Rose Osprey Marketing: Cutting-Edge SEO, PPC, & Web Analytics

Monetizing Your Digital Magazine

A digital magazine can be downloaded to your Adobe Reader, rather than mailed to your home. Digital magazines simulate the act of “turning pages” by clicking an arrow. It appears as if you are looking at a Xeroxed magazine through one of those old-school newspaper-viewers they had before computers. You know the ones where you turn the dial and you see a microfiche of the next page?

Of course the quality is a lot nicer now.

There are several ways that you can make money using this business model. You need content, SEO, and analytics in order to get advertisers. It is a bit more complex, but these are the basics. The need for good content is a given, so I will concentrate on the other two areas.

Analytics for Digital Magazine & Content Sites

The primary issue is that your readers are consuming content in two completely different areas: the Adobe Reader Magazine and on the web. Some people will prefer one or the other, some both. You will probably have to reconcile this data for your advertisers.

Or just lose the magazine and go with only web content.

Assuming you must keep the magazine, here are the ways to monetize the content:
a) Adsense/ Doubleclick type ads (“non-guaranteed inventory”)
b) Direct advertiser purchases (“guaranteed inventory”)
c) Affiliate links
d) Paid Subscriptions
e) Selling users’ personal information or using it in some way.

A. To make money with this type of content you need good content (obviously), a lot of pages, and visible ads (because we want people to click on advertisers ads). Advertisers care about getting converting traffic to their traffic. If you don’t provide it, they will stop advertising on your domain.
The advantage of adsense is that you can set it and leave it and the inventory will be filled. The disadvantages are that you can’t place adsense on adobe pages and you have little control over your advertisers.

B. There are two types of ad purchases: An ad in the digital magazine and an ad on the site. Getting companies to buy inventory on the site will be relatively easy. Just provide them stats. Getting them to buy space in the digital magazine will be much more difficult. Obviously it may just involve getting a salesman to talk an advertiser into giving you money. More likely it will involve a complex analysis in which you show how many of your website readers subscribe/download the magazine, and what do you know about those users. You can use analytics for this. IF you have everything set up properly it still will take time (to accumulate historical data) and a great analyst to figure out how to “spin” the data into actual business drivers.

C. Affiliate links are relatively easy to set up. You sign up and then embed links in your content. If someone clicks and then goes and makes a purchase you get a percentage. The risk is that you will alienate your readers if you do it poorly or too often, or you will send readers off your site and they will not purchase.

D. If you can get people to pay you directly for your content- that is great. Signing up for an RSS feed is ok too.

E. If you have people’s info, you can sell them stuff. There is a line between re-marketing and creepy that could hurt your brand.

I would assume that most companies use a combination of all of these methods. The problem is that some of these can be labor intensive (C), require incredible talent (A, B, C), and require tough decisions from upper management regarding how to allocate limited resources. In each case, intelligent business decisions will lead to larger advertisers, so analytics plays a huge role in the content business. Also, content sites tend to be the largest.

Acquiring Readers with SEO, Paid search, and Social

You need readers in order to have a business. Good content is important, but it needs to be optimized for SEO so that the engines will pick up your content. Good SEO takes a long time, and gains are incremental. At times SEO can conflict with content and design, so you must have a strong decision-maker at the top who is responsible for SEO/Content/Design conflicts.

There are some cases it may be worthwhile to purchase readers (e.g. advertise) so that visitors to your website buy from your advertisers (hopefully for more than you paid to acquire them). This is called arbitrage; this practice is looked upon unfavorably by some companies, and can get you permanently banned, so be careful how you use it.

Social media is a great way to get a loyal readership going. I would look to involve an intern in this process. It would be a good introduction into the world of internet marketing.

What is Remarketing?

In most cases remarketing campaigns target visitors who did not convert or purchase on your site. If a visitor converts, they become a “customer” and thus no longer need to be “acquired”, they need to be “retained” or upsold.* Thus, once a visitor becomes a customer they are no longer the domain of the acquisition team, they are shipped off to the sales or retention department. (Depending on the size of your company, you may be involved in one or all three teams.) But if a visitor leaves your site without converting, they are still the domain of the acquisition team. “Remarketing” is task of targeting that segment and getting them to convert.

Remarketing is hot in the internet marketing world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to implement, thus lowering the barrier to entry. In the online world, the term “remarketing” is used to discuss efforts to acquire customers who have already visited your site or opened an email. If someone has never visited your site, you cannot “RE-market to them”.

As of today, remarketing is only used on the display network. However, it seems that Google or MSN could use that data to customize your search network ads sometime in the future. With the focus on “personalized search” I would think this is on its way.

Facts about Remarketing
The segment of traffic that comes to our site and leaves without converting will be the target of most remarketing campaigns. Since these visitors have already shown a previous interest in our site we can make three assumptions about them:

1. Remarketing segments will always be a subset of the general population. Thus, the impressions and traffic you receive are likely to be small.

2. Remarketing campaigns will cost less to convert since this segment has already demonstrated interest in your brand. We might think of their prior exposure to our brand as a kind of micro-conversion. If your brand is worth anything, remarketing should cost less than the general segment.

3. Remarketing segments are worth more to us than the general population. Feel free to spend more to insure these visitors see your ads.

Tips and More Details on Remarketing
Two other quick things that you need to know about remarketing. One, this remarketing “magic” is created done by using tagging in your analytics/ ppc/ display tool. Your analytics /ppc /display guy should be able to help you.

Keep it simple. There are many more advanced ways to use remarketing which are beyond the scope of this article. If you are not using remarketing, feel free to use it as I described. Even this is way beyond most companies’ capabilities (because they don’t get enough traffic, or lack the resources to analyze the data).

* There are some exceptions to this case. In ecommerce, often time customers need to be reacquired each time they search for a new product. However, let’s ignore this situation for the sake of simplicity.

The-Next-Big-Secret-SEO-Variable: Reading Level

Not only is the search algorithm a secret but it also changes. Who needs that headache?

No one outside of Google (Yahoo, MSN) knows the algorithm for calculating the Google organic SERPS. But we all give advice –and with such certainty!—about how to improve organic rankings. That makes me very uneasy…I don’t like being proved wrong. I don’t need Matt Cutts to issue a statement condemning italics after I tell all my friends and admirers that italics are the secret to high rankings.

For the most part I tell everyone the same thing: concentrate on link-building and good copy if you want to improve your SEO. Your site is not so advanced that you need to think about anything else.
Of course, no exec wants to hear this. I get hateful looks like “how dare he tell me something I could have read on Wikipedia”. They want inside information and conspiracy theories.

My friend who is a salesman always tries to remind me, “No one wants to be ‘leveled with’; make sure you wait until they give you the job to try anything silly like that. In fact, don’t ‘level with’ anyone, ever. In fact, what you need to do is hire me to do your talking for you”.

Since I enjoy work, I am going to let my readers in on The-Next-Big-Secret-SEO-Variable: Reading Level. For a couple months I have noticed that one of the search parameters in Google’s advanced search is called “Reading Level”. The user can select “Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced”. Or you can leave them mixed together.

Why Will Reading Level Matter for SEO
To be clear, right now I doubt reading level affect your SERPS, though it will soon. Answer this question: “Does Google value user-experience?” Yes. Bounce rate and page load time can negatively affect your ranking. The next question would be, “what makes for a better experience, things that are easy to read or things that are hard?” Easy things, of course.

There are many ways that this change could be implemented in the serps. Currently, you are given the choice to choose between basic, intermediate, advanced. I guarantee “advanced” won’t be the highest choice. Thus, if brilliant page ranks #1 but is written in advanced language, it may not be as valuable as something that currently ranks #10 but is written in basic language.

There are other ways the change could be implemented. Google could simply tweak the rankings of sites that are written better. By “Better” I mean “Basic”. Anyone who sat through a horrible class should understand. There is nothing inherently good about advanced language. Even if the subject is a horribly advanced subject like particle physics, basic language is best. The purpose of language is to communicate.

So How Can I Use This Knowledge to My Advantage?
I would still refer you to my first paragraph. Concentrate on links and content. You really shouldn’t be doing anything different. This is a just a way that Google showing us that I am right (I mean, that content is important).

If you really want to act on this info here are a couple things you can do:
1) Hire a better copywriter.
2) Write shorter sentences.
3) Writer shorter paragraphs.
4) Use shorter words.

Using the new Adwords Experiments Feature

Adwords has released a new feature called “Adwords Experiments”. Most people should have access in the coming weeks. I have been part of the Beta testing. I will offer some advice after some of my successful (and not so successful!) experiments.

What is Adwords Experiments?
Due to Adwords’ concepts of “account history”, you are rewarded for past performance. Thus, you must think twice about every change you make to the account as your changes have a permanent effect!
Have you ever had a “brilliant idea” that you couldn’t get your boss to sign off on? Adwords Experiments is great for cases like these. Make a change to a campaign, check it in a month, and then celebrate your great results. If your idea was horrible, “undo” the results without harming your account history!

Adwords Experiments allows you to make changes to your account that you can undo if you don’t like the results. Usually, we make changes to our accounts and then look in the account history (or our memory) to keep track of progress. This is adequate 95% of the time. For the other times, we can use Adwords Experiments.

How Does Adwords Experiments Work?
Adwords will test the control group vs your new experimental group and tell you the winner. If you want to keep the changes at the end of the experiment you just click a button and your changes are implemented. If not, your changes go back to the way they were before the experiment.

If you make a dumb decision, it will still have a negative effect on the company. It might negatively effect sales or CTR or whatever during the experiment. Using Adwords Experiments you won’t be permanently punished for trying to improve your account.
This is all that a marketer wants.

When Should I Use Adwords Experiments?
If you are making a risky change to the account, make an experiment. Testing new copy is not risky. Raising the price of a high performing keyword is not risky. Adding a bunch of new negative keywords to a campaign makes me nervous, so I would set up an experiment. Splitting up a high-performing adgroup into two makes me nervous, so I would set up an experiment.

The Positives of Adwords Experiments:
1) You can make risky changes to the account without fear of permanently damaging your account history.
2) One great feature of Adwords Experiments is that it automatically calculates statistical significance. I wonder why this has to be limited to experiments? It is such a useful feature! It would be great in many of Google’s products.
3) Certain variables can only be properly tested by using the Adwords Experiment feature. (One feature that comes to mind is determining ROI-based-on-keyword-position. Previously our testing has had to simulate this effect, or make inductions based upon time-shifting results. That is fine, and we are able to produce actionable-data, but this new way is a little better).

The Negatives- Unfortunately there are a lot of negatives. Perhaps some of them will be ironed out.
1) You can only run one experiment at a time at the campaign level. E-commerce sites tend to have tons of campaigns, so this will not be an issue for you if you are E-commerce. Lead-generation sites tend to have fewer campaigns. You may have set up your account so that you have a ton of adgroups and few campaigns. If this is the case you will be limited to one experiment at a time. (I would not recommend changing your account structure simply to get around this).
2) The interface is complex: make sure your first experiment is simple. Until you get the hang of the interface, don’t make complex experiments. Try messing around with numbers rather than keywords the first time out.
3) Remember that any changes make will have ramifications campaign-wide. A small change to one adgroup may effect another adgroup. Make sure you look for those. Some of the effects to other adgroups are non-intuitive, but that may just be an indication that I designed a poor experiment.
4) You can’t save your experiment history. If you want to save your results you will have to export them and keep a log.

To Summarize:
-Make BOLD changes to your account so that your results will be statistically significant. Bid much higher or much lower.
-Make your first experiment simple.
-Most of your testing can still be done without using this feature. You can still experiment in Adwords without using “Adwords Experiments”.