Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Analytics, Web Design

The major misunderstanding about media and blogger will be resolved once you read this article carefully:

Brands Treating Bloggers as Media

Brands think that blogs are media too! Well, the time has come to slap you with the reality! Bloggers are not media people they are not authorized to publish content and they own no publishing license! They are free spirits and true personal voices using their own vision and perception to speak their minds about you!

Media agencies on the other hand, are established entities responsible for content publishing in a systematic and legalizes approach; content may be delivered via any medium such as the internet, television, print, and audio CDs… Publishing in definition is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information — the activity of making information available to the general public. Blogs however, is a form of publishing but is defined as a personal journal published on the World Wide Web. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject, the web self-empowered publishing tools such as “wordpress” has enabled individuals to get into publishing their journals. As a blogger you are not required to be a writer or a certified journalist, you are just someone with good writing skills writing in your own daily diary! (Definition by Wikipedia)

Now the first major misunderstanding is that brands think bloggers are Media! First and foremost if the media sends press release to blogger and the blogger published them this means end of “Blogging”! It’s no longer the personal voice reader is thriving to hear, it’s the media influence! This unfortunately leads to the dilution of “Blogging” as a concept! And not only that it also endangers media content to be misused, putting your content in the hands of an individual who may misuse it in any sense is your responsibility, the blogger in that case is not liable!

Bloggers are confused

Second misunderstanding is the blogger themselves acting as media, I personally do not blame them as they are young enthusiasts who got the attention of the brands and extremely thrilled about it! Brands themselves have confused blogger, brands must be responsible in directing bloggers and empowering them with tools and inspirations to blog naturally about them.

I personally am a blogger as you can see, and I appreciate everyone who voices out his thoughts and opinions in a blog format! However, the concept here is not being deployed properly. Brands must understand how to employ bloggers to their benefit, and differentiate between mediums as mentioned in my previous article.

Blogger Evaluation Criteria

The most important thing is that brands must know the criteria of evaluating a serious blogger who can be of benefit to their brands, there are too many of them and differentiating the influential bloggers is a task on its own. Remember that the number of “site hits” doesn’t say much about the blog performance, simply because in Web Analytics a“hit” is not a measurement value a “Hit” on your website is the retrieval of any file, like a page or graphic and other resources such as scripts like .js and .css files etc…from the web server (“Read my article about “hits definitions – HIT OF MISS”). The real measurement is to understand about the visitor page views; meaning the single impression made by a site visitor, which is something usually not announced by the blogger, also you need to look at the bounce back rate (the rate of site visitors dropouts).

Evaluation can be through looking at the quality of blog’s content, number of engagement, number followers, comments, and what type of comments is important, ask them for analysis of their blog visitors look further into the bounce back rate and page views, and most important google their names and see what is their reputation in the blogshpere. I would add to that interview the blogger getting closer to him/her before you decide to hand him/her your brand reputation.

Conclusion

Media must understand that bloggers are supportive channels to other major medias, there are smart ways to use them. Blogs influence the mass in the sense that its people talking to people, so communities can relate to their content in a much personal level than official media. Simple ways of using them is to call on them to speak about your brands in their own voice give them the freedom, don’t expect them to write about you leave it to them! All you need to do is to make them like you. Remember very well if the blogger starts writing about you only to show off then it’s no longer valid it’s fake and no one like that! This message is for bloggers too, if you are true to your blog then embrace the freedom of your opinion and be courageous!

I am sleepy! And I over ate for dinner so you must forgive me if I blabber! I will stay awake to write this article and I am sure I will sleep better if I share it with you!

These days we have many media channels, TV, Radio, Print and Web, telecommunication! Yes yes; broadcasting short message, mobile TV and even bbm are a media channels; I will leave TV & Radio out of this!

I will talk about Print & Web, Traditional VS Non-Traditional or (New Media also called Digital Media)! The current relationship is 80/20! 80% for Traditional Media and 20% New Media! The relationship encompasses using both mediums as content publishing and advertisement! By the way 20% for new media is an over-statement; but let’s be optimistic. This all is of course in reference to the new media usage status in Middle East region!

Traditional Media takes the prominent role in media buying and content publishing, the new media takes a support role more of a back seat when it comes to advertisement and content publishing; and sometimes it’s ruled out completely!

Reasons for that:

1. Extensive Lack of Knowledge
2. Technology Phobia
3. Resistance to Change
4. More Score Cards (YUCKH)
5. Habitual thinking!

The last point, habitual thinking relates to the mindset of people owning the strategic thinking of the companies, often these decision makers like to go by the old book and avoid changes, in fear of more cost or unforeseen risks! Guys!!! Listen carefully if you suffer from this condition:

New Media is measurable! Meaning you can track user behavior and understand his “likes” and “Dislikes”; this will help you in your marketing strategy! When it comes to cost, yes it may cost some money but it is money well spent! Nothing on New Media is disposable!  All your efforts will lead to success if you employ the medium right! You just have to learn how to drive the ship and the shore will be easily reached! Doesn’t this make it invaluable!

Web Actionable Analysis helps you understand the data behind the website and make smart business decisions. Ever since business started tools to measure the efforts flooded the market, from the pencil and paper manual data analysis to the most sophisticated CRMs! So what is it about the web that scares people please help me understand! It comes with full package, a fancy business presentation closer than ever to the consumer anytime any place and a data analysis tool measuring every breath of your consumer!

Why are you putting it in the back seat when it is the future tool for absolutely everything!  It is time to switch roles!  You have to face the reality it’s no longer the age of push marketing and interrupted ads! It’s TiVo age! Consumers are in control of the information they consumes!

Don’t wait too long the train is moving, and moving fast you gotta catch up!

Goodnight!

A good read is “Road Less Travelled“

Did you really reach 1million visitors on your blog or website in less than a year! Look closer, are you reading the web traffic reports correctly?

Before rushing into a hasty announcement about your web traffic numbers and over promising advertisers, read further to understand what really counts when it comes to web traffic.

Unless you are selling everything for $1 or giving away free iPad 2 for all then it is impossible to reach 1 million sustained actual visitors to your blog or portal in less than a year.

I admit reading reports is not easy it’s a task of a trained web analyst with the right skills to extract the numbers and bring the intelligence behind them, but I will lay out few simple facts for you to help you extract the true performance numbers on your web analytics report.

You must understand first the two main key measurements you need to focus on, they are “Hits’ and “Page Views”; website “Hits” are not to be measured by when it comes to web traffic, simply because a “Hit” on your website is the retrieval of any file, like a page or graphic and other resources such as scripts like .js and .css files etc… from a Web server, so one visitor can generate 4 hits or more at the same instant.  Therefore the hits number showing on the web analytical report is an arbitrary number reflecting on the page content. Do not get caught up in the dramatic numbers the “hits” indicate; it’s always misleading!

The real deal is the “Page View” this is your bread and butter; a “Pages view” is the single page logged on your web analytics report. One “page view can generate” many hits. Simply a “page view” is the page you requested to view; the “hit” is the page and the things it carries.

So if you are selling advertisement, then you must reveal the “page views” this is what the advertisers are interested in, and they will choose the number of impressions they needs to buy; an “impression” is made upon the deliverability of the ad banner to the end user’s request, an impression is generated every time a users interacts with your page so one user can register one or much more impressions in one session.

Now! web analytics does not end at “page views” or “impressions”, if you are managing a blog or you are an advertiser you need to look beyond the “impression”. Get bigger glasses role up your sleeves and look closer, numbers that must not go unnoticed are:

If you are site manager look out for: Unique Visitors, Loyalty (Recency, latency, Length of visit, Depth of visit), Content (types of content views).

If you are an advertiser: first you care about number of “Page Views” then you must dig into the visitor behavior performance, to make sure the site has what you need. First you must look at “Page Views”, and then comes user behavior; which consists of content viewed, loyalty of viewers and over all usage of the site, this will give you as an advertiser insights on the overall health of the “Page views” and consequently the “impressions” you are purchasing. Usually the “publisher” does not reveal that much depth stats reports not because he is holding information from you but because providing intelligent reports requires more than just reading the numbers, so compiling reports and analyzing are a costly task. But you as an advertiser can ask the publisher for performance review in any form.

The truth is Web Analytics is a science helping you in every aspect of running your website or blog, when “actionable web analysis” is practiced to the fullest potential you are able to see how your website is performing and how you can optimize it for better performance. Ideally a full time Web Analyst must be on board to cater for this task. But now from this article you got the main and key information to help you manage your blog/website on your own.

Should you worry about “clicks” or “impressions”? Something online advertisers are always concerned about. Well, you must be concerned about both.

Both actions are challenging when it comes to online ad performance, optimizing your ad to generate the maximum and targeted impressions and clicks ending to achieving the campaign goals is a daunting task.

Your advertisement performance is measured by:

• Impression
• Click/Action
• Drop off
• Bounce back

In this article I will focus on “clicks” and “Impressions” without getting too technical.  Reasons users are likely to click on an ad are:

• Relevancy
• Targeting
• Visual Expression
• Enticing & clear message

“Click” is not the end of it; the process continues after the user lands on your website, there the “click” must generate a particular conversion that you have specified, could be purchasing a product or a service, subscribing to a magazine, completing a survey and so on… so you need to bear in mind that worrying about “clicks” means worrying about conversions. To achieve conversions certain measures needs to be taken care of before launching an advertisement anywhere. On top of those measures are:

• Relevant & Consistent message: the message on the display banner must be consistent with the one on the ad landing page, often display ads lead to the homepage of a website instead of a specific landing page; so the user gets lost in the message, and finds no clear meaning to link to the message on the advertisement, this will lead to a high dropout rate. Your message must be persuasive and clear; it also must set and meet user’s expectation.
• Clear conversion path: whatever your conversion path is, you must make it clear; it is like leaving bread crumbs “or mini carrot cupcakes if your user is me” to the place you want the user to go to. Your path must be easy and leading to a result.
• Incentives: it will encourage the user to engage with your website if you offer him something, could be a discount or winning any sort of reward or a carrot cupcake!
• Ad targeting: on top of taking all the measures to optimize your ad for higher clicks and conversions, the initial placement of the advertisement is key to the success, the more targeted an ad is the better and genuine the results are.

A study by Borrell Associates forecasts 60% growth of display ads in 2011, “They’re not buying mass anymore; they’re buying niche,” said Borrell.  So the display targeted ads are the popular choice, targeting can be from geographic locations to a more sophisticated targeting, time of the day, frequency capping, content relevancy, and even more personalized targeting.

An “Impression” is not less demanding than a “click”, to convert an impression into a click also takes similar efforts, from relevancy to consistency of messages, setting up the conversion path and so on.

It is important to mention that regardless of clicks; the impression will be made on the user the instant he downloads the page and sees your ad banner. Once the impression is registered on the server it will also register in user’s brain; even if the user is not with an eidetic memory, still the visuals will be retained in his subconscious and will be triggered later in the course of online actions and experiences. There is something called the mind’s eye, the ability of our brains to retrieve a visual they have seen. So the likeliness of this user to come back and click the ad is high, if that ad really made the impression, by using the earlier measures we spoke about.

———————————————————————————-

Definitions:

CPC: click per action which in “Clicking” on the banner, this  is pricing model
CPM: Click Per impression is the Cost per thousand impressions pricing model

Impression: An online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page
Click: is the interaction with an ad banner by clicking the ad.

—————————————————————————————

By Dawser Al Hadidi

Are you getting the right results from your website?  Have you defined your website goals and never ever measured them?

Even if you do not want to go fancy and perform A/B testing on each and every web page, transaction, or banner campaign etc… still you need a web analytics tool and you will have to measure, who, when, where, what, and how long? Who is visiting my site, where are they coming from? What are they doing on my site? How long are they spending time overall and on a specific page? what devices and browsers are they using to browse my site? The answers to these questions will tell you so much not only about your website performance but also about your business. Using such facts can help you adjust your website and grow your business. No one will help you in generating those results and reading those metrics except for a well educated “Web Data Analyst”.

Who is a Web Data Analyst?

A Web Data Analyst is not a “Business Analyst, Content writer, Designer and God forbids a Programmer” Nor is he/she a Marketer! A real Web Data Analyst brings numbers into business decisions! He/she sits between marketing and IT, works closely with both, and the outcome is enhancing web performance to enable taking educated business decision and increase conversions, and largely achieve those KPIs which have been hammering on your bosses head!

Web analytics software gives you so much data to deal with; exhibiting those on your sales pitch might do you some good; whereas a continuous web traffic data measurement and actionable analytics feeding directly into your marketing strategy will go a long way.

The data sitting behind your website can be extremely valuable to your business continuity and growth; so don’t wait, add a Web Data Analyst to your team.

You might also benefit from reading Quality First, Quantity Second

by Dawser Al Hadidi

We all want to form better business decisions and drive more sales, so why aren’t we rolling up our sleeves and digging into web analytics data?

Businesses! Web analytic data is your magic eight ball. This data will tell you how your customers are dealing with your website and where you can improve upon your site and how to get better conversions.

Since you have the web analytics tool, If you don’t have the web analytic tool, Google does, for free! check, Google Analytics. The best way to get started is to define your customer segments and the mindsets of each segment. This can be simply done by pondering the questions:

Are your visitors in search of information, buying a product, comparing prices, or looking for career opportunities? What is it they want from you? The answer to that question is always a good start.

Another way would be to define your content groups:

1. What are you saying to your customers? Is it relevant?
2. Are you meeting each customer’s mindset expectations?
3. And finally, what is it you would ideally like the customer to do?

By defining your conversion path, you have something to measure against.

Gathering this data and using it to optimize your site to reach your objectives, will vastly improve traffic and response to your site and with the aid of the analytics tool you will get tangible and concrete results.

Analysis can be performed in several ways; one is visitor type analysis:

New comer – the unique visitor who has not seen your website before

Return visitor – the visitor who came back for more

Your objective is for the new comer to become a return visitor and for the return visitor to become a retained one. The data coming from the analytics tool will inform you of exactly that. Didn’t I tell you it’s the magic eight ball?

Another way is content type analysis; it looks at how you’re presenting your content:

1. Is it structured and aligned with overall site objectives?
2. Is it relevant to each customer segment?
3. Do you have expired content that doesn’t change, ever?

The data coming in from the user’s interaction with the content groups can help you improve your site’s performance and achieve your business goals.

Of course there are also the analytics that touch upon the technical side; analyzing the interactive parts of you website, your forms for instance, are they too long? Are users abandoning them half way through?

I won’t get too technical here, but there are many ways to analyze user data to get better insights into your site.

The information you get out of the analytics data, can give you the directions to better serve your website visitors. The key point here is not to get too thrilled with the increase in the number of visitors, rather, have a better look at the quality of those visits and then, only then, can you retain those numbers and increase them.