The Value of a Facebook Fan: A different POV ($136 per fan)

A few months ago, I wrote about Vitrue’s study on the value of a Facebook fan being worth $3.60; and last week, Syncapse released a similar study and assigning a $1.36 value to a fan. The 18 page comprehensive study can be downloaded here but here are some key findings:

Product Spending: Facebook Fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period

Brand Loyalty: Facebook fans are 28 per cent more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook

Willingness to Recommend: 68 per cent of fans are ‘very likely’ to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28 per cent of non-fans)

Brand Affinity: 81 per cent of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39 per cent of non-fans)

Earned Media Value: Incorporating all of the above factors, the average value of a Facebook fan is $136.38 to an organization

10 ways to determine if you have social influence

1. You follow 100K people and they all follow you back.

2. You follow 100K people and 200K follow you back (this person has more influence than the previous).

3. You have a low (follower/followee) ratio because you un-follow the majority of the people who you previously followed.

4. You go to the local grocery store and a random person shouts “Hey, I know you! I follow you on Twitter and RT everything you share”.

5. You have a personal Facebook Fan Page (it doesn’t matter how many people like you either. The mere fact that you have one is all that matters).

6. Your twitter CTR is 38% on all the links you share about YOU.

7. Others randomly RT YOUR Klout score (keyword – RT)

8. You get invited to speak at every social media conference (even if you have to pay for your own travel, you still have influence).

9. You check in to a random location on Foursquare and it turns into a Tweetup in honor of YOU!

10. You get your profile image on Fast Company; you Tweet it, it gets RT’d … and the cycle continues.

In case you didn’t get it, I am being completely facetious with this post. I personally think that anyone who considers themselves to have “real influence” just because they have a certain amount of followers or fans is a complete joke. My opinion only.

There are only 3 things that I care about having influence over; my family (and friends), my co-workers and my clients in that order. Everything else is irrelevant.

How to Choose Content Keywords

There are various and sundry methods for choosing kws for your enhanced content campaigns, ie. contextually targeted advertising on the content network…

* use your instincts and the Google Wonder Wheel
* use the Google Keyword Tool to find related kws, then sort
* use Textanz tool according to David Szetela’s method
* use keywordspy related keywords and sort

The keywordspy.com method I am testing is very similar to using the free Google Keyword Tool, but I’ve found keywords to be somewhat different, plus keywordspy allows you to sort keywords according to “profitability”, which may be an indication of a good niche. Wonder Wheel may dive too deep into long tail terms, and the textanz method is too time consuming for my liking.

My sorting method is based on several factors:

1. search volume and relevance, preferably at least 2 words
2. keyword niche profitability… indicates a profitable niche
3. choose between 5-15 broad keywords only
4. keep an eye for negative keywords as well

Changes coming at Yahoo Search Marketing, codename Panama?

eWhisper posted some insider info about YSM over at WMW, but the thread requires a membership. So go to his site for read about it for free.

A quick summary is that they are planning on doing a massive overhaul of their existing system that has not changed in years.

Here are the main things that will change:

* Account structure will be like that of google.
* Bidding will be more like google, mainly in that it will be performance based, using CTR data.
* They will also be adding a bunch of tools like that of MSN Labs.
* They are also supposed to add geotargeting which would be a huge step, since now you can only target by country, and to do so you need an account per country!
* The other nice thing is that they say they will leave bidding open, meaning you can see what your competitors are paying.

This is great and should be helpful to anyone using the system, especially those trying to exploit it (c:

Now if they would only kill some partner relationships like the douchebags who run searchnut.com. Thanks for 30x the traffic of yahoo itself!

Why do all search partners suck?

It is roughly 3:00am, my stats program updated for the day about an hr ago, and I am already about 8x as profitable today as I was yesterday. That is kind of weird eh?

The only 2 variables in the advertising that I was doing was 1- day of the week, and 2- opting in to Googles Search Partner network of SHITE.

I do not think #1 was the issue, since we usually do pretty well on Sunday, so I am going to go with #2 being the culprit for yesterdays narrow margins.

To start the morning off we decided to try the Google search network to see if we could increase traffic and sales to one of our sites. We usually spend about $30 an hr, and today spent nearly 4 times that per hr. Our ROAS (return on ad spend) is usually around 75% and today we were running at a sweet 3.2%. I would have been better off putting my money in a fucking ING saving account to get that rate. To give you a better idea of how much we got p4wn3d by google, we spend $1525 to make $49.

The biggest source of new traffic was an amazing “high quality” partner searchportal.information.com. These assholes have more sophisticated robotic clicking than your run of the mill rip off companies. They were actually passing the user agents of numerous cell phones, which is a new fun trick, since we are not opted into the mobile market.

So I give props to both google and searchportal.information.com ganging up and giving me some sweet double anal action.

Tomorrow I get to waste 2 hrs requesting a refund for the shitty traffic you sent. The worst part about this is that the only true source of decent traffic at the moment are the following companies/settings:

Google – google network only
Yahoo – none/some with hard work and numerous complaints.
MSN – does not let me buy adult traffic, low volume for non adult sectors. PURE traffic and highly recommended.
ASK – a joke

So in the sectors I work in my only real choice is Google, and with that only the Google/google partner sites provide conversions for me.

An Insider Look From a Yahoo! Search Trend Spotter

When “American Idol” is on, it’s a busy day for a trend spotter like me.

I sometimes sport the fancy title of Web Trends Analyst: My job is to interpret search interest in pop culture and help develop news stories for reporters and readers like you. As you might imagine, a billion or so searches lend themselves to many narratives. Figuring out the “what-does-it-all-mean” goes beyond declaring the winner in an ever-changing popularity contest, or what’s on top of everyone’s mind day to day. (Although, I can tell you Sandra Bullock has lately beat out Lady GaGa as the most-searched celebrity, and “Twilight” leads in searches for the most anticipated movies of the season.)

Instead, I face questions like this: What does the rise in apocalypse-related searches following natural disasters say about our modern society? Are the lookups following Tiger Woods’ story prurient, or are we repeating our ancient fascination with the morality tale? And can search activity project what the masses will decide, even before the masses know themselves?

Fear not, I harbor no aspirations to be the next Nostradamus (who has measured in the top 30,000 searches in the past 30 days). While you can use search trends to gauge fan interest, you can’t use queries to predict who’ll win an Oscar or the World Series.

But queries can point to some interesting projections when it comes to reality shows, where the fate of a limited set of contestants is decided by a mass audience. American Idol presents an increasingly rare and unique confluence of such circumstances (as does “Dancing with the Stars” to some extent, but the judges’ scores also play into the ABC show’s formula.) By gauging who the core “Idol” voters are (generally ladies 30-54), determining the influence of hometown loyalties, and factoring in the tween factor, we’ve made 3 out of 4 correct projections. (Darn you, dark horse Kris Allen and America’s propensity for the underdog, even among underdogs.)

All the interpretative dance we do around search data is actually more important than figuring out the winner. Analyzing search trends helps us understand the impulses and processes of why people make their choices at that particular moment in time. About the only other comparable phenomenon is, well, the presidential elections. Back in April 2007, when party candidates were just raising money for their presidential campaigns, I ranked the Democrats and Republicans by Search popularity. The order adhered pretty closely to the amount of money they brought in. Back then, a largely unknown Barack Obama edged out Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose first-quarter fundraising was separated only by a mil.

Who we are, as a collective culture, is what fascinates me. As a former features and entertainment reporter, I love having at my fingertips the curiosity of the masses (anonymous and in aggregate). The typical trend story relies on a handful of interviews, and a (hopefully) savvy reading of repeating occurrences or underlying themes. A better trend story pinpoints which specific groups of people practice the trend and maybe throws in some robust poll data or study results. The best ones recognize the historical context in which the trend has (re)emerged and gets to the “why.”

For me, I’m getting to the why. My job is to read the Search tea leaves, distill the narratives that fit the fact and context, and serve up my brew. You can get a sip of what we trendspotting editors do throughout Yahoo! from the Buzz Log, our annual Year in Review and on Twitter via Yahoosearchdata. Keep searching — I’ll be looking out for all of you.

Yahoo To Reduce Minimum CPC To 5p

My Yahoo rep has confirmed that they will be reducing the minimum cpc from 10p to 5p on their ad platform here in the UK on (or around) the 19th of January. This is positive news for advertisers who have previously been put off by the minimum 10p bid. The change will be introduced on the current platform before any migration to the upcoming Panama (or Yahoo Search Marketing 2.0) product which is expected around the end of Q1 in the UK.

However, in a rather strange move, Yahoo are not set to completely change the base cpc bids from 10p. There will still be a small number of ‘keyword categories’ (expected to be in the region of 150K terms) that will remain subject to the original base 10p bid. Categories with high cpc’s such as finance are expected to be those kept to 10p.

I would think implementing a complete change of bid would be far easier than trying to run keywords with different minimum bids, so its a little strange. I don’t have access to the full list of categories, but it would seem the high cpc keywords will be those kept to a base 10p bid. Although you could argue that changing bids on these keywords would not have a huge effect on overall average bids & potential revenue to Yahoo due to the small cpc decrease and intense competition, it could also be seen as a form of revenue protection.

I am hoping for a complete removal of minimum cpc with the upcoming introduction of quality based algo. But we will have to wait and see if this ever happens.

New Yahoo PPC Keyword Tool In Pipeline While Wordtracker Offer Free Version

There’s been a whole host discussion over the past couple of weeks about the current problems with Yahoo (Overtures) keyword tool and its slow death.

Well, it seems a Yahoo rep has confirmed that a new Yahoo keyword tool is in the pipline and should be released later this year. YahooSarah replied to a thread over at the WMW forums -

I wanted to confirm that YSM’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed. We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year. If you are an advertiser, I’d suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one).

Good stuff. On another positive note, Wordtracker have released a nice free keyword tool themselves. They have a useful information page that explains how the tool estimates daily search volume for any given keyword. The basic rundown is -

Every day, on average, we collect about 3.32 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com, who according to Netapplications.com account for 0.63% of searches across all engines. By combining these two figures, we estimate that the total daily searches across all engines is 527.8 million.

Yahoo Testing New Quality Based Ranking Algo In UK

An Email from Yahoo has been sent out to UK advertisers to explain that they are currently testing the forthcoming ‘quality based’ ranking model in some keyword markets. So if you spot your keywords in different positions to those in the bid landscape, this could well be a vertical in the trial.

The full email details -

Yahoo! Search Marketing is constantly striving to improve both the advertiser and customer experience, with the goal of providing the most relevant and targeted listings as users search, click and travel across the Internet.

To accomplish this, we constantly test new implementations and matching technologies. To help ensure we launch our new ranking model successfully we have started running a limited test across our UK advertiser listings in which the display order of Sponsored Search listings in some keyword markets is based on factors other than bid.

In determining listing position, the test will take into account a particular ad’s click-through rate, as well as other relevancy factors. The total amount of Sponsored Search traffic that we are providing to you should not change, but due to optimisation of certain keywords you may see traffic volume increase or decrease depending upon the relevancy of your offers and other optimisation factors.

As always, we encourage you to track your results from individual keywords, so that you can manage your bids and creative for maximum return-on-investment.

Our new Sponsored Search system will be rolled out in the UK soon, beginning with advertiser migration later this quarter. We will be contacting you with more specific information as the rollout date approaches.

Using Clients To Rank For SEO

This is another subject I have been meaning to discuss that I haven’t seen debated a huge amount openly even though everyone in the industry is aware of it.

Simply checking the UK agencies ranking for ‘SEO’ (as an example) it’s very easy to spot that some of them are using their own clients as a link network to rank for that very term. I am not going to call anyone out or make examples of anyone, they know who they are.

Presumably by doing it they think its fine, so perhaps I can give examples.

Historically web design and development agencies have always left a signature in the form of a hyperlink on client’s sites often in the footer to show who produced the site. This for me is not a problem at all, but is it right for search marketing agencies often acting merely as consultants to do the same?

Do any other types of consultant do this? No. What benefit is this to the client? None. Does it do them any harm? Mmm.

seo1

Is It Ethical?

While I am sure most clients are aware of the ‘SEO’ hyperlinks, I know for a fact that some clients are either not aware, or do not fully understand the implications of having the link.

I have also seen cases where the links are hidden extremely well, or hidden completely in a few cases which obviously makes this a little darker as it goes against the search engines guidelines.

Perhaps these clients have been given code to insert on their site as part of their SEO service (a scrolling text box…) with the keyword rich anchor & hyperlink included, perhaps it’s a requirement of the contract or even incentivised as an option for reduced fees, or they have been told that linking out to reputable sources will ‘help them rank’.

I also know some of these agencies hard sell their SEO services off the back of their ranking for the said term to justify to potential clients why they should work with them over the competition. Obviously ranking for ‘SEO’ by using their clients as a link network does not say anything about their actual skills as an SEO agency, but they often pass it off that it does.

There are definitely varying levels of ethicality in this, I believe some agencies are very open about it while some are less so and I am not pointing fingers at anyone in particular. But it does make you think, if some are willing to use their own clients as a link network for no benefit to the client, what does it say about them?

In an industry that is so often criticised for lacking credibility & transparency, does this not simply support these assumptions?

Perhaps some view this as simply a form of advertising similar to web design agency signatures, a clever technique to outrank the competition that is no more than any other type of ‘partner’ (if reciprocal) or supplier link or the incentivised links at least could be seen as no more than a form of paid links you see everyday.

Perhaps some would argue that despite all the criticisms above and questionable ethical nature, if it helps them rank for their desired term it’s clearly worth it in the long-term regardless.

seo4

My personal opinion is that everyone involved owe it to their own industry to keep standards as high as possible and in particular for their own clients.

Using your own clients as a link network for your own benefit no matter how you pass it off, to me, is taking advantage of your position. It is of no benefit to the client and it sends out the wrong message about our industry. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone work with an agency that uses this technique regardless of how good they might actually be in reality.