spend most of their media time. But the Internet continues to make inroads against TV.
For the full post on television vs the internet continue here.