Yesterday, we attended the Search Marketing Expo West event in Santa Clara, California. One of the topics that captured our interest was the Landing Page and Multivariate Testing session. The goal of landing page testing is to increase the number of visitors that become customers on a business’ website.

After listening to the panelists present case studies with results and innovations for testing, we asked the panel about risk management. Specifically, with client budgets on the line, what is the best approach to manage and limit risk from a testing regimen?

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The search engines’ proprietary systems crawl billions of web pages to determines which pages will rank for each keyword within the top 10 organic search listings. These listings are the results on the search page that are not advertisements and to which approximately 40% to 60% of the clicks from the search results go.

With Americans conducting more than 12.6 Billion searches in October according to Comscore, search engines are on track to give away almost 100 Billion clicks for free per year. As you would expect, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the must-do activity for online marketing success as businesses compete to get as many free clicks as possible from Google and other search engines.

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Client: Uplifting Athletes, Inc. is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that operates as a national charter and serves as a uniting force to help change the perception of rare diseases. They have created a network of university chapters within major NCAA Division 1A football programs to enhance the current football student-athletes’ academic and playing experience with real-world job skills. Each chapter partners with a charity that supports one of these rare disease and engages in a grassroots effort to connect millions of passionate and loyal college football fans with people affected by these diseases.

Challenge: Thrivepoint was hired by Uplifting Athletes in June-2008 to help generate donations for an upcoming event at Penn State and to help launch the Ohio State chapter. Uplifiting Athletes had created a Google Adwords campaign with a Google Grant that was inactive due to poor Quality Scores. With the key events coming in July, Uplifting Athletes was under a looming deadline to generate awareness of the pledge drive and donations before and during the events. The situation was especially urgent given that the events only take place once per year ahead of football season.

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The economy continues to ring with uncertainty. Despite retail sales being up year over year this past Thanksgiving weekend, the stock market is down as the future remains cloudy. It is easy to become frustrated in these times, but often, the best businesses evolve and improve in exactly this type of climate. The work starts first with investing in your existing customers.

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In the last post on Line of Sight Marketing, the focus was on capturing website visitors contact information for an email marketing program. In this post, we explore how advertising buys that are intended to prospect for new customers can employ line of sight marketing without requiring the user to register or login.

One of the key tools in an advertiser’s toolbox is the “cookie.” Cookies are a common component of most website tracking and online advertising targeting systems and are defined as: “A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.”

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One of your most important assets is your customer list. Managing this asset effectively is as critical as managing your finances or intellectual property. One of the most important things you can do with your customer list is to retain a ‘line of sight’ with each customer.

Line of sight marketing implies that the conversation with the customer is continuous and uninterrupted. When the line of sight is broken, the connection with the customer is over and the customer must be ‘found’ again or replcaed before restarting the conversation.

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Financial institutions are failing. Fortune 500 marketers are cutting budgets. Inflation is increasing. Consumer spending is uncertain. Trade deficits are rising.

The news is filled with dire headlines and seemingly worse news everyday. The market appears to be moving to a more conservative state. Through all this, you still have a business to run and grow. Here are five best practices for your marketing to help you come out ahead during an uncertain economy.
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Statistics consistently show that searching the internet is the 2nd most common activity online (1st is email) with more than 50% of online users conducting at least one search per day. Search engines scour the web for websites and other content to index and provide strong search results to their users. When your website appears in the search results, you are receiving free exposure to your target audience. In addition, if the user clicks on your listing, you do not need to pay for that click.

The key challenge is that unless you pay for an advertisement or sponsored link, you can not control where or when your listings appear. The search engine maintains sole authority and editorial judgement of what sites to list. In an earlier post, we discussed six ways to achieve free traffic from Google and other search engines, but one of the most important additional aspects to achieving website rankings in Google and other search engines is your meta-title.
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Have you ever had a brainstorm for a great business idea? Of course! We all have had these brilliant flashes of genius. Sometimes we tuck them away for later use, sometimes we start furiously writing the business plan. In a lot cases, people are not sure how to start figuring out if the idea is a good one or not. Here are some key questions to help you get started before putting the effort into a business plan or tossing the idea aside:

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Google offers a unique program for non-profit organizations to advertise for free on Google.com’s keyword advertisements – Google Grants. From Google:

“Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education. Google Grant recipients use their award of free AdWords advertising on Google.com to raise awareness and increase traffic. “

Google was recently shown to have more than 70% search engine market share and is routinely touted as marketer’s #1 performing advertising placement. The upside is the program is free, the downside is that there are some limitations and hurdles to getting it to work properly. Whether you have a Google Grant or want a Google Grant, here are three things to look out for with your Google Grant program:
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