Google has launched an API around social networking. In the words of Google:

What is the Social Graph API?

The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers. Developers can query this public information to offer their users dramatically streamlined “add friends” functionality and other useful features.

Now here is what I understand of it - 

We all know that Google crawls the web and figures out which pages link to each other. Google is also crawling the web to find out how sites are related to each other. This is done using -

 a) “XFN”: You can change the links on your page (the <a href=”"> tags) to include a parameter called “rel”. “rel” basically indicates how is the linked site related to the current site - is it a friend’s site, or is it a colleague’s site, or is it another of my sites, etc.

b) “FOAF”: Include a series of tags at the top of your site page(s) to indicate who your friends are.

Google is basically going through the “rel” parameters and the FOAF xml tags and storing how one site is related to another. And they have now made this information available to everyone via their new API.

Take a look at the 3 minutes video here, particularly the scenario at the end.

The official Google Analytics blog makes a great point about the importance of bounce rates to your marketing efforts. They are a simple enough metric that can be applied to nearly any kind of website.It is a metric tailored especially for landing pages…where a high bounce rate can tell you almost as much as a defined conversion funnel.

If you need a resource for understanding which metrics provide the most insight, check out the new book Web Analytics an Hour a Day.

clipped from analytics.blogspot.com If your site conversion rates are low, Bounce Rate can help you understand why. If your Bounce Rates are also low, your troubles are likely due to site design and usability issues. In this case, you might focus your efforts on streamlining your conversion funnel or making your site easier to navigate. But if your Bounce Rates are high, you can focus your efforts on redesigning entrance (landing pages), improving the quality of traffic to your site, and doing a better job of pairing landing pages with ads.

A great post today from the PPC Hero blog…as I stated in my previous post, this is a great search marketing resource.

Whether your goals are to drive sales, leads or sign-ups, increasing traffic to your site is one action you can take to get closer to your goals. Below I’ve described six ways I was able to increase traffic for my clients without spending additional money. And in turn, I was able to generate more leads and revenue for my clients.1. Stop Ad Text Testing, Temporarily - If it’s near the end of the month, one way I increase traffic for my clients is to pause my ad text testing and only use the ad with the highest click-through rate to get maximum traffic. Then, at the beginning of the next month when goals and budgets start over, I un-pause my ad text and begin re-testing.

2. Separate Content Network - After speaking with my Google rep, she said that one way to increase traffic to your site is to turn off the content network in your sponsored search and create a new campaign where only the content network is being used. The keywords you should put in your content only campaign should be very general keywords. General keywords are more likely to be picked up by publishers versus specific keywords. She also suggests that you use the content network placement performance report to see which sites are driving the majority of traffic and which are not.

3. Add All Match Types - If you’re currently not running all match types in Google, I strongly recommend it. I have one keyword with all three match types (exact, phrase and broad) in a separate ad group in Google and all three keywords get clicks and conversions. It’s not always necessary to keep your different match types in a separate ad group, but you might find a higher click-through rate if you do. It’s something you’ll have to test on your own.

4. Keyword Tools – Keyword tools are not only important when you’re setting up new campaigns and ad groups. You should be using the keyword tool at least once a month to add new keywords to your ad groups. The more people type that go to Google and Yahoo and type in new search queries, the more new keywords will show up in the keyword tools. I recently used the keyword tool for one of my accounts that I haven’t used for a while. I managed to find tons of new keywords to add into my ad groups.

5. Site Related Keyword Tool – This is a relatively new tool for Google and I just started using it for my accounts. You type in your landing page URL and the tool will find relevant keywords according to that page. At times when I have used this tool, I have found it helpful most of the time. Even if there’s one or two keywords that the tool brings up that you didn’t think of or didn’t have in your ad group it could possibly bring a significant increase in traffic.

6. Set Daily Budgets, Lower Bids – Everyone knows that raising your keyword bids will increase site traffic. But if it’s near the end of the month and you don’t have the extra money to spend, set a daily spending limit and if you begin to hit that limit consistently, lower your bids. This will allow more traffic to come through at a cheaper cost, and in turn you’ll increase your traffic without spending additional money. Make sure you don’t lower your keyword bids too aggressively at first, or you could end up losing traffic if you go below your daily spending limit. I check my accounts at various times throughout the day to see if and when I’ve hit my spending limit. At one point I found that my account was hitting it’s spending limit at 10am. So I began to lower my bids and saw a significant increase in traffic yet didn’t go over my budget. If you don’t have a daily spending limit set up on your account set one, then gage whether or not you should need to lower your bids.

Source: PPC Hero: 6 Ways to Increase Your PPC Traffic

I have a friend who is an extremely successful pay-per-click marketer and as he has grown out his business his team has taken to blogging on the topic of PPC. After checking out the posts for a few months I have to say that I am impressed. I have worked directly with Patrick and his company Hanapin Marketing in the past and can attest first hand to their expertise and success in the search marketing arena.

So if you are doing any paid search marketing go check out PPC Hero, it has some great tips and advice.

Chances are good that if you do even a small amount of online marketing you have come into contact with landing pages.

Landing pages are described in Wikipedia as “a specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking a link or advertisement”. This could be anything from a search campaign in Google to a banner ad placed in a local business association. These are almost always transactional pages that exist to help fuel the customer conversion, whether it is to purchase a product, download information, or simply sign up for an email newsletter.

We place a lot of importance on these pages as they are the gateway to all customer interactivity with your company. Get it wrong and you could miss out on a lot of potential revenue. It is especially important in the B2B realm - where the value of the conversion is typically greater.

So in an effort to help you get off on the right foot I have compiled a list of tips that have served me well when creating successful B2B landing pages.

1. Carry the message through from the advertisement: Do everything you can to make sure that you aren’t pushing your traffic to a “one size fits all” landing page. If the ad that brought them was about a particular feature - then highlight that feature. If it was a discount that brought them to you…don’t waste time talking up the feature set. It may be more work to create multiple landing pages…but you will definitely get more conversions
2. Personalize the content: I’ve seen marketers spend hours segmenting a list and crafting a highly customized message that speaks directly to each recipient…only to forward them to a generic landing page once they decide to take action! If your email program allows for personalization of content… drive that personalization through the link in the email and into the landing page. If you want to see how you can do this through using simple javascript, see this earlier post.
3. Keep the form simple and above the fold: You can test this yourself, but I have ALWAYS gotten better response when the form is above the fold. And of course, its always better to limit the amount of information to only that which is necessary. Do you really need to know the state when you have the zip code? If possible its even better if you can…
4. Pre-populate the form: Want to know the easiest way to increase conversion? Pre-populate the form on the landing page. If you are driving traffic from an email campaign then you already have alot of this info…don’t ask them for it again! Again, you can do this using simple javascript.
5. Minimize outbound links: You spent alot of money to get the visitor to the landing page so it is perfectly acceptable to drive traffic to a landing page optimized for conversion. As long as you are giving the visitor exactly what the ad promises…you are not entitled to give them access to every page of your website. If you want to force a conversion or an exit…then that is acceptable. I will usually offer a few ancillary links if they aren’t ready to take action, however…the intent is obvious and I try to do everything I can to encourage the dominant call to action.
6. Optimize them for search: It makes a lot of sense to optimize each landing page for a few specific (usually long tail) keywords. Since you will be driving alot of traffic to these pages they will likely gain relevance and therefore prominence. A good way to encourage volume traffic is to link to these landing pages from your website, add them to your sitemap, andkeep them as close to the design and layout as your web site pages (while keeping in mind #5). There are too many SEO tips to cover here…I suggest reading up on any number of SEO blogs available.
7. Keep the messaging to the point: The tendency is to try to do too much with the landing page copy. Its perfectly understandable since we ask so much of this page. But the fact of the matter is that this is no time to beat around the bush or push a lot of marketing fluff. Get to the point, offer real benefits, and answer those last minute questions that may be that last barrier to taking action.
8. Use visual elements to peak interest: A picture is worth a thousand words. The more you can do with images (or even better…embed a presentation) the more likely you are going to pique the interest of your visitor and encourage them to take the desired action. Leave nothing to the imagination…because nobody buys that way.
9. Set a testing plan in place: Don’t just create the landing page and then hope that everything goes right…start testing some combinations of messages. With Google releasing Website Optimizer to the public for free you can immediately begin seeing what headlines and action calls your visitors are responding the best to.
10. Monitor your results closely: I single out my landing pages for special treatment in my Google Analytics…in the form of goals and campaign tracking. This will provide a lot of opportunity to understand campaign traffic segments in relation to goal conversion. I also like to use Crazy Egg’s heat map and confetti view to track specific click behavior. Mine the data…and you will be able to make key insights that help your conversion.
11. Survey them: The best thing you can get from #10 is quantitative data…thousands of reports that will tell you all of the activity that has taken place…but it will not give you the “why“. Why did they choose Product X over Product Y? Why did they decide to leave without converting? Why are people who come from email more likely to convert than from search? Surveying on exit or conversion can help fill in those gaps that analytics cannot.

The most important thing to consider when crafting a landing page is to never sacrifice your message for short sighted gains in SEO or web analysis. Keep your primary focus on the customer and being as thorough as possible in describing the benefits or your product and/or service. Do only those things that make sense for your customer and watch the conversions come in!

I have been evaluating a cool tool provided by VivAlytics for the Yahoo widgets desktop application.

Its pretty simple to get up and running. You just download the Yahoo Widget Engine and then download the VivAlytics Google Analytics Desktop Widget …and after customizing the application to view the reports you want regular access to - Voila! You have all of your favorite metrics available to you right from the desktop.

If you dont want to get deluged with scheduled email reports and dont want to have to login to Google Analytics every time you want to recieve your favorite metrics then this little tool may be for you.

I actually found that the Yahoo Widget Engine 4.0 to be a very cool application and have found a number of tools that I am using it for so its worth checking out on its own. There are hundreds of widgets available for it and its increasing every day.If you take VivAlytics for a test drive let us know your experiences here!

Here it is…

If you logged into your Google account recently you saw a notice about Google Analytics undergoing a face lift. So I was pleasantly suprised when I logged into my account today and saw that my account had been migrated already and I was able to take it out for an initial test drive!

I have to say that I really love the new interface. Its much more intuitive and even simpler to use and understand than before…which was hard to do since it was already a pretty sleek and easy to use interface.

Here are the main improvements:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

I have to say that I really think the interface is a huge improvement in helping you find the information that is most important to you. Where you usually had to dig through to find the data - you are now able to get to it more quickly, save it, and share it.

So far I am very impressed. What do you think?

I have seen a growing number of businesses drastically cutting or eliminating their search engine spending. This is mostly due to low conversion rates and the rising cost of keyword phrases…so marketers are looking into alternative ways to spend their advertising budgets.

This is ridiculous to me.

You cant blame anyone for a lack of conversion - this responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of the marketer. A poorly converting site will always be a poorly converting site.

I have heard the argument made about lead quality from Google going down as a retort. This is factually wrong since Google is spending all of its time making the results even more relevant. To single out Google or any search engine as becoming poor in lead quality is a cop out - the searchers habits didn’t change overnight…it is more likely that the competition is heating up and why keyword phrases are getting more expensive.

Unfortunately alot of marketers have grown to view Google as a cash cow, and hold it to a different standard. The fact remains that Google provides a huge amount of traffic and for anyone to ignore it as a viable marketing channel is looking for the next cash cow instead of putting sound marketing practices into place.

What if you treated all marketing tactics that way? You would soon quit marketing all together.

The smart marketer will always be looking into ways to improve the channel. They will test combinations of ads, landing page layouts, keywords, messaging, offers, and audience segments. They will always be looking for ways to increase response while reducing the bottom line.

So if you find that you are contemplating getting out of search marketing - you might want to think twice about throwing in the towel. There are over a hundred million searches performed every day…do you want to give them all to your competition?

I have created a lot of landing pages since I joined the internet marketing community. I was trying to keep track for awhile and eventually gave up - my last count was somewhere around 5 hundred individual landing pages that I designed, maintained, and tested. ..all for various employers, companies, and clients.

The reason that these pages were so important was because they were the gateway from all of our internet marketing efforts. If you clicked on a banner, search listing, affiliate link, press release, or anything else we used for online promotion - you were taken to a unique landing page. We even tracked print response by driving activity online. There was no campaign we ran that did not have its own landing page to test and measure its success.

So at this point I can say that I am somewhat knowledgeable about landing pages. Lets have some fun and check out two LED sign manufacturers that use pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic.

Here were the top two listings…

LED Signs by BigBrite
Free Shipping, Low Price Guarantee
Order Signs Online or Call
BigBrite.com

Watchfire Digital Outdoor
LED billboards designed and
manufactured to last. Free paper.
www.WatchfireDigitalOutdoor.com

(I removed the google tracking so it wont charge them if you click)

There are obvious differences. Lets start with BigBrite.

The first problem is that BigBrite pushes everyone to the homepage. While there are instances where this may be suitable in this one it is not. None of the information from the ad is reinforced on the homepage where there is no coherent message other than to BUY NOW!

If you aren’t ready to purchase - then what? I guess you can aimlessly navigate around the site to find what you are looking for but my guess is that you would most likely leave before you found it.

Lets contrast that with Watchfire.

This is a landing page that reinforces the message from the ad - encouraging those visitors to sign up for the white paper. They aren’t trying to sell you a sign right away - instead they want to help you inform yourself on making the decision - and open the line of communication. They realize that you aren’t going to pick up the phone right now and tell them to “Sign me up! And while your at it heres my credit card info!” Their interest is to persuade you over time to make the purchase. (BTW, these signs are NOT cheap)

Watchfire also minimizes noise on the landing page by removing all navigation and links. While they do not intend for you to buy today they still need to capture some return from your visit so they are not taking any chances. You can only take the action they intend. This is a fair trade since they are not bombarding you with anything you didn’t already expect from the ad.

When thinking about landing pages keep in mind that most of the traffic coming to your site are first-time visitors, all coming at different stages of the buying process. Very few are looking for the immediate purchase so understanding that most likely wont sell to them on this visit will probably drastically change your approach. If you look at this as more of an opportunity to begin a relationship with your customer you will most likely see more long term rewards with a more responsive customer when you go to re-sell, up sell, or cross sell.

I have been testing this tool for a few months now and I am excited about its release to the public!

This finally brings sophisticated split and multivariate testing to the small business marketers that don’t have the budget for an expensive tool like Offermatica. The beauty once again is that Google provides it for free.

My personal experience with it has been great.

The power of Website Optimizer tool is evident. It is very easy to set up simple test right away - it took me 30 minutes to get my first one set up. You can test simple page elements or entirely different layouts - the choices are entirely up to you. All that is required is a little knowledge of html and what makes sense to test. Everything is available to you - long term and short term tests, A/B splits, or large multivariate tests.

Once note: Some people may run into issues if they are running a fairly sophisticated content management system or don’t have access to the back end. However this shouldn’t hinder using it for landing pages unless they are tied to your CMS as well. Landing pages are arguably the most important pages of your site so it makes sense to begin there. Detach them and begin testing!

And for most websites the implementation will be simple across all of their web pages.

What is cool is that combined with Google Analytics, this is extremely powerful. Now you not only have a place to measure traffic in aggregate, but a easier way to do testing. No more having multiple landing pages to keep track of - just set up your tests and the data comes pouring in.

You will still need to know what to do with that data, however. Check out this post for a little help.

So with the launch of this new product you no longer have to spend thousands of dollars to compete. The playing field is leveling and the small business marketer can rejoice. Now its time to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with testing and analytics!