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I’ve had clients and internal stakeholders ask me some pretty detailed about their corporate blog performance. They’ve wanted to know why their bounce rates are so high, why they aren’t getting more traffic from search engines and why the pageviews-to-visit ratio is so low. In some cases, these are valid questions to ask about a corporate blog, but generally, they are pretty close to irrelevant. When you launch a corporate blog – either to market your company or provide information or support to existing customers – you need to focus on the right metrics.

Especially for corporate bloggers who either consume mass media blog content regularly (or who got their starts writing for independent mass market blogs), it’s natural to use the metrics that have become accepted in those venues. Unique visitors, pageviews and stickiness measures directly indicate the performance of blogs like Technorati and Gadling because of the underlying business model. However, they don’t speak directly to the success of your corporate blog. The reason for this is pretty simple: traffic does not directly drive revenue for your organization. It may contribute to sales possibilities down the road, but it doesn’t offer a straight connection, particularly in the B2B space.

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Changes are coming to the search market. Several innovations are not only the horizon but are coming into play, and they have the power to reshape the search engine marketing space. Look for the de-emphasis of search engine optimization (SEO), as other forms of content — and thus other forms of search — gain prevalence.

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Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.

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Whether search engine marketing is an important part of your online arsenal is beyond question. Google alone, with around two-thirds of the U.S. search market, warrants specific consideration. For IT manufacturers and solution providers, search engine marketing can be particularly challenging because competition is fierce for fairly specific search terms — both for products and vendors and for the IT issues that you seek to resolve for your clients. The latest research from MarketingSherpa reveals the priorities of search engine marketers.

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What social media marketing metrics are you using?

The latest research from MarketingSherpa indicates that businesses using social media to promote their products and services — and fill their lead streams — are employing a variety of measures to gauge the effectiveness of their initiatives. Of course, the metrics you’d expect have been most widely adopted, but there are some important stats being watched by a small group of companies that signal where social media marketing is headed.

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Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. There are some serious benefits to paid search advertising with search engines, such as predictability and control. And, it’s easier to measure your paid search marketing ROI. But, the quality of the leads that come to you this way aren’t nearly as high as those that come via search engine optimization (SEO).

According to the latest study by MarketingSherpa, SEO was responsible for both the highest quality and quantity of search engine-driven leads, with shares of 30 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Paid search on Google did post a noticeable 32 percent of leads by quantity, but it was only good for 16 percent by quality. Meanwhile, paid search on the other major search engines resulted in only 6 percent of leads by quality, compared to a similarly meager 9 percent of high-quantity leads.

Commit to a solid SEO strategy (which can be helped along considerably by blogging), and you’ll earn stronger leads in greater quantity.

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[Source: MarketingSherpa]

Since everything Google does can be used to enhance the delivery of ads against search results (and in other ad venues), it doesn’t need to charge much – or anything, in some cases – for the technology it offers. Unsurprisingly, businesses become pretty interested in low-cost and no-cost solutions. Though the trend is still in its infancy, many IT buyers are opening themselves to the idea of using Google-supplied software-as-a-service solutions in place of their existing systems.

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IT buyers are under pressure to show that their investments are performing. So, if they can keep TCO down and spread their budgets across more projects (with ROI potential), the result is an expanded ROI impact, with low investments yielding substantial returns. This means spending less – and compromising – can pay off in the long term … or at least it would appear that way. Google is making it easier for them to do this — or it’s at least creating the appearance of easier TCO and ROI.

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Search and online advertising offer limited upside for Google at this point. Sure, they can still contribute significantly to Wall Street’s expectations, but they won’t be sufficient to fuel the sort of growth Google needs to maintain the reputation it’s developed over the past decade. The company’s expansion into personal and enterprise applications shows that there’s a need for new revenue streams. This is the impetus for Google products that could wind up replacing some segments of the market where IT VARs operate.

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