To Bing or Not to Bing – Is There Really a Question?

By now you’ve probably heard – Microsoft has a new search engine called BING (does it really stand for “but it’s not Google?”).  If you haven’t about Bing, gently wiggle yourself out from under that large rock and get back in the game!!

If you’re like most small business owners, you’re always on the lookout for the next on-line marketing silver bullet.  Facebook came and everyone told you that you had to create a page for your business.  You did it, but then found that nothing magical happened unless you were willing to promote the heck out of it.  You read all about Twitter in the local business journals, so you spent a weekend and figured that out.  Now your iPhone is overrun by Tweets from the “get rich quick” crowd.  You started a blog, but after 10 posts, you realized that creating great content is a job in and of itself and now it’s been months since you logged in to look at it.

Well, now we have a new distraction and it’s name is Bing!  I’ve heard it 4-5 times this week already – “how come you haven’t suggested setting me up with ads on Bing, it’s supposed to be the new Google?!”

So…

Is Bing worth your attention?  Should you spend this Holiday weekend getting a new search engine marketing campaign together so that next week you’ll be doing nothing but taking orders?  As usual, we take the conversation back to the numbers.  Pop into your Google Analytics account and take a look at your top traffic sources in descending order for the last quarter.  Now, if you were going to set a goal of doubling your website traffic by the end of Q3, on which traffic sources would you focus your (limited) time and attention?

Google Analytics - Top Traffic Sources Snapshot

So…

Do you think Ask /Organic (highlighted in pink at the bottom) – is a hidden opportunity to supercharge our traffic or would you focus on some of the traffic sources at the top of the screen shot?

Although we are big fans of scouring all of our traffic sources in search of a diamond in the rough, if we were put to a quick decision about where we would focus our attention if we had the aforementioned goal, it would be at the top of the screen shot above – not the bottom.

Yes, you might find an occasional pocket of gold lower on the page – some site that sent you a few quality visitors, but where you presently have limited visibility.  But, in our experience, when you focus on improving your bottom traffic sources you’re far more likely to spend way too much time with limited results to show for your efforts than if you had focused on (further) improving your top sources.  This is particularly true of you are not already maximizing your budgets with things like Google CPC or investing heavily in search engine optimization (SEO).

Is Bing worth watching?

Of course, but unless you’re currently maxing out your PPC budgets with Google and Yahoo and dominating their organic rankings, I’m not sure you should get real worked up over Bing.

Look at the data above (which is from Q2 from one of our websites).

It illustrates the incredible challenge Microsoft has in front of them.  Google Organic sent us nearly 8,500 visitors in Q2 which resulted in nearly 1,000 phone calls.

How did Bing do?

Bing, Live and MSN combined generated a measly 500 visits which resulted in less than 50 phone inquiries.  I know how much time and energy we’re going to put into Bing in Q3!  For the record, I’m not anti-Microsoft or anti-Bing; although, I am a Google lover and user.  I just know from interacting with hundreds of SMB’s on a regular basis how easily it is to get distracted with the “next marketing thing.”  Focus on things that have the best potential to move the needle in a meaningful way.  The rest is just noise.

Happy July 4th!!!

Using Facebook for Business – Resource List

In preparation for my presentation tomorrow about how to use Facebook to promote your business, I’ve put together the following quick tips and resources.  Enjoy!

Keys to Facebook Success:

1. Get in the game – The earlier you get started with Facebook, the sooner you’ll be able to determine its marketing potential for your business.  Don’t dabble.  Watch what other successful users do and imitate them!
2. Build a network – Social media marketing success is about building a community or following.  Remember when you first started email marketing and your list consisted of your family and your two best friends?  It seemed like a waste of time.  As your list grew, so did the value of email newsletters as a marketing channel.  Facebook is similar.
3. It’s not about YOU – It’s about your customers and what they want.  Selfish thinking is counter productive when it comes to social media marketing.
4. Content is king – Although there’s a lot of talk about data when it comes to marketing online, content really is king.  If you don’t write well, you better start practicing (easy, easy, why do you think we blog so much!)!  Create content that people genuinely derive value from, want to share, etc.  Quality trumps quantity.
5. Reach out and touch someone – Don’t wait for people to find you – find them!  There are a million ways to make people aware of your presence.  Start with emailing all of your existing customers as well as friends and family.  Reach out to other business owners in non-competing businesses.  Add social media buttons to all of your online assets (website, email newsletter, blog, other social sites, etc.).

Here are a few great Facebook resources:

• Facebook Marketing Solutions – Facebook’s in-house marketing solutions page – a great place to get started.
• Facebook for Influencers – Facebook’s own page for people that want to use Facebook to promote themselves or their business.
• Example Influencers – Examples of people and businesses using Facebook.
• Allfacebook.com – The unofficial Facebook blog – lots of good app info and stats.
• Insidefacebook.com – Tracking Facebook for developers and marketers – techie detail and marketing insights.
• Whyfacebook.com - Using Facebook and social media to grow your business – lots of good tips and tricks.

Some interesting Facebook stats:

- 59% of the top 100 retailers are on Facebook (Source: Rosetta)

- Facebook’s not just for college kids – the fastest growing population on Facebook is people over 35

- The top application for Facebook is the iPhone app, but the Blackberry app isn’t far behind (Source: Allfacebook.com)

- Over 200 million active users – 100 million log in daily!

That’s all for now – if you use Facebook to promote and market your business send us your story!  As with every marketing strategy, don’t forget to track your results!!!

Using Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments

Looking for a way to sharpen your on-line advertising?

Before you invest in another marketing strategy, take a closer look at your current website visitors – starting with how they reach your website.

Google Analytics, a popular website tracking program, defines three primary traffic sources:

1. Direct – A visitor that either enters your website address directly into their browser or returns to your site via a bookmark is considered to have visited your website directly.
2. Search – A visitor that reaches your website from a search and click (paid or organic) on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. would be categorized as a Search Visit.
3. Referring – A Referring Visit could come from a paid ad on a yellow pages website or from a Tweet on Twitter.

Each of the traffic sources above has nuances associated with it that can offer important  insights to help you better direct your on-line marketing strategy.  The catch?  You have to massage your data a little bit in order to get these insights to appear.

Confused yet?

Let me explain in a bit more detail:

Direct Visits are people that either already know you or were driven to your site by offline advertising.  Visitors from Search could be people that already know you – i.e. they searched for your name, but they could also be people that have never heard of you that found your website (if you’re lucky) when searching for your type of product or service.  Referring Visitors are a similar to Visitors from Search.

If you really want to supercharge your on-line marketing efforts, stop looking at your website traffic in aggregate and instead segment your traffic into two groups:

• Those that know you and (direct visits and visits from branded searches)
• Those that don’t know you (reached your site via a Referring site or a non-branded search)

Looking at your traffic from this perspective can change the way you think about your on-line marketing efforts.

For example, if you got 60 new visitors from Google Organic search you might conclude that you don’t need SEO (search engine optimization).  However, if you later found out that of the 60 visits, 45 of them searched for you by name, you might come to a totally different decision about your need for SEO.

To be clear – both metrics (visits from people that know you and visits from those that don’t) could be key performance indicators – particularly if you do a lot of offline marketing or word of mouth marketing.  But the real opportunity lies in the later.  If you really want to grow your business, you need to focus on getting more people – that do not know you today – to your website and engage them once they arrive.

For a moment, think about your website as if it were a sales rep for your business.

You need to test programs that send qualified leads to your sales rep and see how well they close.  If you send a few thousand visitors to your website and find that it can’t close, you might test some website optimizations.  Recognize that many websites face the difficult task of being all things to all people.  They need to be a friendly and familiar face to existing customers and a best foot forward for prospective new customers.  Makes you wonder if more businesses shouldn’t have multiple websites for multiple audiences (many do!).

Anyway, don’t worry as much about converting those that don’t know you into leads and sales.  Just focus on getting them in front of your sales rep (your website) and see how well your website does at engaging them.  In another blog post, we’ll get into improving conversion rates.

If you use Google Analytics as your website tracking program, you can easily set up custom advanced segments to track both types of visitors.  The end result might look something like this:

If you’d like help getting your website set-up with Google Analytics OR if you have Google Analytics on your website but find yourself with not enough time to pull actionable insights from it, drop us a line!