Category: Tips

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Reviewing Ad Profitability: ROAS – Metrics Part One

ROI also known as ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is just one important metric to monitor to make sure your AdWords advertising plan is working for you. The formula for ROAS is shown below:

((Sales less AdWords Spend) divided by AdWords Spend) times 100

This yields a percentage that is an important figure to keep in mind when you evaluate if a Google AdWords budget is working properly to yield a return for your business.

If your ROAS is above 1% you are creating more sales than your expense to advertise. Here’s and example. A typical sale generates $4,800 of income. You spent $400 on AdWords to generate the sale, your ROAS is 11%. If your typical sale generates $4,800 of income but you spent $1,400 on AdWords to generate the sale your ROAS is 2.42%.

The subjective part comes when you try to analyze what is a satisfactory number for your ROAS figure. This varies for each business. For most businesses you really should be at a number higher than 1%.

For businesses selling products online, the ROAS is fairly straight forward, but how about when you sell a service or are looking to add a new patient to your practice. In this case, a review of Cost Per Acquisition may be more valuable tempered with a review of ROAS as well. The key is to generate more sales than it costs to advertise to get them. This takes much more analysis than just running reports in Google AdWords,;you really need to measure your AdWords ad spend against reports on your company’s overall profitability to determine if AdWords is really working for you.

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Facebook Business Page Timeline Tips

I have migrated my two Facebook business pages early to the timeline this past weekend and wanted to share some of my tips that I have figured out while I was using the new look. Remember as you read this blog post, all business pages will all be forced into the new timeline layout as of the end of March 2012.

Here’s what I have learned:

  • Don’t try to create a complex graphic or use a screen shot of our website banner. Use one large high definition image that tries to convey visually who and what you are. In my case we are located near Washington DC and so I am using a image I took recently of the Capital building. I did try my website banner and I did try a composite image, both looked too busy.
  • Clicking the star at the top right of an update will stretch either the image or text update across your whole page. Facebook will leave the bigger post up for 7 days. You can do this in several places on your page to break up your layout. Actually what I did was to design my layout look by using images and text to give a pleasing break to the typical two columns. This means that the new timeline is a much more visual statement than the old wall. Make sure to only load high definition images as when Facebook expands the image if you highlight it, low resolution images will look bad.
  • When you are logged in as a business page entity you cannot post to anyone fan or otherwise walls as a business entity. In fact when you are logged in as a business, you cannot even see a fans wall, you will only be able to see the timeline. That means that all interaction is back on your own timeline. Business pages in fact don’t have a wall anymore, just the timeline.

As a result, our services for Facebook have been changed. We may add additional services later, but for now we have streamlined our offerings to cover what we feel will work for business during this change. My personal feeling is that the action for Facebook for businesses will now be in the advertising arena. For many business owners the cost to keep a Facebook business page updated with photos, video, favorite posts, and other apps will simply be too costly and time consuming.

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A Real World Guide to Twitter and Facebook Featured at SiteProNews

On Monday February 27th, SiteProNews featured Nancy McCord’s newest research paper called “A Real World Guide to Twitter and Facebook on their home page.” You can read the full article at SiteProNews. The SiteProNews newsletter is one of the preeminent publications to the webmaster professional community and reaches over 600,000 subscribers three times a week.

In addition to publishing Nancy’s research paper on their website and sending it out to their 600,000 subscribers, the SiteProNews Editorial Staff has asked Nancy to write more exclusive articles for their publication on a monthly basis.

We are excited that Nancy’s most recent research paper has gotten this exposure and will keep you posted when she publishes additional articles for SiteProNews.

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Our Newest Whitepaper is Out: A Real World Guide to Facebook and Twitter

I’ve just released my newest white paper called “A Real World Guide to Facebook and Twitter”.

You can download the PDF file for free by registering to receive my monthly newsletter.

In this six page guide you will find my candid insights and recommendations on how frequently you should update Twitter and Facebook to grow your follower/fan base as well as my special insights on using both platforms.

To develop the insights for this guide, I watched 23 different Facebook and Twitter accounts for a period of three months and monitored over 2,865 status updates. I personally consider this a fairly small data set, but it is large enough to show some important trends that warrant consideration and further discussion.

As the clients that my firm writes for, are in diverse markets, purchase different service engagement levels, and have unique starting levels of follower/fans, it is impossible to state unequivocally how to specifically grow a social networking account from my data. However, there are some statistical averages and trends that I have found and wanted to share them with you.

I think that you will find this guide helpful, interesting reading, and insightful.