According to eMarketer, Facebook will surpass MySpace in terms of ad revenue this year, with Facebook expected to bring in $605 million in ad revenue compared to $385 million that MySpace is expected to nab.  With such a phenomenal growth in audience and engagement metrics, there is no surprise many online marketers have their eye on Facebook.

Omniture and Facebook announced that they have teamed up to provide online marketers with tools that help them with media buying and optimization on Facebook making Facebook a stronger marketing channel.

The outcome of this partnership, which builds on the Facebook’s wealth of social media data and Omniture’s analytics capabilities, includes an automated media buying process as well as a single dashboard to plan, deliver, measure and optimize advertising campaigns. Utilizing Omniture’s toolset, marketers can compare Facebook Ad campaign metrics alongside their other media channels.

This tool empowers online marketers to better engage customers/prospects on Facebook and promote the most relevant content, marketing messages, products and services.

Omniture clients will also benefit from this new partnership as it helps them generate reports specifically designed to understand the effectiveness of their Ads for Facebook elements such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Google recently re-introduced its Click to Call ads feature. With the wide spread use of smart phones and the growth of mobile search, Google has decided to take another look at Click to Call advertising concept they introduced a couple of years ago. At the time, the focus was mostly on the desktop where calling was not as easy and maybe that is why it was shelved for a while.

Searchers are provided with two options: they can either click to call your business or click and visit your URL. When people search Google using their mobile phones, it is much easier for them to have a voice call with a business using their mobile phone than doing so on a desktop. Now it is possible to make it easier for prospects to reach you by adding a location-specific business phone number in Google ads. Searchers can click to call you the same way they click to visit your website. Google doesn’t charge users for clicks to place calls though the users’ standard carrier rates apply.

The best part of this is that even if you have multiple business locations, because mobile ads can be served based on user’s physical location, you can serve the ad with the closest store location.

You first need to add location extensions to your Google AdWords PPC campaign. You can then give each of your business locations its corresponding business phone number (this can be done in Google Local Business Center). AdWords will display the business phone of your nearest location to where the user is.

Location extensions are available for ads within Google properties such as Google and Google Maps, and some Google Search Network sites and work on mobile devices with full internet browser (e.g., iPhone, Andriod). Currently Click to Call does not appear in the Content Network or on AdSense for Mobile apps, but that might change. The cost of a click to call to your business is the same as the cost of a click to visit your website.

You can review how many calls you’ve received for each Keyword, Ad Group, or Campaign in the Campaigns interface within AdWords by selecting segment button to choose between website visits and phone calls.

Watch video on Click to Call.

Pageviews might not be all you care to measure using Google Analytics.  You may like to measure the number of times your files (PDFs, AVI, WMV) are downloaded.  Google Analytics provides you with the capability to track clicks on file download links.  Because these links do not lead to a pageview on your site containing Google Analytics tracking code, you’ll need to tag the links with the _trackPageview() JavaScript to create a virtual pageview so that you can track these downloads.

For example, to log every click on a particular link to www.semseoexpert.com/files/tracking-downloads.pdf as a pageview for /downloads/tracking-downloads you would add the following attribute to the link’s <a> tag:

< a href= ” http:// www. semseoexpert .com /files/tracking-downloads.pdf”>

You can create a virtual pageview to represent any kind of activity or interaction in your site.   All you need to do is to call _trackPageview() and provide a user friendly name.   This will create a virtual pageview in GA interface (in the Top Content and Content Drilldown reports) even though no new page has actually been loaded.

Google Analytics Top Content Report - PDF Download

Since virtual pageviews appear along with standard pageviews in Google Analytics reports, you may wish to create a duplicate profile where you filter out the virtual pageviews.

Another point that is very important to consider is that even though virtual pageview is a great way for tracking PDF downloads, you should not use trackPageview JavaScript for tracking all kind of events (e.g., tracking menus) as it can potentially inflate your traffic reports in GA. 

Web Analytics

Google AdWords offer a report called Search Query Performance report that can be a very powerful tool for improving your Google AdWords PPC campaign. 

As I mentioned in my previous post on keyword research, keyword selection can make or break a SEM campaign. You can utilize keyword research tools such as Wordtracker, Google AdWords keyword tool and SKTool to identify keywords that you should add to your PPC campaign. 

No matter how careful you are in selecting your phrases and identifying negative keywords in advance, if you use broad match, there is a good chance your ads show up for not so relevant search queries.

Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report

AdWords Search Query report can help you identify the exact phrases that have triggered your ads. You can use this Google report as a negative keyword generator which helps you suppress your ads from appearing for irrelevant search queries.  Excluding irrelevant keywords can help you improve your CTR, get more relevant traffic, improve your conversion rate and reduce your cost.

Twitter seems to have finally found a way to monetize its social media platform. Following their deals with Google and Microsoft to provide them with real time search, there are rumours that they are ready to launch their advertising platform.

Google has been long a believer of ad relevancy and they pioneered the concept of Quality Score to promote and reward the most relevant ads. Twitter seems to follow the footsteps of Google.   According to Twitter`s head of product management, they are planning to make the ads relevant and useful so that they are seamless and users do not think of them as ads. 

We have to wait and see if they can succeed in incorporating the ads in the tweets without negatively impacting user experience.

Social Media Consultant