Paid Search Drives Offline Sales?

I just finished reading an article, from MediaPost that stated PPC ads help increase in-store purchases. This is great news for the bottom line of the stores/companies running Pay per Click Ads. However, for the marketers, it is very difficult to contribute the off-line sales towards the PPC Campaigns effectiveness. With that being said, new strategies and technologies are beginning to be implemented to ensure that PPC Campaigns get full credit for the online and offline sales that they drive. An example of a strategy being used is implementing coupons via barcodes or keyword phrases, to PPC Landing Pages can help keep track of people seeing the ads online but buying in the store, this is still a work-in-progress. Do you have any other ideas of how to credit the appropriate in-store purchases to the online marketing campaign that initiated the sales process?

Selecting a Sensible Web Analytical Platform For Your Organization

There’s countless blogs, articles, and studies out there that preach about how web analytics is the greatest thing since sliced bread and how it can tie together virtually any marketing effort for an organization and measure their effectiveness side-by-side and against each other. All the features, reports, visuals, metrics, and alerts are great…but only if your organization can dedicate the time, talent, and funds to properly implement and support the platforms.

There’s been more than one instance where we’ve seen a large organization invest in a big and flashy analytical platform like Omniture and WebTrends, and not dedicate the necessary resources to properly implement, support, maintain, or even use it properly. It almost seems like some organizations view these platforms as set-and-forget endeavors, when in reality they are no different than the machinery that is used to make their products or the buildings in which those products are sold. Just because it isn’t tangible does not mean it won’t need ongoing support.

One of the driving reasons these platforms and strategies are improperly executed is because of a lack of budget. Most of the larger analytical platforms use a pay-per-pageview approach to their billing, which for well-traveled websites can add up quickly. After figuring in servers and databases, the total cost for the year can easily stretch into the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This usually swallows up the majority of an analytics budget and doesn’t leave much more room for bringing on talent for proper implementation and usage. So this brings us to the driving point of this blog: Choosing a web analytical platform that your organization can actually afford to support (via either internal talent or external agencies) is a critical step that should not be overlooked.

For some of the aforementioned organizations, selecting a cheaper (or even free) platform like Yahoo! Web Analytics or Google Analytics would have yielded much better insights. We even saw this with one client, as they had both WebTrends and Google Analytics, and the latter platform offered exponentially deeper and more insightful reports.

So whether you are the individual or an agency pitching to the higher-ups of an organization why they should go with analytics, make sure you ask the right questions: What do we really need, and what can we actually afford to support moving forward?

Keep your eye on DaBrian Marketing Group’s website for a more in-depth article on this. Also be sure to follow DaBrian Marketing Group’s new Google+ Page!

Email Marketing- A Quick and Cost Effective Way to Reach Your Target Audience

Email marketing is an important component of a successful Internet marketing strategy, and its benefits include:

1. Staying in front of your target market
Email marketing allows your company to stay in front of your current customers and to build long-lasting relationships and enhance connections.

2. Measurability
Many aspects of email campaigns can be measured, such as the number of opens, click-through rate, and conversions. These key metrics allow for optimization of future email campaigns.

3. Cost effective
Email marketing is a more cost effective method of communicating, as it does not include the cost of printing or postage that direct mail requires.

4. Immediate messages
Messages are delivered immediately, allowing for quick notifications and responses to promotions and sales.

5. Increase traffic to website
By embedding links into your emails, customers can easily access specific pages containing relevant information on your site with just a click.

6. Flexibility
Email marketing provides great flexibility in the type of emails sent, such as newsletters and promotions.

Make sure to take advantage of the numerous benefits email marketing provides.