Sramana Mitra Profiles Our Clickable — the Marketing Analytics Company

MonitorThe team at 1 Million by 1 Million Blog profiled Clickable under Deal Radar today:

” … When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Some technology startup veterans will tell you that when the markets are crashing, it could be a good time to pick up great technologies at rock-bottom prices. SuccessFactors was such a company. It was born out of the dot-com crisis of 2001 when Lars Dalgaard bought some well-funded technology companies that had gone bust and resurrected them with his vision.

After the dot-com crisis, the economic crisis provided another such window of opportunity to Mike Onghai. Inspired by the success story of SuccessFactors, he bought the assets of Clickable in 2013.

Clickable was originally founded in 2006 and was known for its award-winning Pro advertising tool and expertise in dedicated search and social advertising. It had received funding of $32.5 million in five rounds from Union Square Ventures, American Express, FirstMark Capital, Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Miller, Manatt Venture Fund, Schoffstall Ventures, and Monster Venture Partners. In mid-2012, Syncapse acquired Clickable in a mostly stock deal reportedly worth about $33 million. However, a year later, Syncapse filed for bankruptcy…”

Continue Reading at … The 1M/1M Deal Radar: Clickable, San Francisco, CA

3 Tips for Increasing Your ROI in Paid Social Media Advertising

We all know how popular social media networking has become and websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are amongst the most powerful networks in the world right now.

These social networks do provide a fantastic environment for paid advertising because they allow you to target by geography, interests, sex, age, and much more.  So if you are considering taking this advertising route, have a look through the tips and strategies below to ensure you are getting the highest return on investment.

Choose the Best Platform For Your Needs

With so many available platforms, you really need to sit down and weight out the pros and cons to determine the platform that you think (based on your targeting requirements) will be the most successful in reaching your target audience.  For example, if you are targeting finance professionals, LinkedIn would be your best option as compared to Facebook.

social-media-icons

Target, Target, Target

Once again, the best aspect of social media paid advertising is the almost unlimited targeting you are open to.  You can target by location, age, sex, interests, job, school, and much more.  So ensure you don’t leave your targeting too broad.  Remember, the more narrowed your targeting is, the more likely your clicks will turn into conversions.

Call to Action

Don’t leave the call to action decision up to the user.  You want to ensure your ad has a very CLEAR call to action such as “Click Here”, “Get it Now”, etc.  The user usually wants to be told exactly what to do, so if your ad leaves any questions open, that could risk losing the interest and therefore, the conversion.  Ensure you provide a clear call to action for the user, which wil increase your ROI.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and check back to the LookSmart Blog each week for new blog posts.

5 Strategies Using Twitter to Improve Your SEO

Anyone whose anyone knows about Twitter and the concept behind the social media network.  However, not everyone utilizes this tool to it’s fullest potential.  Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service where it’s users can post up to 140 character status updates, follow other users, and interact with other users by retweeting and replying to them.  However, this social network can also be used to increase your search engine optimization campaign rankings.  Here are five strategies that you can begin utilizing right away to increase your SEO rankings:

Shrink Your URLs

Use a tool such as Hootsuite or TweetDeck to shorten all of your link urls.  This allows you to track what content is generating the most clicks and which posts were the most successful in generating retweets and replies from other Twitter users.

LSTwitter

Valuable Content

You only have 140 characters to make an impression on someone with your tweet so you have to ensure that you use those 140 characters as best as you can.  You need to put a call to action in your tweets such as “Retweet”, “Don’t Forget to Retweet!”, or “Please Retweet!”.

Choose an SEO Friendly Username

If your website is BobsPlumbing.com and your company Twitter username is @PlumbingNRepairs – this is NOT good for your SEO rankings.  You should try and find your exactly URL for your Twitter username as this will help people identify your brand better and improve your SEO rankings.

Seperate Personal From Business

I see so many people using the same Twitter account for their personal use AND business use and this just is not the best strategy to use.  You should have your own personal Twitter account that you can post whatever you wish, including your opinions on certain issues.  Then have a seperate Twitter account for your business where you can post valuable content related to your products and services as well as connect with your target audience.

Ensure Your Bio is Keyword-Enriched

You have 140 characters to use up in your bio and I highly suggest you utilize these to the best of your ability.  Use hashtags as well (example #SocialMedia) so your profile shows up in Twitter searches.  You can include a VERY brief description of your business, include your website URL, and then include as many keyword hashtags as you can fit in the bio.

Hope these tips have helped you and if you feel we are missing some, please feel free to comment below.  Don’t forget to “like” us on LookSmart Facebook and “follow” us on LookSmart Twitter.

Also, don’t forget to check out 5 On-Page SEO Steps for Your Website and 5 Reasons Local Businesses Should Be Utilizing SEO

LinkedIn Leak

It’s no secret that LinkedIn experienced a large social network no-no this past week when over 6 million of it’s users’s passwords were leaked out.  It caused a great deal of havoc and anger amongst it’s over 100 million users.

linkedin-building

Basically, what caused this to happen is the fact that LinkedIn encrypted the passwords using a SHA-1 algorithm, but didn’t use the proper security techniques that would have made cracking the passwords much more difficult for potential hackers, said Paul Kocher, President & Cheif Scientist of Cryptography Research.  The passwords were obscured using a cryptographic hash function, but the hashes used were not unique for each password.  Therefore, once the hacker matched one hash to a password, that hash would be the same for all other identical passwords.

There is a great deal of highly sensitive information on the social network such as business deals, confidential job information, and personal conversations.

LinkedIn still doesn’t know who was actually responsible for the attack.  LinkedIn is just focusing on ensuring members change their passwords and choose stronger passwords for increased security measures.  However, according to security researcher Marcus Carey, “If a website has been breached, it doesn’t matter what encryption they’re using because the attacker at that point controls a lot of the authentication.  It’s ‘game over’ once the site is compromised.”

Facebook IPO: Not Focusing on Advertiser’s Needs

It’s definitely no secret that Facebook is launching it’s IPO this coming Friday, as it’s been all over the news in the digital marketing industry.  However, there has also been a great deal of backlash from their current advertisers, including GM who actually stopped all of their Facebook advertising.  Facebook recently announced that they were going to increase the number of shares to it’s public offering, which has so many analysts around the world wondering if they are going to be able to uphold their worth.

Facebook has used many different types of advertising models, some of which have been successful, others, not so much.  Although Facebook has been a huge hit amongst it’s users by catering to their demands, they haven’t been so catering to their customers – advertisers.  Facebook is a great marketing tool as companies can choose their exact target audience, however, Facebook has not yet executed a strong advertising system for businesses.

Currently, Facebook has ads on the side of the web page so when users are logged into their accounts, they see ads targeted to them along the right side of the page.  This is great for businesses to get right in the face of their target audience who may be pulled in by the ad, but what if their target audience isn’t actually looking or interested in the product or service?  That is where the advertising system being used by Facebook is flawed.  For example, with Google, users are actively searching for particular products and services and advertisers appear in those searches.  So here you have the consumer searching for a particular product, and the advertiser appearing right in front of the user.

Facebook’s average click-through rate (CTR) for a Facebook ad is under 0.05% which is approximately half the average CTR for banner ads across the Internet, whereas the average CTR on the Google Display Network is a bit under 0.50% – almost 10 times the CTR for Facebook ads.

What are your thoughts on the Facebook IPO launch?