• Your business has an increasing amount of organic traffic because customers are finding your website via search engines and social media;
• Your customers increasingly interact with you when they visit your website (ie. “helping your customer further down the conversion funnel“);
• Your website is a thriving, continuously improving channel for sales, leads and signups.

What types of services are included? Web Page Optimization is a rigorous regimen of optimization which involves ongoing testing and improvement of your website’s front-end user interface, web content and back-end technical structure. Core disciplines include:

• Website Usability: Optimizing how your customers interact with your web pages and improving the user experience to drive more interaction (signups, leads, sales, etc.).
• Website Design: Optimizing the layout, look and feel of your web pages to determine which designs maximize interaction with your customers while maintaining the integrity of your brand. (Sometimes “science” proves that the prettiest design is not always the most effective)
• Content Strategy: Researching, mapping and developing web content – copy, media, art, photos – that will be relevant in search engines, appealing to your customers and drive customer interaction with your company.
• Conversion Funnel Optimization: Metric analysis of the lifetime and recurring value of offers, conversion channels and follow-on remarketing and optimization of each conversion path on the website.

What are the benefits of Web Page Optimization? Web Page Optimization delivers ongoing benefits that impact success across all online marketing initiatives. Benefits include:

• Increased leads and sales from web traffic;
• More free website traffic from search engines and social media (often collectively referred to as “Earned Media“);
• Increased success rate of each visit to your website;
• Improved return on investment from advertising as website conversion rates increase;
• Superior website user experience for your customers;
• Guarantee customers see the most compelling messaging and design on each web page;
• Obtain and improve upon the quantifiable value of each visit to your website;
• Cost-effective website improvement without the need to constantly do full redesigns.

Web Page Optimization is a key activity for businesses looking to gain a competitive advantage in online marketing while making sure that they provide the best user experience possible to their customers.

Read more Digital Marketing Opinions or Contact Us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

TV is a fantastic media for reaching new customers but it is also expensive if you are a growing company without endless marketing dollars. Search provides a window to reach more customers than most companies could ever imagine and on a pay-as-you-go basis. And for that reason, it presented a perfect opportunity for us to conduct a thorough analysis of the online jeans market. From household names to fledgling brands, we found winning strategies and areas of opportunity that we think are worth pointing out to our clients.

First and foremost, there are more than 500 advertisers targeting the keyword “jeans”. This is not surprising at all since the volume of searches clearly makes this a big opportunity for smart marketers. What is more surprising is the number of companies missing opportunities to capture market share by implementing well optimized marketing campaigns – clear call to action, offers, continuity between search ad and landing page, and a generally beneficial experience for people interested in jeans. With more than 500 advertisers competing for each person’s attention, there is little room for error and even less time to capture someone’s attention. With that in mind, here are some of our favorites.

Guess Jeans hits a home run

We love this campaign. The landing page is focused and drives action yet does not sell out the brand. Secondary navigation makes it easy for people to navigate around the site if they want to. And best of all, there are plenty of secondary, low-risk calls to action – email, social, etc. We estimate that this landing page is one of the top converters on the keyword “jeans” – which gives Guess an incredible competitive advantage in trying to capture the 20 Million people a month who search for jeans.
.
.
.

Paris Blues is fun and engaging

This site appeals to a lot of different senses at once – sight, sound, emotion (we know that’s not one of the senses but pretty important nonetheless!). Check out the page here. It is a welcome departure from the endless store pages providing a clear, unique presentation of the brand while also having four clear paths to conversion. The one challenge, which is likely affecting conversion significantly, is that the Flash used to present the landing does not work well on all browsers (such as Chrome).
.
.
.

Levi Jeans breaks the rules… in a good way

The Levi Jeans web page is on brand and provides nice options for primary and secondary engagement. They also do a great job of mixing up the location of conversion paths on the page so that visitors must visually explore the whole page while they are seeking the different offers. Usually a best practice would be to have a prominent call to action in a familiar location, but in this case Levi does a nice job of breaking the convention yet still setting their web page up to maximize conversion. This creates a unique experience that breaks through the clutter of the 500+ advertisers on Google.
.
.

In conclusion, we hope you this helps you find your inspiration for tackling the big guys and capturing market share. The opportunity exists to go out and win the game. At stake, only 20,000,000+ potential customers!

Read more market analysis or case studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The potato chip market is a $15+ Billion dollar a year industry. There are a few leaders, such as Lays, Pringles, Cape Cod, Zapps and Wise, but there are also a lot of smaller companies out there that have a distribution range of a hundred miles (if that). These companies can use the Internet to increase their sales and distribution.

People who grew up in Lewistown have a fondness for Hartley’s Potato Chips. If you meet someone from there and ask them what their favorite food is, there’s a good chance they’ll say “Hartley’s”. And also take into consideration that there are potato chip aficionados (you think only cigar’s have them?) who are always looking for a new chip to try, and you can see how expanding beyond your area code can really help to spur sales.

We evaluated Hartley’s website and would like to start by saying “Nice Site”… BUT…. It could use some help with regards to driving more traffic, more sales and generating a customer base that can help them expand their distribution footprint. This exercise is not intended to critique the look and feel of a site (except with regards to how it affects the user experience). This is a good looking site. If you’ve ever seen a bag of Hartley’s, you’ll feel right at home with this site.

META TAGS
One place to start with ensuring that people “find” your potato chip company’s website (hartleyspotatochips.com) is with the meta tags. The text of the organic search listing is disorienting to people and could be improved by using a company description in the page’s meta tags. Something along the lines of “Since 1935, Hartley’s Potato Chips have been the favorite kettle cooked potato chip of Lewistown, Pennsylvania” as an example.

FLASH
The Flash intro file used to load the company logo loads slowly (it can take more than minute to load on some computers). No call to action for visitor to follow that indicates how to enter the website. These are little things. But they matter. A simple “click to enter” on the bag would help. An optimized Flash file would help speed up the load as well.

Of course, some SEO purists would insist that Flash will greatly diminish your chances of showing up on a search engine at all. We agree. But people like Flash. It’s here to stay. An HTML / Flash hybrid would have a lot more success showing up on search engines while still providing the desired user experience. So be sure that the page loads quickly and the navigation path is clear for the visitor.

WEBSITE NAVIGATION
Currently the homepage defaults to news page with small font. And the news is not up-to-date. (this is probably due to the fact that the site is all Flash and you’d need a Flash programmer to make the update.)

It is best if the homepage has a welcome message, possibly in the form of a message from the Hartley’s team. A brief message, with some keyword-rich content along with a specific next step (shop) would probably help to improve your online sales.

Hartley’s should also consider including an email subscription or Facebok link to start building a dialog with existing and potential customers who can buy online, tell others about Hartley’s and ask their local stores to start carrying Hartley’s Potato Chips. The link to buy online should be more prominent (you have to click “Products”.)

The store is a little hard to navigate. Unless you looked at the demonstration in the “Products” section, you may not know how to add products to your shopping cart. There are many “Off the shelf” shopping cart tools. It might be worth exploring.

A few final thoughts: Why not have a Facebook page? And link to it directly from your site. People (like me) would become a fan. Then my 800+ friends (many of whom have heard me rave on about Hartley’s Potato Chips) would see that I’m a fan and become fans as well. Not all. Not even most. But some. And then some of their friends will see that they became a fan and become fans. And so on. Of course, this means you’ll need to have something to say. But I’ve spent a lot of time in Lewistown, PA, and I can tell you this. Nobody is ever at a loss for words.

What does this all mean for you? Well, if you’re a potato chip company, look at what we’ve said and see where your site stands. If you’re any other kind of consumer goods company, think about how we can help. We focus on all points of entry and with turning visitors into customers. Then turning those customers into evangelists for your brand.

Read more market analysis or case studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Challenge: Halé Bob, a Los Angeles-based clothing company globally known for its unique style and celebrity clientele, employs its website as a key strategy in servicing its global client base, but the website itself was not producing the desired customer relationships or revenue impact. Some factors included: declining revenue during 2008-09 recession; most people leave the site without engaging; Poor performance from online marketing.

Solution: Thrivepoint implemented its proven marketing optimization solution to:
- Completely map the conversion funnel and identify new engagement opportunities;
- Engineer design and message test to increase sales and signups while decreasing abandonment;
- Align online media, paid search and social media with the new strategy;
- Implement SEO on each page to increase organic traffic.

Implementation: Through the conversion funnel analysis, Thrivepoint established that repeat visitors were exponentially more likely to purchase and first-time purchases required a high frequency approach. Halé Bob’s current approach emphasized high reach and low frequency. Thrivepoint recommended implementing a conversion funnel that emphasized first time visitors signing up for remarketing programs that would provide them fashion exclusives and discounts on merchandise. Remarketing was defined as signing up for email, following Halé Bob’s Twitter profile or becoming a fan of Halé Bob on Facebook and the goal was to use these cost effective remarketing programs as the primary channel to introduce the higher frequency needed to turn one time visitors into repeat visitors and then customers.

With this strategy in place, Thrivepoint implemented website optimization consisting of offer, design, message and content testing on key website entry points — i.e., high traffic web pages — to maximize sales and signups to the remarketing programs. Through the course of website optimization, Thrivepoint also implemented search engine optimization by using proven messaging and content from the testing programs. Finally, the improved conversion flow and messaging were integrated with the paid advertising campaigns to ensure that ROI from paid media was maximized.

Results: The campaign has been a big success!  Declining revenue trends have been reversed and the channel is growing again.

Due to conversion optimization focused on the engagement model and conversion funnel, engagement rate from advertising increased 15x and overall site-wide engagement rate increased 851%.

Due to the improved conversion funnel and website usability, online advertising effectiveness increased allowing spend to grow by 3x which delivered an absolute increase in the size of the remarketing prospect database of 60% in just four months. Revved up remarketing efforts increased the quality and frequency of visitors to the site which contributed to higher visit to sales conversion rates and revenue. As a result, visit to sale conversion rate increased by 124% because visitors were introduced to remarketing programs and encouraged to come back to the site, which ensured that the quality of traffic to the site was continually increasing.

Thrivepoint continues to work with Halé Bob to optimize its marketing programs, website and search engine optimization.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The answer depends on your business. In some cases, the smart decision for a business is to outsource SEO to a marketing services company. In other cases, it makes sense to bring it in-house which could mean hiring consultants, hiring full-time staff, or asking existing engineers, copy writers and marketers to incorporate SEO into their work. Every business is unique and determining the your business’ needs, objectives and resources is the first step to answering this question.

What follows is an outline of the questions every business should ask itself before bringing SEO in-house or shipping it off to an SEO firm.

How dependent upon SEO is your business? Is SEO a core part of your business plan? Or is it but one tactic to be balanced amongst many others? If SEO is core to your business, it may make sense to have specialists in-house. However, if your SEO needs outweigh your company’s current size and capabilities, you may want to bring in an agency or hire a specialist to help grow your own competencies.

Does the project require cross-functional, specialized skill sets? Does your business need skilled SEOs to developer and deliver strategies to existing teams of engineers, content editors and marketers to implement? Or does the project require resources for both strategy and implementation? Does your business require – and want to pay for – support at different levels of seniority (ie. Entry level + Supervisor + Executive levels)?

Does your business consider SEO an ongoing activity or a one-time project? Does your business need someone to train existing staff – engineers, marketers, etc. – or does it require a full-service staff. Can your business commit to open-ended tenure of a full-time employee? Or does it need to operate on a shorter-term basis? Can your business commit to a long-term contract with an agency?

What is the budget and what will it afford? How will the budget translate into work provided by a consultant, full-time and agency? If the budget is less than what a full-time employee costs, what could it afford in terms of consulting? How would an agency allocate that budget to work completed by subject matter experts vs. administration/supervision vs. overhead? Would those allocations be acceptable to you?

Who will manage the SEO resources? If an agency is hired, is there in-house staff available to manage, support and collaborate with the agency at all levels? If you hire in-house, who would manage the hires and is there an established career path for employees?

How will decisions about SEO be made? Does your business expect close collaboration with the SEOs in day to day decisions? Will your business require extensive research, analysis, recommendations and rationale in presentations prior to evaluate options prior to making decisions? Or do you want a hands-off approach?

There is not one answer to any of these questions. Every business is different. Evaluating these questions and determining how SEO will integrate into your business’ marketing practices and processes will help you determine whether to outsource, or bring SEO in-house – or some combination of the two.

Read more from Thrivepoint about Search Engine Optimization or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The problem is that the current state of social marketing is much like online marketing was 10 years ago when every channel – search, email, affiliate, display – was lumped into the same general “online marketing” category and marketing strategies were applied uniformly across all. In the time since, the industry has evolved to understand that these channels have unique opportunities for engagement and should be managed as such.

Social marketing is in that same early stage with many marketers treating Twitter and Facebook the same by simply synching their Twitter Tweets with their Facebook Newsfeed. What gets lost in the excitement is that Facebook and Twitter offer completely different opportunities for brand building, direct marketing and customer engagement.

A look at how each site classifies connections tells you all you need to know about where Facebook and Twitter fit in the mix.

ON FACEBOOK YOU MAKE FRIENDS
Facebook offers a rich interactive experience with the “friends” you make. Facebook provides a multi-dimensional interface for discussion and engagement with prospects and customers. Marketers using Facebook at its best are interacting with their friends on an ongoing basis and not just broadcasting mass market messages. For example:

• Engaging in conversations started by anyone (not just the marketer);
• Posting, tracking and sharing events with others;
• Sharing, tagging and discussing relevant photos by anyone;
• Posting and discussing content such as industry news, emails and blog posts.

On Facebook, brands are interacting one-on-one with key customers and influencers. Generic messages have a limited place in that kind of environment. A personal touch will pay off in spades.

ON TWITTER YOU GAIN FOLLOWERS
Twitter is the place to listen and join in on the mumblings and shouts of the web at large. Unlike Facebook where users must be “friends” to participate with each other, Twitter allows anyone to see a user‘s updates. This provides a whoe set of opportunities for marketers on Twitter. For example:

• Broadcast events live with tweets, twitpic, etc. to gain more participation;
• Monitor tweets via Twitter search or Tweetmeme to gauge public opinion and attitudes;
• Follow specific users to see what they are saying on an ongoing basis and join the dialog;
• Broadcast deals, news and other important information out to their followers.

Just as important as broadcasting, Twitter provides a completely unique opportunity for marketers to listen to their customers’ general attitudes and thoughts about brands and competitors. This latent monitoring – of sometimes seemingly irrelevant thoughts – can provide incredibly valuable insight into the mind of a customer.

One other key difference with Twitter is that discussions are broadcast in short messages for all to see. This allows anyone to join the conversation at any time, and as a result it also more difficult to track the history of a specific discussion or the full thread. In effect, it is less of a discussion and more a running dialog on any number of topics at any given time with any given number of people.

Click to read more posts about Earned Media or Social Media.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Have you ever been too hot and turned down your air-conditioner only to find that you are too cold later? And then you turn the AC back up only to find that you are too hot later? The difficulty getting it just right is, in effect, what happens with over-optimizing search: The user logs in, changes all the parameters (keywords, bids, creative, etc.) to improve results and then finds that they did too much. So they log back in and make a number of similar changes to correct the campaign; except the campaign quickly goes back the other way. This happens to too many search campaigns and the following is intended to provide a brief guide on how to avoid over-optimization:

Scientific Method: This holds true for Adwords as much as science: Before taking action, create a hypothesis and construct the campaign in a way that lets you know if your hypothesis was right or wrong.

Learning: Whether a test succeeds or fails, knowing what does not work is just as valuable as knowing what does. Ensure that variables are isolated so that results – positive or negative – are definitive.

Historical Data: Do not continue to rely on results and assumptions that are more than 3-6 months old. Continue to re-test former winners and losers to ensure that optimization takes into account changes in the landscape that may impact current results.

Limit Variables: Tests should not overlap with each other. All testing variables should be isolated to eliminate the chance of misreading results and to drive learning more quickly. For example, a change in bid strategy should not be executed at the same time as a creative test if at all possible because it will be difficult to attribute a change in performance to the correct cause.

Limit Risk: Do not run tests on all keywords or adgroups at the same time because results will be unpredictable and there is always a chance that tests will yield poor results. Segment a portion of the campaign to test and run winners on the remainder of the campaign. The level of testing is dependent upon the marketer’s threshold for risk, but should be somewhere between 10-40% of budget. For example, if there are 10 adgroups spending $1000/month each, then segment 1-4 adgroups to be eligible for tests and run winners on the remaining adgroups. Rotate the 1-4 adgroups every time a new test is started to ensure that no overtesting of any particular adgroup occurs.

Click to read more posts about paid search or marketing tests.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Quality links from quality sites are hard to come by without effort. They require extended efforts to build, and the approach to achieving a long-lasting quality link can be manual, tedious and very time intensive. At the very least, it is an ongoing effort; not a one time, quick-hit activity. For example, if you are a marketing agency, a link from top university marketing departments would be valuable. It would provide a credible link from a credible institution. It also will help you generate traffic directly from the link as students, faculty and business leaders will visit the university site and likely click through to the links presented on that site. As you can imagine it would take time and extensive relationship building to receive these types of link.

On the other hand, to speed things up, some SEOs build out a network of their own sites against different industry verticals and place links to their clients on those sites. When a client contracts with these SEOs, they will immediately receive some guaranteed number of links, properly optimized, pointing to their site. It always sounds like a good deal. And sometimes it can be. The challenge comes when the client evaluates the long-term implications. When the relationship with the SEO ends, the client’s links are usually taken down and rented to the client’s competitor. All your hard work and money spent goes out the window.

The bottom line is that these types of linking relationships are essentially paid sponsorships where the client is renting space on another website in hopes that they will receive more traffic via the search engines. While there will be some SEO benefit, as with many advertising deals, all clients should look to project the expected results of these paid sponsorships against other paid sponsorships. They could be effective for the client, but it is important for the clients to come to the table with a complete understanding of what is included and not included in any SEO deal.

Click to read more posts about hiring an agency or SEM scams

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Every marketer wants the best toolset to be used for their campaigns, but search marketing software is developed by a wide range of companies. Knowing who is behind development and maintenance of the software is just as important as knowing what features it offers because the costs and effectiveness of software varies by developer and can significantly affect the outcome of a campaign. It is crucial that clients clearly understand the benefits, limitations and market readiness of the software its employees and agencies use and the developers who make them.

Search engine provided tools are available for most paid search and SEO functions. Google’s tools are the most popular but not the only game in town. Most firms use at least one tool from search engines whether it be webmaster diagnostic tools, paid search management or analytics. While these tools are usually free, some firms do not use them because:

• Multiple Interfaces: Some tools, like bid managers, only work with the search engine who provided the tool. The result is that users must use multiple tools for the same function;
• Quality: Effectiveness of the tools across the search engines can vary dramatically;
• Privacy and Security: Some firms believe sharing sensitive client data with search engines is a conflict of interest.

A 3rd party product is software licensed by the firm from another company that is dedicated to building and maintaining software products. 3rd party products have dedicated development, maintenance, sales and support teams to service clients. While many 3rd party products are run as independent businesses, in some cases, a services firm may offer its tools as a commercial product. Such proprietary products are used by the firm’s employees to service clients and are licensed to other firms for use with their clients.

Proprietary software is an application built by the services firm to be used only by its employees. Some firms maintain full-time in-house staff to develop and maintain the software while others outsource. One of the benefits of proprietary software is tight integration into the firm’s processes, but reliability and effectiveness of the tool depends on the firm’s development acumen and expenditure on development, maintenance and support of its proprietary tools.

Like proprietary software, proprietary tools are built by the service firm to be used only by its employees but instead of writing custom software, these tools are built using off the shelf software, such as Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access. Proprietary tools often develop organically by the services teams and usually are not supported by dedicated developers. Proprietary tools may be as simple as standardized templates or very intricate and sophisticated tools to automate workflow and other functions. While typically considered inferior to custom software, proprietary tools do offer flexibility and, for some firms, a superior and cost-effective solution when combined with search engine provided tools.

To read more and download the whitepaper,Click here. Please contact us if you would like to discuss search marketing software solutions in depth or if you have any other questions.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Earned media is publicity without payment to the person or company who provides the publicity. One of the primary reasons for the buzz is that earned media is often used synonymously with the term “free media”. The other reason for its recent buzz is that platforms for easily distributing earned media – like Facebook and Twitter – have become very popular over the past couple of years.

Despite the recent buzz, the term ‘earned media’ has been in use for more than 20 years since its first reference in a 1988 Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman. At the time, the authors were referring to broadcasting one’s message on TV or radio without any payment to the broadcaster. Since then, the application of the term broadened to include any type of mention of a company or brand in the news. This landed earned media firmly in the court of public relations professionals.

Consumer broadcasting accelerated with Email Forwards and Link Building
With the growing popularity of the internet in the late 1990’s, and email in particular, consumers began to send trillions of emails and many companies attempted to find the next big email forward hit (think dancing baby) or tell-a-friend program.

At the same time, online search engines started to give away billions of clicks for free to websites who appeared in their listing; listings were gained partially through linking between websites. Businesses, called SEOs, quickly appeared to help businesses take advantage of the opportunity and in the process have developed a $3B market for this service.

New terms emerge
As the internet boom picked up steam in 1999 and later after it deflated in the early 2000’s, the opportunities for earned media continued to grow and soon word of mouth marketing became a popular method for marketers to reach consumers. Word of mouth marketing refers to consumers telling other consumers about a product or brand with professionals focused on facilitating this process. Similar to word of mouth marketing, viral marketing refers to consumers passing along a specific marketing message to other consumers (coupons, promotions, entertainment, tools, etc.)

Social media provides consumers with drastic improvement over email for mass broadcast capabilities
More recently, social applications like Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter (ie. blogs, link sharing services, and social networks) provided consumers with a superior forum to broadcast their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Whereas previous earned media broadcast opportunities were from central authorities determining who got airplay, social applications enabled consumers to reach hundreds or thousands of people with one unfiltered broadcast. The power to guide is now in the consumer’s hands and they are actively endorsing companies, products, and ideas to their friends, family and colleagues.

The old adage that a happy customer tells two people and an unhappy customer tells 10 has now been amplified with social applications so that a happy customer tells 200 people and an unhappy customer tells 1,000.

Earned media is not reserved to social networks
Companies that earn media best always invest resources into growing the opportunity. This could be in the form of public relations, SEO, promotions, software development, customer service and hundreds of other ways to build and communicate one’s brand. In the end, earned media is the ultimate branding exercise where the company educates the public on its products and then observes how the market communicates that teaching back to itself.

If you would like additional information on this topic or to meet with an advisor to discuss earned media, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.