NJ Woman Prosecuted for Facebook ID Theft

Although there’s been a lot of discussion about the potential for criminal prosecutions arising from online impersonation, New Jersey is one of the first states to see an actual prosecution for identity theft on social media. The lucky winner is Dana Thornton, a somewhat unbalanced-seeming 41-year-old woman from Bellville, NJ, who is accused of creating a fake Facebook page to defame her ex-boyfriend.

And defame she did, if the accusations are true: apparently Thornton used photos and personal information about her ex-boyfriend, a narcotics detective from northern New Jersey, to create a Facebook page where she then posted extremely unflattering statements supposedly made by the man himself. For example, the profile proclaimed that the individual in question liked to spend money on prostitutes, had herpes, was “high all the time,” and summed it all up with this sweeping self-indictment: “I’m a sick piece of scum with a gun.” As there’s no leniency for catchy turns of phrase, Thornton faces up to 18 months for fourth-degree identity theft, “for the purpose of obtaining a benefit for himself or another or to injure or defraud another.”

While this might strike the casual observer as just another colorful slice of New Jersey life, the court case is actually important because of a decision already rendered by the court -- specifically, the ruling that the case can proceed under existing identity theft law, even though the statute doesn’t specifically include electronic media as one of the venues where identity theft may occur.

State Superior Court Judge David Ironson brushed off an argument to that effect from Thornton’s lawyer, who said that the case should be dismissed because the statute didn’t mention electronic media. In his ruling Ironson wrote: “The fact that the means of committing the crime are not set forth in the statute doesn't lead to the conclusion that the defendant didn't commit the crime.” The NJ legislature is currently considering amending the identity theft statute to explicitly include electronic media. Currently only New York and California have laws explicitly banning online identity theft.

by Erik Sass,

What is Quality Score?

According to Google, Quality Score is Calculated from:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain; note that CTR on non-Google sites (such as AOL.com) only ever impacts Quality Score on our search partners - not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

101 Types Of Mobile Social Alerts

by David Berkowitz , Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Ever since Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), the coverage I've read has been far more excited about the forthcoming alert upgrades in iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, than the iCloud launch or hundreds of other updates. As more prominent alerts lead to even faster adoption of various mobile services and technologies, mobile social media should be disproportionately affected.

If you wonder why, remember that the Internet was always designed to be for communication above any other purpose. Mobile devices are similarly designed around communication first. We're social creatures, and we'll always pay the most attention to what other people are doing above all else.
To get an appreciation for the potential for how alerts can be used through Apple's mobile devices for social purposes, here are 101 possible examples. These are largely culled from current use cases, or potential use cases for existing apps -- but with a little more time and creativity, this list could reach 1,001 examples before long.

Here are 101 types of mobile social alerts:

1.     Someone is calling you
2.     You miss someone's call
3.     You receive a text message
4.     You receive an instant message
5.     You receive email
6.     A friend starts a video chat with you
7.     You're invited to a group chat
8.     A group chat's information has been updated
9.     A friend joins a group chat
10.  A friend leaves a group chat
11.  A friend is near you, based on their mobile device entering your area
12.  A friend explicitly checks in near you
13.  Someone with whom you share mutual friends checks in near you
14.  A friend plans to attend the same event you're planning on attending
15.  A friend plans to be in the same city as where you are or where you're going
16.  A friend follows multiple stages of an itinerary you have shared
17.  A friend earns a badge for their check-in activity
18.  A friend becomes the mayor, duke, or other leadership title of a venue
19.  Someone steals the mayorship or other leadership title of a venue you used to "own"
20.  A friend responds to an event you posted
21.  A friend sends you a recommendation
22.  A friend shares a recommendation with you based on a product they scan
23.  A friend seconds your recommendation
24.  A friend adds a recommendation to somewhere you've been
25.  Your status jumps to a new level because people like enough of your recommendations
26.  Your recommendation leads someone to purchase what you recommended
27.  A friend requests your recommendation on something they're considering buying or doing
28.  Responses arrive for a recommendation you're seeking
29.  A friend proactively shares a tip to help with a program or project you're involved with
30.  Someone responds to a question you asked through a question and answer service
31.  Someone rates your answer as helpful
32.  You become an expert for a given topic or location through a Q&A service
33.  Someone responds to a poll you asked
34.  Someone requests that you answer their poll
35.  You receive a photo or video
36.  You are tagged in a photo or video
37.  A friend updates their photo
38.  Someone posts a photo of the event or location where you are
39.  A friend takes a photo of the same person, place, or thing you previously shot
40.  A friend likes one of your photos or videos
41.  Someone responds to one of your photos or videos with a photo or video of their own
42.  A friend invites you to listen to their music playlist
43.  A friend sends you an application
44.  A friend sends you an e-book
45.  A friend sends you a virtual gift
46.  Someone tweets you
47.  Someone direct-messages you on Twitter
48.  Someone you follow tweets
49.  Someone on a list you follow tweets
50.  Your tweet is retweeted
51.  Someone tweets using a search term or hashtag you're following
52.  Someone follows you
53.  Someone sends you a friend request
54.  Someone accepts a friend request
55.  Your friend shares a status update in their social network profile's feed
56.  A friend likes your status update
57.  A friend comments on your status update
58.  Someone has viewed your profile
59.  Someone invites you to play a game
60.  A friend makes a move in a game you're playing
61.  A friend reminds you to take a turn in a game you're playing
62.  A friend beats you in a game
63.  A friend beats your high score in a game
64.  A friend reaches or surpasses your level of achievement in a game
65.  A friend helps you out in a game
66.  Someone shares a deal with you
67.  A friend invites you to take part in a deal that can only be redeemed if you both participate, whether virtually or in-person
68.  A friend sends you a progressive coupon that becomes more valuable the more it's shared
69.  A friend buys you a drink or another gift you can redeem in-store
70.  A friend offers to split a bill or tab with you
71.  A friend's contact information is updated
72.  Someone shares a contact with you
73.  It's a friend's birthday
74.  A friend becomes an expert of a product or category based on their barcode scanning behavior
75.  A friend invites you to collaborate on a document
76.  A friend updates a document you're both working on
77.  A friend sends you a file
78.  Someone updates traffic information in your area
79.  Someone updates weather information in your area
80.  A friend records having a better night's sleep than you did
81.  A friend comments on the page of a brand you like
82.  A friend likes a photo of a dish you ate
83.  A friend changes their relationship status
84.  Someone has a crush on you, such as through a dating site or app
85.  A potential relationship match is in the same venue or general vicinity as you
86.  A food truck or other mobile business you follow enters your area
87.  Your friend tunes into the same TV show that you're watching
88.  Your friend posts a comment to a TV show you're watching or interested in
89.  You or a friend earns a reward for regularly watching a TV series
90.  A friend joins you virtually for a run or another exercise program
91.  A new potential relative is discovered via shared connections on a family tree or genetic matches
92.  A certain number of your friends shared the same link
93.  A blog you read is updated
94.  Someone comments on a blog you read
95.  Your social influence ranking changes
96.  A friend installs the same app you're using
97.  Someone contributes to a crowd-sourced program you're running or participating in
98.  A friend bookmarks something you shared
99.  A new friend is added into your search engine's social search results
100.    A friend searches for something you've recently searched on as well
101.  The public sentiment of a trend you're following materially changes

Remember, this is just the beginning. Also keep in mind that not all mobile alerts are social. Alerts will tell you about sales, travel updates, game updates, and plenty more, but the ones that will really get people to pay attention are those focused on other people. If your mobile program includes communication at its core, you're setting yourself up for success.

5 Website Redesign Tips

Going through a website redesign? Keep these 5 tips in mind and use Lazworld.com Web development Services to help you through the process.

1. Goal = more visitors and leads. The reason you are redesigning your website is to impact your business, not because you or your CEO are bored with the design. So, focus on the results you want: more visitors, leads, and customers and make decisions based on these goals.
2. Avoid pitfalls. Inventory your assets and protect them. A website redesign can negatively impact your results by unintentionally removing the assets - website pages and links - that are driving the most leads for you. Make sure to figure out your most powerful pages and links and protect them during the redesign process.
3. Invest in remarkable content that attracts visitors and converts them into leads. A fancy design does not necessarily bring results. Focus on function over over form. Create an ongoing content creation strategy (this means blogging!) to add more content to your website over time.
4. Create conversion opportunities with calls to action and landing pages. Once you have visitors coming to your website, give them the opportunity to give you their contact information in exchange for content. This means using landing pages - and having control over your landing pages - as you build out your new website.
5. Measure the impact on visitors and leads. At the beginning of your website redesign process, you decided you wanted to increase visitors and leads. Did it work? Make sure you have the website analytics in place to measure your progress towards your goals.

A business website is a business tool and should deliver business results. Leave the works of art to the galleries and museums. Your career and your company will thank you for it.  To learn more about how Lazword.com Inc., can help you analyze your website, create content, and capture more leads contact Lazworld.com today.

Total Content Optimization

We all know by now that SEO is a vital part of a company’s web marketing campaign. Having a website, blog, or published articles on the web is great—but if no one can find your content in the search engines, then the material is useless. For years, optimizing a page was as easy as including your targeted keywords many times throughout the content and including them in your meta keywords tag. But now all those tactics are for the birds.

We thought it would helpful to compile a quick content optimization checklist of the fundamental methods of optimizing page content for a website. There are numerous on-page ranking factors that the major search engines take into consideration when determining how relevant a given page is for a specific search query.

While some of these factors may be more significant than others, it is important to utilize as many as possible to gain a competitive advantage in the search engines. Enjoy!

• The page content needs to be unique and present quality information that is useful for the VISITOR. Google has made it very clear that a web page should be build for visitors/actual users as opposed to search engine spiders.
• Each unique page should only target one or two primary keywords. If you are targeting more and the information you are presenting is worthy of its own page then do it! This allows you to hyper focus each page toward ranking well for specific searches.
• The page title must include the targeted keyword. Also, the closer the keyword appears towards the front of the title, the better.
• Your targeted keywords should be scattered naturally throughout the article. Do not force the keyword into your content as your ranking can actually be penalized for attempting to keyword stuff your content.
• Include variations of the targeted keyword (here at ideaLaunch we refer to them as secondary keywords) throughout the content.
• Include the targeted keywords in the url
• Use the targeted keyword in your header tags—most notably H1.
• For any image on the page, be sure to include keyword-rich alt tags
• Name your files with keywords in mind
• Use the <bold> or <strong> tag for your keywords

For more on total content optimization. 

Web Video Production Services Tied in with Sales 2.0 Marketing

Online PR News – 24-April-2011 –Barnegat, NJ - April 24, 2011 -- Companies with web video production services take a company director's idea and turn it into a high quality professional video which may be shown on the business web site. The movies are not only able to be used on company web sites, however. The web video production services may also be used to create videos for company job instruction, trade shows, webmercials, promotional DVDs, demonstration videos, or any video you can imagine. The goal for all of these video formats is one easy thing: to improve revenue. Having an experienced organization that offers web video production services produce a customized video advertising plan for your organization can make a spectacular increase in your revenue. Once you discover and hire a web video production services firm to create a video marketing campaign for you, you'll find that clients are most likely to be impressed by your website featuring the video, or even the video being played at a trade show or meeting.

Working on the video production with your chosen production firm will lead to discussions about your goal audience and their expectations of your company, products, and public image. Getting the right information to the right people is what web video production services are recognized for. Communicating your company's crucial ideas to prospects can be a bit intimidating for some people. Even for individuals who find making sales very simple will recognize that having a video perform most of the groundwork for you works. Seeing income flow in after showing clients a professionally designed, produced, and edited video is one thing which cannot be ignored, even for the most skilled sales people.

Using a company that offers web video production services(http://www.salesengineintl.com/) is one of the simplest methods to communicating why your product or services are revolutionary as well as why they'll be a good investment for potential buyers. The majority of people shopping for something only spend a few seconds deciding whether or not to purchase a product or service. This means that those first few seconds tend to be absolutely essential, and you can hook potential clients immediately with a well-crafted video. Having a professionally produced video to describe and display what it is that your small business is so good at is tempting to customers because it implies that your company is established enough to have a video campaign created. It implies that you believe in your company enough to invest the time, money, and energy into having a video campaign created. What these potential clients do not always need to know is the fact that the videos designed for your company tend to be relatively inexpensive compared to other promotional methods.
If your industry is highly competitive and your company needs a hand becoming established among the competition, hiring a company that offers professional web video production services
(http://www.salesengineintl.com/blog/) can set your company apart from the rest. It is a really sound business investment due to the rising interest in multimedia marketing and internet broadband connections. The majority of your target market most likely has access to a high speed internet connection, and having access to your website with information being conveyed through a video 24 hours a day is one of the easiest ways to take advantage of this fact.

Contact:
Purpose Advertising
79 S Main St Suite 4
Barnegat, NJ 08005
888-698-6609
support@kjprnews.com
http://www.purposeadvertising.com

8 Takeaways from ad:tech San Francisco

TopGetting social in real time
The recent ad:tech San Francisco conference had a good mix of topics (social and mobile everywhere), interesting presenters (although Guy Kawasaki and Arianna Huffington are hard acts to follow), and a great sense of energy. I walked away feeling that if you glanced away from this industry, you’ll be left in the dust as a marketer.

Here were my top eight takeaways from the conference:

1) “This is a more transformational time in marketing than ever before,” said 25-year industry veteran Antonio Lucio, the CMO of Visa. So true! Why? Mobile is anything, and anything is mobile. Power has shifted to the consumer. Everyone is multi-tasking, with one-third of people using three screens. The marketing funnel is now dynamic loops where consumers seek information from many sources and then become a source.

2) Given this, digital engagement and outreach must be integrated throughout organizations. For companies to succeed, digital must be an integral part of marketing, customer service and product development. Lucio also advises setting a directional goal for digital spend (Visa’s was 30%) and then tracking the impact on transactions, revenue and brand equity to find your right media mix. Hint: It’s higher than the 10% allocated on average today.

3) Define your media plan first: Given the power of the consumer, it’s even more crucial to “Think Audience First.” Lucio recommends starting by defining your media plan, essentially an engagement plan, based on consumer behavior with your products and their media consumption. Next, you should develop creative. Feels like opposite-land now, but it won’t soon.

4) The five (instead of four) “Ps” of Marketing: Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter Group, believes we all need to add people to product, place, price and promotion in our marketing plans. Marketing is now about shaping and steering experiences. It’s about talking to the mind and heart of your customers via trans-media storytelling, not with marketing-speak.

5) KISS now means “Keep it Simple and Sharable,” ideally in 120 characters or less so that it can be easily retweeted, according to Solis.

6) Resist the desire to “market to” your fans. Per Solis, your fans are looking for value. If there isn’t value, then they will leave—it’s assimple as that. From the customer perspective that means regular engagement with special offers, interesting content, fun ways to participate and give back, not marketing messages.

7) My favorite quote came from Lucio’s keynote as he talked about the social web approach: “Marketing will become like sex. Only the losers will pay for it.” OK, that’s a stretch, but you get the point. Yes, companies will still pay to develop high-quality products that consumers buy and recommend, to support their customers, and to raise awareness. The key is to seed, nurture and support it properly (marketing 1:1:many) to get more reach and frequency from your marketing spend.

Some predictions from Dr. Jeffrey Cole, Founder of The World Internet Project: 1. Screen time explodes, 2. Privacy concerns will reach a peak, but because digital content needs digital advertising they will get addressed, and 3. Social networks will fragment over time. Facebook will reach 1B UVs and then decline. We’ll see!

One more thing… Try a Yahootini, which was featured at the Yahoo! “Powering Performance” party. Here’s the recipe:

1 shot of Ketel One Orange Vodka
Splash of Blue Curacao
Splash of Raspberry Liqueur
Splash of Lychee Puree (or more to your liking)
Lemon Wedge
And then while you are being oh-so social, multi-screening and enjoying your Yahootini, share your thoughts about Lucio’s principles of the social web:

Sharing is the new Giving.
Participation is the new Engagement.
Recommendation is the new Advertising.
By Christine Beury

SEO, Paid Search or Social Media?

There are so many different opinions on the best way for a business to market online. Whether it is paid search, SEO or social media, there isn’t one consensus best option. As a business owner, you probably hear the following:

“Search engine optimization is long term strategy.”
“Social media is a long term strategy.”
“SEO is dead.”
“Content is king.”
“Paid Search is the safest way to achieve ROI.”
“Social drives brand awareness not conversions.”

Truth is, some platforms work better alone, while other businesses are able to leverage a combination of all three. For instance, paid search may not work well for a T-shirt brand but may work wonders for a lead generation company. Added to the fact that online marketing success is all relative to how you measure success (or conversions), it can get confusing really fast.

Many small business owners have changed the way they view a success. Social media marketing has came on strong in the past couple of years and marketers are beginning to measure successful conversions in terms of engagement rather than purchase decisions.

With this approach, they are able shape their strategy to create long term relationships with customers rather than viewing them as one-and-done. According to eMarketer, “as of March 2011, 44% of respondents to the survey used social media for marketing, vs. 28% who used SEO and 21% who used paid search.” This statistic can be taken with a grain of salt because it is likely attributed to the fact that social media is a friendly, low barrier to entry marketing solution for small businesses.

Many businesses try social media and realize that it is easy to do and hard to do well; they are taking an advertising approach rather than engagement strategy. This is why many small businesses plan to invest in social media for the future. According to the same eMarketer study, 44% of small businesses currently use social media and 29% plan to add to their social media marketing tactics in the future. The growth in social media as an ad platform has made it an attractive solution for fostering engagement, where a smaller amount of SMB’s are investing in SEO and paid search, 22% and 16% respectively.

While we know where the majority of businesses are putting their advertising dollars in 2011, each industry differs in effectiveness. 57.2% of small business respondents told Ad-ology that social media was at least somewhat useful at generating leads. The MerchantCircle survey found local small businesses were more likely to say search engine marketing was an effective channel than social networks, at 40.2% vs. 36.7%.

Social media may be easier to adopt initially for most businesses, but alone it will likely not be as effective as when it is incorporated equally in the online marketing mix. To ramp up your media marketing efforts make sure your business is equally investing strategies in paid search, SEO and social media in conjunction with your website.

By Matt Krautstrunk

Hulu Continues Losing YOY Viewers

Online video site Hulu had about 27.5 million unique US viewers in March 2011, according to new comScore Video Metrix data. While this was on par with 27.26 million unique viewers in February 2010, it represented a steep 31% drop from about 40 million unique viewers in March 2010.
Hulu also lost about 30% of its unique viewer total in February 2011 compared to February 2010.

Google Strengthens Lead

In contrast Google sites, which includes the undisputed leading online video platform YouTube, increased its dominance of the US online video space in March 2011. Google recorded about 143.2 million unique viewers, 1.97 billion viewing sessions and 275.6 average minutes per viewer. These totals were all significantly ahead of any competitor, with the closest competition coming from Hulu in average monthly minutes (215).
Compared to February 2011, Google increased unique visitors by about 1% from roughly 141 million, increased viewing sessions by almost 9% from roughly 1.83 billion, and increased average minutes per viewer by 5% from 261.6.
The only one of those metrics comScore tracked in March 2010 was unique visitors. Google grew its unique visitor total by about 5% year-over-year from 136 million.

Fewer Monthly Unique Viewers Watch More Videos

Video Metrix data shows that 174 million US internet users watched online video content in March 2011 for an average of 14.8 hours (888 minutes) per viewer. The total US internet audience engaged in more than 5.7 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.
Unique viewers were up 2.5% from 169.65 million in February 2011 and down about 3% from 180.2 million in March 2010. Viewing sessions were up 15% from about 5 billion the prior month, and average time per user was up about 9% from 816.4 minutes.

Tremor Media Reaches More than Half of Audience

In March 2011, Tremor Media ranked as the top video ad network with a potential reach of 96.5 million viewers, or 53.5% of the total video viewing audience. Adconion Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 81.6 million viewers (45.2% penetration), followed by Advertising.com Video Network with 80.8 million viewers (44.8%).

Other Findings

• 84.8% of the total US internet audience viewed online video.
• 135.3 million viewers watched 12.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (95.6 videos per viewer).
• The average Hulu viewer watched 26.7 videos, totaling 2.6 hours of video per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.

What Has Video Done For Us Lately?

by Adam Singolda , Monday, April 11, 2011

Andy Plesser was kind enough to invite me to speak last week at Beet.TV conference on a panel with Kevin Krim, Global Head at Bloomberg (disclosure: one of our customers) and Bismarck Lepe, Ooyala founder and president of products. We were fortunate to open the event on a day when the panels following discussed topics such as video strategies, things publishers do, what works, what's not and -- is Hulu a mega-web failure or not? (A question more or less answered below.)  

I thought I'd share some of the notes that were discussed by some key media leaders:

1.     "Content is king."Dermot McCormack from MTV was great, passionately articulating the importance of good content: "We keep reminding ourselves at MTV that, yes, we can try to deal with technologies, and discuss various solutions as much as we want to -- but at the end of the day, it's all about whether you produced a 'Jersey Shore' with Snooki or not. MTV did. Period, the end  -- and content is indeed the king.

2.     Personalized videos can triple your video views and revenue. Kevin Krim and I were discussing the impact of replacing contextual related videos that reside on story pages, topic pages, video pages and the homepage -- with personalized related videos. The uplift it can create in viewership and revenue is ~3x.

3.    We need  single advertisers to invest $100M in online video. Bill Lederer, CEO at Kantar of WPP, said the industry needs serious advertisers. In a later conversation with me,  Bill  said that the need is not for a "package" where it's a TV + online deal, but rather a direct deal to the Web. Bill also estimated that the largest video advertiser spends $30 million annually.

4.     Don't ignore your mobile viewers. Bismarck Lepe  said that as publishers launch Ooyala they see new audiences coming from mobile/portable devices -- from 5% of the total to start, growing to 20%.

5.     Blend expensive production with cheap ones -- otherwise you will not cover the cost. Ran Harnevo from 5min was provoking the panel, asking if Hulu is really a good business or not. He compared the amount of money poured into producing the content Hulu offers versus their revenue. This equation is obviously skewed towards the cost.

6.     Monetizing distributed traffic is not an easy task, but we're getting there. Andy Plesser was discussing with Ed Halsam, head of marketing at YuMe, the challenges advertisers face when buying video traffic that is not on the "MSNBC of the worlds" but rather on blogs, etc. Ed made a comment that if the distributed traffic is unsafe it's hard to monetize it, but there are some good technologies that are advancing a "brand safety" environment so advertisers can capitalize on that traffic.

7.     Good content sells. Mark Marvel from MSNBC.com mentioned that his company is seeing 200 million monthly video views and they are fully sold - because the content and the environment is something advertisers seek. Mark then asked the audience who would pay to read NYTimes online, and most of us raised our hands. The point was clear: good content sells.
Video is gaining increasing momentum in the industry. I see more people coming to conferences and panels than I used to see, and it's the topic of discussion for media leaders.

Those who have videos are seeking ways to get more viewership, and those who don't have videos are trying to get them through syndication and distribution.

10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics

When your job is to drive organic search engine traffic to a website (SEO Director/Manager/Ninja), you will inevitably need to prove your worth. There’s nothing like cold-hard-facts to paint a picture of success (or expose “The Man Behind The Curtain”).

In an ideal world, all digital marketing efforts are managed under one bucket, and the collective measurements highlight the success of the team, or highlight the success of the complete bundle of digital efforts. But, in the end, ROI needs to be justified in order to keep the flow of budget and resources moving to each individual marketing effort.

However, your job is SEO. You know that you are adding value. You just need to prove it.

Dealing With(out) Attribution

Perhaps you’ve had this thought before – “My content brought in the visitor, they learned, they left, and they came back again through a different channel.” So prove it.

Over the past few years, there has been considerable discussion about, and effort to solve, the issue of  tracking sales/leads based on touch points – attribution for the conversion action. The primary stumbling block has been the ability of analytics tools to differentiate between last-click conversions vs. multi-touchpoint conversions.

As the SEO professional, your question might be “did the lead/sale really come in through PPC, or did the visitor first hear of us through SEO content, and then search for our brand name and click on the first thing they saw – our PPC ad for our brand name?”

Of course, this all goes way beyond SEO vs. PPC. It’s the entire digital marketing package. Or, as Richard Fergie at SEOptimise, highlights in The Conversion Attribution Problem, it’s about the entire Marketing mix.

From a purely digital tracking standpoint, Will Critchlow of Distilled created an excellent example of the issue of attribution tracking in an article he posted on SEOmoz:

The idea here is that you want to give attribution for conversions not only to first- and last-touches but also give so-called assists to touch-points along the way (e.g. a conversion path could look like):

long-tail keyword > head keyword > branded search > direct visit

Under this scenario, you might want to give the head and branded searches some attribution for the conversion.

Tracking Tools

Many of the higher-end analytics tools on the market have developed their own methodologies to solve the attribution question.

While Adobe’s Omniture platform comes to mind immediately, you may find this list on Mashable (although maybe a bit dated): Analytics Toolbox: 50+ More Ways to Track Website Traffic – a good resource for finding, investigating and interviewing various analytics companies about their attribution tracking methodologies and technologies.

On the other side of attribution tracking technology is the ubiquitous (and free) Google Analytics. There are a number of good articles out there about how to use custom variables in Google Analytics to track multi-touch attribution. Here are a few articles that I have found helpful in this area:

• How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics, , Will Critchlow of Distilled, on SEOmoz
• Multi-Touch Attribution with Google Analytics, Yehoshua Coren (aka Analytics Ninja)
• Capturing First-Touch Source Information with Custom Variables,  , Nick Iyengar, Webshare
• Tracking Transactions back to the Initial Referrer with Google Analytics, Jeremy Aube, ROI Revolution

Another tool, that I have not used myself, Multitouchanalytics.com, looks to be an interesting way to make Google Analytics integration easier, and provide a cleaner touchpoint dashboard.

Also, Adam Goldberg produced an excellent piece here on Search Engine Land, titled Attribution Technology: What’s Best For Your Needs?, that contains a visual aid in evaluating how you might use specific technology to measure attribution – complete with pros and cons.

10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics

Multi-touch attribution tracking isn’t for everyone. It’s a pure decision of resources (e.g. cost, programming, value of your time, etc.). It’s true that tracking organic search traffic down to determine its role in influencing conversion is the holy grail of search analytics. However, there are a series of other metrics you can use to measure SEO success.

Many of the metrics listed below have been discussed by other SEO authors (e.g. Eric Enge, Tad Chef, Barry Adams, etc.), but I’ve attempted put them all in one place, and added a few myself:

1.   Keyword Rankings

My least favorite metric, and one that can get confused easily when tools are not used (i.e. manually checking rankings). That said, knowing where your target keywords rank, in a general sense, is definitely part of the scorecard. I’d say that the use of Google Suggest adds one reason to track rankings.
I was told at one point by a Google employee that 40% of all searches are triggered by Google Suggest. And, of course, the suggestions that come up start with shorter phrases, pushing ever more searchers to take the short route first. These short phrases are invariably your starting point for targeting keywords.

2.  Basic Conversion Tracking

Make sure to identify multiple conversion types, including sales, leads, subscriptions, downloads, event sign-ups, etc.

3.  Organic Search Traffic

• Overall Organic Traffic Growth – Focus on year-over-year comparisons.
• Growth of Traffic for Targeted Keywords – This is a double check against rankings. Look at month-over-month and year-over-year growth in traffic for specific target keywords.
• Percentage Of  Overall Traffic Coming From Organic – Track the trend, but be careful of peaks and valleys based on key marketing tactics such as email marketing blasts (which will obviously lower the percentage of traffic generated by organic search for that time period).
• Progress With Specific Engines – It may be a Google-centric search world, but also track progress with Yahoo/Bing, and others that may be important to your business.

4.  Keyword Diversity

Examine how many keywords are driving driving each month, and track the trend. It’s valuable to be able to report something like “in the first few months we received traffic from about 300 keywords, and now it’s a couple thousand different keywords generating the traffic (yes, this is the long-tail).

5.  Referrals From Links & Website Properties

Link building and content generation is not just about improving keyword rankings/keyword traffic. When done well, links, and websites you develop to support that effort, will bring traffic to the site. Take credit for that traffic, and for any conversions produced through those referrals.

6.  Visitor Engagement

Warning: these metrics may not appear to be “in your favor” as you create content and increase Keyword Diversity. It’s a simple fact that your success will also bring less-relevant traffic, along with the good stuff.

• Organic Bounce Rates
• Repeat Visitors
• Pageviews Per Visit
• Time Spent On Site

7.  Inbound Link Count

You’ll probably have to report on this whether you want to or not. And, not all links pointing to your site will be due to your SEO efforts. In addition, reporting on the quantity of links can seem silly to the seasoned SEO, who understands that it’s about quality, trust, anchor text, relevancy, etc. That said, keep track of the progress in acquiring links, and consider using something like SEOmoz’s Linkscape to create a quality-links report.

8.  Increase In Branded Searches

While SEO cannot possibly take all of the credit for an increase in people searching for your company’s brand and product line brands, it is also true that some credit has to be given to SEO for people coming to the site after searching for the brand name.
Be careful here though, because it is clear that other media channels can have a much greater influence on this metric. It’s easier to attribute some of the branded searches to SEO when there is less emphasis at the company on mass media and extensive PR (e.g. companies with lower advertising/marketing budgets).

9.  Pages Indexed

As you increase the crawlability of your site, and add new content, you should see the number of pages that are indexed increase. This metric can be especially important to companies with product catalogs or large quantities of technical documentation that have previously been inaccessible to search engines.

10.  Crawl Frequency

This can be a nice way to measure the success of adding fresh content sources to your site.  Keeping search engines coming back more frequently is a key component in getting new pages indexed more quickly, and in getting additional content types, such as news and blog posts, into Google’s Caffeine-crazy algorithm.
Feel free to suggest your own key SEO metrics in the comment section below.

The Bottom Line

Proving that organic search is working for your company can be as sophisticated as multi-touch attribution, or as simple as pulling together easy-to-get data points. Of course, use the metrics to also take an honest look at what might need improvement in your overall SEO strategy, and across your entire digital marketing mix.


by Andy Komack
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily NJ Internet Marketing.

Local Search Marketing

With Google making changes in its local search algorithms, checking rankings for local business listings for geo-targeted terms is getting a bit difficult. Google also takes into account the searcher’s location and alter its search results to prefer local listings. So, searching for keyword “jersey shore pizza”, a person sitting at the Atlantic City may get somewhat different results from a person sitting somewhere else at the Jersey Shore. Sometimes, a person searching from outskirts, or suburbs, of major city do not get same results as a person searching from within city limits or center of city. However, there’s a way to determine local rankings with considerable accuracy. Google provide a Custom Location option in left hand s! ide menu options on search result pages (sometimes hidden under search Tools option). This lets you customize your search location. Make sure you are not logged into your Google account and disable personalization results based upon search activity.  To increase your local presence go local with Lazworld.com Inc.

State of Wikipedia

Posted: 18 Jan 2011 09:47 PM PST

In celebration of Wikipedia's 10 birthday, interactive agency JESS33 has put together a great little video called "The State of Wikipedia." Here are some highlights from the video:

§ Wikipedia started as Nupedia (which was written by experts but only one publisher had final sign-off authority)

§ 270 Languages in Wikipedia

§ 400 Million visitors every month

§ 1.2 million people have contributed to Wikipedia

11 million monthly edits

Comparing the Top Comparison Shopping Engines - Website Magazine - Website Magazine

Comparing the Top Comparison Shopping Engines - Website Magazine - Website Magazine