6 Reasons Why You Need A Marketing Dashboard For Your Business

Clive works at Cyfe. They offer a marketing dashboard that takes all of the guess work out of creating their own visual displays. Click here to learn more about us and to get a free trial.

When it comes to online marketing, your target market is active in many places – from the social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to search engines such as Google.  Many business owners are realising that they have to engage in all of the popular spaces online – neglecting one, can mean that your competition may dominate in that sphere, and that you’re simply missing out on sales.

And so you dutifully engage in all of the popular marketing channels online…
However, after a while, things can get confusing.

If you have a lot going on it can be really difficult to manage your marketing effectively, and if you don’t know how successful each marketing channel is being, you can’t possibly know where best to spend your time.

What Is A Marketing Dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is simply a graphical interface that allows you to see an overview of your entire marketing strategy – in a single view. By providing a simple interface through which you are able to view your key performance indicators at a glance you can cut out all of the data that you don’t need.

It is often said that the problem with Analytics is that there is too much information and inexperienced marketers can either get buried or just completely fail to take advantage of the data that is actually useful.

If you set up a dashboard thoughtfully, with your own goals in mind you can avoid these pitfalls – sounds good right? Let’s look at some specifics though; here are six reasons why you need a marketing dashboard for your business.

1. You See the Bigger Picture

When you’re dividing your attention between various marketing campaigns, it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees.  The philosophy is to keep shovelling and not worry about it.

Your hard work will mean more visitors and more sales, and you will be invariably right in that respect. However, why all the unnecessary hard work? A marketing dashboard forces you to zoom out and see your overall marketing strategy holistically. A marketing dashboard forces you to see everything from a distance.

Marketers are typically obsessive over details, and that’s not a bad thing, but sometimes we miss the big picture – while being able to see it makes us better at getting results.

2. It Makes Your Marketing More Efficient

When you look at the big picture you will notice trends and patterns that were out of view prior to your dashboard usage. These insights will allow you to allocate more of your energy and budget to the more effective campaigns, which makes your marketing more efficient.

Marketing isn’t just about seeing what works; it’s about realising what doesn’t work and where trends lie. If you notice that a traffic source is declining, then either the strategy needs to be tweaked, or perhaps efforts in that channel need to be withdrawn, so that your resources can be spent in more successful areas.

Trends are far easier to spot on a line graph than looking at a list of numbers. When you compare different sets of data in a comparative line graph, you can focus on the important trends and spot patterns and relationships that you might otherwise miss.

Needless to say, the true power of spotting trends is that they enable you to make predictions. For example, you may be seeing an upward trend in sales generated from Facebook.  From that analysis, you may decide to double your advertising budget for the Facebook platform.

If changes happen slowly you might not notice a gradual decline in traffic from Twitter (for instance), but your dashboard will make it obvious and give you time to plan ahead by finding new alternatives or adjusting your Twitter strategy.

3. Monitor and Compare Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you manage a website, your KPIs are likely to be numbers of visitors and sales generated.  A KPI line graph can show you a comparison of the two.  You can see if there are any trends with these two.

Which KPIs matters the most will depend on your business and there are plenty of things you might choose to track. The charts above show a helpful visualisation of how your conversion rate and your conversion volume might interact and how different traffic sources might convert differently.

If your sales suddenly spike but your overall conversion rate slightly drops you can derive that whatever caused your traffic space sent a slightly lower than usual quality of traffic, or maybe that your website is not well targeted for that particular traffic segment..?

4. Which Marketing Channels are the Most Effective?

When your website is taking in traffic from several sources, you need to be able to track :
•    how many visitors each channel brings in
•    how many sales are generated from each channel
•    the resulting conversion rate using the above two metrics

You can plug this data into your dashboard, and then compare each channel to one another. It’s simple really, but if you can directly compare traffic volume, cost of traffic and sales/revenue generated you can easily see which marketing channels are really worth your attention.

5. Conversion Rate Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel graphic shows you a breakdown of your visitors / leads versus customers, and repeat business.  A graphical representation of this data (literally as a funnel) can be quite a striking view, and a focal point that you can shape your improvements in conversion rates around.

This way of viewing your data allows you to quickly see which areas of your website are underperforming, where you are losing the most conversions and therefore where you could perform the easiest improvements.

6. Find Out More About Your Target Market

The more you know about your target market, the better you can serve them.  The better you can serve them, the more sales you’re going to make through repeat sales, word of mouth and recommendations.

A marketing dashboard can give you insights into your target market:

•    where do they spend the most time online?
•    do they respond well to email marketing campaigns
•    or are they more active on Facebook?
•    are Twitter users more likely to buy on your site than Google Adwords referees?

This kind of information can help your tailor your future marketing strategies and help better serve your target market.

You may have an unusually low click-through rate on your email marketing campaign, but strong engagement on Twitter.

While the low click-through rate for your mailings may indicate that the content of the email could be improved, it might simply indicate that your demographic is far less likely to respond to email newsletters in the first place.

The very same market may be far more active on social networks.

This kind of comparison is made a lot easier with a marketing dashboard and without one you may miss the indirect comparison and hence the trend. In this scenario you would likely want to tone down the email marketing and focus on other ways to make contact.

Summary
In simple terms, a dashboard is a tool to help you see what you need to see quickly and efficiently. Certainly you could check all of this stuff via analytics and your various other data sources, but having it in one place saves time.

To really make the most of the opportunity it is important that you only view actionable data. Filter out any stats that don’t have the potential to give you actionable insights.

In other words; when you view a stat, ask yourself “so what?”

You should aim to come up with a simple set of decision questions around each data point. Or in other words: “if this then that”

For example:
If my Twitter traffic does not consistently increase over time then I will reconsider my posting schedule and try alternative platforms.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing –and its working

Email marketing has become an essential tool for business ever since the introduction of the Internet to the world, however some campaigns that make it through to our inboxes are absolute rubbish that we don’t take any notice of. This article seeks to explain what email marketing really is, why companies should use it and how they should go about doing so.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• Sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
• Sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
• Adding advertisements to emails sent by other companies to their customers.

Email marketing has several key advantages over traditional mail marketing, including the following:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Over half of all Internet users check or send email on a typical day.
• Email allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.
• Transactional emails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.

The disadvantages of email marketing surround the rejection/spam rate of the emails by the consumers’ email program, negatively affecting the delivery rate of the emails. This has somewhat been eliminated with the idea of “Opt-in” emailing, where the consumer consents to receiving the emails and therefore eliminates the idea of receiving unsolicitated emails – Ideally maintaining emails that are relevant and appropriate to each individual recipient.

So the questions are why and how should one go about email marketing? Well here are a few thoughts on the matter:

Why?

• Cost – Email marketing is CHEAP, there are no two ways about it. Whether you do it yourself, or through an email marketing agency, marketing to hundreds of consumers via email is going to cost you tiddlywinks compared to other channels of advertising.
• Success - Emails can be targeting specifically to the ideal consumer. With this concept in mind, along with email cost-effectiveness, it’s no wonder that email marketing’s ROI often blows other direct marketing strategies out of the water – The trick is that you have to get it right!
• Measureability and Flexibility – With the analytics available today it’s easy to track responses to your emails exactly, in order to work out what parts of your campaign are working and what parts aren’t. With this knowledge, you can then react instantly to modify your campaign strategy if need be.

How?

Dave Chaffey from Marketing Insights offers an experienced view into the success factors of email marketing, using the mnemonic “CRITICAL“:

• Creative – This refers to the overall design of the email (layout/images/colour). Specifically, it is a good idea to ask each customer whether they would like the emails in text or HTML as there is often a great preference for one over the other.
• Relevance – Targeting, targeting, and more targeting. Make your emails relevent and personalised to each recipient if you want that response rate to rise.
• Incentive - Recipients look at emails and think “WIIFM?”, i.e. “What’s in it for me??”. There’s no such thing as a free lunch right? Well… Offer the recipient a “free lunch” for participating and they will be more likely to respond.
• Timing – Don’t send out an email that recipients will receive overnight, let it pop up in their inbox during their working day. This also expands to selecting certain days, months and even years. Remember – You can test and measure what timing works best for which email.
• Integration – Companies can not just rely on one method of marketing, nor can they rely on several methods of differentiated marketing. Instead, best marketing practices utilise integrated marketing communication (IMC) where all aspects of their promotion work together to create a whole. Email marketing must be including here, therefore your emails must carry the same image and message as your entire operations. Even the timing of the campaign must work in with other aspects of your marketing mix.
• Copy – When considering the copywriting for your email you must consider all aspects of the language, from subject line through to your mail signature. With emails, not all links should be saved for the last sentence, pop them in early to grab that impulsive customer!
• Attributes – Here Dave talks about the email header, with attributes including the subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt and format. Once again, testing your campaigns can rule out the attributes that customers consider spam and highlighting the attributes that will work best for your business.
• Landing Page – Want those emails to turn into sales conversions? Don’t just hyperlink your customers to your home page; show them exactly where you want them to go and make it quick and easy to complete any forms!

So yes… Email marketing is a vital component in many industries, especially for creating those important customer-firm relationships. Learn to use it well and it will definitely bump up your company’s success.

Just try not to send out another email that goes straight through to my spam folder. And, if the email does manage to make it through to my inbox – Make it worthwhile to read!

SEO Interview Question and Answers

Top Seo Interview Questions and Answers for freshers 2014




Latest SEO interview questions and answers for freshers 2014:




1. What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of changing the position of a website or a web page in a search engine's search results (Organic or Natural results).

(or)

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a part of internet marketing. SEO is a method by which the visibility of a website or a web page is increased on search engine.
Google, yahoo, bing

2. Types of SEO
Two Types of SEO are
On Page Optimization
Off Page Optimization


3. SEO Techniques
Two SEO Techniques are
White Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO ( Negative SEO )

4. What is On Page Optimization?

On-page optimization is one of the types of SEO that refers to factor that gives outcome to website or web page ranking on SERP ( Search Engine Results Page ). On-Page Optimization means controlling webpage by you or by your page coding.

Some of the examples are HTML Code, Meta Tags like Meta Title, Description, Content Quality, Keyword Density, Outbound Links, Image Alt tag etc.

5. What is Off Page Optimization?

Off Page Optimization is also one of the types of SEO that are not controlled by the page coding.

Examples of Off-page optimization Link building, Blog posting, Image Sharing, Document Sharing, Video Sharing, Info graphics submission, Increasing Page Rank and Page Authority, Article submission, Getting high quality links from relevant sites etc.

6. What is Page Rank or PR?

Page Rank is a rank that has been provided by Google for each and every Webpage. This Rank ranges from 0 to 10. This Page Rank is calculated by an Algorithm used by Google Web Search Engine. PR of a web page is based on the number of backlinks that received from other high PR webpage.

7. What is a Backlink?

Backlink means incoming links to a website or webpage. Inbound links are always better than outbound links. Those links are also known as incoming links, inlinks, inward links etc. Getting backlinks from high PR and relevant site is always good. Inlinks from .org, .edu sites would increase your website or webpage ranking on SERP. Do-follow links are better than No-follow links.

8. What are out bound Links?

An outbound-link (OBL) or outgoing link is a link from your website or webpage to another website or webpage.

9. What is a keyword?

Keyword is a word that is used for searching through Search Engines in order to get results related to your searched query.

10. What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the percentage density of a keyword or phrase available on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page. It is one of the important ranking factors for search engines to display a webpage on the SERP. Providing junk keywords on a page would decrease the ranking of a webpage.

11. What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is a clickable hyperlink that is also known as link text, link label and link title. The keyword contained in the anchor text would increase the ranking of a webpage that receives the incoming link.

12. What are organic results?

The page views come directly through SERP and not through any Off Page Optimization is known as organic results.

13. What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google to index a webpage. Crawling, Caching and indexing of a webpage happen through this Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.

14. What are Meta Tags?

There are several Meta tags used in HTML but the top four tags that are used for SEO are Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords and Robot tags.

15. What is Meta Title?

Title is the most important factors for a good SEO of a webpage. These tags should be located within head section. These tags should tell some useful information about that page. A good title tag should contain 60 characters. These titles would appear on the SERP for your website along with the Meta description of that page. Google won't penalize your page if it contains title with more than 60 characters and it skips the remaining characters. If a web page doesn't contain title tag means Google would select the H1 tag as title or it will provide the title by its own.
Always write title tag for the page and not for SEO, if you stuff keywords in you title then Google won't rank your webpage.

16. What is Meta Description?

A description tag should describe a webpage and it should contain keywords but don't stuff all the keywords. Meaningless description would affect your webpage. A description tag should contain 150 – 160 characters. If you provide meaningless or empty description, Google would take the description from the content available in that page.

17. What are Meta Keywords?

In early days Meta keywords are the least important tag for Search engine like Google. But it is an easy way to tell our important keywords to search engine. Meta keywords should contain less than 250 characters.
Now Google won't consider Meta keywords as one of the ranking factor.

18. What is White Hat Seo?

White Hat SEO is one of the SEO techniques that a Search engine always likes. Usage of SEO techniques, tricks and tactics by following search engine rules and regulations, algorithm and policies are known as White Hat SEO.

19. What is Black Hat Seo?

Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO is a common term for doing SEO Spamming Techniques. Usage of SEO by not following policies and regulations of search engine is called as black hat seo. Some of the black hat seo techniques are
Providing Low Quality content or duplicate content on the page
Getting backlinks from spammed or adult sites.
Giving keyword stuffed content on the page with background color
Getting too much backlinks from a single page with different anchor text that targets a single page of your website.
Cloaking
Google Bowling etc


20. On Page SEO Step 2 – Keyword in the URL

On Page SEO and to rank for your keyword when you are blogging and using your name in the domain name. I’m going to show you how it applies to your domain with your name in it. Remember to always put the keyword in the URL
For example: Use www.yourname.com/keyword insteadof www.yourname.com/2010/10/?p=210392.html

21. Difference between keyword & keyword phrase?

The keyword term is basically concerned with a one-word term, on the other hand a keyword phrase considered as employment of two or more word-combinations. Therefore, it is very confounded to get high ranking in account of one-word keyword term until the one-word keyword has little online competition. Therefore, this practice is not encouraged to employ. In order to drive more traffic and top ranking in SERP it is recommended to employ keyword phrase.

22. What is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing?

Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible.

Internet marketing covers a broader range of channels. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing / EDM, social media, and so on.

23. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like

http://www.seocutts.com/orhttp://www.seocutts.com/index.html or http://seocutts.com/ .

The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

24. What is the difference between white hat and black hat?

White hat is what the search engines have stated as being within their guidelines for search engine optimization. Black hat is generally unethical tactics to have a page rank. It usually doesn't work for long and can get you penalized.

25. What is your favorite SEO website/blog, and why?
This is an open ended question. There were some that I were looking for but I was also hoping soemone would tell me a few that I didn't know about.
SeoMoz,

Analytics.Blogspot.com,

GoogleWebMasterCentral.Blogspot.com,

InsideSearch.Blogspot.com and

Search Engine Roundtable are a few good ones. There are actually a lot more.

26. What is on page and off page seo?

On page SEO are the things you can do within the website you own in order to help it rank for the keywords and phrases that you would like it to. Off page SEO are the things that you can do on other web sites towards those same goals.

27. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?

Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.

28. I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?



Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case.

29. What is the difference between Indexing and Crawling?
1) When the Search Engines come to your website and read the data or find the data, this process is called crawling.

2) Whenever Search Engines come to your website, whichever page they crawl, they take a copy of that page with them and save it on their server. This process is done by the search engine is called Indexing

30. Is there a way we can tell Google that a particular webpage contains the Adult content?
Yes, we can do it by adding one of these two meta tags to that webpage
<meta name="rating" content="adult" /> OR
<meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />

31. What is Pagination in SEO?

Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google's advice on using the pagination.

32. What are top SEO ranking factors?

Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time on the webpage.

33. Google’s Quality Score and what role does it play in ranking?

While I do not expect Google’s textbook answer,, I am hoping the candidate understands the basic concept behind QS (clickthrough rate + other factors) and that QS is part of the Ad Rank formula where:

Ad Rank = CPC bid X Quality Score.

Their ability to explain Quality Score and Ad Rank to me in plain English is something I pay very close attention to.

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.

34. How to achieve good CTR in PPC?
Here are few things that need to be kept in mind for CTR
■Target your ads to right audience
■Select correct keyword matching
■See that you target your ads by location and language
■Create different Ad Groups for different search phrases/keywords
■Calculate how much you can afford for the day
■test your ads on daily basis, change if you don`t get any response from users
■Give google users a good reason to click your ad

35. What is pay per click? Which internet marketing model does it follow?

‘Pay per click’ , also known as ‘cost per click’ is a form of internet advertising which is used for directing traffic to websites. In this advertisers pay the site owners or publishers for the ads being viewed or click. Pay per click introduces a simple strategy of marketing in which an advertiser pays the website for publishing his advertisement and getting people to view it by clicking it, the more the views are for the advertisement, better is the revenue generated by the website from advertisement. Generally ‘pay per click’ is used by advertisers on keyword phrases relevant to their target markets. Content sites generally charge a fixed amount per click rather than using a bidding system. ‘Pay per click’ advertisements are commonly displayed on websites and search engine results.‘Pay per click’ is an approach that differs from the ‘pay per impression’ methods used in television and newspaper advertising.

36. Where do you put your robots.txt?
a) Search for it in Google
b) In Webmaster Tools
c) The root directory of your domain or subdomain(s)
d) In the folder you want to disallow

37. Your site is flagged as having malware, but you can’t find the malware. What do you do?

a) Submit a reconsideration request
b) Post in the Google Webmaster Help Forum to ask for help
c) Tweet a complaint to @google
d) Abandon your domain name and start over again

38. “Unreachable robots.txt” in Webmaster Tools crawl errors means

a) You don’t have a robots.txt file
b) We couldn’t reach the robots.txt file on your server
c) Your robots.txt file disallows access to your robots.txt file
d) Your robots.txt file requires a password

39. You would like your site to be found for some keywords related to your content which are only found in images on the page. How do you do this?
a) Place the keywords in an image on the website
b) Use the “keywords” meta tag
c) Use the “description” meta tag
d) Use the “alt” attribute or include the keywords in your text
e) Place them in tiny text in the footer

40. All major search engines are case sensitive.
a.True
b.False

41. Which of the following file is created to give instructions to SE bots?

a. Index.html
b. Spiders.txt
c. sitemap.xml
d. Robots.txt
e. Searchbot.xml

42. What is the difference between 301 redirect & 302 redirect ?
The difference between a 301 and a 302 is that a 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location, while a 302 status code means that a page has temporarily moved to a new location.

If you have little bit of experience, here are the frequently asked questions for you:

1. What was your exact job profile in your previous company?

Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.

2. How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

3. How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?

With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer,Backlink finder etc.

4. What is the difference between Spiders, Robots and Crawlers?

A spider, also known as a robot or a crawler, is a program that follows, or "crawls", links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes.

5. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while SEM involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

6. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of other documents with relevant text associated with links back to Wikipedia.

Spamming Techniques, Scam Reports, Black Hat SEO Tips, Negative SEO Techniques

Finding Scam and Spamming Techniques

Finding internet spammer is not an easy task. Most of us don’t know how to find a spammer who has been doing spamming techniques in our Site or Blog. Even though you are having good quality content in your blog or site, sometimes you may not be considered by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. The main reason behind that is ‘SPAM’. Yeah! There are many intelligent spammers in this internet world who have more knowledge to cheat our GENIUS search engines.

 

 If google is updating its algorithm in some way then that brilliant spammers would also update their spamming techniques. Spamming Techniques not only includes Duplicate Content or Hidden Text or Hidden Anger Link or bla bla bla. This spam tree has more branches and leaves. Here I’m going to give some basic techniques for spam.

1. Linking to Irrelevant Website and Content
2. Giving Backlinks to a site that was banned by search engine
3. Keyword Stuffing
4. Increased Bouncing Rate
5. Low Quality Content with irrelevant anger link
6. Repeated keywords in Meta Tags like Title, Description and also in URL
7. Jung or Bulk Submission of the site in several Submission Site like Article site, bookmarking site etc
8. Copying Content from other’s sites and providing them in our site without editing the content
9. Link forming (having interlinking within a group of people)
10. Cloaking (providing one kind of page to user’s browser and another kind of page to search engine spiders by using redirect code in CSS style or User-agent HTTP)
11. Paid Links (Selling Links for Money)
12. Google Bowling (A technique to remove certain site from google SERPs)
13. Comment posting in irrelevant blog and giving unrelated Link.