Central Perk

vineri, 17 februarie 2012

You helped to extend the payroll tax cut

Good afternoon --

This week, thousands of folks have shared how $40 less in every paycheck would affect them if Congress didn't extend the payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.

And it worked.

This afternoon, lawmakers got this done. The President will sign that bill into law next week, and we've already invited some of the folks who shared their stories to come to the White House when he does.

The past few days have been a constant reminder of how incredible it can be when people from all walks of life join together to speak out. On Tuesday, we sat down with another group of Americans who added their voices to the debate, and they recorded a message just for you. It's a powerful thing to watch.

There will be other fights in the weeks and the months ahead when the kind of engagement they're talking about in this video could make all the difference. So check it out, then pass it along to anyone who is skeptical that real people can't have an impact:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/40dollars/stories

Thanks,
David

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President

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Roles & Responsibilities of a Web Marketing Team - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 12:46 PM PST

Posted by randfish

This week we talk about the different roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team. What does it take to have a successful marketing team that will take your brand to the next level? What metrics should your team measure? Your marketing team will go through a few different stages while your company grows and this video walks you through those steps.

Some notes about this video, we shot this a few weeks ago and as with the other video we experienced some quality issues. Please bear with us while we work out the kinks of our new equipment. I also mention that we are looking for another web dev for our marketing team, but I am happy to mention that our new web dev Devin started on Monday! Don't worry we are looking to fill other positions which can be found here.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about some of the roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team and really how to design a successful web marketing team that can accomplish all of the goals that you've got on the Web.

The place that I like to start is with the metrics you care about. The metrics almost always start with customers or with revenue. Customers or revenue. From customers and revenue you can get down to the metrics that matter, the sources from which those people come externally on your site, the internal sources, the funnel, the marketing funnel itself, how far people make it down the funnel, if you're attracting customers, or the quality of those visitors that you're getting, if we're talking about a site that's driven by ad revenue.

The key metrics usually come from places like visits, visit quality, conversions, brand awareness, competitive intelligence, and the quality of customers being acquired. Those are very, very high level, but they typically filter down into deeper ones. When you look at visits, you might be looking at visit sources. You might be looking at the time that people are spending on the site and the number of pages browsed. You might be looking, when you're looking at conversions, at the quality of those conversions, how many of those people come back, what the customer lifetime value is, what the word-of-mouth spread is, you know, for every one customer, how many new customers do we acquire based on some viral co- efficient, etc., etc. You'll know these for your business, and you'll dig down into them.

These metrics map over to the right sort of team format. The teams that I like to build really come in stages. Those stages are natural evolutions and progressions. If you're extremely early stage, what I really like . . . by super early stage, what I mean is maybe there are three of you, four of you, five of you, up to maybe ten people in a business that's trying to do considerable marketing on the Web. I like having someone with a title at the very junior level. The most junior level I would have is a web marketing manager or a director of marketing or VP of marketing. It's certainly fine to have someone very senior so long as they're willing to get their hands dirty. They're responsible for all of this. They're responsible for where do customers and revenue come from, what are the sources from which we can generate those. I'm going to personally build a funnel, personally build out how we execute on all the sources, focus on the right ones, figure out what the channels are that work, etc.

In a mid-stage I like to extrapolate a little more. Have that VP of marketing who's responsible for the key metrics and for setting the goals and responsibilities and then start to break things out into two worlds. One is the inbound, organic world. This can also be organic or non-paid or free marketing or earned media, whatever you like to call this. Those inbound marketers worry about things like SEO, social, content marketing, blogging, videos, etc., all the things that you do on the Web that earn your customers, that earn visits, rather than buying them or interrupting them.

The other side is performance marketers. These are people who do things like paid acquisition, conversion rate optimization. I like having the person who's responsible for paid acquisition also run the CRO and the marketing funnel. The reason why is because these visitors usually are extremely high ROI and cost less. Hopefully, 60 to 80 percent of your traffic is coming through here.

This is where you're going to get a ton of your direct conversions. These people will be paying some cost to acquire those visitors. So owning the funnel makes a lot of sense for them. That way they can say, "Okay, customer lifetime value is $500. We will pay up to $150 to acquire a customer through these five channels. We'll pay up to $250 to acquire a customer through these channels because we know it's worth more. We're going to keep optimizing the funnel and improving the conversion rate."

Then, naturally, the stuff from organic will flow into those paid channels and into that same funnel. The ROI is usually higher, but the directness and ability to increase that takes longer. It takes more effort and more time, more energy expended. You'll have more things where you throw stuff against the wall to see if it sticks versus paid where, hopefully, you learn that very, very quickly. We bid on this keyword, it didn't work. We put an ad on this site, it didn't work. Fine, we take those down.

In terms of who you should assign to these teams, I would say start with one person responsible for each. This person up here, maybe they move into that VP marketing role. If they don't, maybe they move into one of these roles because they're particularly good at performance or at inbound. Then, the VP of marketing comes in and you hire someone more senior to take over those roles.

Then you could get specialized inside those. If you see that SEO is an amazing channel for us and we have a ton of content and ton of material that needs SEO'ing, we need to bring in a full-time technical and content SEO to worry about those types of things. Outreach is huge for us. We need a full-time link builder. Social is huge for us. We need a full-time community and social manager.

Great, those are fine things, and that leads you naturally into the next stage, the later stage or more mature stage where you usually have . . . I actually like to have at this point something like a CMO, someone who's a chief officer and has a higher purview of roles, of responsibility around that. This also means that people who have progressed in the organization from inbound or from performance channels can move into those VP roles: VP of inbound, VP of performance. Then you can have people under them who are very specialized in each of the requirements of that role. So it could be we have someone who just does PR.

We have someone who just does technical SEO. I cannot recommend this enough, have web developers or software engineers who work on each of these teams because it means that someone who's working on performance marketing doesn't need to wait for engineering to get projects done. They have someone who works on the team full-time. This is absolutely amazing here at SEOmoz. We have Casey Henry who works as a full-time web developer, and we're hiring another developer - if you know any great people, please send them our way - to actually work on our marketing team and worry about the www site and the marketing funnel and all the stuff that exists around the inbound and performance side. Obviously, with time, I'd like to see that become two or three or four people.

These people's roles really depend on the channels that are working for you and the channels into which you want to invest. You might have a full-time person who just does video content. You might have a full-time person who just does blogging and they do very little else. That could be a content marketer. You might have multiple people who are managing your community because you have so many people following you and interacting with you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, through your own social sources on your site if you have a social platform, a high level of community contributions, user generated content, those types of things.

This segmentation and role specialization is excellent too because people can move up and have opportunities as one of these channels takes off and becomes amazing.

An even later stage might be that we've got SEO as an entire department and it has its own director. Underneath the director are people who are responsible for specific parts. This person is responsible for UGC SEO. This person is responsible for video. This person is responsible for technical SEO. All those kinds of roles can get even more specialized, and you can move into a bigger division.

The nice thing about how this whole platform works is that it can organically grow. It can build off itself, and you develop strengths in all the areas without ignoring any channels. Early on in your stages, these people and then these people are going to be experimenting with all types of different channels. As you get here, you have specialists who can perform in those channels, leaving the CMO, the VP, the director free to explore new channels and find places where they might want additional specialists.

For an in-house team, this is how I personally like to do it. I am, of course, looking forward to your comments, seeing how you guys do this, seeing where I might be right or wrong here And I hope you will join us again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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West Wing Week: "Go Big!"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, February 17, 2012

West Wing Week: "Go Big!"

This week, the President made a major announcement on preventive care, unveiled next year's budget, pushed Congress to extend the payroll tax cut, awarded the National Medals of Arts & Humanities, met with China's Vice President Xi, and traveled west to Wisconsin and California and the First Lady hit the road to promote her Let’s Move! Initiative.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video of the President's week:

Excel Hints for PPC

Posted: 16 Feb 2012 05:05 AM PST

Excel is one of the best tools for PPC. Downloading your data into Excel gives much more scope for analysis and complex change than using a browser interface or AdWords Editor.

You may have already read Distilled's Excel for SEO or some of PPCHero's Excel tips, but here are my own hints.

Concatenation

If there's one thing you can put into practice from this post, it is this: you can use ampersands instead of CONCATENATE().

A1&A2 is the same as CONCATENATE(A1,A2), except for being far fewer characters and not adding to the oft inevitable nightmare of nested brackets.

Wildcards

Excel has three wildcard characters:

A question mark (?) can match a single character, but it can be any character. So ‘ca?’ will match ‘cat’ and ‘cab’ but not ‘ca’ or ‘cattle’.
Tilde is the escape character – if you actually want to search for asterisks, question marks or tildes you have to add a tilde (~) before them. So ‘Where am I?’ will match ‘Where am Id’, while ‘Where am I~?’ will match ‘Where am I?’ and nothing else.
An asterisk, *, can represent zero or any number of any characters. ‘*’ will match anything. ‘*where’ will match ‘where’, ‘somewhere’ and ‘thwsohfkjsgnsmnglsnwhere’ but not ‘where am I’.

Main takeaway: ‘*where*’ will match anything with 'where' in it. You can use this to check text for a single word.

Wildcards do not work in all functions (you can't use them in SUBSTITUTE(), for example) but will work in SEARCH(), SUMIF(), SUMIFS(), COUNTIF(), COUNTIFS() and VLOOKUP(). You can use also wildcards in Find and Replace.

Checking Ads

Pretty basic tip: You can check that all the bits of your ads are the right length using LEN(), and then having conditional formatting to highlight where text is too long.

More advanced: what if you use dynamic keyword insertion? Then your ad text's actual length can be over 25, as AdWords won't count the '{KeyWord:}' when counting the characters. You can get around this by using:

=LEN(A2)-10*COUNTIF(A2,”*{KeyWord:*}*”)

You usually would use COUNTIF() on a range of cells, but you can also use it to check just one cell – if A2 uses DKI, then COUNTIF() will return 1, and if it doesn't COUNTIF() will return 0. There are 10 characters in '{KeyWord:}', so if COUNTIF() is 1 the formula gives then length of A2 minus 10.

COUNTIF() is case insensitive, so it won't matter if your ads use '{keyword:', '{Keyword:' or '{KeyWord:'.

Checking Search Query Reports

Search query reports are great providers of negative and positive keywords. But it can be difficult to spot trends if people phrase their queries slightly differently. You can use SUMIF() and wildcards to see the performance of all search queries that have an individual word in them.

First, download your search query report into Excel – here's an entirely made-up example:

Then add a second worksheet, and set up these headings:

The 'Word' column is for the word or phrase you're searching the search terms for. Add some words that recur in the search terms.

In cell B2, we want to add up all the clicks of search terms containing whatever's in A2. So use the formula

=SUMIF(‘Search term report’!A:A,”*”&A2&”*”,’Search term report’!E:E)

There are three parameters inside SUMIF():

the first is the range of cells to test
the second is the criteria to test those cells
the third gives the range of cells to add up if the tested cell fulfils the criteria (This argument is optional – leave it blank if you're adding up the cells you're testing)

So the SUMIF() will look at ‘Search term report’!A:A (which is the column of search terms) and see if any match “*”&A2&”*”. So if A2 is 'cheap' then the function will look for search terms that match "*cheap*" – which means any search term that uses the word 'cheap'. It then sums the numbers in ‘Search term report’!E:E (the Clicks column).

The formula for Impressions is

=SUMIF(‘Search term report’!A:A,”*”&A2&”*”,’Search term report’!F:F)

which is the same except that the third parameter is now the Impressions column.

In the Cost column the third parameter should be ‘Search term report’!I:I, and in the Conv column the third parameter should be Search term report’!K:K.

The CTR, CPC, Cost/conv and Conv rate columns can't be filled in using SUMIF(), as they aren't sums – calculate these from the other columns.

Then copy the formulae in Row 2 and paste them downwards.

In this example, searches with the word 'cheap' get good CTR and bad cost/conv, suggesting that 'cheap' should either be added as a negative keyword or effort needs to be spend improving their performance. It also shows there's a lot of traffic for 'blue' which converts well, so separating 'blue widgets' into their own ad group might web a good idea.

What words should you check? Look at your search queries and see what keeps coming up. You might want to check for words suggesting an informational search (like 'why', 'how', 'what', 'where' or 'which'). Or you can check for people searching for websites with words like 'www' or 'com'.

Note that the CTR calculated is likely to be higher than the actual CTR of all searches containing your word – some queries are collated under 'Other Search Queries', and if a search query had a click it's less likely to be one of those. So it may be better to focus on the cost and conversion metrics.

Download the Sumif Example sheet here

Any More?

I hope you've found these tips useful – there's so much depth to Excel that it's easy to miss the things you can do with it. Please share your own tips in the comments!

Seth's Blog : The illusion of privacy (and what we actually care about)

The illusion of privacy (and what we actually care about)

You probably have very little privacy at all, giving it up a long time ago.

If you've got a charge card, the card company already knows what you do, where you go, how you spend your money, what your debt is like. If you use a cell phone or a computer, someone upstream already has access to where you go, what you buy, what you type, and on and on.

No, you don't really have a privacy.

What you care about, I'm guessing, is being surprised. You don't want to be surprised to discover that the card company is sending you gift certificates for VD testing because you've been staying at hourly motels. You don't want to be surprised that a site you've never visited seems to know an awful lot about your buying habits.

As computers get ever better at triangulating our interests and our actions, prepare to be surprised more often. It's not clear to me whether the never-ending series of little snooping surprises will eventually wear us out and we'll give up caring, or whether one day we'll sit up and demand that the surprises stop.

But privacy? Too late to worry about that.