Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Sed posuere consectetur est at lobortis. Cras mattis consectetur purus sit amet fermentum. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Curabitur blandit tempus porttitor. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus. Donec id elit non mi porta gravida at eget metus. Duis mollis, est non commodo luctus, nisi erat porttitor ligula, eget lacinia odio sem nec elit. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus.

Maecenas faucibus mollis interdum. Donec sed odio dui. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus. Sed posuere consectetur est at lobortis.

• Make sure you examine your “Search Terms” report carefully. This is a report of the phrases that searchers typed in google when they clicked on your ads.
• Use that report to make negative key phrases. Make a LONG list of negative key phrases.
• Avoid using the default broad match because of the extremely broad interpretations

For instance, on an Adword campaign for a video production company, the broad match keyword ‘video production’ was getting impressions — and clicks — from people who were using the search term ‘manufacturing jobs.’ Presumably, the automated Google system assumed that the word ‘production’ is related to ‘manufacturing’ — even though video production is not.

When this was brought to the attention of the Adwords support team they said, “With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists,”

Since, in this case, the automated broad match algorithm did not serve the advertiser nor the user — just Google — their extremely broad interpretations were self-serving.

In another Adwords campaign, we noticed that our client had spent over $130K on adwords over the past 6 years. The search term report showed us that 95% of that traffic would not convert into customers. They were renting office furniture in New York but since they had the broad match term ‘ny office’ they were getting clicks from people looking for things like ‘new york social security office’, ‘department of education ny’, and ‘ny dmv’. The list went on and on. It was an EXTREMELY broad interpretation of the parameters.

Of course, the campaign had an extremely low click through rate, which is always a sign that something is wrong. Basically, a bid of $6 was not enough to trigger the coveted phrases like ‘new york city office furniture store’, which were his customer looking for to buy, but the bid was enough toa appear in front of the thousands of people who search for ‘new york post office locations’ every day, some of whom must have clicked on his advertisement by accident, which accounted for his .01% CTR and, unfortunately, over $130,000 of his Adwords budget over the years.

Some background: This research was done March 2009. We were looking for a chat dialog box to be an option when potential customers landed on certain pages. We didn’t expect much traffic at all — perhaps 1 or 2 chats a day — so we don’t require features designed for high volume call centers. A “one time fee” was more appealing than a monthly fee for that reason as well.

volusion.com
won a “small business computing award” and offer the chat solution for “free”, which means in exchange for their unobtrusive ‘powered by’ branding on your chat window. They have a $30 per month “premium edition” which gives you more features, notably, “proactively prompt customers for Chat”. The free version from Volusion looked appealing, however, proactive invitation to chat is a feature that I wanted and it doesn’t come with the free version of Volusion and a $30 monthly fee is beyond the scope of what I want to pay — and it’s a windows only application. The clincher is: It doesn’t work on a mac and I only work on a mac.

customerreach
They offer a 14 day free trail. Their pricing is monthly starting at $25 a month and going up to $90 a month — or they seem to have an “unlimited one time fee” of $499. They offer features that seem to be suited for larger call centers. I didn’t try this because of the pricing.

PHPLiveSupport
They have a 30 day free trial and the costs are “starts at $89.95”. They have free icons and PHP Live WinApp, for an extra $19.95. You can modify the code and it works with MySQL. I tried the free trial but it wasn’t an install — the free trail is totally on their servers. Plus, my first impression of the UI was a turn off.

PHPLiveChat
They seem to offer a PHP application that you can install. They are offering an “older version” 2.7 for free. The new version 2.8r1 is one time $49.99 one time cost. The web site lacks examples, although they have the application installed, nobody was home on the other end of their chat when we visited. I installed the free version on my server and I’m going to use this application. After further testing, I will upgrade if it turns out that my customers like this feature.

LivePerson
Pricing not given on the web site but was told that it’s “Pretty Expensive,” which probably means hundreds of dollars a month. LivePerson offers reporting and routing options — use it for Sales, billing, and various support teams — plus it has features like like Click-to-call VOIP for leads on your web site. It uses a Windows client on the user end

]]> http://marketing.wprny.com/chat-clients-for-online-support-or-sales/feed/ 0 http://marketing.wprny.com/viral-video-and-web-traffic/ http://marketing.wprny.com/viral-video-and-web-traffic/#respond Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:15:40 +0000 http://webhitsconsulting.com/?p=201 A viral video is one that becomes popular through the process of internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites, Facebook, and email. Humor is often a characteristic of viral videos, but not a defining one. A viral video is any video that’s passed electronically, from person to person, regardless of its content. So how can you use viral video to increase web traffic?

The answer, of course that depends on the industry. One trick is to ride the wave of what is already being searched for. New York Video Production creates quick turn around video clips based on the phrases that are in the zeitgeist. So when a tornado hits in Brooklyn in the afternoon, for instance, they have video musical montage of the event up on by the evening.

Another strategy is to parody videos that are already popular. If the rainbow guy can get almost 16 million people to view the video in 10 months, then it follows that the double rainbow song soon emerges and demonstrates a similar draw of almost 12 million viewers by September 2010 — selling t-shirts and itunes versions the whole way.

But viral videos aren’t just for the low brow. Old Spice and Dorittos have agencys that create advertisements which have incredible viral potential. According to the Advertising Age web site, two Old Spice campaigns netted over 1.5 million views in a week.

It’s difficult to see how all this will play out moving forward. One thing is for sure people are watching video and it’s a trend that is here to stay.

The applications can be simple and fun. But they don’t have to be. They can solve real issues or address real concerns. The Facebook application “Causes” has raised millions of dollars for various charities. Maybe there is an application that you can develop which will change the game in your industry and help you emerge as a leader.

But you don’t have to create applications. Facebook Connect enables webmasters to connect with the Facebook social web. We integrated The Irvington Dispatch, a community web site, with Facebook.

Visitors who are logged into Facebook can “share” and “like” articles on the site, and this information is published on their Facebook newsfeed for all their friends to see. If some of the visitor’s friends already “liked” the page, the visitor is greeting with a thumbnail image of these friends. This proved to be incredibely viral. A single person “sharing” a page quickly lead to hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of visits from the friends of friends of friends of the original sharer. This is why sites like CNN.com and MSNBC, and many others, have integrated their web site with Facebook too.

Facebook has certainly become part of the overall web visibility strategy.

One of the reasons core phrases have more volume is simply the nature of how people search. We tend to type one search, and if we don’t find the results we expect right at the time, then we type in another phrase instead of drilling down in the search result pages. For instance, imagine you were traveling to New York and type “hotel new york” and see hotel super sites, hotels in Albany and a hotel in Midtown Manhattan in the search results. You might realize that you need to be more specific. So you type “hotel upper east side new york city” and, even still, the results aren’t what you expect because you’re finding rooms for $450 a night! So you finally type “hotel upper east side new york city inexpensive” and find the Marriott Courtyard near the FDR at 92nd Street and you book your room. So in this case, the core phrase and the long tail phrases were searched, but ultimately, the long tail phrase got the conversion.

We take Yogi to heart, so before setting up an Adwords account, we like to ask some questions to get a clearer understanding of your expectations.

What You Do

1. What does your company (or team) do? If you have various products or services, please list them all.
2. Who is your primary target market or audience for your products and services — list them all.
3. What are you trying to sell or promote? What do you want people to do (buy, visit, download, subscribe)? Be specific about each product’s call to action.

Defining goals for this campaign

1. How much do you want to invest in advertising on Adwords per month? Be specific.
2. What kind of results are you looking for: Generating leads, Increasing traffic, Conversions to sales, lowering your costs-per-conversion/lead, branding? Please be specific and attach hard numbers to each goal.
3. What would you consider a good return on investment? If the ROI differs between services or products, list each one.

About Your Customers

1. Describe your typical customer. Be specific. If it’s a business, then who would find you at the business and who would approve.
2. Where do your current customers live or work?
3. How much is a typical customer worth in net and gross revenue for the one sale?
4. How much is a typical customer worth over the lifetime of that customer?

More About Your Service

1. What are the unique features of your product or service? Are they credible?
2. What are the key benefits that your product or service offers?
3. What features and benefits are most releant to your customers?
4. What action to you want people to take after they click on your ad and when they get to your site?
5. What information will people need before they would take this call to action?

The strategy of pushing negative publicity off the front page of Google involves placing positive web pages above the offending posts on the Google result pages for the predefined phrases. Presumably, your site will already appear above the negative publicity when people are searching your brand — if not…you need more SEO services.

If you’re having a problem with negative publicity, we have designed a package to help you. Please visit our list of SEO Services that will help you.