Join the Bum Rush for Charity Water!

I’ve been blogging about the book series Age of Conversation, and its affiliated Social Media Bum Rushes for charity, since the first one in 2008. I’m proud to have a chapter in their latest volume, Age Of Conversation III: Time To Get Busy. Within its pages I’m in extremely good company, with 170 other social media pros. My very brief chapter (really a micro-chapter, with a lower word count than most of my blog posts) is on social media analytics.

I am pleased to announce that we’re staging another Bum Rush today, on Blog Action Day.

Each year any blogger who wishes to participate in Blog Action Day writes on the same theme. This year’s theme is water. So let me tell you about Charity Water. It’s a nonprofit organization that brings safe and clean drinking water to developing nations.

Now, every sale of Age Of Conversation III: Time To Get Busy goes to support Charity Water and help developing nations get clean, safe drinking water.

How cool is that? Please join our bum rush. You’ll learn more about the power of social media, and become part of the solution to one of the world’s toughest health challenges.

How do you join the Bum Rush? Generate more sales of book at Amazon.com. Purchase it yourself and encourage others to as well. If you work for an organization that hands out Christmas gifts, get them to pop for multiple copies. They make great gifts!

One caveat: Please only purchase 1 copy at a time because Amazon.com counts bulk orders as one.

You can buy the Kindle version here (it’s the Charity Water affiliate link). You can get the paperback version here and the hardback version here (the other two Charity Water affiliate links). What else can you do? Here are seven ideas:

  1. Register for Blog Action Day.
  2. Blog about Blog Action Day and mention Age Of Conversation: Time To Get Busy. Use the same affiliate links that are in this post so that Charity Water can get its contribution.
  3. Join the conversation on Twitter. Use hashtags #aoc3 and #BAD10 for your comments about the book.
  4. Trackback or comment on today’s post about the Bum Rush at http://ageofconversation.com.
  5. Digg, Stumble and bookmark on Delicious.com all the posts you see about the event, including yours.
  6. Become a Facebook fan of Age of Conversation 3 (“AoC3“) and interact with us on Facebook.
  7. Send an e-mail to all your friends and get them involved too.

If we all band together and work for a common cause, we can make a difference. Join us in the bum rush on October 15, 2010 and help us raise money for Charity Water.

Check out this archive for some online ad inspiration

Four years ago, when I first started this blog, one of the first members of the “legitimate” blogging community to pay me notice was James A. Gardner. At the time he was a senior director at Aquent. He also had one of the most ambitious “hobby blogs” I’d ever encountered. It’s Adverlicio.us, a site that’s still going strong. Its tag line is The World’s Tastiest Collection of Online Advertising.

Tasty and comprehensive!

It was an impressive site when I first checked it out, a constant source of inspiration and competitive intelligence. It has recently gotten better. I especially like the category of Ads By Brand.

The ads are also tagged well. I clicked on the tag “Films” (found in the tag cloud, in the right column) and saw the ad to the right for The Social Network.

It’s hard to believe James is still at this archive site — all while serving as marketing director for the Boston computer hardware start-up Litl. I know from my work as marketing advisor of HarQen how demanding that can be!

Do check out this useful resource, and me know what you think of it.

Note: My first mention of the site in a post was Ads with prancing cowboys may annoy, but they sure do work

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More proof to test your headlines religiously

Those who have been in direct response already know this, but for the uninitiated, heed this advice: You should spend as much time on your headlines as you do on other creative elements … maybe more!

Below is a terrific example. It’s an A/B test where the only difference in these two pay-per-click (PPC) ads is the headline. One caused 34% more visitors to fill out and submit the lead generation form. The test, conducted over the course of a month to a 99% confidence level, is more evidence to look at headlines as a type of persuasive secret weapon.

With this one set of test results (you can read which was the winner by visiting Anne Holland’s Which Test Won?), the client was able to optimize their PPC lead generation program to a stunning degree. Think of it. They are spending 66 cents on the dollar now for their leads, compared to money spent on the “losing” headline.

So which is it? Find out for yourself. Then remember that every online marketing effort you conduct should be a chance to learn more and reap the savings.

Content Interest Index is the “missing link” in web analytics

Those who have been following me on Jason Fall’s blog Social Media Explorer know that I’ve begun my guest appearances there with a discussion of Content Interest Index (CII). You may also recall from my recent post, Overcoming the treachery of analytics, that I urge web marketers to be ruthless in the elimination of unnecessary metrics from their reporting. That may seem contradictory.

That’s why this post includes a little more information on exactly where the CII comes in handy and how it appears to be unique in doing some important work.

Attention

In a web visit, Attention is measured by Page Views. Each view is evidence of a page commanding user attention. It’s an opportunity to draw the prospect deeper into the sales process. By the way, a “sale” in this instance is defined as any commitment including but in no means limited to the following:

  • Setting an appointment
  • Requesting more information
  • Filling out a request for quote (RFQ)
  • Subscribing to an email newsletter

Interest

Interest is the “missing link,” in terms of what can be quantified within a web visit. Some attempts at measuring this are commonly called engagement metrics. They’re limited in when they can be used. An example of an engagement metric is counting how many people view an embedded video, or tracking how long they stay and watch. Other metrics, such as bounce rates, are better at gauging interest at a session level, not a page level. Content Interest Index (CII) is an attempt to measure interest by tracking a number of user behaviors.

Desire

Desire, defined in this instance, is activity that demonstrates strong buying interest and a high probability to convert. It is the water circling the drain, or — to use a more web-specific metaphor — descent into a conversion funnel. In both online conversions and face-to-face selling, this stage is the answering of objections and a clarification of the real costs and benefits of the commitment. Conversion funnels are fairly easy to configure to track these behaviors.

Action

Action is the fourth and final stage of a sale or conversion, and is as easy to quantify using conventional web metrics as the desire stage. It is the actual transaction. In most analytics systems, conversions are measured when a confirmation page loads, such as a “Thank you for requesting an appointment,” or “… for inquiring,” etc.

Using Content Interest Index to improve content

The primary use of CII is as a content management coaching tool. This is an extremely new metric, but promises to provide insights into raising the “interest quotient” of pages surrounding conversion funnels. In attracting more interest — especially via social media sharing — pages optimized through CII appear to be better at actually feeding visitors into important conversion funnels.

By finally allowing digital marketers to measure every link in the chain to conversion, content interest index has the potential of increasing the number of people entering conversion funnels, and thereby improving the conversion success of the entire web site.

Watch Social Media Explorer for my post early next week on how specifically CII is measured.

Which is better? Google Analytics’ $ Index or CII?

Today I posted my first entry as guest blogger on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer. Not surprisingly for those who know me, I kicked things off with a description of Content Index Index — a general description and a case for its use. Posting something in such esteemed company is truly humbling and frankly more thrilling than is probably healthy to admit. (I can hear friends and loved ones chiming in now about all of my work / life balance hoo-hah!)

Content Interest Index — CII for short — forgets for a moment whether a particular user has “converted” in that user session. It scores a page’s content on behavior that takes place on that page only (or offline, regarding that page’s content, in social media). That’s quite different from the scoring of, say, a page in a conversion funnel. Google Analytics (GA) has a Funnel Report that gives value to the pages leading directly to a conversion (Google calls these conversions “Goals”).

Another GA metric that tries to rank based on conversion is its “$ Index.” This can be compared to Google’s PageRank,  but it’s for estimating dollars earned by a page view, not search engine Google juice conferred by the quality of back links a page receives. It confers a portion of the dollar value of a conversion (Goal) onto pages that were viewed in the same session. Here’s an explanation and some examples (the graphic below is from that post):

Those GA scoring systems are all about the conversion, which I’m usually all for.

But as I mentioned in my post on Jason’s blog site, and yesterday, at a Translator Lab Hours discussion, people “snack” on content. They may come back to your site many times before they convert.

That means the session where they convert is likely to be brief, and the pages viewed (the ones given $ Index value) can be unfairly inflated in value.

Follow me here, and on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer, to learn more about how CII is calculated and how it can be used to improve the content on your web site that surrounds your conversion funnels.