Thursday, February 23, 2012

Why do people unfriend companies

Here's a great graphic on why people turn away from brands on social media. The top reasons are predictable: too many posts, repetitive content, too much marketing without enough good information. Companies, however, are much more likely to be shunned on email than in social media.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Google Adwords or Pay Per Click

I've now talked with several people who have stopped me when I've mentioned the term "adwords" or they've simply gotten that confused look that most people reserve for the Swedish directions that come with Ikea furniture. Other's confuse adwords with metatabs or SEO. So, here's your one-minute explanation.

Google adwords are words or phrases that prompt your listings or ads come up in the search page of Google. This is also called Pay-per-click advertising because you typically, well, pay... per... click through to your site. It gets complicated in that you have to bid on the word or phrase in an auction to determine the rank of the sponsored listings.  Click through rates are typically 8% for the first listing, 5% for the second and it goes down from there.

Along with the auction, the order is also determined by Google's quality score. The search-engine system calculates the quality score on the basis of historical click-through rates, relevance of an advertiser's ad text and keywords, an advertiser's account history, and other relevance factors as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser's keywords. The minimum bid takes into consideration the quality of the landing page as well, which includes the relevancy and originality of content, navigability, and transparency into the nature of the business. Confused yet?
There is also an art to finding the right keywords to get the most visitors to your site. That will have to be for another day.