The mega search engine plans to ship a tablet with your brand, which will sell for $ 199 online.
The Californian company Google plans to launch a tablet with its own brand in an attempt to boost sales of Android-powered devices with respect to the hegemony of the iPad, said Friday the Wall Street Journal. Computer Services Melbourne
The product, which has not been confirmed by Google, will be sold over the Internet as do Apple and Amazon, according to the newspaper. As part of that strategy, Google will brand these new tablets but delegate the production to its existing technology partners like Samsung and Asustek, which would be one of the first companies to launch one of these tablets, even if that information was not officially confirmed.
Google plans to present the next version of its operating system for mobile devices this summer, a software which will be called Jelly Bean, an event that could be used to publicize your new online store.laptop repairs melbourne
The Wall Street Journal also said that Google is considering the possibility of subsidizing part of the cost of the tablets sold in the future to compete with Amazon and its Kindle Fire, sold for $ 199, almost half the price of the Samsung Galaxy 7-inch Tab.
Not the first time Google intends to sell its brand mobile devices. In 2010 it partnered with HTC to manufacture the Nexus One phone with Android technology but gave up months later in view of the commercial success of Android phones.
04/06/2012
05/23/2011
We're Hiring: Inbound Marketing Jobs, User Experience Jobs, Software QA Jobs
Looking for your next career move? Interested in search marketing? Apply for a job at WordStream! We're on a mission to build the world's best PPC management and keyword research solutions to help companies with their online marketing efforts. We're currently hiring for positions in search marketing product management and software development.
How to Get a Job at WordStream (or anywhere, actually)
Before diving into the job descriptions, thought it might be helpful to give my personal three best tips on how to get a job at WordStream, or anywhere else for that matter!
- Don't use find and replace in a generic cover letter – This is so obvious, I don't know why people do this. Instead, write a short note about what you thought about the position, what got you interested about it, and why you think you’re a good fit. If you take the time to write me a truly thoughtful cover letter, I will always take the time to read it!
- Review the job description and tweak your resume to be relevant – Relevancy is the key in both search engine marketing and in resume submissions. We write detailed descriptions. Read and see if it's a good fit or not. If it's a management position, highlight your management experience. If it's a roll-up-your-sleeves job (and assuming you're really excited to roll up your sleeves) it might be better to de-emphasize the fact that you have a lot of management experience and highlight instances where you were a star contributor.
- Show me real stuff you worked on – If you’re applying for a marketing position, show me the Facebook/Twitter pages you manage, blog posts you’ve written, or your best link-bait, etc. If you’re applying for an engineering position, show me some geeky python project you’ve contributed to. Or if you’re applying for a UX job, show me some wireframes or something (you get the idea). If you show me stuff you’ve done, it says to me that you love and take pride in the work you do!
And Finally, The Job Descriptions
We're currently looking to fill the following jobs:
- Online Acquisition Marketing Manager: Drive qualified traffic and grow our online lead acquisition efforts.
- Senior UX Designer: Drive the user experience for all of our product lines.
- Senior QA Specialist: Provide leadership, direction and both hands-on and automated implementation of testing for WordStream products.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/04/08/ux-jobs-qa-jobs-marketing-jobs
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Five Ways to Lower Your PPC Campaign's Cost Per Action (CPA)
Last week we gave you five tips on how to get more leads from PPC. But what if your main problem isn’t leads? Everyone wants more leads, of course, but what if your most immediate problem is that your PPC campaign just isn’t profitable?
In this post we’ll walk through five more tips, this time for lowering your CPA.
Tip 1: Lower Your Bids
If your cost per conversion is out of whack, this basically means that the following equation isn’t adding up properly for you:
Cost / Conversions = CPA
We’re thinking about ways to get conversions for cheaper, so it’s pretty obvious that we might want to do something about the conversion end of this equation, but all too often I see people ignore the cost side to their own peril.
Many times, there’s a range of conversion that you can expect from your site. You can always work to improve conversion rates, but if your site’s traffic from SEO and your historical PPC traffic converts at a pretty steady rate and you don’t have the resources to do a lot of conversion optimization, you may be looking at something like this:
($5/click * 10 clicks) *.05 = $2.5 CPA
The .05 represents our conversion rate – 5%. If our target CPA is $1, and the conversion rate on our site is 5% we just can’t support $5 a click. This seems pretty straightforward and obvious, but the reality is it’s a calculation a lot of advertisers just don’t do before they jump into conversion optimization efforts. Understand what your conversion rate is and what your CPA is, and know what you can comfortably pay for each click, on average, to make your account or a segment of your account profitable.
Tip 2: Find More Specific Keywords to Target
In the last post we pointed you to a keyword expansion guide and another post on how to expand your keyword list and called out keyword research and expansion as a means for generating more leads – expanding and refining your keyword list can also help you to lower your CPA.
A great means of lowering your CPA can be to kill off or lower bids on “head” or shorter terms and find more specific keywords from methods like:
Tip 3: Increase Quality Score
In our list of methods for increasing lead volume, we recommended:
Better Campaign Structures – In addition to just tweaking your ads, you can also break down your paid search campaigns to create tighter, more relevant keyword groups, which will help enhance the effectiveness (and clickability) of your ad.
This increased clickability and improved relevance will lead to increases in Quality Score – that means a pricing discount and lower costs per click and per conversion. To get an idea of where the weaknesses in your account’s Quality Scores lie you can leverage the spreadsheet in the free Quality Score Toolkit.
Tip 4: Analyze Your Offer Types
Again this is a similar tip with a different twist to our advice around drive more leads: here you want to look at your offer strategy with an eye towards inefficiencies.
If you’re offering a white paper download, it may look from the equation mentioned earlier that you’re doing OK within this campaign – you’re converting at what you’ve deemed to be an acceptable level. But you need to make sure that you’re converting at an acceptable rate to sale. How do white paper downloaders convert to actual paying customers? Again it seems obvious, but many businesses don’t have a strong handle on this number.
You can also take different types of traffic that isn’t converting profitably and test pushing it to a different offer, as we suggested in the first post, as creating new leads may not only get you more leads, but can also drive down your CPA (more leads for the same price!).
Tip 5: Qualify with Your Ad Text
Good click-through rates are great and can drive more traffic, but a great way to lower CPAs is to analyze your existing ad text to look for ads that are driving too much of the wrong traffic. Find ads that have a high CPA and think about the messaging – are you being too vague? Could a more specific ad that includes more details (price, the type of product, etc.) and better syncs with your landing page ensure that you have fewer stray clicks and better conversion rates? If so you might have an opportunity to qualify out bad clicks and improve your cost per acquisition.
Another Bonus Tip: Optimize for Conversions!
And of course: just like with optimizing for more leads, a great way to lower your cost per action is to increase your conversion rate from the equation above.
About the Author
Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM search engine marketing consulting, a boutique search marketing agency offering search engine marketing services ranging from pay-per-click account management to search engine optimization and link building services.
You can learn more about how Measured SEM can help or get in touch with Tom directly via email at tom at measuredsem.com or by following him on Twitter.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/05/02/five-ways-to-lower-cpa
Getting REAL Social Media Numbers & How to Host Successful Webinars w/ @DanZarrella [@InboundNow #21]
Dan Zarrella, social media scientist, author, and speaker, joins us for another exciting episode of Inbound Now, HubSpot's Social Media and Inbound Marketing Podcast!
Dan is our internal social media scientist here. He is the author of The Social Media Marketing Book and the co-author of The Facebook Marketing Book, which he wrote with his wife, Alison. He's also a social media speaker and has been mentioned in a variety of different media publications, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Wired.
In this episode, we chat about:
- Becoming a social media scientist
- Justifying social media with real numbers about real money
- Tips for running successful webinars
- Facebook marketing tips & tricks
- Using new Facebook features
- How to get more Twitter followers
- The future of social media
For the full recap and transcript head here: Justifying Social Media With Real Numbers About Real Money With Dan Zarrella
To Subscribe to Inbound Now, Click Here
Being a Social Media Scientist
"So as a social media scientist, I like to get beyond those unicorns and rainbows and look at the actual data about how people behave online, why they behave that way online, and how marketers can leverage those behaviors."
Dan takes a more scientific approach to social media by basing his information on data instead of on fluffy, "what feels right" truths.
Justifying Social Media With Real Numbers About Real Money
"If you're measuring anything, that means you're spending resources - be it time, be it money - into social media. If you're spending money and time doing these things, the first thing you need to measure is how much is it making you."
According to Dan, the most important metric to measure in marketing (social media or otherwise) is how much money it’s making you – not just leads, but actual customers.
Tips for Successful Webinars
"The most amazing thing about HubSpot, especially my experience here, is the support and the fuel and the push that the rest of the marketing team gives me. We have a huge email database. We have over 100,000 followers on Twitter. We have a giant blog. So to start off, we're leveraging those things."
Dan currently holds the HubSpot record for the most webinar attendees (in the neighborhood of 25,000 for this webinar).
Here are some important tips for planning, promoting, and hosting successful webinars:
- Leverage what you already have. Whether it's a big email list, lots of social media followers, or an active blog, utilize the resources you've already established.
- Use social proof. "So once we get past 10,000 or 12,000 registrants, then I start tweeting about the fact that 10,000 people are signed up for this webinar. All of a sudden, if you're not signed up, you're like, 'What the hell am I doing? I'm not signed up for this webinar.' It turns into more of an event, and it becomes a thing where if you're not there, you're going to be missing out on what everybody's talking about the next day or later that day."
- Create custom hold music. Don't use the sleepy jazz music that automatically plays before the webinar. Create a track that will get people excited and pumped up.
- Use more pictures than words. Study what people with great presentations do.
- Create shareable takeaways. Write 140-characters-or-fewer snippets (with hashtags) that are easy for people to tweet and share - and ask them to share!
- Guest post on other blogs. Pitch guest posts to popular blogs in a similar market as your webinar topic.
- Consider paid advertising. Play around with sponsored tweets, Facebook events and ads, and blog or email list advertising.
Facebook Marketing
"There are two different uses of Facebook, and you really need to understand that and go at marketing on Facebook with a Page, not a profile."
If you’re doing marketing with Facebook, you should have a Page. If you have a Facebook profile, and you're using it for marketing, Facebook can shut it down. If that's not enough incentive to move to a Page, then all the analytics, ads, and insights Facebook offers for Pages should be.
But if you're using a profile right now, no worries. Facebook has an easy pathway to change from a profile to a Page.
Using New Facebook Features
"If you're a little mom and pop cupcake shop on the corner and the pizza shop across the street has a Page, you can go and comment on the pizza Page and say, 'Hey, come over for dessert afterwards.'"
Facebook now has the ability for you to use Facebook as a Page vs. your profile. So you can 'Like' things as your Page, comment as your Page, etc. – instead of as your personal profile.
TweetWhen
TweetWhen is a free tool that was created to help promote "The Science of Timing" webinar. It looks at your last thousand or so tweets, and it finds the hours where you had the most retweets per tweet. It also finds the days where you had the most retweets per tweet.
The free tool generated several thousand new email sign-ups. Celebrities tweeted about it. TweetWhen helped to create an event around the webinar.
How to Get More Twitter Followers
"I think one of the most key things from all of my data that I've found is that self-reference is not contagious."
If you're on social media to build your reach or to market a product or service, stop talking about yourself. That type of content isn't shareable.
"Stay away from talking about yourself, but talk as yourself," says Dan. People read a blog or follow someone on Twitter because they like their unique perspective. People want to hear your take on what's happening, but not what you're doing.
You should be talking about your followers, fans, and readers. Talk about what you've done and how that can help others.
The Future of Social Media
"I think social media, and the marketer in general, is getting much more technical."
While internet marketers don't need to be programmers, they probably do need to know some HTML and CSS. You need to know what a soft bounce and a hard bounce is. Marketing is more technical than it was 10 years ago.
"Another thing that I think is huge in social media right now and is going to be more, is that the lines between online and offline are blurring."
It used to be that what you did and who you talked to online didn't affect your offline world. But now it does. You can go to dinner, snap a picture of your beer, tweet it, and the bartender sees it and offers you a taste of another beer.
"I think stuff like augmented reality is going to be really, really huge." This would be things that blur the line between the web and the real world: location-based services, mobile apps, etc., like Google Goggles, the Yelp app, Foursquare, etc.
"The most recent data that I've published is that 33% of all Facebook postings are done mobile."
It's no longer just desktop computers. It's tablets, netbooks, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Brick and mortar businesses need to show up now by claiming their Google location page, getting active on Yelp, and being on Twitter and Facebook.
Connect With Dan Online
You can follow Dan on Twitter @danzarrella and connect with him on his blog. He also writes for the HubSpot blog and has a couple of books you should check out: The Facebook Marketing Book and The Social Media Marketing Book.
Past Episodes
- Listening in on Social Media & the Concept of “The Social Telephone” w/ Jay Baer
- Facebook Marketing Best Practices with Mari Smith
- Poking the Box and Transforming your Marketing with Seth Godin
- Leveraging PPC and Remarketing for your Business with Joanna Lord
- Connecting Digital & Traditional Marketing Channels w/ Mitch Joel
- Using LinkedIn for Business with Best Practices & Tips via Lewis Howes
- How Small Companies are Evolving with New Technologies with Phil Simon
- Connecting with your community & influencers online w/ Tamar Weinberg
- Business Blogging Best Practices & becoming a Trust Agent w/ Chris Brogan
- Email Marketing Best Practices and Podcasting for Business w/ Chris S. Penn
- Stop Marketing and Start Engaging your Market w/ Scott Stratten
Free eBook: The Facebook Marketing Update
Learn how to use the Open Graph to connect with your market.
Download the free eBook to learn how you can use Facebook's ongoing enhances to market your business effectively.Connect with HubSpot:
Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 4: Making the Charts
In part three of this series, you learned how to build our dashboard’s scorecard. In this article, I will show you:
- How to build the charts.
- How to copy and reuse your charts to save time when building multiple charts.
Building the Charts
The AdWords Campaign Performance report only has two charts and they allow you to choose from many different available metrics for comparison. Our dashboard isn’t really limited by space, so we will be creating a chart for each of our KPI’s.
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Cost
- Conversions
- CTR
- CR
- CPA
- CPC
The best way to do this is to create and format one chart for one KPI, and then we will copy the chart several times for each of the other KPI’s. This technique will save you lots of time, because you will only have to format your chart once.
Follow these steps:
1. Insert a blank Line chart into your dashboard worksheet.
2. Add “impressions” as a series by right-clicking on the chart and clicking “select data.”
3. Add “prv_impressions” as a series using the same method.
4. Add “date” for your X axis using the same method mentioned above.
We will be replacing these series later with named ranges.
You should have a chart that looks something like this:
What we need to do next is format our chart for our dashboard:
1. Move the legend to the bottom and rename them “Prev” and “Current.”
2. Change all font sizes to 8pt (we need all the space we can get).
3. Remove horizontal gridlines from the “Layout” menu > Gridlines > None.
4. Add Major Vertical Gridlines from the same menu as mentioned previously.
5. Format the gridlines by right-clicking and clicking Format gridlines…Change the line type to a dash and the line color to a gray.
6. Format the X axis dates by right-clicking the X axis and clicking Format axis…Change the alignment to vertical and the format to dd/mm.
7. Remove the border from the chart area by right-clicking on the chart and clicking on Format Chart Area…
8. Change the chart type of the prv_impressions series by right-clicking on the series and clicking on Change Series Chart Type…Change it to an area chart.
After all of your formatting, you should have a chart that looks something like this:
The next steps involve replacing our current and previous chart series and X axis with our named ranges located on the transform worksheet.
-
Right-click on the X axis and click “Select Data…” Then click the “Edit” button on the Horizontal Axis Labels.
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Replace the contents with: ='GoogleDashboard_042611.xlsb'!date (GoogleDashboard_042611.xlsb is the name of my workbook. Use the name of your workbook here.)
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Right-click and click “Select Data…” again, but this time “Edit” the “Current” series.
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Change the contents to: =GoogleDashboard_042611.xlsm!curr_impr
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Repeat step 4, but this time “Edit” the “Previous” series and use this formula: =GoogleDashboard_042611.xlsm!prv_impr
Now our chart series and X axis will reference our dynamic named ranges instead of the static columns. In the next steps, we will copy our original formatted chart and create our multiple charts for each or our KPI’s.
Make sure you are through making formatting changes to your chart before your proceed. You won’t enjoy making the same formatting change to eight different charts.
1. Select your chart and Copy it.
2. Then select a different cell and Paste it back to your dashboard worksheet.
3. Go ahead and delete the legend from your new chart. We will be stacking the charts and you will only need the legend to be present on the bottom chart.
4. Change the X axis font color to white, so that it will be invisible.
5. Copy & Paste this new chart six more times until you have eight total charts on your dashboard worksheet.
6. Position your charts as seen below (you will have to use the “Bring to Front” tool when creating your overlaps):
7. Now follow the steps described previously for changing your series named ranges. For example you can change the bottom right chart to show conversions by changing “curr_impr” to “curr_conv” and “prv_impr” to “prv_conv”.
8. You can also add chart titles for each KPI chart.
After you’re though changing your charts to reflect all of our different KPI’s you are ready for the next and final step in creating our AdWords dashboard. In the next post I will show you how to pull everything together and make your charts and scorecard dynamically change when you adjust date ranges and campaign filters using Excel controls.
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of free PPC tools and PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords Specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com).
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/05/11/re-creating-adwords-dashboard-4
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05/22/2011
Google Tests New SERP Format: Site Links to News Articles Replace Website Description in Branded News Searches
I saw this change in the Google SERP format today on a search for "CNN." Check out how Google has replaced the 2-line website description with up to three sitelinks with full-line descriptions corresponding to the headlines of trending news stories. Take a look here:
See how you can click on "Obama won't release bin Laden photos: Reaction" and it will link directly to the article. It seems to be working this way on other major national media outlets, for example:
- USA Today
- Fox News
- Washington Post
- CBS News
I guess on branded searches for media outlets, Google might be thinking something like...
- The anchor text on site links are too small for news articles (they're typically 1-3 words like "contact us" or whatever)
- The user probably doesn't care much for the website description (they obviously know CNN is a news organization, duh.)
- So, might as well use the website description space for something more useful, for example, displaying an article the user might be looking for.
Smaller sites like the Huffington Post, Boston Globe, etc. still have just a plain old website description. Heh, suckers. They're not worthy!
I think this new format just saved me 1 click in my search experience. What do you think of the new sitelink format for trending news stories?
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/05/04/google-serp-news-sitelinks
