Social Media Marketing For Your Business

admin    Social Media     facebook, maketing for business, Social Media, twitter, youtube

If you go back 3 to 4 years ago using social media for business purposes was almost unheard of as a marketing avenue. Fast forward to today and most progressive  businesses realize that social media is here to stay and can be a great way to drive traffic to their website and can be great for branding. As part of their marketing they are using sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the list goes on and on. In fact social media is so popular that Facebook has passed Google as the most visited site on the internet.

If you are still skeptical about about the value of social media here are some stats for you to consider.

• The percentage of Facebook users who login on a daily basis is 50% and they spend a minimum of 55 minutes per day on the site.

• Twitter has 18 million users with an average of 600 tweets per second.

• YouTube had over 91 million unique visitors in the month of March 2010.

To give you some more stats that back up the fact the social media is now a major player in marketing your company. In January 2010 Facebook passed Yahoo and was only second to Google in regards to visitors. Based on visitors to Facebook in a week compared to last year the number increased by a whooping 185%. As I mentioned earlier Facebook now has passed Google for total visitors.

When you take a look at the numbers and utilize the selling power of social media when it comes to business marketing it has become a must in todays market. Using social media effectively is more than setting up accounts and hoping that people find your company, you need to jump and engage in the conversations. As with any type of selling and business in general people tend to buy from people they like and trust. Using social media can set your company apart from other businesses by building your brand becoming an expert in your field.

If you decide to add social media to your marketing efforts try not to only promote your business in every post or tweet. Get your followers or friends to communicate with you by adding interactive polls, games, or quizzes to your pages to get people to spend more time on your site. Repost interesting information from other users that are interesting  and relevant.

Social media is here to stay and using it to market yourself or your business is a cost effective way to find new prospects and customers. If you have not dipped your toes in the social media world now is a perfect time to give it a shot.

Excluding Domains from Google Content Network

admin    Pay Per Click, Uncategorized     adwords, alpharetta ppc, content network, pay per click alpharetta, ppc marketing strategies

There used to be a time when you were advised against using the Google content network in your pay per click campaigns, well not anymore. If you are not using the content network you are missing out on an opportunity to drive traffic to your website that you would not normally get if you only ran the campaign on the sponsored search.

The Google content network can be a great way of capturing additional traffic but if it is not managed correctly you could end up spending a lot of money without getting the results that you are looking for. If you are running on the content network and you have not reviewed your account and added exclusions now may be a good time to do that.

In the content network you can exclude not only domains but also sub domains from your network. When you look at your performance on the content network make sure that you choose a date range that will give you relevant stats with a minimum of 30 days performance. Also, keep in mind of your overall goals, just because a particular site or domain does not work well for one ad group it does not mean that it will not work for other ad groups.

When you go to your campaign within Google go to the networks tab and show details next to the automatic placements. This will allow you to see all of the websites that Google is placing your ads based on the keywords in your ad groups. As with all of the other Google reports, you can sort by cost per conversion, spend, clicks, and etc. and this let  you see which sites are converting the best and you are getting the most bang for your buck.

To exclude a website click on the box to the left of the actual website and select the exclude placements radio button. Google will ask you if you would like to exclude the website at the campaign level or the ad group level. If you are absolutely sure that the website is not working for your campaign than you can exclude it from the campaign level but my recommendation would be to only exclude at the ad group level. After you have excluded the website you will see a red excluded box net to the site. The next time you review your campaign you will know that it has already been  excluded.

To take a look at all of the exclusions within the account go to the bottom of the page and expand the exclusions section. It looks and feels the same way that using negative keywords displays on the page.

content network exclusions

If you have not taken a swing at the content network now may be a good time to try it and if you are currently running on the content network you should review to make sure it is producing solid numbers.