Internet Marketing or What’s That You Said? by June Campbell

Planning an Internet marketing strategy? Will you get the best ROI from a CPA, CPC, PPL, or a hybrid model? And how will you track your CPM and determine your CTR?

HUH?

If you’re new to business and trying to learn how to market on the Internet, your first reaction will be complete bewilderment. Come to think of it, why am I suggesting this happens only to people who are new to business? I’m betting you’d find Fortune 500 CEO’s who don’t know their PPC from their CPA

Egads! And they say government employees talk in acronyms and jargon. They never came up with anything close to what you’ll find on Internet marketing forums and bulletin boards.

Daunting as it is, you’ll need to know this stuff eventually. So, pour yourself a strong cup of something and plow through these definitions:

ROI (Return on Investment)

If your $1000 advertisement results in $1500 in sales, your ROI is $500.

Impression

The number of times a banner or advertisement is served (displayed) on a Website. If 10 people visited the web page containing the banner, you would have 10 impressions. If one person viewed it 10 times, you would still have 10 impressions.

Hit

This is a (poor) method of measuring Website traffic. A hit is registered each time a browser request is made from a web server. If you have a web page containing four graphics, each page display will count as five hits.

Page View

This is a more effective way to measure web traffic. A Page View refers to each time a page is displayed. So, if you have a web page with four graphics, each time the page is displayed counts as one page view but five hits.

Unique Visitors

This is the number of individuals who visit your site in a defined time. If 200 people visit your site this week, that is 200 unique visitors. If one person visits your site 200 times, that is one unique visitor.

Stickiness

This refers to the length of time that a visitor spends at your site over a given period of time, or sometimes to the number of web pages that your visitors typically download.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

This is the cost of obtaining a new customer. You divide your total acquisition expenses by your total number of new customers. For example, if your $100 ezine ad produces 30 new customers, your CAC is $3.33.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand)

This is an advertising model based on the cost of 1000 impressions of your ezine or web ads. If

New Facebook Analytics Tool Digs Deeper Than Insights

A webpage owner has seemingly unlimited choice in products that slice and dice information about those who visit his or her page. Real time? Personal? With a heat map? No problem. Facebook page managers, however, don’t have it as easy.


The Google Analytics of Facebook is called “Insights,” and for someone who is dealing with the typical Facebook fan page, it’s a sufficient meat-and-potatoes analysis tool. PageLever, a Y Combinator startup that launched Wednesday, is a more elaborate version of Insights for brands that want to get a bit deeper in their analysis — a group of users that so far includes YouTube, Microsoft, Mint and Kayak.


PageLever shows impressions (any time a story loads in a browser, whether on your page or not) for any date range, not just month or week. It separates unique impressions from repeat impressions so that you can see your true reach, and it shows when and where fans “unliked” your page. You can also look at what type of content — photos, video, text or flash — your audience responds to best.

Five Things You Should Know About Web Analytics

Web traffic alone doesn't generate sales. Answer these questions as you track your web-site metrics.


As an online marketing strategist, I continually come across business owners who rave about the number of visitors coming to their website. The irony is that website traffic alone doesn't generate money.


I ask these business owners questions: Where is the website traffic coming from? What Web pages are visitors landing on the most? What percentage of visitors return to the site? How many visitors convert into customers?


Their lack of answers shows they're concentrating on volume and not on quality, and I guarantee their sales are suffering as a result. It doesn't matter how many people visit your website if those people are not the "right" people -- the type of people who will buy something from you someday.


Good website analytics take the mystery out of wondering who's visiting the company website and why. You don't need to be an online marketing strategist to use them, either. There are plenty of website analytics packages for sale on the Web, but you can get started free through Google Analytics.


The Google service provides you with a line of code to plug into each of your website pages, and you can then start tracking. You can get a breakdown not only of how many visitors came to the website, but how long they stayed, what site they previously came from, what search terms they used to reach the website, and which pages they visited the most.


Here are five points to consider as you start delving into the numbers:


1. Do your website visitors already know you? The whole point of the website is to link you with potential new customers who have never heard of your business, not people who may be merely looking up your address. A well-designed website should only have a small percentage of visitors, maybe 5 percent, who have used the company's name to find it.


2. Are you bringing in potential customers? Let's say you're a tennis gear provider. People who find your website searching for "tennis" probably aren't going to help you. They likely won't help you if they searched for "tennis racket." You want the people who searched for "Dunlop tennis rackets," or better yet "Dunlop Aerogel Titan." They know what they want, and they will buy from you if you're offering the best deal.

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