Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

By Simon van Wyk

Following on with this month’s theme of the legends of marketing, let’s focus on case studies in all types of marketing, not just digital marketing. Here are some websites where you can find some really useful examples to apply to your own business:

Marketing Magazine case studies: This Australian publication has dozens of case studies to choose from. My favourites include Cabana Boys, a creative agency born during the depths of the GFC, the ANZ Bank’s sponsorship of the Broadway musical Wicked, Australia’s quintessential sandshoe, Dunlop Volleys, and the Transport Action Commission of Victoria’s “Pictures of You” campaign.

read more

By Simon van Wyk

Your online presence fairly bristles with opportunities to collect data about every visitor to your site. And it’s also easy to collect information about the competitive environment in which that your site operates. Measurement and analytics tools can inform your marketing with hard data about consumer behaviour that just can’t be measured in the offline environment.

read more

By Simon van Wyk

Search engine optimisation can make a huge difference to the way your site ranks on search engine result pages – and therefore will directly affect your traffic. And most experts engaged to develop a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy for any website will follow a similar process.

read more

By Simon van Wyk

Number one on Google – that’s the Holy Grail that search engine optimisation (SEO) was meant to deliver to savvy site owners.

SEO involves tweaking your website to appear in the first page of Google search results for the keywords your customers are most likely to enter and yes, it’s Google we care most about, because Google still reigns on the Internet.

read more

The old chestnut “Half of my advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half” doesn’t apply to online advertising. While there is as of yet no foolproof formula for measuring online success, the data you can collect from visitors makes it much easier to find patterns and test various methods to determine which ad works best.

Here are a couple of places to go to learn more about how to do this for your business:

• Search Marketing Now (SMN) has produced a webcast that covers the basics of ad tracking. As SMN says, “Any good Internet marketing professional knows that assigning all of the value to the last ad clicked on before the conversion is inherently flawed. Most Internet advertisers, however, lack 1)The tracking technology required to determine the actual team of ads and their sequence that lead to the conversion; and the valuation methodology to properly assess each ad’s true contribution and value to the conversion…. there is no industry-accepted standard or method for assigning relative value to ads in the path. How do we effectively attribute which ad - or group of ads - ultimately led to the final conversion?”

• The Conversation Marketing website states boldly that  “Advertising exists to help you make money. That’s it. There are no moral victories in marketing.” Advising that you need to track the ROI of online advertising “every bit as carefully as other media,” the site outlines four simple questions that enable you to measure the effectiveness of each of your Internet assets: 1) What’s the goal of your web site? 2)What’s that goal worth? What’s the value each time you accomplish that goal? 3) How many times did you achieve that goal? 4) What did it cost to achieve it? Find out more here.

• Measuring the Social – Shifting Towards Online Advertising – Dan Neely, founder and CEO of social media and customer intelligence company Networked Insights, has produced a short video explaining the increasing importance for companies to measure and understand the complete online social situation as it affects online advertising. He says, “The current macro-economic environment will impact both offline and online ad spend….In the recent meetings with the ‘big three’ US auto makers in Washington, General Motors CEO James Wagoner said that GM would be shifting a substantial amount of their $500 million ad budget online…. Although this is smart, it’s only the first step as its not simply about shifting ad dollars online, it’s about doing this efficiently and intelligently - targeting the right people with the right content. Check out Dan Neely’s video here.