Proving it works
So, you’re running monthly emails and collecting open and click-through data to present to your boss. If he knows his stuff, he should really be saying, “So what?”

Open and click-throughs are not an end in themselves, it is the conversion rate that is far more interesting and provides more useful data. For example, if a key objective of your email campaign and website is to generate online customer enquiries for sales staff, you should be measuring the rate at which email recipients are submitting a sales enquiry. This way you can say to your boss, “January’s email campaign went out to 5000 people and generated 50 enquiries”. You can then take that data, match it with end sales data and in turn calculate an ROI. 

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After a global recession, which put millions out of work, it seems that some jobseekers are having to come up with more innovative ways to stand out from the crowd. Not content to sit back and wait for the right role to be advertised, some are putting the internet to work for them in creative ways, and we could all learn a lot from how they’re doing it.

Alec Brownstein is a great example. In his quest for the perfect job he spent £4 ($6 USD) on Google adwords to reach five creative directors at major advertising and marketing firms: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger, and David Droga. Basically he banked on the fact that these directors would be googling themselves at some point, and amongst the search results was his ad which simply read “Googling yourself is fun, hiring me is fun too.” He got four interviews, two job offers, and according to FastCompany.com, he’s now employed at Young & Rubicam. Definitely a slam dunk for Alec!

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Last week, Facebook revealed their latest tool to help webmasters “Socialise” their sites – Facebook Open Graph.

Open Graph is Facebook’s latest foray into search engine functionality and if all else fails, it’s best to think of it simply as the first step towards a social search engine. Facebook is hoping that as people browse the web they will “like” pages by clicking a Facebook button which then informs their friends via Facebook.

Open Graph will enable sites which you’ve never been to before display recommendations and information tailored for your tastes based on what you or your friends have previously “liked”. At surface level then this is just a slightly more powerful version of those buttons you see around the web which enable you to share stuff you like with your friends. But the story of Open Graph is going to be so much more than that.

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We’ve already written our top 5 resolutions for 2010 for intranet owners – but what about those of you out there on the Great Wide Web? Keep reading for our top 5 New Year resolutions for website owners…

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Often a common error by UK companies when creating keywords for a non-English site is to either leave keywords in English (a big no-no) or to try and use a tool to translate them.

The latter doesn’t work, as anyone who has tried using a translation dictionary may have found: words which may be correct are not necessarily the words a native speaker would use.

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Nutricia, the company that owns the Cow & Gate and Aptamil baby formula brands recently got rapped by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority for magazine ads which claimed their milks could “support” the immune system. The ASA said that this sort of claim could only be substantiated with robust evidence. Baby formula brands are subjected to all sorts of regulations regarding the promotion of their milks. But how does this extend to pay-per-click search advertising? Read on…

With marketing budgets being crunched, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is starting to look even more appealing. The 80-20 rule (otherwise known as the Pareto principle) states that in general 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In SEO terms, this means that a few low-cost changes to your site can result in a dramatic increase of traffic. However, when you consider that Google has over 200 factors that determine ranking on search results, it’s important to focus your SEO efforts on the areas that are really going to make a difference. Read on…

Google is the king of the search engine castle, with 68% of all online searches being made through its sites. Displayed alongside those millions of search results are ads, uniquely tied in to the results with a complex and highly secret algorithm.

Advertising on Google can put your brand out in front of thousands of potential customers, and not just on the search results pages. With the Google content network, relevant ads are also displayed on sites all over the web. Read on…