Month: October 2014

As Facebook announced that it would begin curtailing the reach of brands’ unpaid, or organic posts to ensure that the best content is populating people’s news feeds, for users the news is good, however, advertisers should prepare to pay more for the competition at auction to buy targeted audiences. The competition for news feed and sidebar space will increase too.

Apart from brands now see lower organic exposure as Facebook prioritized personal news in users’ streams, Facebook has not increased the frequency of ads either. There will be a drop in how far posts from brand pages circulate without a paid strategy.

There is also an ever-increasing content competition for the businesses. That’s small comfort for companies that invested in promoting Facebook pages with hopes of quickly generating likes and fans, and communicating cost-efficiently to build brand awareness.

Furthermore, now advertisers need to get more creative bidding on less expensive terms that reach the same desired target as before. Businesses are feeling the pressure to expand to other social media platforms and drive operating profits to cover those costs for paid ads.

Although it has been seen ad rates rising on Facebook, the good side is that better targeting will lead to high click-through rates, especially for those valuable brands to obtain more loyal customers. The improvements of relevance and quality of Facebook ads help drive out less competitive brands, and meanwhile, better engagement will eventually offset any decreases that business experience and attract new advertisers.

New Article http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-cuts-brands-organic-reach/295881/

The Internet age has been a boon to many businesses, especially smaller ones that don’t have the marketing budget to compete against massive corporations. Even for individuals now they must build strong online brand to make an impression and stand out from the competition.

From my understanding, the first step is to make sure that your personal online profile is attractive for search engines. There is something unique there to be discoverable via social media by the potential employers, but one thing to keep in mind is the authenticity. Discover exactly what makes you fascinating and build your brand on your true strengths.

It’s also crucial for individuals to define the audience when creating any online profile. For instance, standing in employers’ shoes to design things that make you qualified for their needs. Don’t wait for opportunities to come to you. Find ways to be helpful to connect with people also to be of value of influencers.

http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/infographic-how-protect-your-online-personal-brand-and-reputation/

Half or more than half of recruiters and HR professionals refer to personal websites or check search engines to find out more about potential employees. Therefore, it is better to start with your brand identity with a 360-degree audit. Take a step back and look at your online branding from a bird’s eye view and evaluate all the various components. Make sure the messages you put on a various of social media channels look consistent to convey the same impression you intended to.

Last but definitely not the least, it is the passion that really differentiates us. Value is added in what you’re sharing or saying. Stay on top of breaking news and pick a few general interests you have that might be useful and entertaining to others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6paItEm2AF4

I recently learned Google Analytics tools that literally changed the way I see the popularity of a website. At first, I was barely scratching the surface and leave with only a vague idea of what was going on with traffic on our client’s webpages. But needless to say, I am now much knowledgeable of this tool and starting to get a better idea of who our typical visitor is, track against goals and understand the conversion paths to let the site visitors behave the way we want them to.

It’s important to keep a close eye on our site’s performance on a regular basis, but chances are good that we wont’s see huge deviations from one day to the next. The Intelligence Events features allowing us to set custom parameters to monitor for unusual site activity and send alerts to designed account managers. For instance, a big increase or drop in traffic on a given day would be considered unusual, and as such Google Analytics would send alert to you. The managers are able to dig out the reasons and take the corresponding measures in a timely manner.

In addition, by using the Compare to Previous Period tool in the data range dialog box, we could gain valuable insights through identifying patterns based on previous traffic. It is crucial that we couldn’t only concern ourselves with traffic trends. We might notice the disparities in the days of the week specified when comparing recent traffic data against a previous date range. It is interesting to have this finding and allow managers to think the reasons why this week view doesn’t mirror the previous period exactly.

These are two useful tools I recently found with Google Analytics to let us gain instantly actionable insight beyond traffic.

http://blog.templatemonster.com/2014/05/27/google-analytics-tutorials-videos/

Inspired by the scary statistic that retailers lose $18 billion annually due to shopping cart abandonment, there generates one of the most painful problems for e-commerce marketers to keep the visitors enticed enough to stay on a website and get that appreciation from visitors.

Since we live in an era of skimming and in a time where information is not scarce, it can be struggle to design a website that convinces visitors that their time on the site will be worthwhile. Same concerns apply to our client Gaba Travel as well.

Gaba Travel has an average loading time, but it could increase user engagement if the application responds instantaneously to the users’ actions. It gives an appearance of direct manipulation and makes users think that the result was generated by their action and not by the computer. And it is important to notify the users via progress bar as to approximately how long they would have to wait.

Besides, Gaba Travel has a better content presentation comparing to Expedia as its website has a neat, clean and not too “busy” look to the eye. The encroached designs with animated images, banner advertisements and various package options all over the place will make users more likely click away than choose one.

Another big reason why users would leave the website is if they can only encounter old and outdated content. It is very essential for Gaba Travel to have a rhythm in its blog postings and stick to those posting schedule. More importantly, it is beneficial to keep a loyal customer base if they have something valuable and even look forward to read about.

http://www.business2community.com/infographics/visitors-leave-websites-infographic-01047260

With media outlets repeating the findings about the ineffective paid search, there has been generating a lot of discussion questioning about the indispensability of the traditional paid search. Although the AdWords is easy for online marketer to use, it is hard to strategically implement including A/B or multivariate testing. It’s evident that organic search (SEO) does get better results in term of clicks and ROI than what PPC attracts.

For instance, eBay discontinued paid search ads containing brand keywords for a limited time and claimed that there was little impact on traffic or sales from the ending the SEM campaigns. The truth is that SEM only works where consumers have been nearly ignorant of a brand and its offerings. But for a well-known brand like eBay, there is small yet detectable impact of SEM on new user acquisition and on informing infrequent users about the value of using eBay. On the other hand, SEM is a great appeal with respect to its profusion of data, metrics and ROI, which is practical for marketers to sketch out strategies for marketing optimization. It is wise for starters with no brand recognition to gain exposure quickly through paid search, as they lack of ability to attract organic traffic right away.

Therefore, the efficacy of SEM is still in controversy, but the fact of the matter is that retailers indeed gain plenty of opportunities to learn more about their customers’ needs through organic traffic searching channel.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237384

Facebook expanded its ever-growing advertising and tracking reach this week with new integration with giant social network, Atlas. The company now is able to let advertisers target you across all of your devices and on participating websites, based on characteristic from your Facebook profile such as age, gender, and location. What’s more, it also attempts to track the products you buy both online and offline to measure the ads’ effects on purchases.

It is controversy to argue the advancement of online social media that it apparently leaves no simple options to protect people against this intrusive data collection. From another perspective, the new analytics tools make it possible to create much richer user profiles, and customize services and products provided in a very short of time. With Facebook’s immense database on users ‘profiles, their status updates, their likes and dislikes, also with the collaboration of the powerful advertising platform Atlas, it can not deliver better contextual ads that offers just the right product or service on the most precise and personal level to everyone on the Internet. Marketers today are facing one of the major threats that Facebook is on the way to boost the audience targeting by utilizing cross-device and even offline measurement. But still, opportunities come with difficulties that it is not hard to imagine that Facebook will encounter serious privacy concerns. However, as far as I concerned, people are willing to trade off more and more privacy for convenience with the fast pace of social advertising advancing.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/81125.html

Responding and dealing with unhappy customers is crucial for business to maintain a positive brand image on social media. The complaints could potentially damage your online profile especially when they come from a trusted source. However, if the business has a policy in place to promptly deal with those online complaints, it is more secured to lead to a positive online community atmosphere and the issues will be addressed through a more professional way.

No matter how a business did in its industry, it is going to experience negative reviews. Regard it as an opportunity to convert those upset customers into loyal ones by firstly standing in their shoes to determine whether the compliant is valid. If necessary, contact them directly from off-line to prevent any online escalations. Try to be open, transparent as well as consistent with all the materials you posted since people will eventually find you out and won’t trust what you’re saying. What’s important, people do admire companies that take accountability for the concern even if it is partly their fault. Communicate the resolution through the trail of dialogue showing your willingness to take initiatives and put much more efforts to resolve the issues.

All in all, every business is likely to receive negativity at some point. From my point of view, it is the stumbling block that you need to step across in order to create a positive medium to engage with your community of customers.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237196