Month: March 2013

The key to measuring the success of your social media marketing

Although most people realize the value of social media marketing (in addition to paid social media performance advertising), few understand the subtleties of understanding how to measure its effectiveness. The secret is to measure engagement.

The relationship era

I was recently at a dinner with Doug Levy, the author of Can’t Buy Me Like, and Doug eloquently made the point that marketing has made a fundamental shift from persuading people to buy to creating trust in your product, and that is what persuades people to buy from you. The most successful marketers are ones who have the greatest expertise in gaining authentic relationships. Among those who have worked with and endorse Doug’s ideas are the CEOs of Whole Foods, Panera Bread and Patagonia, real companies that are highly profitable. Continue reading “The key to measuring the success of your social media marketing”

Using analytics to optimize all of your advertising spend

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review on Advertising Analytics 2.0 shows how advanced analytic tools and concepts can improve the return from your growth efforts. The article, written by Wes Nichols of MarketShare, shows how ad channels increasingly interact with each other and you can be much more effective by understanding these interactions. What you do in performance marketing, search ads, web, YouTube, TV and PR are not independent of each other. For example, a TV advertisement may increase Google searches that are then directed to your web game by purchasing ad words.

Advanced analytics allow you to understand these interdependencies and allocate accordingly. For example, one company found 85 percent of its budget went to TV ads and six percent to YouTube ads but the YouTube ads were nearly twice as effective at driving search. They then changed their allocation of ad dollars. This adjustment increased sales nine percent without incurring any additional advertising expense.

Advertising analytics 2.0One of the keys to using analytics more effectively is understanding what data to collect. Many in the game industry think that tracking clicks on cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns, adding some consumer surveys, focus groups and last-click attribution is enough to optimize their marketing. It is not. Continue reading “Using analytics to optimize all of your advertising spend”

How to implement A/B testing

There’s a great blog post on GamesBrief on how to get your A/B testing efforts going. Given the importance of A/B testing to optimizing both your game’s performance and user acquisition, this is a must-read article if you are not already A/B testing.

A/B testing image from blog.empowerment-group.org

To summarize the post (read the full post for a much deeper explanation of each point), the key point is that there are six steps to start successful A/B testing: Continue reading “How to implement A/B testing”

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