Archive for December, 2010

Zach’s Best Of 2010

My yearly best of, in no particular order:

Best Books I Read in 2010
Web Analytics 2.0 – Avinash Kaushik
Ignore Everybody – Hugh MacLeod
Rebel without a Crew – Robert Rodriguez
Switch – Chip Heath
Cognitive Surplus – Clay Shirky

Best Movies I Saw in 2010
District 9
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Art & Copy
Moon
Inception
In Bruges
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Shutter Island
Exit Through The Gift Shop

Best Songs I Heard in 2010
Laundry Room – Avett Brothers
Never Say Die – Bouncing Souls
Swim Until You Can’t See Land – Frightened Rabbit
The Diamond Church Street Choir – The Gaslight Anthem
Satisfied Mind – Johnny Cash
What Are You Willing To Loose – Lucero
Steve Don’t Party No More – Mean Jeans
Excuses – The Morning Benders
The Eyes Of Death – Off With Their Heads
Answer To Yourself – The Soft Pack
Cut Throat – Varsity Weirdos
As We Enter – Nas & Damian Marley
We Are Sex Bob-Omb – Sex Bob-Omb
End In Sight – Knucklehead
Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill

Highlights:
Best date night – Aziz Ansari @ Comedy Works in Denver
Biggest drag: Thought I fixed a leaky pipe but instead it it leaked for 4 months and caused $1,500 in damage
Scariest moment: Almost driving off a cliff in a VW van on the road to Hana in Maui
Best Concert: Off With Their Heads @ 3 Kings in Denver
Best Purchase – Townhouse in Boulder
Suckiest moment: Getting my first tooth filling

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! Thanks for reading!

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December 19, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized

How To Determine Your AdWords Budget

Your AdWords budget is a little different then a traditional marketing budget because it changes based on your average order value and your cost per conversion.
Think about it: if you got $50 for every $40 you spent, how big of a budget would you want to have? You would want to have the largest budget you could possibly have because the more money you spend, the more money you make right?!
Traditional advertising budgets spent on billboards, TV or magazines have no way of knowing how much money is being made back on your investment – hence the reason for having a budget.
Below is my AdWords Budget Calculator built in excel for calculating the sweet spot for your budget. Feel free to download it at the bottom of this post.
AdWords Budget Calculator
So the first thing you need to decide is how much a sale is worth to you – weather it’s the worth of one lead, the margin you make on a sale, or the value of a visit – I call it the average order value. Next, you determine your cost per conversion. This is derived by cost divided by conversions. If you’re just starting out you won’t know what this metric is in your AdWords account since you need to accumulate some clicks and conversions. But you can still use the tool to make a goal for your cost per conversion.
Once you start playing around with the calculator you’ll see the relationship between these metrics and your revenue. The more you can decrease costs to get that average order value to go up, and the more you can optimize your AdWords campaigns to get that cost per conversion down – the more revenue you make. Obviously no matter how large of a budget you have, at some point there won’t be enough demand, in the form of searches triggering your ads, to allow you to continue to make more money. This is where expanding your keyword lists comes in and the process starts all over again.

Download AdWords Budget Calculator

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December 13, 2010 · Filed under Internet Marketing, PPC

Facebook Marketing Dashboard Download

Facebook has some pretty cool metrics for Pages that you can access from the insights tool. This can be navigated to by clicking Ads & Pages on the homepage’s left sidebar, then Pages on the Ads Manager left sidebar. From there, click on insights and you can export data about traffic, Likes, and interactions from your Fan Page using the “Export” button in the top right corner.

I made this marketing dashboard below using that data from Facebook Insights and a few metrics from Google Analytics. (The numbers are all fictional so don’t read into them too much).
The purpose of this dashboard is to visualize Facebook’s impact on the business’s website in terms of revenue and measure the quality of the content posted on the Facebook page.

Facebook Marketing Dashboard

Click for larger view

The top left graph shows total number of Likes with a line graph over the top of it showing total number of visits to the site from Facebook. Do more Likes equate to more visits to your site? You would need to get visits data from Google Analytics to put this together.
The next chart over shows total amount of revenue from Facebook. Revenue may not be the goal of your site for Facebook, maybe its leads generated or email and RSS subscriptions. Whatever it is, you should try to quantify some kind of outcome as a result of your efforts on Facebook. More Likes of your page should be a means to an end, not the end itself.
The bottom left chart shows daily stream impressions (amount of impressions your status updates have had in your fan’s news feeds) with a line over it showing a percentage of attrition – meaning number of people un-liking you. It’s important to be posting good content that people would want and at the same time not post it so frequently that it burns people out. In my example you can see a correlation between frequency of impressions and the number of un-likes. You can also see that number of un-likes has decreased and looks like it is still decreasing which is a sign that the frequency and quality is getting closer to the sweet spot.
The last chart shows the amount of interaction the fans have with the page in terms of Likes and comments on a daily basis. Again, this is a good way to monitor the quality of your Facebook page’s content.
So there you have it, my take on a marketing dashboard for Facebook. It doesn’t include anything having to do with Facebook ads, I think I’ll tackle that dashboard next. Let me know what you think, and if you’re interested, click this link to download the Facebook Marketing Dashboard in Excel.

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December 9, 2010 · Filed under Internet Marketing, Social Media

Quantifying Display Ads Success

Display advertising, or advertising with text ads on Google’s content network, brings with it a different mind set than paid search. Display doesn’t work very well for direct response but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful for something. What are some more ways to quantify the success of display ads besides conversions (which typically have high cost per conversion) and number of  impressions (which may or may not have even been seen if it was below the fold or ignored altogether)?

I really like looking at the Visitor Loyalty metric under Visitors in Google Analytics. Make a custom segment for just that display campaign and see how many return visits those ads created.

Google Analytics Display Segment

If this is the first time the visitor has visited the site the chances are slim that they are going to buy. But making something compelling enough to get them to come back should be looked at as a mini-win that leads that visitor down the conversion funnell. Look at the Visits With Conversions custom segment to get an idea of what the typical amount of visits to conversion is on your site. Let’s say its 4 visits, if your display campaign begins the visitor down that 4 visit funnel, that’s worth something.
This just goes to show the importance of giving the visitor some kind of hook on the landing page to invite them to interact with you again: you can teach them something, watch a video, engage in a conversation, subscribe to email, RSS or at least a cookie on their browser to send them a re-marketing message later.

Google Analytics Visitor Loyalty

When you look at display advertising this way, rather than only at direct response and conversions, you begin to ask the question of how much time and effort your business spends on pre-purchase transactions and how much you spend on trying to simply close the sale?

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December 3, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized