Social Media Lessons From SES San Jose, Conversion Rate Correlation To Ad Position, Facebook’s ‘Rockmelt’ Browser, And More

Social Media Lessons from SES San Jose

1. Know Your Audience – Know where your users already are before you set out to engage them with social media. You can only ask your users to extend what they are already doing. Therefore, if they aren’t on Twitter, don’t ask them to tweet; if they aren’t active on social networks, don’t develop a strategy for your brand around Facebook.
2. Define An Objective – The best social media campaigns have clear objectives from the start. Having a clearly defined objective can help inform the social media campaign you choose to create.
3. Make Your Videos Discoverable – Twenty 20 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, so video search becomes a very important tool for users.  Tag and name your video wisely, and include a detailed description for easy discovery, and it’ll be a more useful plank in your internet marketing platform.
4. Think Beyond The Web – You can bring your video creative offline with Google TV Ads, which can drive search and increase your bottom line.

Google Finding: Conversion Rates Don’t Vary Much with Ad Position

Research from Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian, and his team concluded that conversion rates are not strongly affected by ad position.  Higher positions tend to get more clicks and therefore more conversions; and higher quality ads are usually in the top positions and therefore have better conversion rates.  But what happens if these same high quality ads are placed in lower positions?

The average position reported by Google is an average over all auctions in which you participate. If you increase your bid, your ad will appear in new auctions, and it will usually come in at the bottom of those new auctions. This effect can be large enough to decrease your overall average position.

Accounting for these effects, Google used a statistical model to determine that on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad.  For pages with 11 ads showing, the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across the positions.

New Browser Rockmelt Could Be Coupled with Facebook

According to rumors, Netscape founder and a member of Facebook’s Board of Directors, Marc Andreesen, is backing a new browser called Rockmelt that will be dedicated to browsing Facebook.  Details are scarce as to the exact functionality for this Facebook browser, but it may be an applications platform more than simply a way to surf the web.

Sources suggested the browser could store Facebook usernames to let users interact with their Facebook friends while they’re surfing the Web.  This would keep users on Facebook as long as possible and therefore open up greater online advertising opportunities.

Tapping the amount of searchable and browsable content on Facebook’s servers has potent implications for advertising future, as Facebook can keep Google out of that data and demographic rich content, made ever more valuable as it is supplied by real life users who identify themselves.

Google Updates “Insights for Search“

Google has announced new features to their Insights for Search tool.  It now has the ability to do forecasting, in which it extrapolates a search term’s future popularity based on its past performance.   The tool now offers an animated map that that allows you to visualize the way searches change over time in different regions, and allows you to add gadgets to your iGoogle page or embed them into any website.

If you’re interested in learning more about what Rocket Clicks can do for your pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, or law firm marketing, please check out our PPC services and SEO services or schedule a quick audit today. 

Sources:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/08/conversion-rates-dont-vary-much-with-ad.html

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Marc-Andreessens-RockMelt-Could-Boost-Sales-For-Facebook-788659/

http://news.ebrandz.com/google/2009/2810-google-insights-helps-advertisers-for-predicting-search-trends.html