If you’re not familiar with Engine Ready’s free software suite, Conversion Critic, you may want to take a moment to utilize some handy online marketing tools.  Conversion Critic can be used to evaluate your landing pages, check for broken destination URLs in your pay per click campaigns, and to forecast the performance of your PPC marketing efforts.

The calculator is perfect for computing expectations for a new campaign.  Many marketers and business owners want to calculate the risk associated with a new campaign.  Accurately forecasting return on ad spend is a challenge shared by all marketers, which the PPC Calculator attempts to relieve.

The free tool will also illustrate how slight changes in the conversion rate or cost per click can significantly impact your bottom line.  In the example below we can see that a 0.5% increase in conversion rate (everything else being equal) equates to thousands of more dollars in revenue.

Example:

Slide the button, or manually input your ad spend.

Forecast snapshot of performance.

conversion rate, cpa, EngineReady, internet marketing, Keyword Opportunities, Online Marketing, PPC, search marketing, Software, Tools

On December 22, 2009, Engine Ready’s Brian Lewis and SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin arranged for a holiday networking party for the local San Diego SEO community. About 35 internet marketers showed up at the Gordon Biersch Brewery in San Diego to join in some great networking, beer sampling and appetizer munching.

Rumor was that there were even isolated pockets of SEO related discussions going on … imagine that …

Engine Ready, EngineReady, Google, internet marketing, SEO

An interesting study has been recently released that shows the growth in mainstream acceptance and use of social media as a tool for shoppers.

According to a comScore survey, 28% of respondents indicated that social media has influenced their purchases. Of those influenced, most had read consumer reviews and expert product reviews. Interestingly, almost 1 out of 10 of those people mentioned that they were influenced by postings on Twitter, from either a company’s Tweet or friend’s tweet.

A similar study was performed by a search marketing agency in 2007, and at that time, Twitter was not even on the radar as a tool for holiday shoppers.

So, it’s pretty obvious that retailers will need to increase their attention to their social media strategies including the 3 primary movers: product reviews, Facebook, and Twitter. For those who have yet to jump in, here are some tips:

1. Identify your social media goals (customer service, branding/awareness, marketing, product update communication), and the metrics by how you’ll evaluate campaign success.
2. Identify the “players” in your industry, and begin to follow their Tweets. Get a firm understanding of the conversations taking place about you and your competitor’s products. It’s important to do a thorough job of listening before jumping in.
3. Setup up auto alerts in Twitter with your company name, name of your products, and those of your competitors, so you can quickly stay on top of the incredibly dynamic nature of conversations relevant to your products.
4. To maintain and grow your follow list without alienating your readers, be sure to provide a ratio of tweets of at least 4 to 1 of “value or information messaging” versus “marketing messaging”.
5. Whenever possible, provide links to the source of your information messaging.

Engine Ready, Facebook, internet marketing, Social Media, Twitter

In their first episode, the Search Marketing Vegetables discuss the importance or proper ad positioning when advertising on the pay per click engines. Watch as the dumb radish is insistent that the number one position is the place to be.

internet marketing, PPC, search marketing