Tracking Online and Offline Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

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Although every day is a mother’s day, here in the US we dedicate one day especially for her to show our appreciation and thankfulness.? Mother’s Day is just around the corner. As a marketer or a business owner you are getting ready, like all retailers, to kick-off your Mother’s Day campaigns. Last year’s campaign did ok. You didn’t get fired , but you didn’t get a promotion either! You are a much smarter marketer now and you want to better track your initiatives, assess what channel is performing and fix what is not performing. You are planning all sorts of marketing activities: offline: TV and newspaper ads; online: paid Search, email, banners, social media, and others.

You have your messaging, promotions, copy, creative, and landing pages all ready, and soon you will go live and you have a week to figure out this “tracking, measurement and analytics” business!

No worries! Google Analytics and this post have come to the rescue!!

In this post I will walk you through a process of how to plan and implement a comprehensive external campaign tracking.

You have Google Analytics implemented on your siteYou have a basic familiarity with URL taggingLast but not least this post also assumes that you are ready and willing to be proactive and you do care about analytics and campaign ROI

As you know, the sole purpose of tagging is to differentiate between the different ads and campaigns you are running, so it is very important to agree on the structure and the naming convention as a first step. Here is an example:

As you can see from the chart above, we are running different online and offline ads for our Mother’s Day campaign. In the next section, we are going to tag all these ad’s links with the campaign variables using the URL Builder tool provided by Google.

Email campaigns are one of the most effective ways of attracting visitors to your site especially existing clients. If we don’t tag the emails links with the right campaign tags, visits from emails will be attributed as referral or direct traffic.

How do we tag email links?

Use the URL Builder to create tagged linksEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Use the generated link URL in your email (ex. “Visit the Store” button”)

We will follow the same tagging steps that we used for email campaign to tag our banner campaign:

Use the URL Builder to create tagged linksEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Use the generated link URL in your banner (ex. “Shop Now” button”)

Social media today is reshaping the online marketing landscape. People are using YouTube, Facebook, Flicker, and Twitter for more than just personal updates and video/picture exchange. There is a huge amount of promotion and branding taking place in these sites and our job in this post is to measure the success of these marketing efforts.

Let’s use Twitter for our Mother’s Day campaign and make sure we tag all links to our site with the proper campaign variables.

Use the URL Builder to create tagged linksEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Shorten the generated link URL using any URL shortening tools (I usually use bit.ly)Tweet about your promotion using the tiny URL

Thanks God that Google AdWords and Google Analytics are cousins and integrate very well together! Google AdWords has a nice feature called auto-tagging which makes it easy for us to see AdWords campaign information in our Google Analytics reports without any manually tagging.

To learn more about auto-tagging visit this help topic.

Sign in to your AdWords accountClick on My account tab and select Account preferencesUnder Tracking section, click EditCheck the Destination URL Auto-tagging checkboxClick “Save changes”

Unlike AdWords, to track Yahoo paid traffic we need to manually tag the destination URL with the campaign variables.

Tag your yahoo ad link using the following variables:
Use the tagged URL for the “Destination URL” field

Similar to what we did with Yahoo ads, but with the following variables:

Website URL: http://www.store.com/Campaign Source: bingCampaign Medium: cpcCampaign Term: {QueryString}Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

When we talk about tracking campaigns, it is not enough to focus only on online campaigns. We have to include the offline campaigns in our reports for complete analysis. In this section, I will share with you one method of tracking your offline campaigns in Google Analytics in 2 simple steps:

In your offline ads, refer visitors to a page that is unique to the campaign; [www.store.com/mother]Tag all visitors to the unique page with the campaign variables [source, medium, & campaign name]

How to tag all visitors to www.store.com/mother with the campaign variables?

We will assume that all visitors to the unique landing page [www.store.com/mother] are coming from a specific offline campaign let say the USA Today newspaper. When the USA Today visitors request the promotion URL and before we fire the Google Analytics code, we will refresh the landing page using meta-refresh tag, which update the URL with the campaign UTMs. When The Google Analytics code gets executed after the page refresh, it will see the URL with the campaign UTMs attached to it and will attribute the visit as desired.

Go to the URL BuilderEnter the following variables into the URL builder:
Add the following code to the header of landing page before the Google Analytics tracking code

Now as we had all tags in place, it is time for deep dive analysis into the “Mother’s Day 2010″ campaign. I suggest that you isolate the campaigns’ visits by using advanced custom segment and look at this unique segment across reports.

Sign in to your Google Analytics accountAdvanced Segments > Create a new advanced segmentAdd the following dimensions:

Now, you are ready to conduct analysis based on the customized segment. You can look at the traffic sources report and see how many people purchased and from which medium:

From the first look at the ecommerce numbers above, we can confirm that:

The TV campaign has the highest conversion rateThe newspaper campaign was not as effective as other campaignsSocial media has the highest ROI (Return on Investment)

Click on the dropdown menu below for more marketing campaign tagging examples.

If you like this exercise and you were able to extract some valuable insights for your business, apply the same concept for the upcoming Father’s Day, which is on June 20th here in the US and do a comparison between the users’ purchasing behavior in these two very special occasions.

Share your findings and happy analyzing and drop us a comment below!

For advanced users and those interested in multi-channel attribution, you can make use of the the Multiple Custom Variables (MCV) feature in Google AnalyticsIf you are running social media and online viral marketing activities and?you are active in blogging, on Twitter and Facebook, you should include “off-site”?measurements in your overall campaign?analysis. In addition, be sure to dedicate resources to listen and participate in the social conversations around your brand, products and campaigns

Technorati Tags: campaign analytics, campaign tracking, google analytics, msn adcenter, offline tagging, pay per click, search engine marketing, social media, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

Tags: campaign analytics, campaign tracking, google analytics, msn adcenter, offline tagging, pay per click, search engine marketing, social media, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 5:04 PM and is filed under web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Social Media Marketing

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8 Content Marketing Lessons from 80′s TV Shows

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Advertising8 Content Marketing Lessons from 80′s TV Shows

What phrase do you prefer? The ‘content is king’ or the ‘marketing its all about the content now’? Content is king sounds nice and grandiose, a brash and bold statement that justifies all this ‘content’ creation. I don’t disagree with either of those statements (I’m sure I have used both countless times) and will continue to do so (maybe less of the ‘king’) but the truth is that marketing has always been about the content. Marketing and content have always been linked way before social media, even before the internet and tv, radio, you could even go back 100 years or much much more.

Think about it. No one has ever sat down to watch television for the adverts, no one buys a daily paper for the adverts, no one switches on the radio a few minutes before each hour to catch the adverts. Nope. People sit down and tune in for the content. Due to technology and costs the easiest way for marketing to work was to slot in between other peoples content and catch people as they waited for the ‘content’ to return.

If anything there has always been a?dependence?on marketing by content in order to pay the costs of the content. While marketing depended on content in order to communicate the message.

What technology has done is it’s facilitated a shift in who the content provider is, basically cutting out the middle man and allowing the brand to become the writer, broadcaster and publisher rolled into one. The audiences are still there at home consuming media – all provided by someone. So what lessons can we learn from traditional media, and, for the purpose of this post, 80′s TV shows, for our new age digital content marketing strategies?

1. Bad TV Shows Never Worked
Bad TV shows had poor audience figures. For good reason, they were dire, lame ideas, or re-hashed content that was packaged in some format the TV station hoped the audience would consume. ‘Manimal’ anyone?Similarly bad marketing content in this age of content is king, will not gain traction. It will pull in the equivalent of a ‘bad audience’ and the communication will be ignored by most of the desired audience. It almost begs the question why bother?

2. But Bad TV Shows Were Cheaper To Advertise During
Yes, because they attracted lower audiences. Bad content, in terms of digital marketing, often has less resources invested in them in terms of time, planning ?and creativity. Facebook might be free but there’s tonnes of poorly used pages out there that could be doing a lot more – if the necessary resources were applied.

3. Good TV Shows Always Surprise and Delight the Viewer
Good TV shows always managed to surprise audiences. Something amazing on the TV the night before and people would talk about it the next day. Water cooler moments they were called. Those who hadn’t seen the episode would hope that maybe someone recorded it onto VHS so they could watch it. Think about it – who shot JR? OMG Bobby just got out of the shower? To get people talking about the good content they needed it to be a surprise, pleasant or shocking, but different. In todays terms if it has that surprise and delight factor it might get linked to on Facebook.

4. Good TV Shows Didn’t Always Get Big Audiences
When you first met Lieutenant Frank Drebin was he in the flop show Police Squad, or the hit Naked Gun films that came long after the TV show? This still happens today, does anyone remember Arrested Development or The Wire? All great shows that never had huge audiences until many years later when eventually a friend of a friend made you watch it. It took years for these shows to achieve ‘cult’ status because of the friend of a friend. Lesson here for content marketers is to make sure you’re distributing your content in as many ways as possible, who knows where the ‘friend of a friend’ hangs out online.

5. Viral Marketing ‘Seeding’ has Always Been Around
By seeding, I mean getting the content into as many available points from which the audience can either hear about it or see it for themselves, and hopefully spread the ‘word’. This hasn’t arrived with the advent of Web 2.0. It’s always been here. Do you remember that Gold Blend ad from the late 80’s with Anthony Head. There’s a compilation of the ad’s just below. As an aside, I’m looking at the stats for the 20+ year old set of ads. Believe it or not they have clocked up almost 78,000 views in the last 2 years. I’m sure there’s plenty of new ‘virals’ that wish they were just that ‘viral’.

I remember reading about that the final part of their ongoing ‘will they, won’t they’ saga in a newspaper, how it was going to be broadcast that night and how ‘the nation’ would gather round the tv set for it. Yep, I thought that day the world had literally run out of news and was now reporting on adverts. But no it was some clever PR dude looking to get greater exposure for the advert and in turn get as many eyeballs in front of the set at 9.10pm or whenever. It worked.

Last weekend on the X-Factor the two girls who had been friends until their audition fight, and haven’t spoken since finally made their appearance. I say finally because Sky News were talking about this two weeks ago and gave the impression that it was going to be on weeks back. Nope that was to build anticipation and interest in the actual broadcast of the fight. Which it did, even a friend of mine who doesn’t watch X factor knew it was on last Saturday night. Its such a popular clip that typing ‘X Faxtor’ into Youtube right now will bring this 5 day old clip up as the first search result. Subo’s they aint.

Its got 4.3 million views so far. Now I’m not comparing the two but by seeding content in offline and online ways (I’m sure that Sky News weren’t the only media outlet talking about this before it happened), is going to increase the probability of more people seeing it. The more people that see it, perhaps the more people that will spread the content and it may just go ‘viral’. You may not have access to Sky News but I’m sure you have plenty of other possible options to get word out about your marketing efforts.

6. Great TV Shows Have a Longer Life Span
Great content always had a longer life span. Not only are the stats impressive enough for the Gold Blend adverts from the 80’s, above, but how much of current television output is made up from decent enough older TV shows? I still watch plenty of old shows like Cheer’s, Seinfeld, and every five years I dig out Larry Sanders and watch them back to back. Great content lives on in the minds of the audience because it will always be great. Examples like these and even these will be remembered for a long time to come.

7. Copying Another TV Show, No Matter How Great, Doesn’t Work
A TV station has had a big hit. It’s now time for all the other TV stations to try and have a similar hit. So they take a formula and tweak it enough to be slightly different, but its never as good. Can anyone remember Airwolf or Blue Thunder? Knight Rider or Street Hawk? Did every TV show in the 80’s revolve around solving crime? Even so, how many digital marketing campaigns are just ‘tweaks’ of others hoping to grasp some of their glory, but failing to understand the originality of it all?

8 . Great Ratings + Big Audiences = Best ROI?
When I was a kid the Late Late Show was the highest rating show in Ireland. It may still be, albeit with a smaller audience. In the late 80’s it would pull in well over 1 million people every Friday night out of a population of 3.5 million. It cost big money to advertise on, but how else could you get to such a high percentage of the population in one 30 second slot? Today, Facebook is logged into by 1.73 million people in Ireland an incredibly high number of people for such a small island. Brands, companies and organisations are heading to the social network in their droves because the statistics say it has the highest audience. And what do ya know, it’s free to get a profile on Facebook. What a bargain! Except to be successful on FB requires resources, time, ideas and a certain amount of financial investment also. But is that the best use of your resources to reach your audience? I mean my family never watched the Late Late, and maybe your audience don’t use Facebook? Maybe they watch other shows and can be reached using far less resources but?achieving?better results. Just because it’s the most watched in the land doesn’t mean ‘everybody’ is actually watching it.

But it would seem there’s many parallels that can be taken from traditional advertising into digital marketing strategies. Many of the lessons remain the same, its just the source, context and technology have changed.

Do you think there’s any other lessons that can be learned?

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Related posts:

18 Blogging LessonsThe Marketing of Breaking BadNeworld: Facebook Spam, Blogging Tips, Google Realtime, Facebook Places ResourcesTV’s Dexter: 8 Great Marketing Moments15 IKEA Marketing Examples

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eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit – San Jose 2010

If you weren’t planning on attending the San Jose eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit already, it’s probably too late to convince you, but I’ll give it a shot as this might work especially if you are the last minute type .

Why should you consider attending? Well, you get to hear from the analytics industry rock stars, participate in a number of networking opportunities, pick up few tips from practitioners and consultants and learn firsthand from the analytics vendors on their latest and greatest, including “what’s new with Google Analytics, by our friend Brett Crosby.

Here is the detailed agenda, but basically on Monday you have the pre-conference workshops (there were some on Sunday), the conference sessions are on Tuesday-Thursday including some awesome keynotes, and then more workshops on Friday-Saturday, and it’s all happening at the Fairmont San Jose.

You can register for the entire conference, or just for a workshop. If you are really busy this year and don’t have the time to attend the entire event then I recommend you at least sign up for the “Social Networking Pass” which will allow you to attend the morning/afternoon keynotes, evening reception, exhibit hall pass and get your own conference bag!

And don’t forget to attend the Web Analytics Wednesday event on Wednesday the 5th at 6pm.

Hope to see some of our clients, partners and industry friends. If you are coming from out of town and you need any help here in the Bay Area, let me know, I am happy to offer free local advice . Drop a comment here or email me directly. See you soon!

Thanks
Feras

Technorati Tags: emetrics, marketing optimization summit

Tags: emetrics, marketing optimization summit

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 PM and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Marketing Trends of 2010

In 2009 many companies seemed to be eating humble pie. Many marketing strategies involved candor, owning up to mistakes, speaking directly to the customer, making promises and vowing to keep them. This was largely due to the economic situation in the past year and large corporations asking for bail out money. Many consumers became skeptical of corporations like GM, and began to put up walls in regards to deciding where to purchase their goods from. Well what a difference a year makes. This year companies are fighting for your dollars. No more mister nice guy. Refutation is this year’s big trend.

Refutation is a strategy used by companies where an argument between companies takes place via their marketing campaigns. Fast Food chains have traditionally taken this approach, but a current example is AT&T and Verizon.

Verizon seemed somewhat bitter that they were losing customers to AT&T due to their exclusivity deal with the Apple iPhone. Verizon started broadcasting commercials that targeted AT&T’s lack of 3G coverage. They started saying “there is a map for that” which sounds like “there’s an app for that”. Then AT&T started launching their own campaign where they acknowledge Verizon’s claims; then discredit them and provide facts of their own coverage area while attacking Verizon’s 3G coverage and their phone portfolio. These refutations continue today. The key here to make it a true refutation; that is, they have to acknowledge the competitor and refute the argument.

Dominos Pizza went from being vulnerable and honest to now outing results of a “national taste test” between their new revamped pizza and their competitor Papa John’s. They claim that Papa John’s classic “better ingredients, better pizza” is just “puffery”. Papa John has yet to answer, but I have a feeling it will only be a matter of time.

Another example is Dish Network and Direct TV. Dish network claims they provide the same service as Direct TV at a much lower price. They’ve done this in a series of commercials. The first attack came when Dish Network mentions all of the celebrities that Direct TV has used to in their commercials which include A-list celebs like Beyonce and Christina Aguilera. Dish network makes a good point. Contracting stars of this magnitude is pretty pricey. Direct TV had no comeback for the celebrity endorsements but they do mention in their new commercial that they have more choices as far as packages for sports. Not a great argument, but they obviously noticed the attacks since they mentioned Dish Network specifically.

If you want to predict trends, I think paying attention to the economy is important. Another thing is to really pay attention to commercials. I know not everyone is enthusiastic about watching commercials, but it’s kind of fun to keep track of who is saying what. So is this approach successful? It all depends on the execution and delivery.

I think the best refutation marketing campaigns are the ones that really put things into perspective for consumers; the ones that really make you stop and think. Sometimes the refuter can be too subtle and choose to take the high road, but, I say go for it! It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and in a world where we have so many choices you have to be aggressive and fight for those consumer dollars.

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FourSquare Day: Changing the Marketing Landscape

FourSquare is a social network that allows you to “check-in” to a location, which then provides a Google Maps location of where you are. You can then share that information with other friends on FourSquare, as well as update your status on Twitter and Facebook. FourSquare Day takes this a step further by having specified location give incentives for consumers to check-into their locations to receive discounts or even free goodies.

I tested this out myself. While at first I was reluctant to use FourSquare I decided to use it so long as I stayed true to 2 key rules for myself. Rule #1: Don’t Check-in at home… EVER! And Rule #2: Don’t check-in at work! I decided to do this, so that I can maintain a sort of anonymity that many users tend to lose when they join social media sites. Especially when considering sites like PleaseRobMe.com which brings awareness to the many dangers surrounding “over-sharing” on social media.

Today I decided to participate in 4sqDay and eat one of the unhealthiest foods known to man… McDonald’s! Sadly, when I arrived, the guy taking my order had no idea what FourSquare Day was—let alone what FourSquare was. So I got a happy meal and chalked it up as a loss. Later I found out they are giving coupons for the next visit to McDonald’s, which if you ask me is a little anti-climactic for FourSquare Day.

In any case, FourSquare has officially proven its relevance and should have caught the attention of many investors who can appreciate its value! If you think about it, you have hundreds of users sharing their locations and spreading the word about different venues. Although the discounts don’t make it “free” advertising incentives are relatively cheap to offer these coupons and the ROI on the advertising greatly surpasses the expenditures for using this type of promotion.

This is probably the most ingenious and profitable use of social media yet! I predict FourSquare starting a whole new trend in marketing, especially considering rumors that the social site might reach 1 million users after this day’s national event.

Update:

It seems that the success of this company has not gone unnoticed. Search engine giant Yahoo! wants to acquire the social media site for $125 million, which is $45 million more than the company’s current $80 million dollar value.

Personally, I don’t think it’s the time for them to sell; especially if we keep the consumers in mind. This is during a great peak in generating new users and I think the company can grow a bit on its own before deciding to sell-out to a larger company.

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The Science of Social Media Marketing

I tuned in to the HubSpot webinar a couple weeks ago, which was called “The Science of Social Media Marketing.” It was one of the first webinars on Social Media that I attended that I actually learned from. Usually webinars about social media introduce the different funnels of micro-blogging, which is something many of us already know. What I’d like to know is how to USE these funnels to benefit my clients! Dan Zarrella from HubSpot gave some excellent tips on how to use micro-blogging to engage your audience.

When I look at popular blog posts, videos, and tweets, I often wonder, “How in the world did this spread virally?” when it isn’t particularly good or even entertaining. Dan described it perfectly in saying that news spreads simply because of “contagiousness.” It has nothing to do with whether a video is good or not. People seem to be more attracted to posts that have many views; it seems to add credibility that many people have seen this post. The problem here is how do we get our social media content to reach a viral popularity?

Pressures of Micro-Blogging

The pressures of micro-blogging are much different today than they were even a few years ago. The problem with micro-blogging before was there was a limited amount of people that you could reach. Seeing as nowadays the amount of people you can reach is not an issue because of sites such as Twitter, and MySpace, where you can add people who are in your field, and in most cases they’ll add you because of your connection through the field. A new problem has occurred though, there is so much information that is being thrown at us daily, how do we make our content grab the user’s attention. That is the new issue arising with micro-blogging.

The way to grab a user’s attention is through finding a person in your field who has the power over influencing a large amount of his followers. Once you find this influencer, as Dan calls it, your next step is to make people aware. When you post your information, make sure your influencer reposts it. In terms of Twitter, post your information as a retweet so that it is simply passed on exactly as you posted it. A good tip is that you shouldn’t post very often; many people think to get a lot of people interested post as much information as possible. The problem with doing that is people will start to get frustrated with seeing multiple tweets and posts that it will get ignored or they will stop following you. So when you post information, make sure it’s relevant and don’t bombard your followers with updates.

Benefits of Social Media

Many traditional companies seem to shy away from social media; they fail to see the benefit. But what they don’t realize is that their competitors are one step ahead of them. Just being involved in the conversation about your company that is happening in the social universe is beneficial for you in itself. Having a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter, and the conversation in those spaces or directly on your page (through posts and updates) can help you identify problems that you may not have known were there otherwise. Through your pages you can instantly address problems. For example, If you are getting negative publicity, the more time you allow without addressing such issues can make your company seem stale or irrelevant. Your social media outlet will be the perfect place to catch these problems quick.

Having a presence in these spaces can also enhance your marketing efforts in ways you may not have thought of – announce sales, promotions, and posting live information as soon as they occur.

So, go out there find your influencers; stay connected, and don’t forget your calls to action!

Quick Tips:

Stay active on your social media funnels, check your profile, and keep up with your followers inquiriesKeep it personal; after all social media is about a human interaction with a company, not just a logo! For example, share pictures from your office, store or warehouse.Use URL shortening tools for Twitter, since you are only limited to 140 characters.Try to participate in conversations about your company where it makes sense.Don’t forget to comment, retweet, and respond to tweets because this will build a community around your brand!

Related Links:

Dan Zarrella’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/danzarrella – Very useful tweets! http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/marketing/article/5-ways-to-grow-your-local-business-with-social-media-john-jantsch – Article about how to use social media for a small/local businessesFollow E-Nor on Twitter! — http://twitter.com/enorincTechnorati Tags: microblogging, social media

Tags: microblogging, social media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 4:19 PM and is filed under marketing strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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YouTube Marketing Tips and Strategies

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A multimedia presence (i.e. such as TV, Radio, Magazine ads, etc.) has always been an imperative part of a complete marketing strategy. The Internet, in a way, has skyrocketed each of these forums to the next level. For video marketing, YouTube would be that rocket.

Whether you’re a small business or large corporation, YouTube videos/channels are as key of a component in having a comprehensive online marketing presence as having a main website or social media channels.

I’ll admit, when I first heard of YouTube, I was thinking to myself, “Ummm, not everyone can afford a video camera.” “How large are video files anyway?” “No one is going to go through the trouble of converting these gargantuan video files then uploading them.” “Why would someone want to display their videos for the world to see anyway?” Of course, my psychic intuition was horribly, utterly, and ignorantly wrong.

Your freedom to upload and share almost ANYTHING – personal movies, clips, slideshows, even audio with still backgrounds – is quite liberating and the attention feels great.

On the other end, that “play” button is like a shinny red button to a toddler calling our names – “PUSH MEEEEEeeeee!”? Rarely does it disappoint ether – “OOOOooooh, moving images and colors!”? If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video may be analogous to volumes of books.

A world of moving images are at your fingertips – find anything – from videos on how to make tiramisu to personal home videos of your buddies breaking the world record for eating the most peanut butter sandwiches in a minute.

With the embed code being so easily accessible (and even sites like Facebook automatically translating YouTube urls into embed’s), it’s easier than ever to SHARE your videos.? Mix in “heeelarious” content that your friends have to see and pass on, and born is the viral video – spreads like a virus – millions of views in a small amount of time.

YouTube.com now is the second most used search engine (next to king Google). It would only be a matter of time before advertisers/marketers (including all major corporations) took notice of the value of this amount of views and would devise plans to take prime advantage of this phenomenon. For example, Dell attributes 2 million of its sales to YouTube.

How can you take advantage of YouTube to market your products or services? It’s 100% free to create a channel, and easy to customize and brand as your business’s own video page. Upload an unlimited number of videos that are automatically indexed and searchable by not only YouTube, but google as well.? Make your videos easy to share.? Finally, generate enough interest and your YouTube videos can go a long way in bringing you attention, potentially resulting in revenue.

Good content – bottom line – content is king. Nothing can replace good content. If your goal is to have a video go viral, your content should hopefully accomplish the following.

Share-worthy – Your video should make viewers want to share with friends. It’s best if this increases your views exponentially, meaning every 1 viewer passes it to at least 2 people.Replay Value – Your video should cause viewers to want to replay it.

Generally, viral content is usually gut-busting comedy or captures something absolutely amazing and rare to see. Another great way to get a lot of views are “How-To” videos – answering a common question with a brief instructional video. Of course, creating content like this is easier said than done.

Call-To-Action Slide – Many videos begin and conclude with a slide that has an organizations branding, call-to-action, or contact information.

Take FULL Advantage of Social Networks – by now, if you’ve jumped on the social media bandwagon, you’re checking your Facebook or Twitter as much as your email. You’ve probably added friends you’ve never even really met. You may even realize that you’re connected to a huge web of millions upon millions of people – an extremely valuable marketing resource if you can tap into as many connections as you can.

Post the video on your facebook wall, twitter wall, blog, social bookmarks, myspace etc!Post often and ask friends to share and post as well!Note: just be careful to be balanced and not to spam your friends’ feeds, which will cause the opposite reaction – everyone to ignore you.

Best Time to Launch a Video – it’s argued that Friday and Sunday are the best days to launch a video, either during lunch or after work.

“ike any search engine, youtubes ranking is based on certain algorithms in which key criteria may be important. Here are some basics on how to optimize your videos so they rank better.

Tags/Meta Data – for all you SEO geeks, these fields - title, description, tags, etc. – all go into an algorithm that will your rank/index your videos in YouTube search results. The closer your video is to the top of the page when someone searches for your keyword, the better the chance it will be clicked on.

GOOGLE – It’s important to note that YouTube videos rank on GOOGLE search results as well, so having an optimized video may end up helping your SEO more than you think. Your site may not end up ranking on Google if your keyword is really popular, however, your video may end up at the top of Google organic search results.

Keywords – Optimize your video for certain keywords and sprinkle them in your meta-data as well as descriptions. For YouTube keyword research, use https://ads.YouTube.com/keyword_tool

Link Building/Interlinking – Linking to other videos in the descriptions or annotations also helps your video’s SEO.? Also, link to other sites through urls in your description (“http://” text is automatically converted into hyperlinks).? Link to a landing page on your main site.

Related Videos – You might think Youtube’s main search is best way to get your video noticed, but actually, majority of YouTube organic views (views not generated by paid ads) come from related videos. Thus, relating to the right video can be crucial. Related keywords should be taken into account in your SEO efforts.

Activity – The more active your video has, the better your ranking. Views, comments, stars, interlinks, etc, all count activity. One way to generate activity is to actually reply to comments on your video and get discussions going!

Annotations – Annotations count as activity. It engages the user with your video – engaging the user is always a plus. Ask people to comment, bookmark, subscribe to your channel, go to another video, etc.

Geographic Location – If your organization does local services, it’s always important to indicate geography in your profile since some search results can be geo-targeted.

Title – Having a good title may make a difference in enticing a viewer to select your video. A video that’s called “206485.mpg” probably won’t attract as much views as a video titled “MOST AMAZING SKATEBOARD STUNT EVER!!!!”.

Description Field – You have 27 characters before your message becomes “…”, so use that space wisely. Link to your website or state a call-to-action.

Thumbnails – Though YouTube limits the thumbnails you’ll be able to choose to represent your video, it’s important to choose a good thumb from the options they do give you. Obviously, a still with an attractive looking person is more likely to entice viewers to click over say a blank black screen.

Playlists – Playlists show up on YouTube search results, so be sure to create good playlists.

Channel – Your channel should be treated like a landing page.? It’s your organization’s video page!

Profile – Make sure to fill out information about your organization – sites, interests, about/bio, etc. Users will land on your channel and look to this area as a birds-eye view of your organization.Featured-Video – Make sure to choose an important featured video that you would like to draw attention to. Also, make it auto-play so your YouTube channel views will be counted towards video views.Activity Feed – Use your activity feed to update your subscribers – similar to any social networking newsfeed.

Traffic On YouTube: YouTube Insights – YouTube now offers some great statistics on every video you upload. Login to your account on each video on your video page you’ll find an “Insights” button. This dashboard allows you to see for each video your views per day and the demographics of your views (geographic location, gender, etc). You can measure the success of a YouTube campaign by seeing if it caused your video views to spike on certain days/months.

Traffic From YouTube – Using analytics tools such as Google Analytics allows you to see if a popular video has generated traffic to your main site or ecommerce product. You can adjust your marketing strategies for your videos based on these metrics. Say adding a link to your site in the description of your video increases traffic to your site. You now know to do that for all videos!

Create an interesting video that will make viewers want to pass it on to their friends.Increase your ranking by following good YouTube SEO PracticesSet up each video to have good branding, call-to-actions and conversion links to your respective site/product.Measure your videos’ performances.Technorati Tags: search engine optimization, social media, youtube

Tags: search engine optimization, social media, youtube

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