Kikabink News

Google has introduced the Search-based Keyword Tool (currently in beta). The tool suggests keywords for you to target in your Google Adwords campaign, based on their relevance to your website.

According to Google, you can benefit from the Search-based Keyword Tool in two main ways. Firstly, if you are running a campaign the tool will suggest keywords that are highly relevant to your website, but are not currently part of your AdWords campaign.

Secondly, even if you aren’t currently advertising in Adwords, you can use the tool to discover nuances about your target market. The tool essentially generates keywords often used in association with the keywords you have chosen to target.

Right now, the Search-based Keyword Tool is available to advertisers in the U.S. and U.K., with additional languages and countries to follow in the near future.

Check it out here: http://www.google.com/sktool

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool”, Inside AdWords, November 18, 2008

Not everyone has jumped onto the web 2.0 or social media bandwagon. Many people are happily using the Internet without blogging, tweeting, posting on forums, participating in social networks, and so on.

Which means that if non-web 2.0 users are YOUR target market, you probably need to focus on non-web 2.0 means of reaching them.

Here are a few tips:

1. Consider using traditional media. There’s a thought. What about a direct mail campaign or a telephone call? Even a personal visit (if you’re selling large ticket items that justify it). Not to mention traditional forms of advertising - television, radio, newspapers and magazines.
2. Use ‘traditional’ forms of Internet communications, such as email, display advertising and paid search advertising. Have an email newsletter as well as a blog. That’s what we do here at Kikabink. You can read the blog or get the email newsletter delivered to your inbox each day.
3. Softly sell your prospects on using Web 2.0 or social media content or tools. This isn’t so much a matter of emphasizing that any given content or tool is “web 2.0″ as indicating the value of the content itself. Your target market may not be interested in reading your “blog posts” but MAY be interested in reading your ARTICLES.

If you run banner ads, you may wonder what kind of click-through rate (CTR) you should be targeting. Well, according to MarketingSherpa… don’t worry too much about it!

The thinking is that since display or banner ads are primarily a branding tool, CTRs are a by-product rather than an objective.

Still, as MarketingSherpa point out, the higher your CTR, the more successful your ad is likely to be in terms of resonating with your target audience.

My take: accept a lower CTR (compared with paid search ads), but keep track of industry benchmarks. While the aim may not be to get clicks, the CTR is still an indication of the effectiveness of the ad.

So what are the industry standards? What is a reasonable CTR to aim for? A study by MarketingSherpa reveals different average CTRs for different banner sizes:

• 160 x 600: 0.14 percent
• 300 x 250: 0.37 percent
• 120 x 600: 0.18 percent
• 728 x 90: 0.27 percent
• 468 x 60: 0.10 percent
• Overall average: 0.21 percent

So now you have some benchmarks. But remember, a lot will also depend on your target market, where you run your ad, and the placement of your ad on a given website and webpage, among other things.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Banner Ad Size and Click Rate: Bigger a Bit Better, But It’s Clicks that Count”, MarketingSherpa, September 16, 2008

For all the hoopla about Chrome… Mozilla Firefox (ideally version 3 and over) is the browser of choice for many Internet marketers.

Why? Simply because there are tons of powerful free extensions and plugins for Firefox that can give you invaluable information on the fly.

Aaron Wall’s plugin, ‘SEO For Firefox‘ is one such tool. In fact, it’s one of my favorite search engine optimization (SEO) extensions. (I’ll cover some of the others in future articles.)

What does SEO For Firefox do? Well, when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo, it yields a host of other data about each of the search results.

Specifically, the tool pulls market research data into each of the search results, including the following:

• PR: Google PageRank - an estimate of global link authority.
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org - the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider (and theoretically the search engines).
• Links: Yahoo linkdomain - a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Link: Yahoo .edu linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Page Link: Yahoo .edu link - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a specific page.
• .gov Link: Yahoo .gov linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .gov links pointing at a domain.
• Page Links: Yahoo link - a rough estimate of the number of links pointing at a page.
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us.
• Technorati: an estimate of the number of links to a site from blogs.
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic (heavily biased toward Internet marketing and webmaster sites).
• Cached: Google site - how many pages from a site are indexed in Google.
• dmoz: based on the number of pages from a site listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: an estimate of how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: indicates whether a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory or not.
• WhoIs: a link to the whois data for a site.

SEO For Firefox also provides links to the given data sources to enable you to verify and further analyze the data. You can also choose which data points and links you want activated at a given time.

SEO For Firefox is a handy, free extension that can save you a LOT of time when conducting keyword, SEO and competitive research.

Just one tip - and this applies to similar such extensions - turn SEO For Firefox OFF when you are casually browsing.

If you always have it switched on, then each time you perform a search, you will effectively be running hundreds of search engine queries… to the point where the search engines may view you as a robot and ban you for a certain period of time. (This has happened to me, so I speak from experience!)

==> Click here to get SEO For Firefox

Fun article by Jill Whalen in High Rankings Adviser. Ms Whalen admits to being a Google Analytics “junkie” and explains how she uses the website analytics tool for multiple purposes beyond simply tracking her search engine statistics.

For example, when she’s needed reassurance that writing articles for other publications has been worthwhile she’s simply checked her stats to see how much traffic she’s received from those sites, and what percentage have ended up subscribing to her newsletter.

I like the way she thinks. Nothing like the motivational boost you get from some cold, hard facts (or as close to “facts” as Google Analytics can provide).

On the other hand, I guess it could be depressing to discover that all those article directories you’ve spent months hand-submitting unique articles to… have delivered NO traffic, much less any converting traffic!

And then there are those traffic sources that have delivered a ton of traffic… which doesn’t convert at all. Ms Whalen mentions StumbleUpon as being a major culprit here.

Similarly, she notes that while 60 percent of her website traffic comes from search engines, a lot of it doesn’t convert. That’s to be expected. The more content-rich your site, the more people will come to it via all kinds of wacky and weird search phrases. If, however, you have optimized your website for the search engines, you’ll attract a significant number of search engine visitors who ARE your target market and who will convert very well.

Google Analytics is also great for revealing information ABOUT your target market (not just where they come from). For example, you can get a good sense of not only how advanced and elaborate your website should be, but also how technical your visitors are, by considering the percentage of visitors who use the various web browsers used by your website visitors. It was interesting to find, for example, that over 70 percent of visitors to a corporate site I’m working with use Internet Explorer, whereas only about 43 percent of visitors to the Kikabink site use IE. Different horses for different courses!

All in all, Jill Whalen’s article is a welcome reminder to set aside some time to analyze your website statistics. Regardless of whether you use Google Analytics or some other web statistics program, you may just uncover some “pearls” that could impact on your marketing, product development or other aspects of your business.

This is powerful information - real data about YOUR website - that may be far more pertinent and instructive than any general research study findings.

Source: Jill Whalen, “Measuring Success Beyond the Search Engines”, High Rankings Adviser, September 10, 2008