Microsoft released it’s new search engine yesterday called Bing.  There is no doubt that with the original MSN, then search.live.com, and now this, that Microsoft has had their share of identity crisis over the years.

According to last week’s article on TechCrunch, their search algorithm is supposed to be “an order of magnitude” greater than the last engine.  When you do a search for “costa rica” for example, you get a similar layout to Google with sponsored links across the top and side and organic listings underneath, but there is more.  There is a side column on the left (the layout changes depending on topic) with Related Searches and your Search History.  Under the organic listings, it begins to further breakout more semantically related terms such as “costa rica map”, “costa rica vacations”, “costa rica weather” and more, and then finally concludes the page with Images and Video.  You end up getting a lot more on the page than the typical 10 results that Google returns.  Therefore, there is less paging through 3-5 pages trying to find what you want.

Comparison: Microsoft Bing vs. Google

I wanted to do a quick comparison between Bing and Google for a less “sexy” term, but one that is near and dear to our hearts:) – “free seo analysis”

Here is what the Bing search results page looks like:

Looks very similar to a Google results page with 10 results, some space for sponsored links, but includes a “related searches” section over on the left column.  This could be useful not only to a user, but also to an SEO as we now know the other terms that the search engine is categorizing, so we can optimize for these terms as well.

Here is what the Google search result page looks like for the same term:

Similar layout, but totally different results, which you may expect.  Only 40% of the listings are common between the two search engines, with the other 60% of the listing being completely different between the two.

While our Website Analyzer tool ranks 5th in Bing, beating out Hubspot’s Website Grader, we are nowhere to be found on Google until page 2, position 7.  And then SEOmoz, a highly reputable and popular SEO site gets a high #4 position on Google, and nothing on Bing.

So it begs the question, do we “over-optimize” for Google?  Bing is getting a lot of attention, and Microsoft is reportedly dumping $100M into an ad campaign to promote it – will Google lose their prestigious title as the dominant search engine, or is this simply a bunch of hype?

Time will tell, and so will my traffic numbers

Microsoft Bing: Will This New Search Engine Outperform Google? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The following is a blog post by Nan Palmero, Chief Inspriation Officer at Sales By 5, a San Antonio firm that helps companies achieve dramatic increases in sales.

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.

Guest blog: Twitter Blows Out Direct Mail is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’ve been wondering lately about Twitter.  I wonder when I send a tweet to my 800 followers, who is actually paying attention not only reading my tweet, but clicking on the link I provide.  In reality, it seems to me that we only have a small window of opportunity to be “noticed” or else the tweet just gets buried in the time line.

My guess was that any tweet has a “shelf life” of roughly 2 hours, and assuming about 5% of your followers are considered to be “active followers” (meaning they usually respond to things you post or at least consistently read them), I could expect about 20 click-throughs to the link I provided in my tweet.

The Test

I sent a post at 1:38p CST (right in the middle of the day, when hopefully most are actively using Twitter) entitled “Test: How I Evaluated the Effectiveness of Print Ads: http://bit.ly/19GkSz”; a blog I posted on this site on April 21st.  I used bit.ly to track the results, thanks to my friend @bolora.  I was using BudURL and was getting frustrated with it, so Bo said to try bit.ly and by inserting “/info” right after the .ly, I would get a full report on clicks, etc.

The Results

Right after the tweet posted, it was re-tweeted by friends @erikdarm (678 followers) at 1:53p, and then 2 of his followers re-tweeted the post; @blellowj (2,047 followers) at 1:54p and @stephenlynch (712 followers) at 1:57.  It is now 3:19p and there have been no further re-tweets, so the pass-along value may have reached its limit within the Twitter time line.

Total reach = 4,235 potential Tweeple to read and click on my tweet (my 798 followers, plus the followers of the re-tweets).

If you go to the bit.ly link, you will see a screen like the one below:

So the “Now” screen looks like this and refreshes every few seconds, so the time line keeps moving to the right.  (It would be cool if you could go back and see the clicks at the beginning – there was more activity around 2:00p with one time about 6 clicks came in simultaneously).

I think it’s safe to say the post has now exhausted it’s useful life, with the last click at 2:41p CST (it is now 3:29p and no click activity since then).

This shows the activity for the “full day”, with a total of 34 clicks at the 2:00p mark, and 15 at the 3:00p mark for a total of 49 clicks to the link in the tweet (i.e. 49 potential new visitors to our blog/website).

Conclusion

We would have to do several tests to prove this out, and I’m sure would vary if you were Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki, but in general (for the rest of us), from this small experiment we conclude that a “useful” tweet has the following characteristics:

-a shelf life of about 1 hr 15 min, and then it “dies”
-1 to 2% click-through rate on links

Which means that this is not a whole lot different than direct mail for example, without out the cost of course.  What do you think?  Is Twitter really a good way to communicate and share useful knowledge, or is it simply getting lost in the mix?

Test: Is Anyone on Twitter Paying Attention? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

As I was flying back from the east coast on Southwest Airlines, as usual I pick up the latest copy of Spirit magazine to see what’s interesting as we wait until I can open my computer and do something else.  It occurred to me as I was perusing that there were very few ads that had either a direct response mechanism, or at least some kind of tracking mechanism to validate the performance of the ad.

The Test

So I decided I would do a study: count every single ad and see which had a) direct response mechanisms; b) tracking mechanisms; or c) nothing at all.  Even when I stopped in Nashville, I went and purchased the latest copy of Entrepreneur magazine and did the same study so I could compare the results.

So, let’s first define the three basic types of ads:

Direct Response – this type of ad has a mechanism to entice the prospect to learn more about the product or service, or to purchase.  Examples would be a tear-sheet to mail in for a free something, a link to a website with a promo code, a cut-out to bring in for a discount, a link to a form to download something, etc.

Tracking Mechanism – this type of ad does not have a promo or direct response mechanism, but has a special 800 number or URL so they can effectively track the responses from the ad.  The URL mechanisms are fairly easy to spot, but the 800 numbers are not.

Branding – this type of ad has no direct response mechanism and no noticeable tracking mechanism.  They simply are there to generate brand awareness to the company/product/service.

Now, knowing these basic parameters, there are some caveats:

1. Brand awareness ads have their place in the world.  Because I get excited about measurement, I would love to see all ads of all types have a direct response or tracking mechanism, but it is not always feasible.  As long as the company knows exactly how much they are spending on “brand awareness” and has at least tested turning them on and off to see the relative impact, I’m OK with them.

2.  While some ads may not have a direct response or tracking mechanism, they could have had a place on their web sign up form with a “how did you hear about us” field.  I think these are generally ineffective since you never know if the person was guessing or simply picking anything just to get through the form faster.  If you are running ads in multiple publications simultaneously it is nearly impossible to track the performance of them, so you might consider running ads one at a time to see what the relative increase in performance is compared to when you run nothing.

The Results

The results of the test may or may not surprise you, but the use of direct response or tracking mechanisms in print advertising is largely missing.  Many of the hotels and casinos were guilty of most of the branding ads in Spirit magazine, while in Entrepreneur magazine, it was the franchises.  Collectively, less than 25% of the 125 total ads had either a direct response or tracking mechanism.

The Awards

Based on all of the 125 ads, here’s what we’ve come up with:

Best Direct Response Mechanisms

Gotomypc.com has an excellent campaign where they are giving 30-day free trials if you enter a special promo code.  Their ad in Sprit magazine had the code “spirit” and in Entrepreneur they had the code “entrepreneur”.  I have also seen them using this on their tv spots as well.

Airport Parking has a pretty good ad that offers 1 day free, and then asks for an email for the 2 days free offer.  The sales associate scans the barcode which indicates which offer and which publication it came from.  It could be a little clearer that you do actually need to cut this out and bring it in to the retail center.

Kaplan University has a great example of a tear-sheet that you mail in to get a free book.  If you don’t want to mail this in, you can call the 800 number (which I am sure is specific to the campaign) or go to the unique URL.  I like this one a lot because in the form it also has a referral mechanism where it asks if they can contact a friend on your behalf.

Least Likely to Succeed

IBM – First, this ad is way too busy, and it’s rare for people to actually read an ad these days.  I didn’t think the readers of Entrepreneur were the IT-type, but I could be wrong.  Then, if you want more information on this “offer” you go down to this small box where it has a long URL, or an 800 number where you are required to remember (or write) down some long string of characters.  Not too convenient, and I would suspect they could have a conversion problem on their hands.  Why not just “ENT409″ for Entrepreneur Magazine, the April 2009 edition?  Nope.  6N8AH14A was better.

Comcast had an interesting ad that hooked me with the fact that I might be “stuck in an old phone contract that doesn’t fit” (which I’m sure many of us are), and then drew my eyes to the red strip where I thought I would find some direct response mechanism.  Nope.  Gotta go way back up to the top right corner to get a website and phone number.  This could have been so much better…

Most Confusing

The Parking Spot folks, similar to the Airport Parking guys up top, had a similar offer to save 20% at any of their “spots”.  Problem was I did not know or understand that I am supposed to cut this out and bring it in to the retail office.  Way down in the bottom right corner there is a “For cashier use only” which indicated to me that it was a coupon – other than that, I didn’t catch on.

Biggest Waste of Money

Now this ad was weird.  First, I guess I don’t understand the butterfly concept, but more ironically, I had to “search” for this search company’s contact info.  And I actually thought the name of the company was “Search Marketing” – that would be a blunder if people went to Google looking for “search marketing” and came up with their competitors.  My point is that the number and website (calls to action) are buried in the text that no one reads anyway.

Test: Measuring the Performance of Print Advertising is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’m real big on measurement. And I mean BIG. Without data, you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure, you have no real insights to your business as to what marketing is working for you, and what’s not.

Whether you are spending a small fortune on marketing and advertising, or nothing at all, I’m going to show you 5 cost-effective ways to get more insights from your prospects and your customers to help grow your sales.

1. Web Traffic
If you are not looking at the traffic that visits your website, you should start today (that’s an order!). We can debate if you should use a server-based solution such as AWStats, or a javascript-based solution, such as Google Analytics, but that’s another blog post. I am going to recommend 2 products to you that are both javascript-based, and let you decide.

Google Analytics – this is a FREE but very powerful tool. You can literally install Google Analytics in less than five minutes, and start collecting data. You can segment your visitors, say comparing paid traffic to organic traffic, or traffic from one city to another. Their advanced segmentation and motion chart features are fantastic, but take a bit of wizardry to completely understand how they work.

Clicky – this is a paid tool, but does have a FREE limited version. Clicky offers real-time data, iPhone accessibility, and a “spy” tool where you can see what visitors are doing on your website in real-time. But primarily, Clicky is very easy to use.

I like to make the analogy that Google Analytics is like buying a bike in a box that you have to take home and assemble, where Clicky is already assembled and ready to ride.

Now, if you don’t have enough traffic coming to your site to measure, well, that’s another problem, and you’re going to need to run this FREE Website Analyzer to determine why you can’t be found on search engines.

2. Task Completion Rate
So now you have some analytics on your site. What are you looking for in all of those wonderful looking Google Analytics, or Clicky dashboards? You’re probably getting excited with “average time on site”, or “average this”, or “average that”. Beware of averages – they lie! While the dashboards are nice, they tell you little about what the visitor did, and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. So while we do have “conversion rates”, I would like to stress the importance of “task completion rates”, or the ability for a visitor to actually complete the task they set out to do. This can easily uncover some usability issues with your site.

I highly recommend using a FREE site-level survey called the 4Q. Four simple questions that measures how they liked the website from 1-10, the purpose of their visit, if they were able to complete their task or not, and an open ended comment.

3. Customer Leads and Sales
How do you currently track your lead pipeline? Do you know what your close ratio is? I just saw customer service guru Jack Daley speak, and he spouted some interesting data. If you contact a lead 2 times, you have a 5% probability of making a sale. If you contact a lead 12 times or more, you have an 80% probability of making a sale. The real eye-opener is that the majority of sales folks were contacting leads much less than 12 times, and in fact, the percentage that do is single digit.

Secondly, you need to be able to track every lead, the source of the lead, and if they converted to a sale. If you knew this, then you can start to compare quality of leads, such as do your paid search leads close faster than word-of-mouth leads? Or, do leads from direct mail result in a higher gross sale than newspaper ads?

The good news is that there are some tools to help you along. What you need is a simple CRM (Client Relationship Management) System. If you want to use a web application, try Zoho for FREE, or as little as $12 per month. Then there is Sugar CRM, the open source platform that you can download and configure on your own server. The app is FREE, but you will likely need to pay for a Sugar developer to get the tool working the way you want – unless their out-of-the-box solution fits your needs. Lastly, you could always try Salesforce.com, which has some great features like being able to link to your Google AdWords campaigns. The tool is relatively affordable when you start off, but if you are keeping tons of data, then it can get expensive.

4. Email Campaigns
I sure hope you are not trying to email hundreds of people a promo through your Outlook, Entourage or Mozilla email client. If you are, STOP! I have some better tools for you to try:

Constant Contact – you may have heard of these guys, since they have probably been around the longest. Surprisingly, they are not ahead of the curve when it comes to features compared to some other competitors. Their big thing is that they have an affiliate program. Big whoop. You need sales, not puny commissions of some email marketing tool. CC will charge you by the size of your list, and not by how many emails you send out.

Mail Chimp – these guys have tons of great information on how to properly set up and send an email to your prospects with all kinds of white papers and instructions. They even provide opt-in forms for your website that are completely customizable. Sending your first email is a bit of a hassle since they want to know exactly where you got your emails from, so expect about a 3-day wait to send your first email since they have to approve it.

Campaign Monitor – these guys have some neat features such as checking your email against over 20 mail clients so you can see what it will look like before you send it out. It will even convert a web-page to and HTML email if you want, and will even integrate into your Google Analytics account. They are also strict on the first email sent out. If you get more than a 0.02% complaint rate, they will disable your account. Pricing with them is a bit different. It’s $5 per email, plus $0.01 per recipient.

5. Net Promoter Score
This is undoubtedly the most important question you can ask your customer: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The score is from 0 to 10, where 9′s and 10′s are your “promoters”, 7′s and 8′s are your “passives”, and the rest are your “detractors”. You can read the book “The Ultimate Question” by Fred Reichheld for more information on how to apply this.

So there you have it – 5 ways to start measuring some things that will improve your marketing performance, and that won’t break the bank.

5 Ways a Small Business Can Improve Marketing Performance Through Measurement is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’ve been paying attention to television advertising spots lately to see what the tracking mechanisms are.  Surprisingly, I would venture to guess that only about 30% of the spots (local and national) have clear tracking mechanisms.  The underlying goal is the necessity to know the impact of each media channel on sales.

The ones that are easy to identify are the ads that display a URL at the end of the spot that says something like “www.domain.com/tv32″, where the “tv32″ identifies the geographic location for a multi-location buy.  Now, it is likely that this page is not accessible through the main navigation, and may even have a “no follow” rule for search engines so they won’t index it and muddy the data.  You would simply go to your favorite analytics program and look at the pageviews for that special URL, and possibly even segment the group and track their activity beyond this page.  My question is do people really type in the “tv32″, or simply go to the main site?

Other methods use a promo code, where they send you to the main website (no special page) and will have a clearly labeled area on the home page to enter the promo code.  Each code varies based on the media, and possibly even run dates so you can identify very specifically where the traffic came from.  I like this method better because a) the ad becomes offer-based, rather than just awareness; b) it removes the likelihood of a visitor bypassing the special “/tv32″ page that was set up.

Now, you might say that the latter example mixes existing inbound traffic with new traffic created by the TV spots.  You are correct; however, we can do a couple of things to separate this out:

1.  Create a segment of visitors from the cities that the ads were run.  If you ran the TV spot over 10 different cities, then create a segment for those cities.

2.  Look at your aggregate traffic before the spots ran, during the flight when the spots were running, and again after the flight ended.  Now, if you are running TV, print and radio all at the same time, it will be very difficult to segment traffic out by media unless you use the promo code option above, but then again, those are really only the folks who would “convert”, which will be a percentage of the total visitors.

3.  Calculate the effect of increased traffic to the website by taking the gross traffic during the time the spots were running, and subtract out your baseline, or average traffic before the media blitz.

You can get more finite information if you know exactly when your TV, radio or print ads ran and comparing visitor traffic down to the hour if you wanted to.

So, given the complexity of monitoring traffic on a national media campaign based on the potential issues mentioned above, and the fact that no method will be perfect, there is third idea:

What if you were to purchase a promo URL for each medium, such as television, radio and print?  (I neglect to mention Internet here since those visitor types are much easier to track). This way your traffic would be easily segmented and not all together in the same “bucket”.  I am not seeing this being widely used, and while some may argue that it detracts from the brand itself, I still prefer to pick a method that is more “trackable” than another.

Of course, you could always do a media “hiatus” and measure the effect on sales by comparing POS data.  You could even run one media channel at a time to see its relative effect as well.

What do you think?  What have you seen?

Using Analytics to Track TV Ads – Which Way Is Best? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

A guest blog by Steve Patti, a marketing strategy expert at Polarity, Inc. – part of The Permission Network

Most of you that have read our blog posts know that we’ve been trumpeting a wake up call to all marketers that the days of dumping millions of dollars into non-measurable, interruption marketing are over.  While our target audience has been largely management and executives, we’re pleased to see the latest Ad Age article that raises the stakes and calls out the CMO as holding ultimate accountability for marketing performance and budget ROI — and we couldn’t agree more.

In today’s economic meltdown, marketers needs to be “manning the war room” where tactics are mapped, performance is measured, and funding decisions for tactics are made each week/month based on what is working and what is not.  Not only are we talking about measuring acquisition performance of the various sales funnels, but focusing on the lifetime value of the customers produced in each sales funnel (see our other blog posts on this topic).

It doesn’t matter if you’re embarrassed to say you are a marketer not getting it right when it comes to performance metrics — because few are.  However, the sooner you start the more quickly you can distance yourself from your competitors who may be sitting around their agency conference room asking how much “reach & frequency” they should be buying — instead of how they should be engaging prospective customers via permission marketing.

Feel free to share your thoughts.

Guest Blog: Ad Age Agrees — CMO’s to Be Financially Accountable is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Below is a video tutorial of an example of how you can correlate offline media efforts to web traffic, and essentially understand the effectiveness of your offline media.

I use Clicky Web Analytics to help measure the the effectiveness of offline media because it can track visitors down to the street level. All of the other analytics tools I have used only go to the city level. (caveat: this isn’t exact, so don’t knocking on people’s doors or anything! Use this for relative measure of density in areas of a city).

How can marketers use this data? Well, I can drop a direct mail piece and a few days later see if I have a concentration of visitors in the neighborhoods the piece was dropped. You can do the same thing with billboards as well, although it may be more beneficial to place the boards in the areas with the most concentration (or least if you are after brand awareness). This could even work great for a nation-wide television campaign, to where you could follow-up with direct response marketing to the areas with the highest concentration of visitors.

Anyway, watch this short video and if you’re not already using this tool, get Clicky!

How To Track The Effectiveness of Your Offline Media is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I came across this excellent four-minute video by Phil Fernandez, President and CEO of Marketo, and he explains the importance of nurturing your sales leads into actual sales. He says that 50% of your leads are not yet ready to talk to a sales person, and are not ready to purchase. By properly engaging with these prospects, through webinars, emailing white papers, etc., we can, over time, get 70% of these leads ripe for sales. This is the “consideration” stage of the Awareness – Consideration – Purchase steps in all marketing efforts, as described by colleague Steve Patti of Polarity. Here is the video:

How To Increase Your ROI on Sales Leads is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

If you like tinkering with your website, then you have probably heard of A/B or multivariate testing. This is where you can quickly test new things on your website, such as copy, images, call-to-action buttons, placement, etc., and see which combination effectively leads to more conversions. A/B testing is essentially testing two versions against each other that could be completely different, where as multivariate testing assesses multiple areas of the page and tests all possible combinations. So, if you had 3 versions of a headline, 3 versions of an image, and 3 versions of a button, you would have 27 possible combinations in a multivariate test.

Traditionally, multivariate testing has been where each possible combination gets equal play; meaning each combination is displayed equally to your traffic. Once a visitor is exposed to one of the test combinations, they are given a cookie so that each time they return while the experiment is still in progress, they will see the same combination. Google Website Optimizer is considered a traditional multivariate testing tool, where their algorithm will determine the winner based on how many combinations you have, and how many visitors is required to statistically determine a winner.  Their model shoots for a 12% minimum improvement in conversion rate at an 80% confidence level.

Now we have what’s called adaptive multivariate testing, which is offered by a company called Hiconversion. What they do is the same multivariate set up, but instead of giving equal play to each possible combination, they only test page combinations that are consistently performing in producing conversions. They claim that their methodology dramatically reduces the amount of traffic required to reach a statistically correct “winner”. This real-time adaptation also reduces the amount of loss leads or sale conversions that a typical test can produce.

Courtesy of Hiconversion.com demo presentation

This is sort of how Google AdWords works when you opt for the “auto-optimize” feature, which instead of displaying your ads evenly, they display the best performing ads more often.

Well, I personally was never a believer in AdWord’s optimization feature. I thought they determined a “winner” way too early, and so I’ve always turned off the optimization feature, and did my own split testing within the ad groups themselves.

I also had the same disbelief for the Hiconversion tool initially. First of all, how could you really determine a winner if all combinations were not played evenly? If one was played more than the other, then of course that combination would win!

So I began to ponder about the mathematics involved with this (I know…that’s what I do). First let me start by saying that I do not know how the Hiconversion algorithm works (I did ask them, but they said they would have to shoot me), so this is just my rationalization.

Let’s imagine that our multivariate test had 100 possible combinations. As the testing starts, each combination gets equal play, or 1%. The algorithm can quickly see which combination is starting to get higher conversion rates until it reaches a point to where it begins to test itself. (Bear with me). So if a few combinations are “starting” to look like good performers, the algorithm might say “OK, you got 5 conversions on 100 plays in X time…let’s see if you can get the same 5 conversions or better for the next 100 plays in the same time period.” If the combination meets or exceeds the mini-test, it moves up to the next “level” where it is now played 3% of the time, where if it doesn’t, and lets say it falls to 4, or 3, then perhaps it stays among all of the other combinations that are tested at 1% play. So the combinations in the experiment keep getting tested in this manner until there are only a few left, where a “winner” prevails. All of this happens very quickly, and in real-time. It’s kind of this survival of the fittest scenario because the combinations that can’t leap into the next levels, actually get played less and less over time, since the ones that are performing are eating up their play time.

Anyway, that’s my take on how it might be working, but again, I didn’t design the tool. My ultimate experiment would be to do identical experiments in Google Website Optimizer and Hiconversion and see if they arrive at the same result. Of course, I can’t be experimenting with all of our clients leads and sales, so maybe I’ll try this on my site one day.

Adaptive Multivariate Testing – Does It Work? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.