ClickBrain

The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise All Categories category for the 4 weeks ending May 26, 2007, based on US Internet usage.

Rank	Search Term	Volume
1.	myspace	1.20%
2.	myspace.com	0.62%
3.	ebay	0.38%
4.	www.myspace.com	0.33%
5.	youtube	0.24%
6.	mapquest	0.22%
7.	yahoo	0.19%
8.	craigslist	0.18%
9.	myspace layouts	0.17%
10.	my space	0.14%

Source – Hitwise – May, 2007 – based on volume of searches.

 

Hitwise US – Top 20 Websites – May, 2007

This list features the most popular websites based on US Internet usage for May, 2007, ranked by market share of visits across all Hitwise industries.

Rank	Website	Market Share
1.	www.myspace.com	6.22%
2.	www.google.com	4.77%
3.	mail.yahoo.com	4.45%
4.	www.yahoo.com	3.97%
5.	mail.myspace.com	3.9%
6.	www.hotmail.com	1.85%
7.	www.ebay.com	1.59%
8.	www.msn.com	1.54%
9.	search.yahoo.com	1.48%
10.	www.facebook.com	0.92%
11.	www.youtube.com	0.75%
12.	search.msn.com	0.73%
13.	images.google.com	0.54%
14.	blog.myspace.com	0.43%
15.	www.wikipedia.org	0.42%
16.	music.myspace.com	0.4%
17.	www.gmail.com	0.37%
18.	mail.aol.com	0.35%
19.	my.yahoo.com	0.33%
20.	mail.live.com	0.33%

Source – Hitwise – May, 2007 – based on market share of visits.

Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories, May 2007

Brad Google, content

My friend Sumantra Roy wrote a great piece published over at Web Marketing Today on the 10 most important factors to test on your landing pages. This is an excellent overview of the critical issues all advertisers must consider on Adwords or anywhere else on the web. It’s all about the landing pages and testing. If you really want to test properly, then you should check out Sumantra’s company Conversion Multiplier. Their technology is fantastic and their results are amazing. I’ve seen results from his multi-variate testing increasing conversions up to 600%. Call them and tell them Brad Nickel at ClickBrain.com sent you.

…these are all based on actual tests that we conducted for our clients.

1. Long Copy vs. Short Copy. Conventional direct marketing wisdom is that long copy always wins over short copy. Well, not always. Our tests show that while long copy wins over short copy in some cases, short copy performs better than long copy in others. …

2. Credibility Logos. Signing up with organizations like the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and Hacker Safe and displaying their logos on your site can often significantly increase your conversions. But, don’t assume that this will always be the case …

3. Security Assurance in Order Form or Shopping Cart. Test whether adding a few lines of content somewhat prominently in your order form or shopping cart page assuring visitors about the security of their financial and personal data increases conversions. This often proves to be a very important variable especially if your target audience tends to be somewhat older in age, or somewhat new to purchasing things on the Internet.

Click on over to read the rest of the piece. Source: 10 Factors to Test that Could Increase the Conversion Rate of your Landing Pages

Technorati tags: marketing, testing, multi-variate testing, split testing, copy, writing, landing page, landing pages, advertising, adwords, conversion, conversion multiplier, conversions

Brad Adwords, SEM, adversiting, content, landing pages, multivariate testing, split testing, web marketing

Excellent piece on how to write good headlines to draw readers of your newsletter to your site.

A recent iMedia cover story on behavioral targeting has this headline: “Why Your Creative Needs to Catch-Up.”

This is a good, challenging title. It’s going to attract some readers, but not others, because not everyone wants a challenge.

The word “Why” is, in western culture, a defensible word. This means people being asked “Why…?” feel they need to defend themselves. All you need do is look at someone and say “why” with no inflection and their blood pressure goes up, their pulse quickens, their breathing shallows out and their irises go wide.

The physiologic responses are fascinating and are flight or fight based, not good when you want someone to accept information you’re providing them or inviting them to explore your content further.

So, while “Why Your Creative Needs to Catch-Up” is good, “Your Creative Needs to Catch-Up Because…” is better because the “Because” is a promise that the answer is coming. The reader doesn’t really need to respond. There’s no reason to defend, thus energy spent unintentionally raising blood pressure, et cetera, can be spent intentionally exploring the content.

You can even up the ante by adding “(Five Experts Speak)” or something similar. “Your Creative Needs to Catch-Up (Five Experts Speak)”. Understand your audience and you’ll know whether “Your Creative Needs to Catch-Up Because…” or “Your Creative Needs to Catch-Up (Five Experts Speak)” will drive your numbers heavenward.

Source: iMedia Connection: Headlines That Attract Attention

Brad content, web marketing

I am all hot and bothered over video “advertising”, but not so much advertising. I want real world customers and users testifying as to the value of a customer’s services, products, and overall value. Yesterday I met with a major retailer about their online SEM and other marketing needs and I believe very strongly that that firm could get a lot of value by adding customer testimonials as well as real life case studies. I also am pushing clients into community and content with video as well to drive lower cost search engine marketing (SEM) by utilizing indirect terms to content rather “buy this” terms. I call it “Indirect SEM” “Indirect Search Engine Marketing (Maybe I should trademark it).

Great content alone doesn’t cut it. Marketers need to put their online video content to work across a number of different channels. With promotional campaigns, high-quality destination sites and custom channel branding, marketers can increase user interaction and participation while communicating their message to a wider and more engaged audience than ever before.

The real challenge of online video is about what (as in what makes good video content, if you don’t have good content then you’re toast anyways) and it’s about where: figuring out how and where to use online video, while still maintaining the integrity of brand. If done right, there are a variety of ways for companies to distribute and display online video to grab an audience and retain their attention.

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A great example of a recent successful promotional contest is the collaboration JVC developed with VMIX. VMIX provided a platform and a JVC custom channel for the “Create Our Commercial Contest,” which asked individuals to submit self-produced ads that they filmed with their new JVC Everio camera to the VMIX JVC channel.

The online video contest produced more than 80 quality entries for JVC, garnered national print and web publicity for JVC and the winner, and ultimately provided a major grassroots marketing campaign for JVC, targeting lifestyle, college, retail and events. The winner of the online promotional contest received $2,500 and saw his commercial aired on Spike TV.

Source: iMedia Connection: Veni, Video, Vici: Conquer Online Video

Brad CPC, Google, SEM, adversiting, content, web marketing

I am moving from Drupal to Word Press. For now I am going to link to the previous version of my web marketing blog and hope Google spiders it properly. More to come on why the move, but while I still love all the power that Drupal gives me, it just made things far too complicated. There was just too much there. I will still need Drupal for community and social networking projects, but for our basic company site and blog, this should be ample. I am finding Word Press to be elegant, easy, and simple to utilize and that is the bottom line. In addition, I want to relaunch the corporate components to ClickBrain. The market is HOT for SEM right now!

Brad clickbrain.com, cms, content, content management system, technology, web marketing