March 9th, 2010 admin
At Nina Hale Inc, many of our clients use social media ads, particularly Facebook, to reach their target audience and connect with social media users. The reporting currently available through Facebook leaves a lot to be desired. We’ve searched high and low for opportunties to improve reporting for our clients and provide more actionable data to help increase this engagement in this channel.
Now for our Omniture clients there is good news!
In May 2009, Omniture announced an exciting partnership with Facebook. Just last week they announced that they are expanding on that partnership with Facebook (and apps) to include analytics capabilities. The SearchCenter Plus product, available to SiteCatalyst customers, will initially focus on automating the media buying process and access to analytics that measure consumer engagement on Facebook. The idea is to make it even easier for clients to purchase ad space as well as compare metrics alongside their other media channels with a tool they are familiar with using.
Some of the key features of the partnership will give clients the ability to:
- Gain deeper insights into user behavior throughout Facebook apps—Improve the overall user experience and conversion
- Understand how apps “go viral” amongst Facebook users
- Segment users by number of friends and categorize these segments by social activity performed to better understand adoption rate
- Correlate Facebook reports and key events with other online channel reports such as Web, mobile, video, etc.
- Tools to understand how these channels are impacting conversion
- Measure 100% of Facebook apps including: FBML, iFrame and Flash-based apps
This tool will streamline the ad buying process and reporting for SiteCatalyst customers and may make it much easier for hesitant marketers to make the leap in allocating budget to the wildly popular social networking site.
While we know not all of our clients are using Omniture now, we see this as a great step forward and hope that Google Analytics follows suit.
Google, are you listening?
Sources:
Washington Post
Omniture.com
Posted in Analytics, PPC, Social Media | No Comments »
February 10th, 2010 admin
Wow, how fabulous is this screen shot of a bunch of our clients Google Analytics accounts? Almost everyone is way up, and a lot of those are from Search – both organic and paid. Everyone’s been working hard for our clients and it shows!
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Posted in Analytics, PPC, SEM, SEO | 1 Comment »
February 9th, 2010 admin
Well it was a wild January for us at Nina Hale Inc. Moving into our fourth space in two years (due to growth), having to rip out the caulk from the walls that was smelly and for outdoor use only, adding new staff and everyone getting bigger desks. And the exciting addition of Peter’s hydrualic press capable of applying 20 tons of pressure (video forthcoming). People have been heads-down working like demons and to relax, we’re having our first "it’s smashing!" party this Friday. For office staff only, we’re spending Friday afternoon watching a movie (leaning towards Zombieland) and smashing things. We’ll have a regular office party soon for friends and clients, inviting all comers to bring items they’d like to smash flat.
Here’s Annie, resplendent in her Gopher’s snuggie, building links and optimizing PPC accounts.
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November 29th, 2009 Nina
I have have to drop in a comment about how much I love the Google AdWords Editor for PPC management. The reason is because they are always adding small improvements that display a constant awareness of how SEM campaigns are built, managed and optimized. Case in point: to optimize well, it’s a good idea to run search query reports that show you the keywords that people actually used that resulted in a click to the site (and hence a charge). These often reveal irrelevant keywords so you need to add them to a "negative" list to filter them out of the keywords you pay for your ads to show on. Any-who, when adding these new keywords, you have to add them to each campaign. Sometimes you want to add them indiviudally to campaigns or adgroups, but sometimes they apply to the whole account. In the past I would copy and paste to each campaign. But a small enhancement makes it easier to add across campaigns.
AdWords Editor is filled with all these small considerations, some of which make it much easier, and others you just save a few minutes. But it shows a remarkable attention to all those little things that make optimization easier. Now after my little love note, do you think they’ll wear my letter jacket?
Posted in Google, PPC, SEM | No Comments »
November 29th, 2009 Nina
We’ve posted more photos of our beautiful office to sublet in Uptown Minneapolis. We hate to leave because it’s such a great office, but we need more space. The new photos show the office sublet before we were too crowded in there, and that shows the space much better. It’s a sunny, professional office with four offices, a conference room, and an open area good for a few desks. Basically it’s a very professional office for anywhere from 4-6 people, but not for the 12 we’ve had at times. We’re moving to a much larger space and need someone to sublet this one. Available Jan 1, 2010, this office for rent in Uptown Minneapolis is 1,186 sf, $3,250 per month. See full photos, floor plan and more about our small office space to sublet in Uptown Minneapolis.
Tags: minneapolis office space
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November 15th, 2009 admin
Say it ain’t so! It seems like only a few months since we moved into lovely new digs in our office space in Uptown Minneapolis. That’s because it was only this spring. But we didn’t get a big enough space and now we’re outgrowing this one. So we’re hauling out of here to the far reaches of the warehouse district in Downtown Minneapolis. The new space is going to be FOUR TIMES bigger than this one, so we can’t imagine outgrowing that. We’re talking about having individual kingdoms for everyone, and Peter is promising to bring his 30-ton press so we can have fun squashing things. What else? I may finally fulfill my very real desire to have a life-size horse-shaped lamp.
But it also means that we need to find someone else to rent our minneapolis office. It’s a beautiful, sleek, 1,186 sf space, perfect for 3-6 people (not the 12 we sometimes have in here). There are four indivudual offices, a conference room for eight, and an open area for desks (we have five desks there now, but it’s probably better with two). There are amazing views of Lake Calhoun, heated parking (which I’m especially sad to give up because it’s better for my fancy shoes), secured entry, nightly janitorial services, and access to a small gym included in the rent. Tons of glass open the space up and provide light and views. The monthly rent is $3,250. To see more photos, go to the site we threw up – Minneapolis office space – or call us at 612-392-2427
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October 30th, 2009 admin
Social Media is exactly that. Social. Media. You can’t be social if you sit alone the dark watching Friends. I mean, you can, but then you would be lucky to have invisible friends that won’t return your calls. You need things like Twitter and Facebook so you can send updates and LOL’s to the members of your Friends Fan club when Kramer comes reeling through the door, or when Jerry laughs at one of his own jokes.
In other words, it works best when not in a vacuum. Somebody sitting in a room sending tweets probably isn’t going to garner an article in Fast Company. The brilliant social media plan that Mono developed for BluDot to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of their SoHo store opening, however, did.
What they are doing is dropping a number of their Real Good chairs onto Manhattan streets leaving them free for the taking. That’s right. Free.
The catch is that each chair is tagged with GPS, allowing it’s movements to be tracked throughout Manhattan (or the world) and shared live on a Web site. BluDot will then drop in on the new owners to interview them—whoever they may be—for their website.
The plan is genius because it has all the right elements—something free, something interactive, with a way for people to feel included—all wrapped up in a pretty package that is fun and easy to share.
Nothing short of genius. Orwellian genius, but hey that’s the free lunch part. Now if only we liked Friends as much.
Tags: Social Media
Posted in SEM, Social Media | No Comments »
October 23rd, 2009 admin
I’ve been thinking lately that people may not be able to find some of the pages on the site that we’re the most interested in having you see. These are the main navigation categories above. So let me tell you a little more about ourselves. We’re currently six people strong, with two – four contractors. Most of us have been doing search marketing as a primary or even exclusive offering for ten years or more. A lot of us have worked together at previous agencies, where we teamed on strategy, design, email and merchandizing before settling down to the funnest part of eMarketing – search. I work hard to network with the great search marketing people in Minneapolis and I like to think that most of them are either our employees or our clients (our clients are a sharp lot, lucky we have a no-hiring-clients rule). And if they aren’t yet, hopefully someday they will also work with us.
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September 15th, 2009 admin
We don’t just like Pocket Hercules because one of the partners is my brother-in-law. We like them because they create memorable, impactful ads. Heck I still remember some Ikea ads from the reel Tom showed us all about 10 years ago. Pocket Hercules was just named “
Midwest Small Agency of the Year” (2009) by Advertising Age. I went down to the Pocket Hercules offices this winter, and over lunch helped them launch a PPC test on Facebook. The story goes like this:
Facebook PPC Case Study –
Pocket Hercules & Schell’s Lakemaid Beer
Challenge
Pocket Hercules’ client Schell’s wanted to sell a new line of beer called “Lakemaid Beer” which features fresh-water mermaids. It can be hard to get noticed with a new beer, even with a beer-drinking nymph on the bottle. But once people saw and drank the beer, they were “hooked.” One of the tactics was to create a Facebook page that featured their sharp wit and hilarious videos. But now how to get fans?
Solution
We launched a one-month test using Facebook PPC advertising to target the appropriate demographic and interest groups on Facebook. Using the imagery and irreverence of the brand, the ads encouraged people to watch the videos and become fans of Lakemaid Beer.
Results
In one month and only $300 in ad fees, the Lakemaid fan page grew from 60 fans to over 600. They currently top 1,000 fans.
Facebook advertising is easy to launch and can be inexpensive to test. Nina Hale, Inc. recommends and generally tests Facebook for most of our B2C clients.
Posted in PPC, Social Media | No Comments »
August 12th, 2009 Peter
We’ve been playing with the update to the Google search engine code named "Caffeine". It’s kind of a silly name, but most folks seem to like the practice of naming these updates– I suspect we’ll see more, sillier names as time goes on. In any event, Google might have done a bit more research into the effect of the drug on spiders: caffeine web
Anyway, at first glance the Google update is fast. Very fast. It is also vast– containing over 18 billion web pages, or 2 billion more than the live Google index. The new search also seems to be a bit less affected by link spam. I’ve been critical of Google’s over-emphasis on incoming links for the last few years– allowing spam monkeys to inject themselves into results by just having a million links. EDU top level domains seem to fare a bit better in search rankings. My only wish is that Wikipedia is not always the assumed first result for informational searches– no obvious change there. Someone else should have a chance to rank on the number 5– The Jackson Five perhaps.
Probably the biggest change that we’ve noticed and it may not last once Caffeine is moved to a live environment, but international search has lost their "search for pages in our country" as an option. For example the current Google.DE has three search options, "Das Web", "Seiten auf Deutsch" and" Seiten aus Deutschland". Caffeine only offers all web search and only in German, which may mean that some of us who have optimized international sites on a top level domain targeting a particular country may have to revisit the code and focus on language. Or, perhaps setting the website target region in Google Webmaster’s Tools will actually have an effect:
Time will tell.
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »
