Brands4Friends Goes the World: It feels almost like there aren’t any more countries where B4F founding investor Oliver Jung and his cohorts haven’t got a shopping club investment stake.

A few days ago an announcement came by email which mentions for the first time publicly the “global shopping club alliance”:

“Australia’s leading by invitation only shopping club, brandsExclusive, announced it has raised substantial Series A funding from Trayas.

Trayas is led by Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung, who are also invested in a number of leading overseas shopping clubs including Turkish Markafoni.com, the Brasilian Brandsclub.com.br, the Swiss Fashionfriends.ch and the Indian FashionandYou.com.

“The global shopping club alliance, which has a combined membership of several million online shoppers worldwide, creates an amazing opportunity for Australian brands to reach a wider international audience, and for the Australian consumer to access more brands and even greater deals.” Says co-founder Daniel Jarosch.”

Besides the known 9% of Brands4Friends that Oliver Jung holds, he also has a stake in Russian KupiVIP (which recently raised $20 million in funding), as well as the Canadian Beyond The Rack, who announced their financing round at the end of January.

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks www.optaros.com

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Keyword research is near and dear to my heart because it is the foundation for Internet marketing, including social media. Keyword research can be the glue that holds your Internet marketing campaigns together and provides strategic oversight. If you skip this important step, you could waste resources, time, and money.

Keywords and the Buying Cycle

Keywords tell us a lot about people. They help us understand intent or where a searcher is in the buying cycle. There are four segments that represent each phase in a searcher’s buying cycle: research, shop, buy, and inform. Really, the first three are part of a “purchasing” cycle, and the last one is more for searchers who are just looking for information like tips or how-to info.

I am an avid cyclist, so I like to use cycling examples. To illustrate this, let’s look at a searcher who types the word “bicycle” into Google. Using a broad search term tells me he is starting his research and is trying to get his bearings.

Next, as he learns more about the topic, the searcher will use more specific or detailed search terms like “Trek 6.9 Madone.” This searcher now knows what he is looking for and is probably looking for specific details and starting to shop. Once he has decided he’s ready to purchase, he will likely use a keyword like “trek dealer boston.” This puts him in the buying phase and he is looking to pick up the bike at a local store.

Understand Your Audience

Another important aspect of keyword research is to understand your audience. Try to anticipate keywords they might use, not keywords you or your industry would use. In conducting a keyword research project for a furniture client, I came across two related keywords – sofa and couch. Within the furniture industry, “couch” is not the correct terminology. However, after doing the research, I found that “couch” was searched for almost as much as “sofa.” By leaving out this keyword, we would have missed a good opportunity.

Keyword Relevance

Another very important principle is keyword relevance. When a person types in a keyword, he already has a certain expectation of what he will find. If your ad or organic listing includes that keyword, you are helping to make a connection with the searcher and building on their expectation. The next step in the process is for the searcher to click on a link to a Web site or destination page.

If at this point you don’t deliver with quality and relevant content, then you are probably going to lose the searcher. Be sure you include relevant content that is rich with targeted keywords in copy and with properly tagged images and video. This will help to provide continuity across the whole searcher experience, thus assisting in searcher conversion. So, drive-to-site channels like SEO (define) and PPC (define) help establish an expectation and your Web site or blog helps to deliver on that expectation.

Keyword Tools

I wish I had the time to go through all of the available tools for conducting keyword research. There are many, but I will provide links to those that I have found most useful. The top three paid tools you should look at are Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, and WordStream. Note that each of these will allow you a trial or a lite version that you can use while evaluating them.

There are tools out there you can use that are free of course, and Google is the place to go for most of them. Start at Google Keyword Tool. You can enter keywords manually or submit a URL and have the tool identify keywords for you based on the content.

If you base your keywords research only on searches from the previous month, you may be missing some opportunities. Search patterns change throughout the year. Factors that might affect this could be weather, tax season, holidays, sports, etc. Google Insights and Google Trends are excellent tools to learn more about seasonality. In the example below, I compared two keywords: “road bicycles” and “mountain bikes.” You can see that the spring and summer are where most searches come from and that there has been a slight decline since 2004.

Other Google tools you may want to look at are Google Sets and Google Wonder Wheel. To use Google Wonder Wheel, do a search on Google and then select “more options” right under the search box. This will enable more features, one of which is the Wonder Wheel. It’s a type of mapping tool that can help with brainstorming more keyword ideas.

Keyword Research and Social Media

Social media has certainly turned a lot of heads in the past couple of years. Keyword research used to mainly be useful for SEO and PPC. Now, with many marketers looking at leveraging social media, we need to consider how keyword research figures in.

First of all, social media can be a great research tool. Earlier, I discussed the importance of understanding searcher behavior. What better way to do this than to monitor social media sites? Specifically, you can:

• Understand user behavior and user intent
• Identify specific points of engagement
• Better understand the demand for certain keywords
• Learn more about interest and sentiment around various topics
• Track popular topics and identify trends

Let me introduce to you some social media tools that can help you with your keyword research. One of the great things about Twitter is that there are many tools that expand the functionality of what Twitter can do. Specifically, they give you insights to identifying and tracking targeted keywords. Here are some that are related to keyword research:

• Hashtags.org – provides information on #hashtag use
• TweetBeep – lets you save targeted keywords and receive e-mail alerts from tweets with those keywords
• TweetVolume – enter keywords to see how often they appear on Twitter
• Trendistic – see trending keywords in Twitter

Next, let’s look at Facebook. If you want to get some general insight into the use of keywords in Facebook you can do a search using its search tool. To get a complete picture select “posts by everyone” and you will get more information that can then be sorted by language and type.

Similar to Hashtags.org, there are other sites that provide similar information on tagged based conversations. You have probably noticed the #tag after some conversation on Twitter. Another form of this is bookmark tagging. Sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Technorati provide tag clouds that represent the popularity of the tag.

Then, if you want to drill down more you can do a search on targeted keywords to learn more about conversations and bookmarks related to those keywords.

For video, the YouTube Keyword Tool can provide some good insight to relevant video related keywords and tags. This tool functions like the Google Keyword Tool but pulls data from YouTube videos.

If you want to look at images and image related keywords you can try Flickr, which provides a tool called Flickr Trends. This tool allows you to compare two keywords and their use over time. See the example below where I compared road bikes to mountain bikes.

There are of course many tools I didn’t mention, but I wanted to at least get you started with understanding the wealth of keyword research information you can sink your teeth into within the realm of social media. Look for more tools to come down the road.

All in all, keyword research is essential to building a solid search campaign strategy. After conducting keyword research, I have seen company’s incorporate their keywords into positioning statements, new product names, etc. Because you are learning about human behavior, that knowledge can be used for purposes beyond just SEO and PPC. I would recommend revisiting your keyword list at least once a year if not more. You might find new ones or realize some keywords are not performing as planned.

Please feel free to add any further keyword tips or resources that have worked for you in the comments below. Also, as I said at the beginning, if you have topics you would like for me to cover in future 101 articles, please let me know.

Addendum

It is great to join the ClickZ family after writing for a Search Engine Watch column for a couple of years. As you can tell from the ClickZ’s column title, my purpose is to write about the basics of SEM (define) topics. If you are one of those who are just getting their bearings on Internet marketing and need a place to start, then this 101 column is for you. Additionally, if you have specific topics you would like me to cover in this column, please drop me a line and let me know.

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks By Ron Jones, www.ClickZ.com

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The pure-play retailer has launched asosfollowsfashion.com to help users follow the best fashion Twitter feeds and show ASOS to be a fashion-conscious brand.

This is ASOS’s second site to use real-time data from Twitter. In November it launched ASOS Reviews, which collates comments about the brand from Twitter (nma.co.uk 19 November 2009).

James Hart, ecommerce director at ASOS, said, “We’ve been chatting to our customers through social media for a few years but we also follow and interact with some of fashion’s greatest through Twitter. With asosfollowsfashion.com we get to share this passion.”

The site, created by digital agency AdaptiveLab, features top Twitter profiles within categories such as Bloggers, A-List and Insiders including Mary Portas, Agyness Deyn and brands including TopShop, River Island and Net a Porter.

James Haycock, MD of AdaptiveLab, said, “ASOS’s open approach to including competitors on the site demonstrates that it really understands the role its brand can play when it comes to social interaction, as this application positions them as a useful resource that will have continued relevance.”

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks http://www.nma.co.uk

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I’m just wondering if you know anyone who might be interested in being involved in one of my current projects?

My friend Carloine is project managing an exciting new collaboration between Eden Project and Enterprise UK. The project is a ’green’ careers resource for young people, www.realcoolfutures.com, at the heart of which lies an interactive database of inspirational case studies.

Many young people are concerned about our impact on the climate and the environment, but can’t see what society is doing about it or what they could do to make a change. Eden has launched Real Cool Futures to inspire young people with the variety of job roles out there adapting to challenges of the 21st century, as well as the varying routes into those jobs. Together, the case studies on the website create a much bigger picture; young people will be able to connect what they’re doing at school to the ways they could make a living in the future – and make a positive impact on our planet.  It will also act as a platform to showcase companies at the forefront of the growing environmental and low carbon job sector.
We are still looking for more individuals to join the site as job/career case studies. For someone to become part of the site, we just need them to complete the attached questionnaire and return it (with a photo) to the email address shown on the questionnaire itself.  We will be featuring individuals with no qualifications right through to those with PhDs in their field, as long as they are making a positive impact on climate change and sustainability. There are no right answers to the questions, the more varied the case studies, their backgrounds and career routes the better! We will also be filming a percentage of the case studies to create a series of short videos to accompany the written content on the site.

Please email your completed form and photos to Caroline Bosher (caroline@olibarrett.com) by close of business on 12^th March 2010.

I would be very grateful if you could forward this request to anyone else you think might be interested in taking part.

You can also get involved by becoming a fan of the Real Cool Futures Facebook group.

I really appreciate you taking part – here’s to helping change the world!

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This week’s Twitter column is about a very intriguing survey by Neicole Crepeau. She surveyed 336 Internet users asking them several questions about their Twitter usage and perception. The most note-worthy finding is that most of those who have quit Twitter did it out of boredom.

At the same time these people didn’t use Twitter in a way that made Twitter interesting in the first place. So in a way it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: You use Twitter in a boring way and you quickly get bored of it.

I don’t want to argue that Twitter is interesting beyond doubt and for everybody. It depends of course. Neicole Crepeau has gathered data that suggests it was their own fault though.

Most people who have quit Twitter did it after a month or less. Moreover they have followed only 10 people or less and used solely the Twitter website (no external tools or clients). That’s like making your feet wet in a puddle and then saying that “swimming sucks”. They haven’t tried hard enough.

That’s maybe too abstract as an advice so I’ll suggest some ways how beginners can make the Twitter experience less boring from the start.

1. Follow at least 50 people but not more than 500 at the beginning to have enough but not too much to read.
2. Focus on 3 topics you want to read about on Twitter, in my case it’s SEO, blogging and social media.
3. Search for popular tweets and people covering your topics using tools like Topsy and Tweetmeme and pick the best users to follow.
4. Organize your Twitter experience by external tools like Hootsuite and internal tools like Twitter lists and favorite users aka “top friends”.
5. Connect your website and blog to Twitter to make sure to get enough followers yourself. Ask your readers to follow.
6. Stay on Twitter for a few months and check and do your tweets once a day using the schedule function in Hootsuite.
7. Reply and retweet and also start conversation yourself by asking general questions where many people can contribute.

You see it’s not that difficult. Now in case Twitter is still boring OK, you have tried hard enough. Of course you need time and effort but Twitter is not about passive lurking, it’s social networking.

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks http://www.seoptimise.com

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Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang from Altimeter Group released their report today on the 18 use cases for Social CRM and provide some ideas and guidelines for how to move forward within the space.  They included quite an impressive roster of experts and vendors to help them compile their report.  However, keep in mind that what they created is just a starting point.  I just finished re-reading the report again and I think what they have put together is a great document but I do have some ideas, thoughts, and notes on what they put together.

Let’s start with this image that depicts the 18 use cases of Social CRM:

Traditional CRM has always been used for three things: sales, marketing, and customer service.  Social CRM doesn’t replace those but instead it adds new layers into the mix (as you can see from the image above), mainly collaboration, ideation, and improved customer experience.  Actually, I wouldn’t even classify customer experience as a separate SCRM layer because I think the whole point of SCRM as a whole is to improve the customer experience.  Collaborating with customers, innovating, and improving your marketing, sales, and support efforts are all geared towards improving the customer experience because that is ultimately what is going to be the key differentiating factor between competitive companies.

I’ll point everyone to the following idea that Esteban Kolsky came up with (Chess Media Group helped redesign it).  Again this image shows the overlap between Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM.

Back to the report…

Jeremiah and Ray researched 18 use cases for Social CRM but I’m sure others will emerge quickly (or may already exist).

The report also goes on to discuss the 5 Ms of Social CRM and the baseline processes.

What I would have liked to see is a separation between what can be automated and what needs to be handled by a human.  I have a baseline framework for this that I brainstormed with Brent Leary and hopefully I can create an image that depicts what that should look like.  The other challenge here is that Jeremiah and Ray recommend that  we need all 5 Ms yet each M involves working with a new vendor.  According to the baseline process chart, in order to fully take advantage of SCRM a company would need to work with at least five different vendors such as Biz 360, Facebook Profiles, Sugar CRM, Informatica, and IBM Cognos.  I don’t think that this is realistic and then there’s the issue of integration and of course budget and resources (yes I know, a completely separate issue).

I definitely commend Jeremiah and Ray for really compiling a fantastic report (there is much more in there for you to read).  I think this report is a fantastic starting point for the SCRM framework, and while I’m sure not everyone agrees with what they (or I) have to say about SCRM, it certainly will cause great discussions to surface.  If you want to check out the full Social CRM report, you can visit the Slideshare presentation (which I recommend you do).

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks www.jmorganmarketing.com

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If you thought fragmentation was changing the way a brand buys media, just wait until you see what it’s going to do to the Digital Marketing space.

Are the days of big websites and long website builds numbered? It could well be. If you think about how people find and connect to most brands, it’s not just through a search engine anymore. In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Does this mean that the website is going the way of the dodo bird?

Not exactly, but it does mean that the overall Digital Marketing strategy is going to change dramatically in the next little while. Instead of one, big and centralized website with many digital marketing outposts in the appropriate platforms, it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities.

Imagine a world…

Where a Digital Marketing strategy focuses less on one big website and more on creating engaging “things” like iPhone apps, a mobile website, a Facebook page along with a Blog (or whatever), and it’s all supported with a simple website that acts more like a hub for all of the other spokes. Yes, there are some (only a few) brands already playing with creating Facebook pages in lieu of micro-sites for promotions and experiential marketing initiatives, but it has not become a commonplace activity where you find a brand doing multiple things in multiple channels and focusing less on driving consumers to their marketing-riddled jargony websites.

It becomes a more complex Digital Marketing play.

The “game” used to be about always driving people back to your own, controlled, website, and the truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it. Does this mean we need to trim websites back to WordPress Blog-shaped platforms or micro-site sizes? Not really, but it does mean that if a brand’s vibrant community is happening in a place like Facebook, they won’t have much control or ownership over the content, but they might be able to do things (in terms of connecting and growing that community) that they could not scale to with a big, towering website of their own.

This is just further proof that the conversations are everywhere (and maybe not where we always want them to be).

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks www.twistimage.com

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Leading advertising trade magazine, Adage, has just published an article on social commerce – focusing on Facebook e-commerce.  Forget e-commerce, f-commerce is here.

The article is archived below, but here are our top takeouts;

• The jury is still out on whether social media can drive sales – but  one thing is clear: Sales are starting to happen in social media – specifically, with Facebook.
• Adding e-commerce functionality to Facebook will help marketers prove how closely social media can be tied to sales, and will also help Facebook’s primary revenue strategy, advertising, by enabling advertisers to monetize campaigns directly with e-commerce sales.
• P&G sold out of the 1,000 packs of diapers it was offering via Facebook within one hour.  P&G used Ohio-based digital agency Resource Interactive’s Off the Wall e-commerce technology, already used by retailer The Limited.
• Jones Apparel Group has been trialling Facebook stores for it’s Nine West and Rachel Roy brands.  Nine West has launched a Flash-based Facebook sales app powered by Fluid software, offering exclusive products and 15% discounts to Facebookers. In February, the Facebook store for Rachel Roy store sold out of a limited quantity of jewelry within six hours.
• Avon’s trendier, Lauren Conrad-endorsed teen cosmetics brand, Mark is enabling peer-t0-peer network marketing sales on Facebook, powered by Alvenda, the f-commerce developers behind the  1-800-Flowers Facebook store.
• Facebook has partnered with online-payment platform PayPal to allow marketers to test e-commerce apps and turn 400-million-member social-networking site into giant, global shopping mall.
• Third-party developer Payvment recently used PayPal’s API to build an app anyone can use to set up a retail store on a Facebook page.
• Whilst Facebook does not take commission on e-commerce sales on Facebook pages, it will now collect 30% on purchases of virtual goods (the virtual goods market is estimated to be worth $5 billion) made with Facebook Credits, that can be purchased via PayPal.
• In addition to selling virtual goods, Facebook is now selling digital and real gifts in its Gift Shop; music from Apple’s “lala” brand, flowers, candy, cakes and tickets from “Real Gifts” – that can be purchased with Facebook Credits

Will E-Commerce Help Facebook’s Ad Sales?

Deals With PayPal, App Developers Help Marketers Reap Profits — and Give the Social Net a Chance to Get a Cut

By Kunur Patel Published: March 01, 2010

Retrieved from http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=142322

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — There’s been a lot of talk about whether social media can drive sales, but one thing is clear: Sales are starting to happen in social media — specifically, with Facebook.

P&G sold out of the 1,000 packs of diapers it was offering via Facebook.

As it builds out its own store internally, strikes a deal with online-payment platform PayPal and allows marketers to test e-commerce apps, the 400-million-member social-networking site is starting to look more and more like a giant, global shopping mall. Last week, for example, Procter & Gamble’s Pampers became the latest marketer to sell product on Facebook, dropping an e-commerce application in a “Shop Now” tab on its 200,000-fan-strong fan page. Within an hour, it sold out of the 1,000 Cruiser diaper packs it was offering at $9.99 a pop.

The question is: Does the proprietor make any money off such sales? So far, the answer is no. “Once a number of marketers are doing commerce on their own, you have to wonder how Facebook is going to get a piece of it,” said David Berkowitz, 360i’s director of emerging media.

To that end, late last week Facebook announced it will now collect 30% on purchases of virtual goods made with Facebook Credits, according to its developer blog. While the in-app credits program is still in closed beta, it already includes developers like Playfish and Zynga — two of the biggest players in the estimated $5 billion global virtual-goods market. With the fee, it looks like Facebook is taking Apple’s lead: Apple takes a 30% cut of paid applications in the App Store, a fee levied to the developer, not the user. The announcement did not mention revenue collected on apps outside the credits system — like Pampers’ and 1-800-Flowers’ commerce apps — though the virtual goods economy is comparatively much more developed. It also illustrates Facebook’s interest in getting a cut of revenue collected in its house.

Regardless, being a place where goods are sold could actually help Facebook’s primary revenue strategy, advertising, as ads on the site will be closer to a potential purchase — moving it from being seen not just as a marketing tool but as a sales tool. It may also help prove how closely social media can be tied sales, something just about every marketer is wondering.

Facebook has given developers and agencies free reign to develop commerce apps. The Pampers’ Facebook sales app used Ohio-based digital agency Resource Interactive’s Off the Wall e-commerce technology, which retailer The Limited used to sell scarves during the holidays.

Friends only
Digital-shopping company Fluid recently launched a Flash-based Facebook sales app for Nine West, which is only open to the accessories retailer’s fans. Users can browse items from the Jones Apparel brand’s spring collection, add items to a shopping cart and check out on the retailer’s own commerce site with 15% off. This followed an e-shop for another Jones’ brand, Rachel Roy, which sold out a limited quantity of jewelry in the first six hours on Facebook in a similar execution earlier in February.

And Minneapolis-based tech startup Alvenda has created an e-commerce platform within Facebook for 1-800-Flowers. It also built a friend-to-friend sales app in December for Avon’s beauty and accessories brand, Mark.

Annemarie Frank, Mark’s director of digital and strategic alliances, said Mark makes money on its fan page through sales, but it didn’t work with Facebook to implement the sales widget. And while Mark has run ad programs in the past to drive its Facebook fans, it isn’t spending with the social-networking site today.

Facebook became profitable in 2009 and reaps the majority of its revenue from advertising. An executive with knowledge of the matter said Facebook is focused on buoying the business via advertising. To that end, Facebook announced a partnership with eBay’s PayPal in February to pipe the payment platform into the site’s ad and developer tools. Because PayPal conducts transactions in 24 currencies, Facebook will be able to collect revenue from small, international advertisers. Of Facebook’s nearly half-billion users, 70% live outside the U.S.

1-800-Flowers has an e-commerce platform within the social network.

As for consumers, they’ll be able to purchase Facebook Credits — currency redeemed for virtual goods or gaming — through PayPal. Before the deal, PayPal, which collects fees from merchants, had already been on Facebook facilitating payments in games such as Zynga’s “FarmVille” or “Mafia Wars.”

“We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service,” said Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of payment operations in a statement. PayPal transacted $71 billion worldwide in 2009.

One shopping cart

With Facebook integrating an online pay system for its users, PayPal’s open development platform could tie together purchase behavior across the site. Third-party developer Payvment recently used PayPal’s API to build an app anyone can use to set up a retail store on a Facebook page. If the app takes off and consumers are buying on multiple pages across Facebook, Payvment allows all purchases to aggregate in one shopping cart for one check out.

A fraction of Facebook’s revenue does come from the sale of virtual goods — icons of objects such as Champagne bottles and hugging penguins that Facebook users buy to post on friends’ walls. Facebook has started to add real gifts and brands to that virtual-goods economy, which has been largely tied to gaming. Last year, Facebook starting selling music files, charitable donations and licensed icons from sports organizations such as the NBA and college teams. For advertisers, Facebook launched branded virtual-good ad units, which are gaining increasingly more interest from brands such as Skittles and P&G.

Facebook also opened shop for physical goods last year, when it launched Real Gifts, a startup funded through its venture-capital arm to sell real things through the gift store right alongside the virtual ones. Right now, the real goods for sale are primarily generic gifts — Fandango movie tickets and the Slanket blanket are the only branded items on display, though Dave Sanguinetti, Real Gifts cofounder-CEO says there’s been “significant interest from big brands” and we can expect top-tier brands on sale soon. As for its business model, Real Gifts buys goods at wholesale prices and sells them at retail.

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks http://socialcommercetoday.com

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The Facebook analytics war may have begun. Only a few days after WebTrends spurred excitement over its new Facebook tracking capabilities, competitors Omniture and Coremetrics have unveiled their own. It’s welcome news to data junkies who have long complained that Facebook campaign measurement has been lacking.

The latest news is of Adobe-owned Omniture partnering with Facebook to enable marketers to buy and measure Facebook media through Omniture’s search campaign management platform. The analytics firm also touted ad effectiveness reporting for Facebook Pages and apps; Omniture already offered Facebook app reporting. Additional features are expected as a result of the partnership, Omniture said.

Some have argued that Facebook’s limited campaign measurement offering may be preventing marketers from investing more in the channel. The steady stream of Facebook analytics announcements in the past week might convince them that campaigns on the site can be more measurable than once thought and, equally important, comparable to other campaign channels.

While Facebook offers its own analytics system, most marketers agree it’s spare – providing information such as demographic and geographic data on fans of a branded page or how many comments were made about posts, for instance. Workarounds enabling marketers to employ Google Analytics or other analytics tags to track Facebook campaigns also exist.

“The case for measuring social media better keeps getting stronger and the needs get more pronounced,” David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at digital agency 360i, told ClickZ News last week. “I expect an analytics arms race.”

Omniture competitor Webtrends announced last week new tools for measuring Facebook campaigns beyond applications. The company can now show Facebook interactions and their effect on other channels in one report.

Another player in the space, Coremetrics, yesterday announced its own new Facebook features for its platform. The company can track Facebook fan page visits, ad exposure, and app interactions – and compare them to subsequent interactions on advertiser Web sites.

Webtrends told ClickZ News last week it planned to unveil “Flashbook” tracking soon, which could prove valuable to companies using the Facebook-approved Flash rich media technology in campaigns.

www.warrenknight.co.uk thanks Kate Kaye, ClickZ.com

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You stand on a small platform called a “board,” high above the big top floor. A swinging bar – a trapeze – swings in front of you, away and then toward you. Your task is to dive into open space, grab the bar, and swing out away from your little perch.

At the apex of your swing, you are going to let go.

If all goes well, there will be a strong young man with impeccable timing in a perfect catcher’s lock ready to grab you by the hands and swing you back to a safe landing on the other platform.

At the moment you release, you will not know if everything has gone right. Will your catcher be swinging away from you, leaving you to fall? Will you see someone other than a young man reaching to ferry you across the chasm?

We all experience the same kind of anticipation when we click on an advertisement. There is a moment of disorientation as we ask, “Who will be there to catch me?”

When an aerial artist releases his life to the trust of another, he doesn’t expect to see a gorilla, a butcher, a cheerleader, or a pirate reaching to catch him.

It is the unexpected that causes falls.

In the world of display advertising, the landing page is that strapping young man, the “catcher” we hope to find each time we click on an ad.

There Is a Net

Just as a broad net catches the errant trapeze artist, surfers have the back button and its cousin, the close window button ready to save them. This net is not good for advertisers, as the price for the click has already been paid and the potential sale is lost.

In the same way that the trapeze artist bounces in the net, so do prospects “bounce” from the advertiser’s landing page. True to form, we call ratio of exits to the total number of visitors the “bounce rate.”

The key to a successful handoff is not a creative or engaging landing page. First and foremost, the landing page must offer the expected. The ad itself makes the promise. The landing page must deliver on that promise. Test after test has demonstrated that the more closely the landing page resembles the ad, the lower the bounce rate, resulting in higher conversion rates.

To minimize bounce rates, the landing page should begin by mirroring the ad in every way, with the same offer and similar imagery. In an ideal world, each ad version you serve should link to its own landing page tailored to that specific ad.

Choosing the Right Catcher

What if you are serving hundreds or thousands of different ads at any time? This is made possible with dynamic ad technology. By mixing elements in real time, dynamic ad technology allows us to compose ads on the fly. The ad may change based on a viewer’s gender, location, age, or surfing history. The image, offer, color, or copy can be changed instantly.

How do we ensure that our landing pages match these chameleon ads?

For most advertisers, the solution lies in creating a variety of landing pages, and then assigning these landing pages to groups of ads with a similar characteristic. For example, it is vitally important that the landing page supports the offer made in the ad; so this is a logical way to group landing pages: by offer.

However, when an ad featuring a sweater takes a prospect to a landing page featuring a discount on all tops, there is a disconnect. The landing page was too broad to meet the ad’s promise. If a selection of sweaters isn’t presented, impatient visitors will bounce away.

When behavioral data is added into the mix, things get even trickier. Imagine an ad for khaki pants. The ad may be smart enough to know the gender of the viewer, showing a man or woman modeling the item. However, this intelligence isn’t available to the landing page. When a female visitor clicks on an ad with a picture of a stylish woman in khakis, and is then taken to a page with a handsome man in khakis, there is a disconnect. It causes hesitation and bounces.

With the help of a software developer, the characteristics of an ad can be coded and sent as part of the URL that calls the landing page. Then, some logic on the server can assemble the proper components of the landing page. We would expect this to increase sales, but it can add considerable expense and time to each campaign.

An alternative is to supply the same behavioral data to the landing page used by the ad. LiveBall from ion interactive offers the ability to modify landing pages on the fly. Advertisers can swap page elements based on data such as, geography, keyword, and history. Theoretically, an advertiser could set up LiveBall rules similar to those guiding their ads, increasing the likelihood that any landing pages generated would match the ad clicked.

Tumri CEO Calvin Lui gave me a preview of its new dynamic marketing solution that promises a landing page component to complement four new dynamic ad technologies. While this landing page module is still in beta, it holds out the possibility of marrying the right landing page with any dynamically created ad.

Integrated Landing Pages

The new ads announced by Tumri highlight the next challenge facing landing page development: ads as applications. The new products allow the viewer to flip through offers in the ad, like the circulars you find in your Sunday newspaper. The Dynamic Circulars and Dynamic Merchandising products are more like little ad catalogs.

With this capability, landing pages need to match not only the ad, but know which item within the circular generated the click.

In the near future, advertisers must anticipate “Add to Cart” buttons within an ad. With such a tight coupling between ad and Web site, the concept of a landing page almost disappears. In this case, the trapeze metaphor breaks down. Prospects act more like tight rope walkers in this situation.

Who’s catching your clicks? To maximize leads and sales, design landing pages that firmly grab the attention of visitors. Eliminate the unexpected. When a prospect clicks on an ad, she experiences a moment of uncertainty, like a trapeze artist waiting to be caught. Your landing page must catch her, reinforcing the promise made in your ad with headings, copy, color, and imagery. If it does not, the clicks you pay for will bounce away.

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