Arkansas Internet Marketing and Arkansas Inbound Marketing Blog

Vertical Studio to Present @ Arkansas Venture Forum

Posted by Wilson Kanaday on Tue, Sep 7, 2010 @ 15:09 PM

We'll be at the Arkansas Venture Forum on September 15th at the Doubletree Hotel in Little Rock.  

If you'd be interested in learning more about Vertical Studio's solution for growing online businesses with conversion rate optimization or as an investment opportunity we'd be happy to talk to you.  

Topics: Arkansas Business Trends & News

Arkansas Business: Blogger Comments on Small Business Blogs

Posted by Wilson Kanaday on Thu, Aug 23, 2007 @ 20:08 PM

Lance Turner, the blogger for ArkansasBusiness.com, yesterday inked this quip,

Some [small businesses] are actually turning blog traffic into sales, almost [Lance's emphasis] justifying the time and expense it all takes.

Where to start?  Okay, there is a lot of skepticism around blogs.  Not long ago, I was one of the skeptics.  But now you are reading my blog. 

Do blogs take time?  Sort of.  I know my field and I enjoy it.  I think about the stuff in my posts all the time.  The most difficult thing is writing short posts.

Is it expensive?  No.  I even had some blog experts to do all of my back end work on setting this thing up and they still do some consulting around my posting and marketing. 

But can you just blog and hope for the best?  Of course not.  Notice the keywords I use over and over again.  Notice the URL directories displayed.  Very little in this blog is an accident.  And, over time, it will pay off.

And lastly, if your blog is actually getting solid traffic and you can't figure out how to make money with that, is that the blog's fault?

Topics: blogging, Arkansas Business Trends & News, Internet Marketing Trends & News

Internet Traffic Measurement – Response to Arkansas Business

Posted by Wilson Kanaday on Fri, Jul 13, 2007 @ 16:07 PM

The latest issue of Arkansas Business has an article on the cover below the fold entitled, "Quantifying Internet Traffic Remains Elusive". Since I make a living in the Internet Trafficking business, I am glad to see it get some front page news - thanks Nate. But I would like to elaborate on some of the points in the article.

The main point of the article is that it is difficult to obtain precise traffic estimates for sites that display advertising (see the title). Should it matter to marketers that these specific traffic estimates are difficult to pin down? In a word - no.

In traditional advertising, those selling the advertising could only point advertisers towards circulation numbers or television viewers and some demographic data to attract advertisers and set their rates. So naturally, traditional marketers still have this frame of mind when judging the Internet.

On the Internet, however, the marketers' focus needs to shift from circulation numbers to measurable ROI. There are great tools like Google Analytics and Omniture that allow Internet marketers to trace any digital campaign all the way back to a real ROI number. If I spend $10,000 per month advertising on SFGate.com and I can show an ROI of 40%, should I care if the site gets 2.4 million or 7.6 million monthly visitors?

The metrics that really matter are not ‘circulation', ‘viewers', ‘page views' or ‘time on site' but profit and loss.

Nitty Gritty Details

The article speaks to a specific niche of Internet Advertising - buying banner ads directly on another content-driven site. Think of the Metropolitan Bank banner ads that are displayed regularly across the top of ArkansasBusiness.com. ArkansasBusiness.com has made a good living out of selling space on their website in the same way they sell ads to statewide businesses in their print edition of Arkansas Business.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which is sited in the article, display advertising of this kind accounts for 22% of total Internet advertising revenue. The article doesn't speak of the advertising done on search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN, which accounts for 40% total spending. For search engine marketing, getting the exact number of impressions (times someone was exposed to your ad), clicks-throughs (number of times someone clicked on the ad) and conversions (times someone took the action you wanted them to take for coming to your website) is straight forward and reliable.

Why are Internet traffic measurements elusive?

Measuring traffic, or visitors, on a website that you don't own is tricky. The main reason is because that is the proprietary information of the website's owners. As Nate mentions, there are services that can estimate a website's traffic for you. comScore, Nielsen/Net Ratings and the Audit Bureau of Circulation are sited directly in the article. In my opinion the best service for getting data on another website is Hitwise, which was not mentioned. Before advertisers start citing the wide variance in these traffic estimates, they need to understand how each of those services works so they can make intelligent analytical adjustments to the estimates. Maybe I will touch on the differences in the services another day.

Topics: Arkansas Business Trends & News, Internet Marketing Trends & News, Web Analytics