A new partnership between Kantar Video and OpenAmplify looks to make viral video all the more measurable. Using OpenAmplify's The Meaning Platform (which measures semantics within content) and Kantar's video analytics (Videolytics), marketers will have an opportunity to see beyond a video's raw numbers such as total views.

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Inbound links increase the value of your website in the eyes of Google and the other search engines. And, they help more people find your website and all you have to offer. Each inbound link is like your website just got another vote of confidence.

So, once the link has been set up, your job is done. Or is it?

Getting links to point to your site is one of the most challenging parts of search engine optimization, but link building doesn’t end once a link has been set up.

In fact, getting that link should only be the first step in a long-term link building strategy.

Do you follow up on links? Let us know.

Let’s talk about this for a minute. Someone received your link request, and went to the trouble of responding. Or, they heard about you, researched you, and maybe even purchased something from you, and then decided to link to you . However it started, he thought it was a good idea to create a link to your site and took the time to make it happen. 

Do you just congratulate yourself and move on? 

No! The person who helped you deserves a little bit more of your time and attention.

Not only should you send them a thank you for the link, you should treat this like the opportunity it really is. By establishing a relationship with them, you could not only boost your search engine rankings, you could be opening the door to rich collaboration and business opportunities.

Consider these nine important questions for sites that already link to you.

1. How popular is their site?

The more popular the site, the more beneficial it can be for you. Start by checking out the number of inbound links the site is getting, they are a good measure of the popularity of the site. Then you can sort in order of priority and start with the most popular.

2. Which of the sites that link to you are bringing you real traffic?

Review your log files or investigate Google Analytics to find out which of your links are actually bringing you traffic. When sites bring you traffic, it can be for a combination of reasons, for example:

- You share the same target market and their visitors are interested in what you provide

- They get high traffic themselves

For whatever reason, getting traffic is only part of what you need. The next part is … 

3. Does the traffic from the sites convert to sales?

As important as it is to get traffic to your site, if none of the visitors DO anything when they arrive, you aren’t really too far ahead. The critical question is ‘does the traffic they bring convert for my benefit?’ Set up Google Analytics to help you find out the answer. And, if you find out that they link to you, they bring you traffic and the traffic they bring converts, then stop reading this article IMMEDIATELY and get in touch with them.

Start by thanking them, and then initiate a dialogue to explore what else you can do together.

4. Have you done them a favor in return?

No? Do so, right away.

Yes? Do so again.

It’s very easy to do a favor for someone and being helpful and willing is a great way to build relationships – and relationships are at the heart of successful link building. It might be as simple as sending them an email thank you and asking them to keep in touch.

5. Do you know how the link got to be there and can you put a name to the person behind the site?

It’s really important to remember that it’s people who make links, not websites. Visualize a network of people linking to you, not just a network of websites linking to you.

Do a bit of research to find out who they are and what they do. What do you have in common? Why did they link to you in the first place? Is there more business you could be doing together? And, as we talked about in question four, what favor could you be doing for them?

6. What social media sites are they active on and have you linked up with them?

With the escalating popularity of social networking, contact through social media is critical today. Because these people have linked to your website, they’re relevant to you – and they bring with them a network of friends and followers who are also likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or whatever, and respond to their posts, re-tweets or comments. Do that and just watch your network – and your inbound links – grow.

7. Can you say at least one thing that is great about their site?

Make sure you do.

Write a complimentary blog post, add a kudos when you re-tweet, make a positive comment, agree with them, elaborate on their ideas. You’ll be getting yourself an even bigger fan.

We all love a bit of flattery and it can be a powerful tool when you are building relationships. Dale Carnegie put it very well when he said, “Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself”.

8. What linking text do they use when they link to you?

The linking text that people use when creating the inbound link to you is very important for your search engine rankings. Therefore, you need to know if they are using a really basic ‘click here’ or if they incorporate more keyword-rich text in the link. If necessary, it is worth the time to make a quick approach to them and suggest they use one of your important keywords or phrases in the linking text. It will strengthen the value of the inbound link for you.

9. Are there any ways you can collaborate, either in content or in business?

If there’s really a good business fit between you and a site that links to you, then they’re likely to respond positively to any business proposition you may make. Time to start brainstorming. Is there more you could be doing to help each other or generate more business?

In summary, don’t view getting an inbound link as the end of the story. If you see links as simply a way to boost your search engine rankings, then you’ll miss out on some tremendous opportunities. 

Instead, remember that link building is really about building relationships with people and generating opportunity. It is about being part of community, providing useful content to your readers and the people who link to you. Who knows where it could all lead you?

What is the most important element of link-building to you? Comment here.

Real-time app analytics provider Localytics is offering up some interesting information on loyalty as it relates to phone and tablet apps. 

While customers seem willing to give new apps a try (perhaps due to the number of US smartphone users growing from 42.7 million in November 2009 to 61.5 million in November 2010), Localytics data reveals…

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People who say social media isn’t measurable aren’t looking very hard.

The truth is that there are at least 25 viable metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability, it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.

Here are the 6 critically undervalued social media success metrics.

Daily Story Feedback

Instead of just counting the number of Facebook “likes” you accrue – which signifies nothing more than digital bumper stickering, instead track how often your fans click “like” and comment upon the status updates you post.

The more fans that click “like” and comment, the more likely your future updates are to be seen in their News Feed, dramatically increasing your actual Facebook audience.

If you’re an administrator of a Facebook fan page, you can find the Daily Story Feedback chart at http://facebook.com/insights (look in the interactions category)

Klout

Rather than paying rapt attention to the number of Twitter followers you’ve corralled, instead look at your Klout score.

Klout is an online influence gauge that combines several data points (followers, retweets, clicks on links, etc.) and then applies some fancy algorithmic voo doo to arrive at a unified metric.

The data used to calculate Klout continues to change (they added Facebook information recently), but I have found it to be the most reliable influence tracking metric. By no means perfect, but much more illustrative than follower counts.

PostRank

One of the challenges of writing a blog is knowing how to value the wide variety of reader engagements and behaviors. Should you care more about Digg submission than about comments? Are tweets more important than Facebook shares?

PostRank Analytics solves this problem.

Free if you connect with their “influencers” outreach program, or $15/month if you do not, PostRank provides a useful, detailed blogging scoreboard, especially if you connect it with your Google Analytics account.

The best part of PostRank Analytics is the Engagement Score, which is sort of your Klout score for each blog post. The system looks at total comments, tweets, shares, etc. for each post and applies behavior points and an algorithm to determine the total score. This is a fantastic way to look at your last 25 blog posts to see what type of content you’re publishing generates the most engagement. 

Share of Voice

Tracking how often your company and/or its products are mentioned on the social Web is a best practice, of course. But without also paying attention to how often your competitors are referenced, it’s difficult to determine whether the chatter about your brand is significant.

To add a reference point to your social mention tracking, create a Share of Voice report.

To do so, determine the number of times your company and its products are mentioned on the social Web in a neutral or positive context over a 30 day period. You’ll want to use Radian6, ViralHeat, Spiral 16, Sysomos, Social Mention or any of the other social listening tools for this project. Then determine how often your competitors are mentioned (neutral or positive) during the same 30 days.

Add up all mentions for the category (you + your competitors), and then divide your mentions by the total to calculate your Share of Voice – which is always a percentage. Usually, Share of Voice reports are formatted as a pie chart, so you can easily see how you fare versus your competition.

Search Volume

Perhaps more than any other marketing metric, the number of people that are searching for your brand on Google serves as a catch-all metric for market awareness.

In many ways, social media and your other marketing efforts create demand, which is then harvested via searches.

The tie between search and social media cannot be overestimated. Perhaps the best study on the subject – from GroupM in 2009 – found that consumers exposed to a brand in social media are subsequently 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand than are consumers unexposed within social media.

Use Google Insights to examine whether or not searches for your company and products are increasing over time, and if your volume is going up, and your competitors’ isn’t – double bonus!

Inbound Links

Without other sites linking to your website, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever crack the Top 10 in Google. Links are the coin of the realm in SEO, and without them all you have is a pile of carefully crafted words.

Social media is one of the best places to accrue links, because we social types are prone to link from blog posts, within blog comments, etc.

Track the number of links pointing to your website and/or blog, and examine the source of new links. How many links do you have, in comparison to your competitors? What sites are linking to them, that perhaps you could get to link to you as well?

There are several inbound link tracking services online. My favorite is Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. The free version allows you to track and report on up to 1,000 links.

If you’re looking for a magic number that automatically determines your social media prowess, you’re not going to find it. Instead, the secret to tracking social media is tying together disparate data sources, and selecting the metrics that make the most sense for your company. And those are never the obvious ones like Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Tracking social media may not always be easy and fast, but it’s absolutely, 100% doable.

Right?

Originally published on Convince and Convert

Distimo, an app store analytics company, has released their latest Distimo Report, covering the full year of 2010. Included in the report are findings taken from analysis of Apple App Store for iPad, the Apple App Store for iPhone, BlackBerry App World…(read more)

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We’re looking at the things Google has done over the course of the year. For the first quarter, read this article. Then find the second quarter here and the third quarter here. Now we’re on to the fourth quarter. 

Allow me to include the disclaimer from the previous posts: I have not included every single Google-related story of the year. That would require a book (and a rather large one I believe) rather than an article. I’ve omitted most of the legal stories and rumors (both of which there have been many in 2010), and tried to stick mostly with actual releases, features, acquisitions, and happenings. Even still, I’m sure there are plenty of things that didn’t find their way into the article(s). Please feel free to add more in the comments. All of that said, it’s been a huge year for Google, even just looking at the items included. 

October

In October, Google acquired BlindType for Android text input. Android got a Skype app and iPhone users got a way to search Google by taking pictures (Google Goggles). Google started testing a feature that brought Twitter into Google News, introduced a spotlight video section on Google News, announced it would disconnect GOOG-411, and started testing self-driving cars.

Google’s Marissa Mayer took over some new responsibilities at the company (including local) and Google’s partnership with NBC Universal on TV ads dissolved. Google launched an in-page analytics feature, connected the search appliance to the cloud, and major TV networks blocked their content from Google TV. Google implemented stricter internal privacy regulations, put businesses’ interiors on Google Places, donated $5 million to support digital journalism, and introduced Place Search. Also, YouTube crossed a billion subscriptions and launched a tool to help itself get a faster second billion.

November

In November, Google launched a resource to prepare retailers for the holidays, partnered with the ad council on teen Internet safety, mixed Promoted Tweets into realtime results, launched Google Instant for iPhone and Android devices, unveiled a new tool for a faster web, offered free in-flight Wi-Fi for the holidays, committed to more huge acquisitions, launched an app for Windows Phone 7, unveiled Instant Previews, and initiated the rollout of the new AdSense interface.

DISH Network began offering Google TV to customers for $179, Google said it was cracking down on link spam, and major advertisers signed on for a Google Goggles test. Google launched Hotpot, Google Voice for the iPhone, mobile editing for Google Docs, made a deal with France’s biggest publisher, made a toolbar deal with AVG, and greatly expanded Google Apps to include most of Google’s services. 

Google Cloud Connect was released, Google released meta tags to get proper credit to journalists, Google gave $100,000 toward a bid for Alan Turing papers, and got called out in a New York Times article for ranking a business high when they were openly exploiting Google rankings while treating customers poorly. The company also launched new "click type" reports for AdWords and weaved privacy tools into holiday shopping.

December

In December, Google visualized U.S. budget data with Public Data charts, whipped up an on-the-fly algorithm change to beat "bad businesses", released a Google Reader Android app, put tons of new satellite data online with Google Earth Engine, announced changes to copyright handling, acquired Phonetic Arts, and discussed local search ranking factors. 

Google Cloud Picker was discovered prematurely, and Google acquired Widevine Technologies. Google turned your friends into sitelinks for some queries, launched its eBookstore, officially debuted Gingerbread, announced that Google Wave would live on as Apache Wave, and announced tools and resources to help businesses go global. 

Then Google had their big Chrome event, where they showed off Google Instant for Chrome (and some other new Chrome items), launched the Chrome Web Store, and unveiled the much-anticipated Chrome OS, while starting a pilot program for it. 

Google released the end-of-year Zeitgeist, launched Message Continuity, launched Instant for mobile globally, released priority inbox for Android, let people send calls from Santa with Google Voice, brought the desktop version of Docs to the iPad, launched Latitude for iPhone, and added a search filter for reading level.  Google let advertisers use seller ratings extensions in mobile ads, released the Gmail app in 44 new languages, launched personalized voice recognition, launched Google Voice or the iPad and iPod Touch, released the Nexus S phone, renewed its search advertising deal with MySpace, and gave users a new YouTube homepage to try out. 

Google released a new 3D version of Maps for Android and offline functionality for it, a follow button for Google News, Shared Spaces, and YouTube Trends. Then they sent Android into near-space.

What is your favorite thing that Google did in 2010? Least favorite? Comment here.

If you’ve ever wanted to have a say in what Google does next, a visit to Matt Cutts’s blog may be in order.  This afternoon, Cutts published a post asking readers what actions they’d take as Google’s CEO, and although no official contest is in effect (and Eric Schmidt’s definitely not stepping aside), the question may be more than random link bait.

Interested?  Cutts wrote, "I’d like to know: what products would you launch?  What ideas would you fund? . . . .  I’m specifically interested in Big Ideas.  Things like data liberation or self-driving cars.  Or what’s the one huge feature missing from a Google product?  In essence, what are the big products, features, or ideas that you would like to see Google work on?"

Fair warning: don’t bother trying to get Google to perfect a $500 Ferrari.  Or build a spaceship, however cool that would be (and the company could probably do it, with its NASA connections and market cap of $190 billion).

In the comments section, Cutts clarified, "I don’t want stuff so blue sky (e.g. solving all energy problems) that we’re not even sure whether it’s possible.  But concrete stuff like Scott’s ‘surface analytics about my time that would help me improve my life’ or Lauren’s suggestion [covering customer support] are the sorts of things I’d love to hear. . . .  Maybe a good idea/proposal is something that 1 to 20 people could deliver in 2011 if they really worked hard?"

So perhaps the whole "CEO of Google" setup aimed a little too high.  Still, that "1 to 20 people" remark makes it seem much more likely that Google will actually accept someone’s recommendation.

Good luck making the cut (and receiving some sort of reward) if you decide to volunteer an idea.

Complete Conversion University presentation by Jeff Gillis

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http://www.AdwordsNemesis.com In this video I teach you how to reduce your google adwords cost! I used a clickbank product as an example but you can use this on any website! 0:07-0:22 Find a website you would like to know the statistics (demographics) about. In this case, I chose a clickbank product. 0:23-0:32 Search for website you would like data about at http://quantcast.com 0:39-0:44 This is the information you will plug into your google adwords campaign. 1:21-1:28 Since 54% of the …

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Learn how to use Google Analytics to optimize your AdWords spending. Compare keyword conversion rates and ROI, see how different search result positions perform for each keyword, and compare ad performance.

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