That's some brand love.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

The Facebook page for the group is nothing more than a simple sales pitch for businesses becoming involved on the site. It’s tips for publishing, appeals to outmoded user statistics, and overall tone is clearly directed at the first-time Facebook advertisers. Promoting Sponsored Stories seems to be the main goal, though the ability for a small business to achieve such a close relationship with the company behind the site is not clear at first glance: Nike, American Express, and a page that can get 100 answers to the question “Blue or purple?” are featured, but no one just starting out with limited brand awareness. However, as you delve deeper into the videos, a number of case studies can be heard by the part-time Internet marketer to help understand the basics of the varied services Facebook offers, explained in a way that focuses on what makes social media advertising different from traditional venues.

But July 27th brought a new arena for the first-time marketer. The Facebook for Business site offers a set of introductory slides more like what one would expect on the Facebook page. The Best Practice Guide and other tips take the unedited rambling of the taped live webinars from the Facebook page and put them into clear slideshows (though inexplicably as unsharable and minimally-graphable PDFs). Discussing Pages, Ads, Sponsored Stories, and the “Platform,” Facebook lays out its basic services in an all-too-simple way.

The site is clearly for someone who doesn’t muck with websites, as just one tab describing the Open Graph protocol for a new marketer would show a whole new world, integrating on-site tagging with a need to contact a Preferred Developer to best take advantage of the depth of information one can provide, shape, and offer to their clients.

It’s easy, at least for the somewhat experienced marketer, to come up with counterexamples, glossed-over topics that are the core of Facebook advertising such as effective demographic targeting, and the just-seething disdain for squares who just haven’t gotten how cool Social Media is. But I applaud Facebook for their efforts; the only other major social media outlet for business is Twitter, which starts its Promoted links at $5,000 per month and provides little information for its non-paid business partners. Google+ recently purged business accounts, asking creators of those accounts to “hold off,” and have been “focusing on the consumer experience” — words that are hardly music to marketers’ ears.

What the shortcomings of the Facebook for Business and Facebook Marketing Solutions pages really show off is that a business needs dedicated social media management, whether through an SEO firm or internally. The waters are murky and best handled by someone who knows not just the sales pitch for getting involved, but also the mechanics of the process and what little stuff can greatly improve the social footprint of the small business. It’s too hard to sum up everything that should and could be done to optimally advertise using social media just on a few webpages or through a few taped webinars — the best thing is to call Ghostbusters and let Peter and Ray and Egon worry about the ghosts so business owners can get back to directly helping their customers.

"The Simpsons" © 20th Century Fox Television (Don't Sue Me!)

In the middle of December 2011, Google rolled out some new changes to the Webmaster Tools. This update included search queries with top pages, organic CTR, and organic imprressions, as well as, intergrated graphs ala Google Analytics.

Since this update went live, I’ve been wondering if the data that Google is providing is accurate and how does it stand up against Google Adwords Keyword Tool and actual Adwords data.

We have a client who is position 1 for a cosmetic surgery term in a major metropolitan area. So I pulled the two sets of Google data reported and the results were mystifying.

Adwords Keyword Tool:

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Keyword Tool reports there are an average of 2,900 local monthly searches for the phrase geo-modified cosmetic surgery.

Google Webmaster Tools:

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Webmaster tool reported a mere 140 impressions! That’s a difference of 27k searches! Granted this data represents the holiday season in the US but you can not convince me that 96% of the searches stop. 10 or 15% sure, people have other things to think about during the holidays than getting bigger breast, but 96%! No %&*#ing way. Especially for a client that is in position one for the phrase.

And yes before you say it is an “approximate 12-month average number of user queries”, that would mean two out of the remaining twelve months would have to had double the search queries of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool number (go do the math, I’ll wait…).

Oh and to convince myself this isn’t some isolated event in Google’s data reporting, I pulled some additional information on another client who ranked in position one and was running Google Adwords ads during the same time frame that Webmaster tool reported on.

Adwords Keyword Tool:

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Google’s Keyword Tool reports that the local monthly searches are 1,300…

Google Webmaster Tools:

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And Webmaster Tools reported 140 impressions from Dec 22 – Jan 22. A big difference than what the Adwords Keyword Tool is reporting. But wait! The data looks even more like jelly when you compare Adwords  to Google Webmaster Tool for the same date range (oh and to clarify this client has been strong at position 1 for over a year for this term).

Google Adwords:

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For the same exact date range and same exact keyword running simultaneously for the same location (this is a geo-modified keyword for a national level audience) the data is off by almost 50%! That’s failing (terribly) where I come from.

Seeing this data together is actually disheartening.  If I was using Google tools to perform an  A/B test and got a 50% accuracy in the data I would throw away the test. I understand Google is giving away ( most of) the data for free but there really should be some quality assurance for the Google Adwords Keyword tool. This tool should be giving advertisers the most correct data possible in order to help them create more effective campaigns and better gauge potential market growth.

At the end of the day, I wouldn’t trust Google Webmaster Tools as an authoritative source of search volume for your site. While it is collecting great data about indexing issues and missing pages, it is doesn’t give you accurate enough information to make a decision. I guess in a way, the three sources are like credit scores. If you just look at the one, you miss some important knowledge that could either be a boon or a bust.

Not surprising to many is that Internet Marketing Revenues for the 1^st half of 2010 alone totaled $12.13 billion dollars – an 11.3% increase over the same period in 2009.  If that number is surprising, it’s likely you haven’t yet had your eyes opened to the wonder that is Internet Marketing.

Obviously I’d be a champion for all businesses to hop on the online marketing train, but my beliefs are founded in the great results I’ve seen in my time working within the field, as well as the benefits that online marketing offers, particularly compared to traditional forms of advertising.

The main benefit, in my opinion,  is that you can measure the true effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns. Through the use of phone call tracking numbers and contact forms, you can see the source of your leads, which allows you to measure which aspects of your online marketing mix are most effective. Given strong internal processes, this data also allows you to track leads and potential customers all the way through the close of the sale, giving you your true return on investment figure.  This brings up the importance of making use of the technology available to assist business owners with tracking leads, or even simply using a spreadsheet if you can maintain the data.

For example, say you receive 20 leads over a period of time from source A, and 10 from source B. Many marketing managers or small business owners might view source A as more valuable. However, if you have strong systems in place that track the sales process from the submission of a form or a call to the close of the sale, you might see that 30% of leads from source B become actual customers (3) while only 10% of leads become customers from source A (2).

The benefits of tracking are evident in the IAB study as they report that “the most prevalent pricing model since 2006” is performance-based pricing. The effectiveness of tracking can also fall into the hands of your online marketing agency, as many use leads to prove their value. They may also be willing to work with you to compare your new customers to incoming leads in order to further prove a real-life ROI.

Additional benefits of online advertising include, but are certainly not limited to, the ability to target as well as the cost effectiveness of many programs available. Many online campaigns have a relatively low cost of entry. With search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads, since the magic is in the text, once your site is built there’s no hefty graphic design costs compared to print.

According to the IAB study, retail is the leading purchaser of online advertising. Small to medium businesses need not be intimidated by the large share of the market for which their industry accounts, as yet another benefit of online marketing is that small businesses can compete with larger businesses in the online realm.

Top Industries of Online Advertising:

1.     Retail

2.     Telecom companies

3.     Leisure Travel

4.     Financial Services

5.     Automotive

6.     Computing advertisers

7.     Consumer Packaged Goods and Food Products

8.     Entertainment

9.     Pharma and Healthcare

10. Media

The IAB also reports that the largest portion of revenue is spent on search-related advertising. Search related advertising can be the most effective and bring in more quality leads than display advertising because your products and services are being shown to individuals who are seeking what you are selling (if you target your ads appropriately).

All things considered, online marketing can certainly work for you, but many times, when done incorrectly, advertisers and small business owners don’t see the value because they don’t have enough information to either a) conduct it effectively or efficiently or b) to even know if they are. In this case, advertisers, both small and large, should reach to a seasoned Internet marketing firm with the skills and experience to help you and your business utilize this ever-growing segment of the advertising world.

View the full report here.

Thanks to vizzzual-dot-com for the photo!

Somebody call the CPS!

I was shocked. How did the baby-selling black market get ad space for their sale? I thought Google had standards! Though, free 2-day shipping on an 8 lbs. package is a steal. My curiosity was piqued. I just had to click. Needless to say, I was let down. Apparently, California Baby is a product line of shampoos, soaps, etc. If this is how they advertise baby lotions, I’d hate to see how their ad for the importance of baby naps would look…

I really don’t know how the site owners gave it the go-ahead. Perhaps if I lived in California and knew of the product, my mind wouldn’t have automatically jumped to such a horrendous conclusion. However, not every person who is searching for baby moons is going to be familiar with this brand. Even just adding the word “products” in between “baby” and “on sale” would have helped. It’s much clearer, still falls in the 35-character limit, and doesn’t remind people of the Lindbergh baby.

Awkward first impressions aside, they make a couple other rookie mistakes. First, the keyword selection is incredibly unclear. Most search engines bold the keywords in the title and copy. I assume they’re going for the phrase “California Baby,” but Google doesn’t seem to recognize it as a keyword. That’s why only California is in bold but nothing else. This should have prompted them to rethink their strategy.

Next, it’s best to try to squeeze the keyword into the copy as well. The bolder, the better. It stands out more to the customer, which means they are more likely to click through. They must have learned this lesson between the above ad and the most recent one I found:

TWO ads for baby sales? They must be selling like hot cakes. The free market has spoken!