I am a huge iPhone fan. When the iPhone 4s came out I had to have it, just for Siri alone. Besides the battery issue (that still isn't fixed in 5.0.1) I love the phone. However, the iPhone is a beautiful phone that needs a case. The phone is glass. Glass is pretty easy to break. Do you see my dilemma?

Speck Products, which is a company that makes nice iPhone cases has several that I love . Why do I love them so much? Because they are designed perfectly (mainly the pixelskinHD and FabShell cases) to protect your iPhone. Speck recently produced a joint case with Burton which is a premium snowboarding brand. The case called the FabShell Burton for iPhone 4S/4 is designed from Burton's creative staff. Since Burton's name is on the design, you're getting charged an extra $10 fee for that privilege. For a grand total of $39.95. So what. I still want the case.

When I first went to the Speck Products website, the design I wanted in the Burton FabShell case was sold out. I emailed Speck and received a timely and fast response back that they will "keep an eye out for them". This was back in October 18th. It is now November 23rd and I still want a FabShell case. I logged onto the site today, and viola they do have the cases in stock.

Strangely,  I signed up to "notify me" when the cases come back into stock via email. Why did I not receive an email? Is your company missing out on other revenue opportunities like speck is? Email marketing will still be the number one sales drive for digital media. Don't get sidetracked with Social, search, mobile or remarketing. Email is King.

Note: Speck Products Uses Media Math, Ad Brite, Google Analytics, Marin Software and part of the Rubicon Project.

While browsing Tech Crunch today, I came across a  banner ad from One Up Web. One Up web is a marketing firm that specializes in search engine marketing. I find this humorous because they claim to be a search marketing firm but are using display media as an acquisition tool for new clients.

I'm a sucker for agency's campaigns, and like to see what they are doing. I clicked on the banner ad and landed on this page. (I striped out any campaign tracking data so it won't interfere with their analysis) As any seasoned digital marketing expert might know, landing pages are extremely important. These landing pages can make or break a campaign by just a few percentage points.

Depending on your industry you might use this page for different things. Examples might be to obtain a lead like One Up Web or others might want you to complete a purchase in a eCommerce environment. While an eCommerce environment opens up a can of worms with your checkout flow, this landing page is designed fairly simple. Fill in your information and submit the form.

One Up Web is advertising their "Merge" magazine. Which reads like a digital marketing magazine but in reality all of the content is sourced from within the firm to promote their own services. Cheesy. I liken these types of strategies to infomercials on TV, wherein companies buy large blocks of time to promote their products and everyone from the audience just raves about it.

Welcome Messages are great for door mats

One Up Web uses a welcome message. Welcome messages are great in certain circumstances, like when you purchase a product (Apple uses an automated email campaign when you purchase a new mac for example: "Welcome to the family"). However, on a landing page, since we are limited to the amount of "stuff" we can fit on the page, do we really need to have a welcome message on this page? And if you must have a welcome message, shouldn't it be in a readable font?  I can barely read this:

Videos are a great way of telling a story

One up web uses a video to let the audience connect to their brand. This is a really good example of good landing page design. Videos are excellent! However, when you view the video you're greeted with quick snippets of clients and a lot of boring text to read. Please don't tease me with a video only to switch me back to reading text again.  Sit one of your directors down and interview them, ask them questions. Get answers. People like seeing people in videos. For one it tells me that you don't have robots running your campaigns or worse, aliens.

Web forms are critical to the success of a landing page

Everything you've done before the form is meaningless if you can't get the user to fill out your form. This is extremely important. The form fields are the "Superbowl" of good landing page. On this example, One Up Web uses a border around the form field. I'll go out on a limb here and state they found (via usability or A/B testing) that users can fill out a form faster with a border around than those without. It's true. Usually around 20% faster too.

Since One Up Web is subscribing you to their "Merge" magazine mentioned earlier, they want your address, city, state and zip. In my opinion this is a lot of information to ask for and they might test asking for less, (first name, last name, email, company, phone) for an example.

The last point of contact with the form is the "submit" button. Although this usually isn't labeled a submit button. In this example, One Up Web is using the phrase "submit" and the font is actually the same as the welcome door mat message above. I normally don't suggest using the same welcome font and submit button font together, in this case it is hard to read. Really, the submit button should describe the action the user is taking, such as "request information" or "subscribe".

Plug those leaks

It is important to remember that your goal of the landing page is for the user to take action, usually the action of completing a purchase or fill out a form. What happens though is the user doesn't do what you wanted them to do. This usually happens when your page isn't' getting qualified traffic or your page has leaks. Leaks are areas where the user can click out of the page and out of your conversion funnel.

On the One Up Web example, the footer is filled with social links. What is your goal? Did you want to increase your subscription count on YouTube, grow your followers on Twitter, or increase your likes on Facebook? Or did you want to the user to fill out the form? There are better ways to fulfill those actions.

Note: One Up Web uses Click Equations to track their PPC and Google Analytics

Have you seen a highway billboard advertisement lately? These large billboards are usually focused on high traffic areas to give most impact and visual appeal to these massive signs. But you might ask, why would I use one of these signs in a marketing or advertising campaign? What can they do for me?

Build your brand

The biggest way they can help, is by building your brand. These large signs are seen if placed in a high traffic area by thousands of people every day. In fact some of the best locations receive over 300,000 views per day, usually off of major highways or intersections in metropolitan areas. Seeing your branding on these billboard advertisement sparks appeal and interest in your brand that can be recalled with another marketing campaign that is online focused.

A good case study on this is Chipotle. Chopotle uses billboard advertising in large metro populated cities to advertise their tex-mex infused dishes. They aim to target their audience of young adults, nerds, geeks and others who crave the cilantro lime rice bowls piled high with their choice of toppings. The campaign works along with strong word of mouth marketing and other online marketing campaigns.

Another company who uses billboard advertisements would be Apple. You will see Apple signs along highways and again in large metro populated areas like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. Apple sticks to one category such as using one of their products in an ad. Lately, they have been pushing their iPad device. They are securing market share with a new vertical (tablets) and helping user adoption. It makes sense to advertise this device.

If you are building your brand with large, national hopes. A billboard advertisement campaign might be a good idea if you have the cash to sustain such a marketing move. Most signs start about $1000 bucks per month, with higher more predominant position costing upwards of $7000 bucks or higher.

Industry Events

Are you an exhibitor for a industry trade show? Want a very effective way to get industry veterans, press and potential customers to find out about your company? Plan a billboard advertisement campaign around the host venue of the industry show. You have a large audience dedicated to your vertical or industry at the event in a concentrated area. This works wonders with billboard campaigns. Even if you aren't exhibiting you can still have a presence related around the show with a billboard. Point the viewers to your booth or work in a campaign about your overall brand on the billboard. You could even add in a search marketing campaign to the mix. This is true multichannel marketing.

In the tech arena? Pay to advertise in silicon valley. You could get picked up by a major news outlet, or a potential customer might see the billboard ad and pick up the phone or start typing in your web address.

Plus, Google has Matt Cutts (the #1 Google fanboy)  fanning the flames by getting SEOs involved that weren't already with Danny's article. In a recent blog post with his 20% of "free time" that Google allows their employees he says to start off:

First off, let me say that I respect all the people at Bing. From engineers to evangelists, everyone that I’ve met from Microsoft has been thoughtful and sincere, and I truly believe they want to make a great search engine too. I know that they work really hard, and the last thing I would want to do is imply that Bing is purely piggybacking Google. I don’t believe that.

That said, I didn’t expect that Microsoft would deny the claims so strongly. Yusuf Mehdi’s post says “We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop.”

Matt is contradicting himself. What did he expect? Did he expect Microsoft to raise their hands up and admit that they copy or piggyback off Google's search results? They would not dare do that. In fact, they did what any reasonable company would do. Flat out deny it.

Google, which has a much bigger brand worldwide compared to Bing, has given Microsoft a huge advantage now. The amount of media attention the debate has gotten has been astronomical. Plus, at no charge to Microsoft and thanks to Google, Bing is now a common household word. Google's marketing and PR department should be taken outside and shot (English humor). Why give more attention to Bing?

Do you know what else this tells us about Google? Google feels threatened. A blog post entitled Blog Fight rules of engagement from Michael Arrington can apply here. One of the main rules when entering into battle is not to argue with a smaller blog, or in this case company. I completely agree with those rules. Google is huge compared to little ole Bing--the search engine. But by pointing fingers at Bing, Google has now boosted Microsoft's brand. The problem with pointer fingers is you not only draw attention to yourself but also to the one you are accusing.

Microsoft is smirking right now. Not because Google thinks they copy their results. But because for the first time ever, Google views Microsoft as a threat. Not just any threat. A threat in the search engine world that is dominated by Google and Google has now validated that Bing is a legitimate competitor.

The next question I raise is: how can you tell if your affiliate program is working by generating new sales of customers that haven't already been to your site? If you have a good analytics package installed on your site then you shouldn't have a problem.  Inside of your analytics package look for a report called original referring domain. This reports the original path the user took to get to your site or the "first touch". Most analytic campaign reports only give credit to the "last touch", so whichever your last marketing campaign touched the customer, that campaign would get credit for the sale/conversion.  However, the original referring domain report gives the first touch.

To illustrate: lets say that a user visited your site, went to checkout and decided to hunt for a coupon code.  He leaves your site only to find an affiliate site with a "coupon code" that is apparently from you.  He clicks the link to the affiliate website (as is tagged with an affiliate ID). Except that you haven't created any coupon codes. Your company has a strict "no coupon code" policy. The customer tries typing the coupon code into the box and alas it doesn't work. Frustrated, the customer completes their order. In this scenario the affiliate website would get credit for the sale and it would be reported on your affiliate sales report.  Obviously, this isn't the expected result. You want new customers that haven't been introduced to your brand or haven't ordered before. Why should you pay an affiliate on average 6% in commission for this?

Running your original referring domain report, and comparing it with your top affiliate sales report gives you a snapshot of what sites bring in the most new customers that haven't interacted with your brand or that haven't already visited your website through another online marketing campaign. Here is a sample report, lets see what we can learn.

As I stated earlier, we matched the affiliate sales and the original domains up together. Instantly, I see that my top affiliate website in terms of sales is "Website A", however looking at the next column over I see that of the $35, 267.58 of sales generated  only $411 of that was originally from their website. The rest of the sales, were generated from a customer leaving my site and eventually returning by means of that affiliate. Remember though that I am paying 6% in commission of $35,267.58 which is roughly $2116.05 in fees. To generate $411 in net new income, I spent $2116. That's a really bad return on my investment.