Archive for October, 2009
I should have known when my partner, Ben Sanders, who runs the technology practice at Resolute Digital, offered to sell me his Treo 700W phone for a bargain price of $100 back in March, 2008 that I was going to be taken [worse, I already has a 700P but I figured the Windows version would sync better with Vista -- and it did]. Ben was getting a new iPhone and ditching the Treo. Ben is known as a new adopter and I, like many Treo users was worried about typing on the keypadless iPhone and spotty AT&T coverage.
So when Resolute Digital standardized on iPhones a few months ago, I was skeptical.
I was about as wrong about the iPhone as I was in 1994 when I pronounced the Internet as too slow (using Mosiac and a 28.8k modem) to be useful as a communication’s platform.
This iPhone phenomenon is the real deal. For many companies, building and promoting a dedicated iPhone application is going to be as important, if more important, than their own website. The reason is there are many kinds of applications that are better suited for an easy to use mobile platform like iPhone than an office, home, or laptop computer. Such as finding a Starbucks when you’re on the road. Checking the weather forecast from your sailboat. Reserving a car or hotel when you realize you’re going to be stuck in Kansas City for the night. The last thing you want to do is battle a mobile browser trying to make an e-commerce internet connection.
Companies that lag in putting their reservation system on the iPhone will find they are losing real business. For example, I needed a car and I couldn’t find an iPhone app for Enterprise or National so I went to Avis (Hertz has one too). Sometimes I get tired of that old gray lady, the New York Times, and I want to check out the New York Post’s racy headlines or the Daily News. The Times has a great iPhone app. The other papers don’t. So guess what I read on the subway.
We at Resolute are so sure that designing and building quality iPhone (and other mobile apps) will be a huge business in the next 24 months, we’ve launched a dedicated business iPhone Dev Shop to serve that need. Our first application, Parents® magazine iPlay ’n Learn™, rose rapidly to 3rd place in the Education category and is now #13 in the”What’s Hot category- iPlay and Learn iPhone.
Compared with building websites, iPhone apps can be built at much lower cost. And they can be developed quickly. These are not going to be optional items, so marketers better find some spare budget pronto.
Writers and editors have to adopt a very different mindset when they set out to write headlines and titles that will attract search engine visits rather than catch the eye of a passerby at the newsstand or the book store. While clever headlines might sell newspapers, they won’t do much to attract the search engine user. That’s because search engines are very good at giving the user results that are related to their specific search query. A user interested in finding a job at Goldman Sachs is likely to type into a search box “Goldman Sachs jobs” or “Careers at Goldman Sachs.”
A professional writer or editor, on the other hand, has been trained to think of a clever, non cliched turn of phrase rather than the ultra prosaic “Jobs at Goldman Sach.” He or she might title an article about the rebound at Goldman Sachs like “Goldman Sachs Gold Rush is Back!” or something much more clever. The problem is is that the more clever the headline or title, the less likely it is that anyone might be searching on that specific phrase. After all, it’s clever because it’s unique, not because it’s obvious.
The search engines give great weight to the “title tag” when trying to figure out what the content of the page is about. The title tag is the content in the html source that appears between the <title>this is the title</title> in the <head> section at the top of the page. Although the title tag is invisible to users on the page, it appears in the blue horizontal row at the top of the browser. A good compromise for clever writers and editors is provide a <title> that matches what a user interested in the subject might type in a search engine. He or she can save that very clever turn of phrase for the title that actually appears on the page itself, usually in the form of a <h1> tag.
My advice to writers and editors who want to have their copy read by large numbers of internet users and who want to help their companies sell more advertising, is work closely with your webmaster or search marketing staff to find out what keywords or phrases that have been identified as important to building traffic to the site. Often, there will a relatively small list of, perhaps 50 or fewer words and phrases, that are highly relevant to the website but which are most frequently entered into search engines. These are the works and phrases that you want to see included in the title tags and even the <h> tags as well.
Google announced an API for Google Analytics on April 21, 2009. An API or “applications programming interface” is important because it opens a window between the consumer of analytics data and the data itself, which resides Google servers. Agencies like Resolute Digital are continually involved in creating and sharing reports with their clients on the progress of digital marketing campaigns. With the API, it’s now possible to automate much of that reporting, to build custom reports, to make information available in near real time, and to share data with clients in a transparent fashion.
It also opens the possibility for a variety of widgets and mobile apps and, in fact, there are several Google Analytics applications now offered on the iPhone so that Google Analytics users can stay in touch with their websites while away from their computers. While it might seem like data overload to need to stay in monitor website data that closely, it’s not unusual for search marketing campaigns to to testing new bid levels and keywords. It’s often hard to predict how quickly budgets might be consumed and using budget caps is a rather crude way to manage the campaign. You don’t want to be away from your computer when a new campaign kicks in and the spend rises to $5,000 per hour.
The API itself is extremely easy to use for anyone with a programming background. There is a ample documentation and Google provides sample code to jump start the process. And naming conventions are quite intuitive. To read more about the API itself, check out Google Analytics Documentation.
Resolute Digital has created a benchmark report that compares traffic and traffic sources for four different time periods: a “baseline” period which serves as a benchmark, “last month,” “month to date”, and “last 7 days.” The main traffic sources that we follow are: organic (unpaid search engines), paid search engines, referral urls, direct, and email. For our paid search clients, we typically report cost per visit (as opposed to cost per click), cost per page view, and cost per action (goal). “Green” change numbers report progress against the benchmark while “red” number show movement in a negative direction. Resolute Digital’s modest web traffic is reported here: Resolute Digital Reporting. In order to view the report, login with the username “rd” and password “rd”.
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