What makes Facebook worth so much money, when even Google who has a solid bottom line at $10 billion is trading at 20 times its earnings?

Looking at external factors the US economy is recovering but at 2.5% forecast this year it’s slow and not enough to create such heady valuations.  Nor does this valuation make any sense from the share market perspective which is trading at 12 times its earnings. Further investors are wary at the previous dot.com listings that haven’t really performed too well and are wary of paying massive premiums for Facebook shares. Have a look at the table below to see the performance of some of these companies which have been trading at their 52 week lows recently.

 Let’s put aside economics growth figures and market multiples and look at Facebook in isolation as a social network platform. Here is a company with 845 million users, that provides an easy and cost effective way to for individuals to network and companies to promote their brand identify at a global level. This is achieved by humanising our online identities which were previously thought to be too dry and cold in the online space.

As a result of our expressive outpour, Facebook knows where we are, what we like eating, when we are upset and the brands we consume. To compare this to some of the other main user engagement platforms, Google has a vast depository of user search behaviour, twitter knows users’ thoughts and opinions and YouTube has 60 hours of video footage being added each hour.  

 Facebook has almost all of the above and more information about us. Currently its advertising model is based on user demographic and the information users specify about themselves which can be targeted by advertisers.   It could in the future get around user privacy issues and use an advanced form of dynamic user profiling to target adverts. Here is a scenario of how this could work:

Tom is a regular Facebook user who shares pictures, comments and is part of different groups. During the run up to his birthday, Facebook could use his timeline data to determine who he interacts with the most on face book and things he likes.  So if he has been part of the Spartacus TV show group, it could show his close friends bespoke adverts of Spartacus DVD from a retailer with a special discount if they bought it for Tom. That’s not just gold dust its diamond dust.

Facebook critics, worry that with 85% of its revenues coming from advertising it’s not a very diversified business model making the upside relatively limited. In Facebook’s support, these same critics seem to forget that over 90% of Google revenues are from advertising and it’s doing alright!

I feel that the case here for evaluating Facebook’s potential is not in its diversification of revenues but in its durability as a business and its ability to effectively monetise its 845 million users.

I am quite sure that as long as people fly and Boeing makes safe and competitive products, it will be in business. However one cannot be so sure about Facebook’s future, when only recently we have seen another high profile social platform go under in Rupert Murdoch’s hands.

Are your ‘likes’ worth a $100 billion? is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Is this really then the beginning of the end for high street retail? Will Oxford Street in a few years look more like a warehouse compound used for collecting packages rather than a street with all the frills and fancies for a rich shopping experience?

In the last few decades any major paradigm shift be it in the way we travel, read, listen to music has been dependant on practical, economic and emotive factors.  If you are in a shop and hear a song that you like, you can Shazaam it, download it on ITunes and once in your car play it wirelessly off the stereo. Sounds like a dream, only it is the way it works these days.  Hence it’s not too difficult to imagine a complete shift from Vinyl and cassette tapes to digital. However the emotive side in us keeps the vinyl stores alive in the back streets of Shoreditch and Soho.

Shopping online provides you with an international mix of products, 24/7, often at a (perceived) discount and delivery to your door. This is a lot more agreeable than standing in long queues and running between shops to finish your shopping before they shut. Online companies are able to save costs on premium rentals on high streets, employ less staff, stay open 24×7 and minimise ongoing investment that are required to make the store look as inviting as possible to boost footfall.  Despite all the conveniences and savings online, our collective memory going back many hundred years of going to markets still cannot kick the idea of browsing around stores, touch and feeling products and the joy of interacting with people. After all humans are social creatures and thrive in interactive environments.  However, if people aren’t buying, how do these shops stay in business?

Over the past few years every major retailer has observed the disruptive nature of e-commerce. It has without a doubt changed the way people consume products and services. Some companies have shut their eyes to this change and gone out of business while others have adapted by going online themselves and survived.

There is however quite interestingly a 3^rd development that has been taking place over the last 12 months. Traditional retail companies have realised that shopping online be it mobile or desktop is here to stay. E-commerce companies have lower costs hence will always beat them on price but they lack the ability to provide the physical experience to consumers. This has lead to furious innovation by these companies in multichannel marketing and provided a lifeline for their survival.

Marks & Spencer, a traditional British store, now sells knickers and superior cakes by smartphone. House of Fraser has launched new HouseOfFraser.com stores in Aberdeen and Liverpool that act purely as order and collection points for goods.

In South Korea people are busy at home and tired after a long day at work so Tesco have launched virtual subway stores offering the opportunity to shop while walking home, scanning QR codes to populate their shopping baskets and paying with their mobiles. The food is delivered by the time people reach home.

Such innovation in multi-channel retailing is an indication of things to come where rather than being pure play, companies will be a lot more integrated across channels.  This will not only ensure the survival of high street retailers but also revitalise their growth and put pressure on online retailers to focus on usability and customer experience.

Is High Street Retail Dead? is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Google has always preserved that “The Sandbox” is a figment of SEO companies’ imagination derived from SEO companies need to satisfy themselves and their client’s by making the name synonymous with the delayed time between the promotion of a website and it gaining results. It would appear logical that a new website would need to work its way up the rakings by building itself over time and can not expect instant positions after launch. This phase can be anywhere from as little as 2-3 months up to 1 year. Going by the number of companies that now resort to spamming and under hand techniques to get their website ranked, it would appear that a sandbox policy would be a perfect system to weed out the work of ‘bedroom bandits’ and black hat SEO techniques. The downside to this system is that some legitimate websites also get caught in the trap for sometimes exaggerated periods of time.

So for the sake of argument let us assume that every new website falls into the sandbox and gets out, some enjoying their stay more than others. Hence the big question is, with new websites, how do you cut this period short and adapt your SEO strategy to factor in this difficult period during a website’s infancy

Build a strategic relationship

Millions of new sites come up each year and also go under. What the search engines look for is consistency in relevancy. So if you are a new domain then its advisable to either get links from associated group companies, business partners and other known, trusted industry resources. The impact of a few such links from relevant sections can dramatically scale down the sandbox period and if you’re lucky might even transfer some page rank in the process.

Provide a prelaunch preview

Between the time you decide to launch a website and the launch itself, there is always a gestation period which might last as little as 3 weeks but can range upward to even 4 months. This time should be utilised by companies in putting up a few holding pages with content or news about the new website and other relevant snippets of information. Normally developers put up one page with images and maybe an email address which provides no information to a search engine about the website to come or the nature of the business. Further to the previous point, smaller content rich websites are easier to get out of the sandbox. If this is done effectively, when the new site is launched the domain would have already built up some credibility and presence allowing the finished website to index and rank sooner than if it had no previous history. This same theory partly applies to the suggested advantages of buying existing domain names for new websites.

Keep it static simple (KISS)

Many websites these days employ complex technologies and database systems to provide cleaver features for its users to enhance usability and conversion paths. Unfortunately many of these such as timeouts, sessions and flash banners provide a hindrance for search engines to crawl a website efficiently. However this does not mean that a website has to be something you’d expect in the mid 90’s. A professional SEO company will aid you in working around your complex designs and in circumstances where dynamic back end systems or flash are causing problems, a few solid static pages with regularly updated content and a firm architecture can be a strong solution to SEO woes when combined with the right links and foundation already detailed above.

In addition the above carry out manual site submission and the submissions of .xml site map files to accelerate the frequency of search spiders and efficiency of page indexing.

When looking at the search engine optimisation strategy as a whole. The early stages of a websites development and certainly the first 2-3 months of promotion are crucial to the acceleration and success of its optimisation results moving forwards. Many companies wait until the site is up for many months before consulting with a search marketing expert and are then frustrated to learn that they could have been ranking and generating business already had they taken this into account far earlier.

The early stages of development and pre-launch are the perfect times to gauge the technical strengths and weaknesses of your site, conduct the necessary keyword research, audience traffic potential research and initiate a plan for social media. Also what is often overlooked is that much of the on-site SEO work can be done more effortlessly during the build stage. Many of the activities outlined are surprisingly time consuming even for the experts and if they are cut short or not given the attention they need then much of the value of these activities are lost and the sites potential suffers right from the start.

Escaping the Venus” site” Trap is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Fortunately the conversions increased; unfortunately the (Reputed) agency that was appointed for launching the new site ignored all the key points of migration thinking them less relevant than focusing on the correct placement of images on the pages. As a result they lost all the SEO credibility that was build over the years, dropped their internal page rankings by more than 80% along with a bulk of their site traffic.  The impact this would have on their Christmas trading season is unimaginable.

For established online business, who have a steady traffic, conversion and rankings and are highly dependant on seasonality, need to take extreme precautions when they are looking re-developing their website as they might otherwise find themselves going back a few years in lost work.

Here are a few suggestions for companies that are looking at redeveloping their website to help ensure that your design & build agency doest write off your Christmas.

1. Ranking schedule: If you are a business that is dependant on seasonality trends which most retail companies are try and launch your new site alteast 4-6 months before your key trading period. The reality of the situation is that no matter who is developing your website and on which platform there are bound to be bugs which you do not want to find out through mass basket abandonment or Visitor drop off.

2. Performance Benchmarking: Make sure to take a detailed stock of your rankings, traffic sources, conversion ratios, site page ranks, bounce rates, pages indexed before migration. This will make you aware of exactly what’s at stake and good yardstick for measurement post migration.

3. Site migration strategy: Share the benchmark report with your website development agency and ask them to provide you with a detailed plan of action on the steps they will take migrate all the SEO credibility over to the new website without losses. If you have an SEO agency on board run this document past them as they would be the best people to advice you. (While there will be fluctuations there need not be any major adverse impact if things are done properly)

4. Change management lockdown: Once you are in the season lock all major changes to the website as the last thing you want is for your site to go down when people are buying as they will then rarely come back.

5. Post Migration Management: Once the migration is complete check all key tasks against the strategy document as sometimes the smallest slips can have adverse impacts.

In this particular case, as the site was a complete re-build on another platform and had new URL’s , the agency forgot to carry out 301 re-directs on all the internal pages which had a high page rank and positions in Google. By the time they came around do doing these Google had de-indexed these pages as orphaned.

A lesson which cost hundreds and thousands of pounds in loss revenue and one that can be easily avoided.

What some web development companies don’t get about site migrations? is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Over the last 12 months we have been keeping a close watch on the smart phone market and noticed that as their volumes have been steadily increasing and the technology getting more robust, the share of mobile traffic to website has been rising and rising.

While this percentage of mobile traffic to websites is still relatively small compared to users coming from PCs  it is still a decent volume, growing and in most cases not being channelled into a measurable response.

Portable devices with web capability and large screens have been around for quite some time and online companies’ understanding of user behavior using these devices is quite good.

Smartphones however are quite new and bring new challenges that companies have to deal     with. The most important of these can be summarized as the follows:

1. The size of the screen is small and a regular website needs quite a bit of scrolling and magnification to be read
2. The keypad is small and typing more strenuous
3. Mobiles users are typically on the move and have their attention constantly diverted. The information they need is spontaneous and want it quickly without shuffling through too much data

This started a debate internally if Mediarun should look at re-designing its website keeping in mind the growing mobile market. After endless debates we finally agreed that rather than jeopardizing an existing market ( PCs & laptops) at the cost of an emerging one ( Mobile) we would tackle both independently.

So we now have a website that is suited to be viewed from the PC and a mobile compatible micro-site to which it gets automatically directed when someone comes from a mobile phone.

We have designed the micro site to ensure that it doesn’t need any magnifications, long scrolling and provides all key information in a snap. Our guys also incorporated some features which are simple but very useful. These are the ability to get plot directions on the map, one click to call number and emailing options.   This site also has little room to maneuver which reduces frustrations of getting lost on a small screen.

A few weeks back we started our mobile PPC campaign and got our first enquiry. It was the perfect occasion for the Italian Prosecco that had been taunting us from the cooler.

Making a mobile friendly website is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

A Landing Page is often further categorised into a “reference landing page” and a “transactional landing page”. A reference landing page exhibits all information relevant to a web page visitor in the form of text, images and other web resources. A Landing page’s effectiveness is judged by the revenue value earned by the advertisement. Meanwhile a Transactional landing page is designed with the aim of immediate sale of product and services. A web page visitor performing a desired action is termed as “conversion”. A Landing page’s effectiveness and quality is thus measured in terms of its conversion rate.

A well-thought out and properly crafted landing page can do wonders for a web site. Identify all frequently searched keywords related to your domain and then draw up your content as well as URL using those keywords. Make sure your Landing page has crisp, to the point and accurate information of the product or service you are marketing, a proper call to action and a user friendly design. Also make sure you make changes in the landing pages from time-to-time and keep a track of the effects of it on the campaign.

A Landing page’s utility in generating effective positive results and business makes it an integral aspect of a PPC campaign. It is important to spend some quality time on creating a landing page to be able to derive the desired results.

Landing pages – The Backbone of PPC campaign is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun