For those still left in the office. Keep busy during the month of August!

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August. Many people think of August as the month where business slows down. It’s the one time of year that everyone saves cherished vacation days for. But is this not the best time to advertise to people? All the folks on holiday spend more time reading magazines on the beach or laying in front of the T.V. then any other month of the year. Doesn’t this seem like a good time to get your ads out there for maximum exposure?

August is also a very good time to catch up on the thing you’ve been ignoring for the entire year. After all, the fall rush is coming fast. Here are some things you can do to keep you busy and your business on top of the game.

1. Re-vamp your website.
2. Update all social media profiles
3. Get started on an email newsletter that will be ready for September
4. Get your finances in order

This “slow” month has just become a time to regroup and get ready for the busy months to come.

Marena Studios

MTA may shuffle the deck with redeemable MetroCards

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The metropolitan transit authority has announced that they will be selling the front and back of the metro card to advertisers as early as October. This is just a part of the new effort in raising revenue from the MTA system. As many people have probably seen by now, subway cars are being wrapped inside and out with larger than life ads. This will become more common as we head toward 2013.

Many see this new ad space as something much bigger than originally conceived. Wayne Congar and Brendan Bilko of creative and branding consultancy Mayday Mayday Mayday, believe that New York has an opportunity here to go above and beyond traditional advertising.

They have come up with a citywide puzzle including the faces of metro cards as puzzle pieces. Each card would be printed with a small piece of a much larger picture and would come together to form a billboard or window display. “We thought about how advertisers can create a campaign that changes commuters’ relationships with the MetroCard,” they explain. “Where rather than purchasing any card, they’re hoping the one that comes out of the machine is a specific one, the missing piece of a billboard or window display or artwork.” (1) Nike has already shown interest in using their giant 57th street display for the game. In Nike’s case, the MetroCard would be redeemable at Nike Town for a discount on Nike’s new products and each new piece would reveal more of the larger 57th street display.

Mayday Mayday Mayday has come up with three different campaigns that would easily fit this new marketing model. The first being that each MetroCard would uncover a show of some sort and the contributors/winners would gain exclusive access to that show. The second would be the launch of a new product and the contributors/winners would get a discount or special offer from the hosting company. The third and final campaign would include a large artwork that New Yorkers would collaborate in putting together thus creating a sense of unity amongst the city. Each campaign is ultimately in place to drive the sales of MTA cards all over the city and boost city revenues. This would be a fun, engaging way of implementing it.

Mayday Mayday Mayday may really be on to something.

1. Hutchings, Emma. “Trending Stories.” Mashable. PSFK, 1 Aug. 2012. Web. 06 Aug. 2012. .

Marketing by association: Olympic style

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Every year the American people witness larger than life advertisements during our nations biggest event; the Super Bowl. Companies like Budweiser and Pepsi pay millions of dollars to get their highly budgeted ad viewed by the American population. Is this really the biggest event out there? Can you think of maybe one more that gets more viewers than the Super bowl? You got it! It’s the ever so cherished Olympic games. Once every four years, the summer games get a viewership north of 3 billion people every time they take place. With these kind of numbers, these ad spots are the most expensive form of advertising in the world, But are they the most effective?

The difference between the Super Bowl and the summer Olympiad is that marketers who advertise during the Olympics are trying to associate their brand with high moral standards, excellence, dedication and gold medals while the Super Bowl has become an advertising event in its own right. Is brand association as effective as the leaders of these companies are led to believe? All signs point to no.

The truth is that branding is mostly comprised of reputation. Consumers are not the moldable putty that some advertisers believe that they are. In reality, if Mcdonald’s burns their hamburgers or Visa provides low quality customer service, these extremely expensive association tactics are essentially useless. Now if for example, Wendy’s is the new favorite hamburger of consumers and they advertise on a different, less expensive channel, they will have a higher return on dollars spent on advertising because reputation is king. If I know the sandwich being shown on T.V. is delicious, the ad might inspire me to drive over to buy one. If I know that is doesn’t taste good, no form of association can get me to spend my hard earned dollars on it. For this reason, the association tactic of branding is not worth its weight in gold medals.

Some good advice to follow would be to take all of the money your company would spend on the XXX Olympiad and invest it in product performance and customer service. That is how your company will take the gold.

How to Improve Your Quality score

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Before we discuss the importance of your website’s quality score and how to improve it, lets go over what a quality score is. A quality score is an estimate of how relevant your online advertisement, landing page and keyword are to the person searching on Google. It is so important because it determines how far up on the organic search list your website will appear. Think about how many times you were searching for something and made it past the first page of results. Not many, right? Well, with a low Q score you can forget appearing on even the first fifteen pages let alone the first one. Another great thing about having a good Q score is you will pay less per click the higher it is, two incentives that are crucial for successful online advertising.

So the next question is how do we get a good Quality score? The Q score is determined by a combination of click through rates and relevancy to the searched term. Google will recognize when you have searched for a particular keyword and when your have not clicked on a leading result. In an effort to give you what you’re looking for, Google will lower their Q score so they don’t come up as often for your searches. They are basically assuming that if you never click on a link, it isn’t what you’re looking for. Most of the time they would be right. The more your link is clicked on after a keyword search, the higher your click through rate, the higher your Q score. Get it? Well that’s only half of it. But before we get into relevance, how do we make sure we have a high click through rate?

Split testing.

Split testing involves making two of the same ads with different content. Through Google analytics you will see which one has received more clicks. Delete the other. Then you will gradually make changes to the winning ad until you have a maximum click through rate. Trial and error will lead you to click through rate success.

The other half of your Q score is determined by relevance. Google can actually tell how relevant the content of your site is to the topic being searched. This eliminates anyone trying to take advantage of keyword searches. For example, a website with a certain keyword written five hundred times on a page would not receive a good Q score. Google is not stupid by any means. They want to eliminate any flaw in the searching system, giving the searcher exactly what they are looking for. That being said, keywords are also very important in raising your Q score (used sparingly). Because Google can detect duplicate content, Key words have to be place in different sections of the page. It’s always important to have your keywords in the ad text itself, but it is also important to put them in your Meta tags, your description, your H1 tags, your title and your content. This way Google will find relevance with your entire page thus raising your Q score.

Do yourself a favor and take this seriously. Google can be the difference between getting rich and going out of business. You don’t want to be on the wrong end of the infamous “Google Slap”.

The Rise of The Mobile Device In Google Analytics

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Mobile devices have become so common among people today that most people have more than one. I myself have a smart phone and an Ipad. Google has recently announced that in efforts to keep up with the mobile trend, they will be releasing new technology to monitor webpage and mobile app analytics. This is a necessary move for a couple of reasons.

1. Viewing analytics for a mobile app will become so simple that a business will be able to track the user from discovery through download all the way to engagement and even in-app purchases.

2. Analytics will be viewed in real time, which makes having a Google Analytic App on your mobile device useful no matter what time of day it is.

3. Automatic and customized alerts can be received at anytime of day. Google analytics will detect statistical problems in your data and alert you right away instead of waiting until you get back to your computer.

Google will expand the mobile app analytic technology on two fronts. Tracking mobile devices from a computer and tracking webpage analytics from a mobile device. Clearly Google is staying ahead of the curve when it comes to Internet marketing.

But why are apps so important? Mostly because a majority of them are free. Free, fun, and useful. Either a user is downloading a game to pass time and interact with friends or reading the news and checking the remaining balance in their checking account. I can tell you that every function just discussed comes for free on both Apple and Android smartphones. Because they serve such a purpose, using them to promote events and drive sales has become very useful. Now with the New Mobile Google Analytics, applications will also be just as measureable as Internet advertising. Google continues to pave the way.