When you publish an image in relation to your brand, you're contributing to the evolution of your brand-its changing face to consumers. Images should be selected carefully and be integral to the message as well as the tenets of your brand. Just the other day in an Arizona business publication, there were two ads for commercial real estate companies using the same stock photo. What's worse, the ads were displayed on the same page. Where is the differentiation among these competing companies? This coincidence serves as an instant downgrade in what might otherwise have been a great piece of marketing. Going further, the ads might cost both companies dearly, detracting from their brands and losing them money.

There are a few key considerations to keep in mind when choosing stock photography:

1. How specific is the image to your message? The more generic an image, the more likely it is to be used across your industry or many industries. Choose genre-specific photos that really drive home the message you are trying to send.
2. Look for quality. Choose honest images with good lighting, color and angling. Look for subtext-how does this tie in with the copy, with the brand?
3. How do you want your brand perceived? Don't turn generic by overlapping your look with your competitors. Stand out. Be memorable.

The solution isn't just investing in rights managed photography or conducting custom photo shoots for every campaign. Royalty free stock photography does exist that meets all of the criteria above. It just takes planning and strategic thinking to pull it off. Why settle for less when it's your brand that's on the line?

There are four main reasons not to use landing pages:

1. They lack context.
2. They bounce enough traffic to beat rubber balls.
3. They turn people off.
4. Your home page should be your best converting page.

They lack context.

Landing pages (also known as squeeze pages or capture pages) exist to convert.

My argument with that is this: Your home page should serve that purpose. If it doesn't, why have it?

I'll go as far as asserting that landing pages alone simply do not work for considered purchases. If they do perform, it's most likely a business that has billions of dollars of stored brand equity and can be instantly recognized and trusted. It's not going to work for more obscure brands. There are millions of small businesses nobody has heard of. Consumers need the whole story.

Take, for example, Wrike. They sell web-based project management software. They're not Basecamp. They're not Microsoft. Most people don't know what they do when they hear the name or see the logo. So even if they're giving away free trials with a landing page, it's not going to convert as well as if they gave away free trials with their home page. Because their home page provides the necessary context and background to tell prospects the whole story, the right way. Even if you're spending just $10 or downloading a piece of software for free, you still want to know who you're dealing with and that it's a secure and trustworthy company before handing over personal information.

They bounce enough traffic to beat rubber balls.

Don't get me wrong, I speak from experience. I was once a believer in the old LP. I've done the landing page/ squeeze page route and have seen results. It's hard to stop doing something or try it a different way when you continue to see at least some kind of results. Squeeze pages do still convert a certain percentage of the traffic that hits them.  But they also have a crushing bounce rate.  Whether it's the overuse of them by affiliate marketers or their aggressive nature or both, they turn more and more people off. They're meant to be slippery slides that get people down the funnel fast but they end up being turbo charged trampolines instead. The vast majority of the people that land on a landing page jump right back off.

Why? Because there's nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do except make a purchase or fill in a form or both. Really, because they turn people off.

They turn people off.

Most of the time, those who do make the purchase are people who were already sold on the product or service before they arrived at the landing page. The rest, the majority of your Internet marketing audience, does not like to be siloed. They don't want to be squeezed.

How well have you responded to an aggressive sales person in a store? How much do you trust that person? If you're like me, you're at the very least annoyed and sometimes angered by pushy or buttery or otherwise manipulative sales people.

Control your home page.

If you need to present different content to different audiences, why not do that with different versions of your Web site's home page? Not only can you serve different versions of a home page to different audiences, but you can also optimize each through multivariate testing. If you don't have that kind of control over your home page, why not? This way, prospects get to see your offer in the context of your whole business. This makes the offer more credible.

Why not create multiple versions of a home page with different focuses and calls to action then test different variables on each for creative performance and optimize based on the results? The effect is dramatically increased conversion rates. It's a better, more effective and more sophisticated approach to online lead generation and sales.

If you try this tactic versus landing pages, you'll see a much lower bounce rate, many more page views and often quite a bit more conversions. When the message is in the context of a professional and well organized Web site, there is a wealth of additional information at the user's fingertips should she be interested. She will be more likely to trust the message when she has the option to go into the Web site and learn more. He will feel more confident about giving his personal information through a professional and branded Web site rather than a seedy old squeeze page. Visitors are much more likely to self select into your list than be pushed or coerced into it.

Let me know what you think.

What do you think? Do you think squeeze pages still work and are perhaps a necessary evil of Internet marketing? Do you think they work for small and medium businesses or just big brands? Or, do you believe that audiences are savvier online these days and would much prefer landing on your home page and having the option to dig a little deeper?

I welcome your comments.

Next week, I'll talk about prospect navigation. Let them explore, but walk them down the right trail.

Your content takes the place of the tangible product to hold. It must answer the questions for the would-be sales person who isn't there. Through extensive research and usability testing, we've identified a set of best practices for writing e-Commerce content:

1. Show the prices.
   Pricing is usually the first thing prospects want to know. It gives a sense of the value of an item, whether it's within the prospect's budget, and whether they're shopping in the right place.
2. Accurate product descriptions.
   Rather than marketing hype, which deters most prospects from your Web site, clear and accurate product descriptions with images will build trust in the consumer for your brand. Descriptions should include enough detail to differentiate products and highlight its precise benefits, yet too much detail is overwhelming. Concise writing using everyday terms is the rule.
3. Photos and illustrations.
   Choose images that show relevant details your prospect cares about. Make it possible for users to enlarge photos for a closer look. Show products from critical vantage points and make zoom-in functionality big enough to show adequate detail but not so big that context is lost.
4. Layer information in order of importance.

Present key points first and make it easy for shoppers to get more specific information. Layered product pages with links to all related information such as details, photos, reviews, accessories and manufacturer information will put all of the relevant information at the prospect's fingertips without overwhelming.

1. Display awards and verifications.
   Show any awards, verifications and recognitions for the quality or your Web site or products and services. This will enhance your credibility and build consumer confidence.

The bottom line: Support sales with quality content online. Sales hype and pushy marketing turn Web users away-it's not what they're looking for. Let the content speak for itself. Make copy concise and informative and present it in a style that suits the Web.

A well-structured navigation system goes unnoticed by users. It allows people to find information effortlessly. The labeling, layout and relationships among content is intuitive, anticipating what users want and allowing them to find it quickly. The goal is to get out of the users way and allow for comfortable and confident exploration.

Natural Progression
Remember that you're designing navigation for your prospects and customers, not for yourself. What makes perfect sense to you might be unfamiliar to your end-users. The best way to know what your audience expects is to get their input.  Then, organize your Web site content in a natural progression toward conversion by reflecting the thinking and needs of your customer base.

For example, your main navigation might serve to answer a progressive series of the most pertinent questions your prospect will have, ending in a call to action, such as "get started."

Resist Cuteness
Efficiency does not mix with loading, rotating animated navigation. Don't make your users wait for main topics of interest to appear. Don't make them hunt for it. The place to flare creatively is in areas of your Web site that users actually care about. Navigation is a means to an end. Main topics should be static and consistent. They should allow people to skim through choices and find what they're looking for quickly. Even the slightest movement can make this process cumbersome. It's best to clearly feature main topics and organize sub-topics intuitively by logic and use.

Label for Clarity and Specificity
What determines where users are led and how they interact with your Web site is navigational labels. They should be easy to understand and specific. Meaningless words get skipped over in favor of informative and distinct terms.  Vague words like discover, learn and the overused, abused click here, announce unpredictable information and create confusion. Specific and explicit category labels, such as articles, advice and tools help eliminate confusion and get users to what they're looking for quickly.

Control Your Lists
Vertical dropdown menus and multi-level menus are widely accepted and understood. However, keep in mind that less is more. Too many nested levels in a menu make it difficult to operate. If you have more than two levels to display, it's better to add further sub-navigation in a side menu on the category page in basic hyperlink format. This will allow more room for descriptions, allowing users to differentiate between choices.

Funnel to Conversion
Reserve the links on your home page for the highest priority operations of your Web site. Avoid using long lists and multiple levels in the home page navigation. Know your audience, plan out the tasks that are most important to them, and present direct links to these areas of your Web site from your home page. Keep it uncluttered and restricted to no more than three to five links on any individual area of your home page. And make these links progressively address the top questions your prospects will have, ending in a call to action, essentially creating a funnel to conversion.

Overall, your navigation system should be designed for your prospect with the goal of staying out of their way and serving them precisely what they need. The best navigation systems are simply not noticed by users because they function well rather than call attention to themselves. Enhancing the user experience and engaging prospects in topics that interest them will lead them quickly down a path toward conversion.

A Blessing or a Curse?

Strategically integrated motion and sound can and does assist usability. Content can be interacted with and therefore produce a more personal and customized experience. The key word is strategically. Indiscriminate use of multimedia creates a sensory overload, disrupts interaction, overwhelms and confuses users. While multimedia definitely has its place on the Web, interactive animation technology can very easily degrade the user experience rather than enhance it.  This usually happens in one of the following three scenarios:

1. Gratuitous animation
   When a Web designer adds personal multimedia flare for the sake of expression, the interface design becomes cumbersome and less user friendly.
2. Unconventional interactivity
   There are essential best practices for interactivity, such as the standards established by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), that should be followed for optimal user experience.
3. Resource intensive
   This doesn't just mean bandwidth and CPU, but also time, thought and effort that would be best spent enhancing usability and quality of content.

The Time and Place

There is a time and a place for the appropriate use of rich media. Music sites should play music, movie and entertainment sites are great when they have sample clips and video libraries, automotive Web sites need to have configurators, and vacation destination sites are enhanced when they have virtual tours available. In all of these and similar cases, multimedia is used to complement the content rather than the primary mode of delivering the content.

Even when used appropriately, the system limitations of users should always be accounted for when designing Web sites with multimedia elements. Don't force users to download plug-ins or third party applications in order to use your Web site. If you feature audio or video elements, include text versions as well. Accessibility will ensure that your Web site reaches the widest audience possible.

A Word About Autoplay

Don't do it. The majority of visitors to your Web site want to decide for themselves what content they want and when. Immediately playing sound or video is forceful and intrusive, especially for users who land on your Web site from a quiet environment like his or her office. Additionally, tests have shown that autoplay versus click-to-play video drives down conversions.

Keep it Simple

Simple and graceful design with restraint and subtlety is not easy to do. It requires knowing your audience and their goals, having a solid strategy for how to help them achieve those goals, and executing that strategy effectively. Designing for elegance and functionality takes planning and forethought. With any design decision you make along the way, the question you should be asking yourself is: does this add value to the user? If the answer is no, simply don't do it. Eliminate clutter, simplify interactions, and make sure every element on every page has a purpose.

Sophisticated, user friendly Web sites are well planned, organized and functional. The essential rule for optimizing the user experience is function before beauty. Primarily, know your user. Strategizing and designing your Web site with your users in mind will always lead you in the right direction.

Brand building is a customer loyalty labor of love. People will talk about your products and services. They'll talk about your brand. Satisfied customers are free marketing and PR for your brand. They're repeat purchasers as well as referrers. There are also unsatisfied customers who contribute negative word-of-mouth advertising, destroying your brand. Then there are the in-between-customers who are satisfied but passive. They're not talking about you and they're happy to go to a competitor if there is a better deal. Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, classed these groups of customers into three distinct groups and named them Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. In this book, the ultimate question posed to customers is: How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?" Answers are given as a number on a scale from one to ten.

• Promoters:
  Customers who talk positively about your brand, products, or services to their friends and family. These customers are those who assert that they would be extremely likely to recommend your company to a friend or colleague, answering with a nine or a ten.
• Passives:
  Customers who have nothing bad to say about your company, but aren't as likely to recommend it to others. These customers answer with a seven or eight.
• Detractors:
  Customers who are more likely to have negative things to say about your company. These customers' answers range from zero to six.

Start a Conversation

Opening a dialogue with your customers, making it easy and keeping it flowing is essential to building your brand and your promoters. One classic and very successful example is eBay's feedback and customer review capabilities. Not only are customers interacting with the brand, but with each other, and eBay stays out of their way while enhancing the user experience and gaining important information.

So how do you improve your score? That's part 2…

As we said in part one, there's only one question that matters. It's the opinion of your customer about your business that matters. People don't respond well to surveys and they're typically asking the wrong questions anyway.

According to a Forrester's survey, consumers trust the opinions of friends about products or services more than any other source, including published reviews, television commercials, or reviews from people they have never met. But a survey seems hardly necessary. All you have to do is ask yourself: How much do you trust the opinions of your friends and family? How do those opinions affect your purchase decisions?

According to Reichheld, a company's net promoter score (NPS) is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.  It's an important number for any business, if not the only number that really matters. The average company in the United States has an NPS of less than 10%. This is dismal news. Or it's good news, depending on perception, because the potential to raise your NPS and be performing far above the average is high. So how do companies achieve this?

Your customers will be prepared to recommend your business when they feel good about doing business with you. To achieve this level of satisfaction for your customers, you must reach them on two levels:

• Logically: Your customers know they're getting a great value. Whether the value is the price, features, quality and ease of use, or a combination, the value is obvious .
• Emotionally: Your customers are loyal to you. They feel that your brand understands them, values them, listens to them and acts accordingly.

When both the head and the heart are invested, your customers will enthusiastically recommend your company to friends and colleagues. Your NPS score will soar and growth will follow.

What do you do with your detractors? That's part 3…

Maximizing your promoters is a matter of designing your customer's whole experience with your brand, from social to search to your actual Web site, around shaping their positive opinions. Don't waste time focusing on just one aspect of your Web site to boost conversion or by focusing on just paid search to boost clicks. Spend your energy, time and money optimizing the whole experience for an integrated, cohesive brand story that will engage and charm your customers, winning them as promoters.

The Simple Formula

1. Determine your company's NPS by surveying your customer base with two questions: the ultimate question noted above and the primary reason for the rating.
2. Determine the results and address the top priorities of detractors.
3. Address the priorities of Passives and Promoters and develop strategies to energize Passives into Promoters.
4. After addressing these customer priorities and executing strategies, wait six months to one year and survey again.

Converting detractors into passives and passives into promoters will increase your score significantly. In order to achieve this, it's usually necessary to have a culture change within your business, making it customer-centric and incorporating superior customer service into your brand identity. It's very important to develop a strategy for handling complaints. This will require a customer feedback tool that's easy to use and unbiased, and a plan for addressing each complaint.

The formula is simple, but not easy. However, the concept is easy: The fundamental action required is to do right by your customers. Realigning your goals to meet your customers' priorities may not be an overnight process, but the rewards will inevitably be greater than the costs.

What caused you to hold the beliefs that you have right now? Did you snap to instantly at the glance of an image or the affect of a few words? Not likely. You had a range of experiences over time that culminated into what you now believe. Getting here has been a process-a shaping and forming. This is the fundamental error with the idea of last click measurements in gauging Internet marketing campaign success. It's not the last ad before the sale that should get all the credit.

The ability to precisely track and report the performance of advertising campaigns online is unprecedented. It has's given marketers access to granular data that offline, traditional advertising campaigns had no way of measuring. However, even Internet marketing campaigns are multi-faceted and complex, --perhaps especially -because publishing content on the Web is so easy and instantaneous that it's often more widespread than offline campaigns. Presently, tThe reporting tools for measuring Internet marketing campaign success presently have no way of capturing this complexity. Instead, the standard model gives complete credit for conversion over  to the last ad clicked before transaction.

In this three3-part blog series, we'll discuss how the effective return on investment (EeROI) is measured across the funnel and how to track results effectively.

There is such a thing as an online sales funnel. Advertising networks and portals, as well as rich and social media platforms, have a wide reach that builds brand awareness. While search marketing tends to be the deal-closing step in the sales funnel, it's still just one step. There is no accounting for the interest and awareness building accomplished by the rest of the assets in the Internet marketing campaign.

Advanced Attribution - Spread The Love

Let's not forget that people usually conduct multiple searches and make many clicks to an e-commerce Web site before actually transacting a purchase. We all know the last click is not the whole picture. If it were, we'd all just bid on our branded key phrases and go home.

The Microsoft Atlas Institute developed Engagement Mapping technology, a model that evaluates the effectiveness of every touch point in the Internet marketing campaign, not just the last. What Engagement Mapping studies has revealed is that clicks don't trump views. A large portion of sponsored search ad clickers have seen a display ad before they clicked.

In part three3 of this series, we'll look at the whole picture and how best to analyze it when tracking results.

Every conversion has a story-, a history. When you capture data from the whole conversion history, you can optimize more effectively. The effective return on investment (EROI)EROI is a measurement of the performance of many different ads across a campaign, often from various publishers, that are reaching prospects before they convert into customers.

Different publishers serve different parts of the funnel.  Most publishers serve the upper and middle parts of the funnel, such as video and entertainment Web sites, news and lLifestyle Web sites and ad networks. With the Engagement Mapping model, weight is given to clicks, click orderr, and impressions.

Get a Dashboard

Consolidate tracking and reporting into one central dashboard. This will deliver the most accurate cross-channel campaign performance throughout the sales funnel. Impressions, as well as clicks, should be factored into conversion reporting. EROI is different based on campaign goals and the Engagement Mapping model accounts for these differences.

Overall, employing the Engagement Mapping model to determine the EROI for each asset in an Internet Marketing campaign will yield detailed and useful information with which to optimize every piece of a campaign, resulting in better performance.

• Content + Popularity + Money

The High School Analogy

Gaining success in search is like gaining popularity in high school. When you're the new kid, you're unknown and on the outside of all the cliques and lowest on the social hierarchy. There are a couple of ways that you can gain popularity. One quick way is with money- buy everybody lunch every day for a week. You'll have a host of instant friends. It may not last long, but the results will be immediate. Then there is the good old fashion way of making friends one by one. Prove you're a good and interesting person and eventually one of the more popular kids will take notice and bring you into the popular crowd. This takes time, but is lasting and cumulative.

In this five-part blog series, we'll discuss this formula at length, beginning with the importance of research in building your search strategy.

The first step in any search campaign is research. Build lists of keywords and phrases to target, bucket them into groups such as audience segments and employ a tool to accurately forecast your results based on budget. Paid search campaigns can be built and launched from this data alone. Once the data is aggregated, content can be analyzed for targeted key phrases. Is your content optimized to capture that traffic? Are there gaps to be filled? Evaluate each page for which bucket it should target and optimize its tags and content accordingly.

It's also important to align your research to your specific business goals. How much of your desired result is new client acquisition and how much is retention? Create buckets and build content pages around these goals as well.

After research, the strategy begins with information architecture optimization. We'll take a look at that in part three.

The beauty of Internet marketing is that you can adjust strategy based on performance. If you're attracting a good amount of traffic for certain phrases, you can easily look at how that traffic is behaving and adjust your strategy accordingly. The number of page views and conversion rates are key points to watch. If paid search converts higher and organic yields more page views, you may want to create magnet pages to optimize these results.

The pillars of successful search performance to optimize based on performance are:

• Information Architecture optimization
  • Content optimization
  • Popularity optimization
  • Paid search and display advertising budgets

Information Architecture Optimization

The way your Web site gets indexed by the search engine spiders can be guided by your linking and navigational structure. Keeping navigational information as plain text is key, as search engines don't index images of words. There needs to be a clean path from your home page to any page you want indexed by the search engines. Using bread crumb trails as secondary navigation is a good idea because page names are used as anchor text and they always lead back to the main page.

Information architecture informs content strategy, which relates directly to popularity. Remember the high school analogy? How interesting and cool you are is what makes you popular over time. We'll discuss content and popularity in part four of this blog series.

Knowing how to optimize your content means knowing your audience. What key phrases do they type in when looking for your products or services? What language do they use? Your audience conduct queries using their own vocabulary, so plain spoken content rich with these specific phrases is always the way to go. Avoid using industry jargon or clever turns of phrase. Headlines are the most important pieces of content on the page to optimize linguistically. First, because search engines give more weight to headlines when indexing your pages and second because your visitors often don't read beyond headlines when scanning your content. They're more likely to read on if the words they typed in the search field appear in your headline. One strategy to use when optimizing your content initially is to think about what your customers' problems are. It's tempting to focus on the features and benefits of your solution, yet your customers are more likely searching for the solution by describing their problem.

Popularity Optimization

Attracting links to your Web site is essential in building your reputation. A simple way to achieve this initially is to include links in your press releases, which will cause sites that report on news to link to your site. You can also submit your Web site to online directories, some of which charge for links. But the most important factor in attracting links from reputable sources is to have good content. If you have a high-quality product or service, people will talk about it and link to your Web site. If you have interesting content and helpful tools, other Web sites will link to you.

Back to the high school analogy once again-even if you're the most interesting and coolest kid around, the other kids aren't going to know that right away. So we'll talk about the part of the formula that gets instant popularity points even before anyone knows who you are-money.

Knowing how to optimize your content means knowing your audience. What key phrases do they type in when looking for your products or services? What language do they use? Your audience conduct queries using their own vocabulary, so plain spoken content rich with these specific phrases is always the way to go. Avoid using industry jargon or clever turns of phrase. Headlines are the most important pieces of content on the page to optimize linguistically. First, because search engines give more weight to headlines when indexing your pages and second because your visitors often don't read beyond headlines when scanning your content. They're more likely to read on if the words they typed in the search field appear in your headline. One strategy to use when optimizing your content initially is to think about what your customers' problems are. It's tempting to focus on the features and benefits of your solution, yet your customers are more likely searching for the solution by describing their problem.

Popularity Optimization

Attracting links to your Web site is essential in building your reputation. A simple way to achieve this initially is to include links in your press releases, which will cause sites that report on news to link to your site. You can also submit your Web site to online directories, some of which charge for links. But the most important factor in attracting links from reputable sources is to have good content. If you have a high-quality product or service, people will talk about it and link to your Web site. If you have interesting content and helpful tools, other Web sites will link to you.

Back to the high school analogy once again-even if you're the most interesting and coolest kid around, the other kids aren't going to know that right away. So we'll talk about the part of the formula that gets instant popularity points even before anyone knows who you are-money.

We here so much about conversion rates for Internet Marketing campaigns, yet not all Web Sites are selling products or services online. Or, if they do, they do so as a secondary revenue stream while the primary purpose for the Web site is to get people in the door of one of their multiple retail store locations. These multi-location retailers have goals for their Web sites that are distinct from other types of retailers.

Foot Traffic, not Cyber Traffic

The conversion that multi-location retailers are looking for is turning cyber traffic into foot traffic. Once in the store, the POS marketing efforts can take over. For these retailers, the two main goals of a Web site are to help customers find their nearest store and navigate to it as well as to allow customers to research products before they purchase. Consistency of branding, messaging and domain names on Web sites are important, even in the context of paid search advertisements, to affirm credibility and bran safety, creating trust in the consumer's mind that right from the source is the best, most relevant information.

The following are eight best practices for multi-location retailer Web sites:

1. Maintain only one Web site for consumers.
   Multiple Web sites for one corporation can be confusing for consumers because they don't know where to go or who to trust online.  One corporate Web site with a "store finder" utility is best for a retail franchise.
2. Use only one domain name.
   Both search engines and consumers can get confused and disoriented when your information is scattered among multiple domains. You don't have multiple logos or multiple names for your company, so why have multiple domains?
3. Build regional and location-specific microsites that are flexible and updated often.
   Microsites are smaller sites within your corporate Web site that can be tailored for each brand or location. Keep them fresh with new and frequently updated content.
4. Use Geo-IP technology to automatically list the closest locations on the home page.
   One of the main things customers want to know when visiting your Web site is where to find one of your locations. Make this as easy as possible with Geo-IP targeting.
5. Make location search prominent and easy to identify in navigation.
   Always feature the "Find a Store" link prominently in your main navigation.
6. Use the domain as the display URL in all paid search campaigns.
   Vanity URLs or other domains can be misleading and disorienting to customers.
7. Employ a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that works.
   Make sure that the people who are looking for you can find you quickly and easily. Target both nationally, for generic terms, and locally, for location searches.
8. Use Web forwarding services.
   If you use separate domains for tracking purposes, use the forwarding services provided by domain registrars to direct them directly to regional or location-specific pages within the main Web site.

Employ these eight best practices and watch the foot traffic through your retail location doors increase, sometime dramatically.

This is the first blog post in a four-part series about multi-location retailers and their Internet best practices. Next time, we'll address the three main reasons why it's important for these retailers to have only one domain Web site.

"When to use an entirely new domain? When you don't want it to rank at the search engines. Seriously, though, a new domain, even for many of the world's largest brands, is not a particularly good idea. It's practical for entirely new campaigns, like a new movie (though if I were Warner Brothers or MGM, I'd opt for warnerbrothers.com/newmovie) or a new brand, and it's obviously necessary when building a new company. Other than these limited uses, however, multiple domains hosting content that could fit on an existing domain is brand dilution. I'd liken it to retail stores only taking American Express Gold cards and rejecting AmEx Corporate or AmEx Blue - overly segmented and dangerous for the consumer mindset (particularly consumers named Google, Yahoo! or MSN)."  - SEOmoz

Why Keep a Single Web Site?

1. Popularity: The key to search engine ranking is popularity. Leveraging the almost one million visits per month to the main franchise domain makes each local microsite even more popular.
2. Ranking: If each location has a Web site, this creates unnecessary competition for the same search engine ranking. By contrast, pages on an authoritative Web site will always outrank a new domain or landing page. The authoritative ranking in the #1 or #2 spot for the keyword "massage" with over 700,000 searches per month would be significantly jeopardized with multiple top-level domains.
3. Branding: Both consumers and search engines don't have to figure out which is the official Web site. It's always having one Web site that limits brand dilution.

In part three of this series, we'll address five common pitfalls that can easily be avoided by having and maintaining a single Web site.

With over 32.2 million smartphone units sold in 2008*, there's no question that the demand for mobile Web sites is growing. Here are some tips on how you can make an efficient mobile Web site that will give your users the interaction they're expecting.

Mobile Detection
Your Web site needs to detect when a user is on a mobile phone and automatically redirect to the mobile Web site. Adding a "mobile site" link to your regular Web site defeats the purpose, as mobile users then have to wait for the entire site to load then go looking for the link.

It's also important to have a "full site" link on your Mobile Web site. Mobile Web sites often don't have all the content the full site provides. Avoid putting your users in a position where they can't find what they need.

Who said bigger is better?
There's nothing more tedious and frustrating than waiting for a Web site to load on your mobile phone when you only need a small piece of information, but that doesn't mean you should throw aesthetics out the window. Be smart about your mobile Web site design and graphics:

• Use html/css techniques when possible instead of graphics. Take advantage of borders, background color, and ascii symbols.
• If you are using graphics:
  • Be smart about file formats. Make sure you choose the file format that provides you with the best image quality and smallest file size.
  • Repeat what you have. Duplicate image use where possible.
  • Size Down. The average width of some of the most popular smartphones is 320px. There's no need to have graphics wider than 320px on your mobile Web site.

Simplicity is Key
Give your users what they want.  Analyze what your Web site offers and use that information to determine what resources your visitors want most, especially when they're on a smartphone. They're typically looking for locations, hours, contact information, prices, etc. Put only the most important resources on the mobile Web site. Users can find additional information by clicking on the "full site" link, if needed.

Resources
* http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=688116

1. Avoid duplicate content.
   Duplicate content, specifically as it results from affiliate marketers or multi-location retailers that use the same set of templates placed on different Web sites, damages link popularity and brand integrity. The affect on ranking is measured by many links to one URL, not many links to many URLs. Google now singles out these duplicate content Web sites for blacklisting.
   
2. Avoid competition for rankings.
   Multiple Web sites create confusion not just for the consumer but also for search engines. By having them, search engines must work to determine which of the hundreds of Web sites is more relevant.
3. Avoid link farms, Web rings and site networks.
   Links to and from many related Web sites that are not under one domain could appear to the search engines as link farms or site networks, which are blacklisted.
4. Avoid quality issues.
   The quality of the site counts. Quality is not just visual appeal, but technical foundation, proper code and accurate content.
5. Avoid looking like a phishing scam.
   Anyone can purchase a domain name and create a site that includes the brand name. Phishing scams often use these tactics to collect personal information from consumers. Maintaining one Web site prevents consumers and even today's Web browsers from incorrectly identifying the site as a phishing site.

In the final part of this series, we'll address the increasingly challenging world of e-mail marketing, offer four best practices for list management and look at what some other top retailers are doing.

Something Smells Phishy
Many brands struggle with avoiding phishing scams, which are fake e-mails that appear to be sent from a trusted company, yet they're scammers sending customers to a spoof Web site to steal their personal information. Most companies educate their customers on how to spot and report these spoof e-mails and Web sites. If your company has multiple legitimate Web sites, how will your customers distinguish between official sites and phishing scams?

Here are four actions you can take to improve your e-mail marketing:

1. Centralize the management of e-mail lists and create a global unsubscribe.
2. Always link to one main, official Web site to avoid looking like a phishing scam.
3. Maintain and enforce a corporate privacy policy.
4. Localize the e-mails and include announcements on local events and promotions.

What are other retailers doing?
Let's leave off with some retailers who exemplify these principles in action. While some retailers struggle with legacy technology that impedes the ability to aggregate local and regional microsites, the following SEO-friendly retail franchises maintain a single top-level domain structure for their Web sites:

• Red Door Spas uses one top-level domain with SEO friendly location microsites: http://www.reddoorspas.com/RedDoorLocations/newyorkcityspa.aspx
• The Little Gym uses one top-level domain. All location-specific top-level domains 301 redirect to the location microsites within the site. http://www.thelittlegym.com/ashevillenc/pages/default.aspx
• The UPS Store uses one top-level domain with location microsites:  http://www.theupsstorelocal.com/2020/
• Life Time Fitness uses one top-level domain with a sub-domain for location microsites: http://clubs.lifetimefitness.com/page/Allen-McKinney/11274/
• LA Fitness also uses one top-level domain with location microsites, but could benefit from search friendly URLs: http://www.lafitness.com/Pages/clubhome.aspx?clubid=458&clubStatusID=1
• SuperCuts is also similar to LA Fitness:
• http://www.supercuts.com/salondetail/default.asp?salonid=9676&searchAddr=85282
• Tony & Guy has a good URL structure, uses Geo-IP on the search page but could benefit from moving the Geo-IP list to the home page:
• http://toniguy.com/salon/chandler_fashion_center/default.aspx
• Brite Smile has microsites with an SEO friendly URL structure:
• http://www.britesmile.com/teeth-whitening-med-spa-beverly-hills.html
• State Farm Insurance also requires that even agent domains like www.SharonLayman.com redirect via Web forwarding to their microsites on the State Farm domain. http://online2.statefarm.com/b2c/sf/agent/03/1237

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For those yet unfamiliar, RTB stands for real time bid. The technology infrastructure allows demand side platforms or DSPs to participate in real time auctions for remnant inventory. When an ad call hits the auction from a publisher, the DSPs seated there analyze thousands of data points and decide in a millisecond whether to bid on the impression and at what cost.

A New Level of Performance
Selecting a pricing type and setting a bid on a campaign is what determines delivery and performance for that campaign. The most common pricing model has historically been CPM (cost per thousand impressions). A CPC (cost per click) pricing model is usually used for targeted campaigns where the goal is to drive traffic to a specific landing page. CPA (cost per action) pricing models are where an advertiser pays only for approved actions as defined in a contract with the publisher. These types are rare and typically only available to big brand advertisers with a proven track record of performance.

The Birth of the Performance Goal
When you run a CPM campaign, you can either set a bid for a straight CPM, purchasing a set number of impressions at a set price, or you can set a performance goal that the ad server will optimize toward, depending on the ad server and your service contract. The performance goal can be either a CPC goal (cost per click) or a CPA goal (cost per action).

In the second part of this blog series, we'll take a look at how and why dynamic CPM (dCPM) is a game changer in the performance goal playing field.

A dynamic CPM or dCPM campaign works the same as a CPM campaign in that you set a bid that is a flat price for one thousand impressions and add a CPC or CPA goal to optimize toward. The important difference is that with CPM, the ad server can only pay the exact bid amount for each impression, regardless of the goal. With dCPM and with the advent of RTB exchanges, each ad call can be evaluated in real time to determine what the impression is worth and the DSP can bid that price. In the end, it will average out to the set bid price or just under.

For example, if you have a dCPM bid of $2.00, your DSP might bid 50 cents for one impression and $3.50 for another, depending on its value. The dCPM model is ideal for RTB exchanges because, depending on the DSP's technology infrastructure, it can potentially maximize performance by having the flexibility to "hand pick" each impression and pay exactly what it's worth. With a flat CPM model, you would never have access to those more valuable impressions, which are the more likely to convert. Likewise, you may overpay for many impressions that are worth far less than the CPM bid amount.

Every advertiser is after the same goal: To maximize their ROI. The power of dCPM combined with RTB exchanges creates a whole new level of competition and performance potential that has been and will continue to generate significantly higher ROIs for advertiser's who have access to the technology and infrastructure.

There are a number of popular audience targeting methods used for Internet marketing campaigns. Many advertisers are confused as to which ones to leverage and at what cost? For SEM or paid search, the targeting has historically been keyword and inventory based, perhaps with a frosting of geo-targeting on top. But what about display? Is the targeting being left in the hands of the Ad servers or exchange networks?

The Digital Advertising Big Picture
Digital advertising has been on the rise. It's not stopping, either. In the US, Forrester predicts that display advertising will grow from $8.4 billion at year-end to $17 billion in 2014. Online display advertising is growing and changing so quickly, audience targeting is more complex than ever. There are also more Internet users than ever, so how do you talk to the right ones at the right time and most importantly, the right price? Let's look at the top three categories of targeting being used today and the success rates of each.

1. Standard Targeting - This category is for the highest level and most simplistic targeting methods that are almost always used in any Internet marketing campaign. These include location (geographic, time of day, languages), demographic (gender, age, economic spectrum, household income), technographic (browsers, operating systems, connection speeds, and screen resolutions), and inventory (Web sites, publishers, categories, and channels).
2. Behavioral Targeting - The level of complexity here can be infinite. Advertisers can build custom behavioral targeting segments with multiple data points to configure an accurate behavioral profile. Behavioral targeting can yield high conversion rates when used properly. The important fact to consider is the more complex your BT segments, the less inventory available. As you limit your target audience, you also limit the range of inventory available for those select users.
3. Retargeting - Retargeting (also called remarketing) involves placing a Beacon on a page to collect data on site visitors, tracking their behavior (such as uncompleted purchases), then serving ads to those visitors related to the same product or service. The conversion rate is often highest on retargeting tactics over any other targeting tactic because the audience has already demonstrated a certain level of interest by visiting the site.

All About the User Experience
In addition to boosting performance, a primary reason to execute a well-planned targeting strategy on your Internet Marketing campaigns is to deliver a better user experience for your prospects and customers. When you target specific audiences you can create relevant messages specifically for them. The more relevant your message, the more useful it is for the consumer. The ability to deliver relevant messages to different types of consumers is arguably the most important function of targeting.

But what about the bottom line? Of course, performance is also paramount.  In part two of this blog series, we'll discuss how to enhance targeting and boost performance.