SnapHawk Blog

Marketing Partnerships for Profit

2009-10-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

Developing business partnerships or strategic alliances traditionally brings to mind mounds of paperwork, attorneys, and long legal documents. Also, the belief that these alliances could somehow limit flexibility can scare businesses away from developing these partnerships. However, by slamming the door on this opportunity, your firm could be missing out on a significant platform to grow your business and provide value for your clients.

Partnerships, at their most basic level, are simply a business-to-business collaboration and are only as complicated as you make them. If your business does not have a budget for intensive advertising or media campaigns, relying on free PR such as customer referrals from partnerships is a key channel for incremental business. According to the “Small Business Notes” website, companies in partnerships report that at much as 18 percent of their revenues come from their alliances.

Developing partnerships requires substantial effort and continuous refinement, not only to identify the appropriate partners, but to define the type and scope of the arrangement that will be most beneficial to both firms. In deciding how to reach out to these partners, try online social and business networking sites, industry groups/newsletters, advertising through your website, or networking the old-fashioned way.

Once you have started building partnerships, create a page on your website dedicated to showcasing your extensive professional network. It not only provides further credibility in the market place, but enhances the breadth of your product offering, showcasing your business as a full-service firm, and entrenching yourself further in the industry.

One immediate benefit of partnerships to your website’s Search Engine Optimization strategy is link building. By exchanging logos and website URLs, your partners can link to your website from their end and vice versa. Put simply, the more times your company name is mentioned and your website linked, the higher up you will turn up on search results.

At SnapHawk, we have spent a considerable amount of time determining certain categories of partnerships that we feel would be most beneficial to us and our clients. In the arena of online marketing, different agencies provide the various services that become pieces in a jigsaw puzzle of establishing online presence and growing revenue for your website. SnapHawk has an ongoing interest in developing creative partnerships with various firms involved in web development, strategic marketing consulting, IT consulting, traditional advertising agencies, etc., who have clients that could benefit from a well organized and executed Pay-Per-Click campaign.

On the other side, our clients may need web designers to create professional, branded, and clean website layouts; web hosting companies to host their website; web developers to setup and maintain the website; offline marketing agencies to incorporate anything from TV, radio, newspaper, magazines, or yellow pages with their website; online marketing agencies to manage anything from Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search Campaigns, banner ads, blogs, social media, email marketing; and the list goes on and on and on.

We understand that we can’t possibly offer every service that is out there; rather, we specialize in a set of services and develop a great understanding of everything else around us so that when our clients come to us with needs outside of our specialization, we can provide them with consultation and partner solutions. And because the online landscape is never static, we are constantly keeping a hawk’s eye on new potential partnerships that will help our clients keep a step ahead of the game.

Posted by: Smita Shastri

The Marketers' Gold Rush

2009-07-29T12:10:00.001-07:00

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

Social Media Marketing has become one of the hottest buzzwords in the online marketing area. Though many companies have already started to provide social media services, few fully understand the complexities and impact of viral marketing or successful social media campaigns.

Marketers’ interest and involvement with Social Media Marketing are growing rapidly and offer a innovative opportunity for companies seeking to expand their online presence and brand awareness capabilities. To optimize your Search Engine Marketing strategy, you should consider Social Media Marketing a great chance to build a universal, effective, and powerful relationship with your clients using various non-text digital assets traditionally associated with current search engine marketing campaigns. In other words, use integrated marketing.

Even though social media is not a direct marketing method, well-optimized social media content can attract new participants through search. New content distributed via social media channels could generate more links to website content both directly and indirectly. Unfortunately, social media is not as simple as setting up a Twitter account, building a Facebook fan page and adding social media on your marketing to-do list. Social media requires continuous activity and engagement. More importantly, whereas Search Engine Optimization concerns how search engines view your site, social media is all about how groups of participants including web users view your site, your products/services, and your company.

Websites can no longer function at the bare minimum effort of optimization by maximizing relative keyword placements and outbound/inbound links. You now have to maximize user engagement and make your brand mobile across across digital channels. If you stay with traditional means of Search Engine Marketing, you will lose to your competitors who are also leveraging Social Media to rank higher in search results.

Posted by: Yong Kim

How to utilize Microsoft Advertising Intelligence in Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign.

2009-06-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

Utilizing its expertise in windows office, Microsoft‘s Advertising Intelligence is a great tool regarding keyword research and creation. The short story is, it could save you huge amount of time (compared with tools provided by Google) and still provide notable insights.

As a certified Microsoft adCenter member, SnapHawk would like to share some of the experience in using this great tool. Now, let’s play around with it using some live examples.

Popular keywords

Popular keywords allow you to rank the keywords in the selected category by impression. You will see what are among the hottest topic in a certain category. For example, if we want to generate potential keywords for an education client. We simply click the popular keywords -> vertical category content list and then choose the "college/university" category. Here is the screenshot of the keywords represent people's interest in college education.

Under this example, if the school has a marketing objective to drive traffic, using the popular keywords such as school calendar, online college obviously helps.

Keyword research

The keyword research tool tells you the demographic information and geographic information about the search user.

For instance, if I am interested to know what kind of people would like to search the keyword “online education”, simply type the keyword you want to analyze in excel and click demographic function. here is the screen shot of the result.

Geographic

Demographic

Keyword	Age0_12	Age13_17	Age18_24	Age25_34	Age35_49	Age50_64	Age65Plus	Female	Male	Date Range
online college	0.94%	3.77%	19.81%	41.51%	22.64%	6.60%	4.72%	50.00%	50.00%	10/2008-10/2008

We can see Texas people (maybe because the area has fewer school) and people who aged between 25-34 (maybe because they just enter the job market and feel like needing more education?) are more likely to search the keyword. Therefore in our Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, a higher bid for the right audience according to this information will help us to improve our Return On Investment (ROI).

Pricing

The pricing tool allows you to gain an overview of the average performance and Cost Per Click (CPC) of a keyword in both the search network and content network. Take the keyword online college for example

In the search network, an Exact search type presents a higher Click Through Rate (CTR), and of course, resulting in a higher CPC. In this case, we will suggest clients to bid different prices for the different match types.

However, the keyword’s performance in content network is not as high as in search network. We might also notice that compared to Google, Microsoft has limited content partners. (So their price is low and our clients could adopt it if the objective is not CTR but as many clicks as possible).

Vertical Key Performance Indicators

The vertical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tools enable you to learn more about how keywords in your specific business perform against other business, and in both the search network and the content network. For example, here is how sub-categories in education compare with each other under various variables.

Apparently the reference works has a higher clicks as well as impressions. This can help a business operates across industry to allocate their budget in a higher level. As SnapHawk, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agency, we will make sure to check the changes from time to time to ensure a most up-to-date results, regarding which category driving more CTR and CPC.

Forecasting Keywords Performance

As a SEM agency who continuously helps our clients in choosing keywords over time, Advertising Intelligence makes this process efficient to track. For “online college” again, here is the monthly results about number of searches. Microsoft also enables users to observe this day by day. Another thing worth-mentioning is that by default, Microsoft helps to forecast three months worth of search traffic.

In some cases, seasonality could be possibly observed if using data mining function in excel.

Post by: Elin Weng

Bringing The Humanity Back to Technology

2009-05-09T07:07:00.000-07:00

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

By now, you must have heard the latest research against technology. The pundits are predicting that social media will degrade the value of traditional ways of socialization; the more we connect virtually, the less we connect inter personally. Educators are struggling to engage students who, more than ever before, require instant gratifications due to short attention spans. Twitter, Facebook and email remain primary ways to connect with our friends and loved ones. We can tell everyone what we are up to in 140 characters, we can tell hundreds of people where we went and share photos with a few clicks. People can know our world and track our lives without ever picking up the phone and calling us.

These sociological trends have trickled into the way we do internet business. Search Engine Marketing, one of the most effective forms of advertising, easily falls into this trap. Many agencies apply a 'one size fits all' approach to numerous clients in the hopes of expanding their business quickly. There is greater distance between clients and their Search Engine Marketing agencies. Also, the time to listen and empathize with clients, to understand their customers and growing pains has decreased.

SnapHawk decided that there must be a way to bring humanity back to the internet age. The traditional client - agency relationship models had it right, there was greater care, stronger bonds, and a deeper understanding of clients needs. Businesses and their agencies could grow together.

SnapHawk brings this client centric approach back to Search Engine Marketing by playing the roles of traditional account managers for each of our clients. We implement a customized consulting approach and offer feedback based on extensive research and discussion. We realize that small and local businesses have greater need of accountability, transparency and communication. We provide all three and continuously optimize our campaigns to increase your sales, generate leads and build your brand awareness. SnapHawk doesn't think that the internet must dehumanize all relationships. We want to bring humanity back into the internet age.

Post by: Shivika Sinha

The Math Behind Google Web Optimizer

2009-04-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

Google Website Optimizer works by embedding tracking codes in your website and collecting data from the website. Website Optimizer will then perform cool calculations and generate reports showing the chances of the refined page performing better than the original.

However, if you want to have multiple conversion pages for one experiment, Google will integrate the final report you will only see how the landing page is working as a whole. It will not be possible to see separate pages. On the other hand though, if you have multiple experiments for different conversion pages, you will be able to see the separate result but will not see the whole picture of how the landing page is doing.

Sometimes knowing both the separate result and integrated result would be essential to the online business. Therefore it is necessary for us to know the background calculations of Google Website Optimizer, which will enable more flexibility of the reports.

The raw data is shown on the rightmost column in Google Optimizer and those are where all calculations begin.

The estimated conversion rate is simply the conversion over the impression. The range (also known as the margin of error) will be discussed in the paragraph after the next.

The observed improvement is the easiest calculation where the conversion rate for the original page serves as a base. The difference in conversion rate between the original page and the refined page will be the numerator.

(refined conversion / refined impression) – (original conversion / original impression)

The range for the estimated conversion for a single page will be determined by the standard deviation and the total amount of impression exposed to the visitors. Statistically speaking, if all the visitors being observed have relatively similar behavior (homogeneity), say, they are converted with a very low percentage, we only need very few visitors and the range of the conversion would be relatively small. However, if those visitors display heterogeneity, we will need more observations to make sure we reach a certain confident range.

The margin of error would be calculated with the following equation:

The z score is the desired confidence level you want to reach given the conversion rate and the impression. As a common practice, we use 1.96 as the z score for a 95% confidence level, suggesting that 95% of the visitors will fall into the range or the range will be 95% correct. Please note the margin of error via such calculation is only single sided. The plus and minus sign expands the error to a two-sided range, doubles the margin of error, indicating that the conversion rate will be more or less.

The chance to beat the original is the comparison of conversion rates of the new page and the old.

First of all, we shall decide whether the visitors to the new page and to the old page have similar conversion rate (similar standard deviation). To determine whether two groups of visitors could have similar conversion rate, we would first calculate the standard deviation by using the following equation.

We then put the larger deviation over the smaller one to calculate the F value for testing. Here again, we assume a 95% level of confidence saying whether those two group have the similar standard deviation. In Excel, the function “FINV” will return the standard F value. In “FINV” function, the probability would be 0.05, limiting the chance of us making a false conclusion will only be 5%. The first degree of freedom is the impression of the page with larger standard deviation, less 1 (impression-1) and the second degree of freedom is the other impression less one. If the returned standard F value is larger than the testing F value, we could assume that they have equal variances and use the smaller standard deviation (Spool) for the calculation aftermath.

The statistical base to calculate the chance is the independent sample T-test. The calculation takes into consideration the difference between the two conversion rates, and the sample size (in this case, impression). In Excel, the function “TDIST” will help generate a T distribution for the sample.

Here is the equation of the testing value and degree of freedom in T distribution.

degree of freedom = impression A + impression B -2.
The returned chance of that T distribution is the chance to beat original.

Post by: Fangjie Xu

Search Engine Configuration in Google Analytics

2009-03-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

Today we share some tips and thoughts on using Google Analytics. We hope these are useful for you!
First, lets start with search engine configuration.

By default, Google Analytics identifies the following sites as search engine referrals. (Referrals from search engines not in the list are found under the Referring Sites report.)

Google	Netscape	Voila	Club-internet	Google.interia	Lycos	Mamma	Altavista
Yahoo	CNN	Virgilio	Mama	Szukacz	Ask	Alltheweb	Gigablast
MSN	Looksmart	Live	Seznam	Yam	Alice	Wp	Najdi
AOL	About	Baidu	Search	Pchome	Yandex	Onet	Netsprint

Then what about other websites? Is there any way to add them as search engine referrals in the report?

The answer is yes. You can add these websites by customizing your Google Analytics tracking code. You can use the _addOrganic() method to add additional search engines to the list.

The detail code is:

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

Parameter "new OrganicEngine" here is the name of the engine.
Parameter "new OrganicKeyword" is the character or word used to demarcate the search string.

For example, when we search "SnapHawk" in Bing.com, we get "http://www.bing.com/search?q=snaphawk&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n".
In this case, we put "bing" as "newOrganicEngine" and "q" as "newOrganicKeyword" and then get the code for Bing.com:
Bing.com: pageTracker._addOrganic("bing", "q").

Pretty cool, right? Here are some other examples for your reference. Enjoy!

wolframalpha.com: pageTracker._addOrganic("wolframalpha", "i")
Bingtweets.com: pageTracker._addOrganic("bingtweets", "q")
Techorati: pageTracker._addOrganic("technorati.com","search")

Post by: Autumn Chen

Apples and Oranges

2009-02-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

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Aside from the obvious differences (one is organic and one is paid), Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click have one very important and often times overlooked difference. With Pay-Per-Click, you control the landing pages visitors will see. With Search Engine Optimization, spiders control the landing pages.

As a marketer, you will want to provide the most relevant landing pages for your visitors so they don't hit the back button immediately after arriving at your website. Pay-Per-Click seems like it would work well with customer turnout for specific products or services, sales, discounts, special offers, etc. that would require strategic landing pages.Search Engine Optimization seems more effective for visitors looking for a wider range of information on a website rather than specific pages within the website.

Depending on what your conversion goals are and your immediate vs. long term needs, Pay-Per-Click may be the better fit for your business than Search Engine Optimization, and vice versa. What's the trade off then? Amazon.com would do better promoting Pay-per-click ads of specific web pages that match a search query for "Cajun Cookbooks". But they would also perform just as well at ranking high in organic search queries for "order books online".

Most small- to mid-size businesses however do not have the mammoth budget that Amazon.com has and will sometimes need to choose between apples and oranges.

Post by: Nancy Chu