'Net Features : Optify

Edison Awards Honor Optify, Integrate & More

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:50:00 GMT

The online industry was well represented at the 26th Annual Edison Awards held in Chicago, April 24-25.

Judged by a panel their peers, including business executives, past winners, academics and leaders in their respective fields, companies and products such as Optify Connect by Optify (Measurement/Management Tools), ClickShare by Barco (for Content Management), Square Register by Square (Innovative Services) and AdHQ by Integrate (Communication/Campaign) walked away with gold Edison Awards for their advances.

“It’s a huge accomplishment to be recognized with a gold Edison Award among some of the most innovative companies in the space,” said Rob Eleveld, CEO of Optify. “We’ve been fine-tuning our software suite to meet the ever-growing needs of digital marketing agencies, and Optify Connect is an integral part of that success.”

To see a full list of the winners, click here.

Less than 25% Use Autoresponders

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:20:00 GMT

Did you hear it? Did you hear the sound of my digital heart breaking into a googol of pieces? That's the feeling I got upon hearing that only 25 percent of companies analyzed from the Inc. 5,000 were using autoresponders within their marketing automation programs.

The study, conducted by Optify, examined companies with annual revenues of at least $1 million operating in the Advertising & Marketing, IT Services, Software or Business Services industries. What they found will (well, should) absoluetly astound you.

- Nearly 25% of websites do not offer any type of online contact form.
- Of the companies with online contact forms, only 24% respond immediately with an autoresponse email. Approximately 30% respond within one hour.
- Only 37% of companies follow up via email within one week of form submission.
- Only 8% of companies send more than one email within a week after form submission.

"Autoresponders allow businesses to capitalize on a unique opportunity to engage with prospects at the moment they express interest online," said Doug Wheeler, Optify CMO. "Using autoresponders for your marketing automation -- and using them correctly -- can help you accelerate better, more personalized relationships with prospects and customers. These are basic steps that every company can adopt -- no matter what size."

Google Dominates 90 Percent of B2B Space

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:32:00 GMT

From search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) to social media and email, Web workers use a variety of tools to build and sustain website traffic. But knowing what is actually working to achieve these goals (Web-wide) is important not only for accurate budgeting of time and money, but also managing stakeholder expectations.

Optify’s recently released 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report can help. The company analyzed more than 27 million visits to nearly 600 B2B sites from various traffic sources throughout 2012.

“We weren’t shocked at the data, but we were surprised,” said Optify Chief Marketing Officer Doug Wheeler.

The first takeaway is that organic search serves as the number one driver of traffic to B2B websites, followed by direct traffic (40 percent) and referrals (11.50 percent). The report also finds that despite the increased adoption of social media by B2B in 2012, itʼs still only a fraction (1.90 percent) of total traffic to B2B websites. It is important to note, however, that the report also found that Google is responsible for nearly all of organic search, making it the single most important referring source of traffic.

“In the B2B space, 90 plus percent is coming from Google,” said Wheeler. “When you are looking at where you are going to spend your money, that’s imperative to know. Second, we are now seeing more than 40 percent of all organic visits from Google coming back as ‘not provided.’

“Google is spending more of its resources, taking that data away and at some point, you have to understand how it is you are going to acquire traffic, customers living in a paid information world. The way to get that traffic is through paid media.”

Very soon on the horizon, Wheeler expects seeing analytics, around what traffic is coming to your site, moving from free to paid. Understanding and optimizing everything Google is going to be imperative, but Web workers also need to find out if paid search makes financial sense to their companies.

The report states, “For the companies that run paid search campaigns successfully, paid search has the potential to be a sustainable, strong source of leads. But not all companies can, or should, run paid search campaigns. Analyze your paid search potential (price point, average cost per lead, realistic conversion rates, resources, etc.) to find out if this source is for you and how much you can get out of it.”

Optify also looked at sources for converting traffic.

“Don’t put away that checkbook for email,” said Wheeler. “Email is number one in terms of conversion.”

According to Optify, the average conversion rate among all B2B websites in the report, across all sources, was 1.6 percent. Additionally, email shows the highest coversion rate compared to all other sources.

“Surprisingly, organic search, the number one drive of traffic, is at the bottom of the conversion-rate list, second only to social media among the sources with lowest conversion traffic,” read the report.

And while the report states that only 5 percent of B2B traffic comes from social media, Twitter outperforms Facebook in terms of lead conversion by more than a 9-1 ratio. Why does Twitter convert so well?

“I think it’s because it’s an accepted form of communication, almost like email,” asid Wheeler. “It’s just a different style, so people respond to it more instantly. They wouldn’t bother communicating with you if they didn’t want to respond, that’s my pure, opinion.”

The full report is available for free download.

“In reading this report, you might discover that you are doing better or worse than the published benchmarks and discover areas of potential for your marketing activities,” said Wheeler.

Digital Firm Connects to Higher ROI with Optify Connect

Amberly Dressler — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:15:00 GMT

When it comes to successfully engaging a lead from their first website visit to their purchase decision, automation is key.

This idea is why Optify, a provider of B2B marketing software, developed Optify Connect, a system capability that presents the entire behavioral history and known information about a lead in one place. It also ties new contacts with their anonymous visit history to connect separate visits regardless of the contact’s source, cookie status or last visit, in an effort to give marketers a 360 degree view of their leads.

Optify Connect, which is built on the company’s marketing automation suite, is for professional B2B marketers and digital marketing agencies. R2integrated, a digital/social marketing and technology firm, filled the bill and made the decision to go with the Professional Version of Optify (about a year and a half ago) to gain insights into its website activity. The company’s Director of Marketing and Communications Samantha Devita is glad they did.

"Over time, Optify has become a day-to-day operational tool within our department,” said Devita. “Business decisions, campaign budget allocation and optimizations are driven based off the valuable information Optify Connect is providing, and our lead maturation programs have been highly successful.”

Of the Optify Connect features, r2i uses its Email Manager application (built on the platform of ExactTarget), Landing Page Builder (includes out of the box Salesforce integration and A/B testing) and alerts notifications tools to segment, message and collect lead intelligence for its Business Development team. Also included in Optify Connect is Contact Manager, which, among other features, automatically mergers duplicated contacts and provides detailed visitor information that can be exported at any time.

For its purposes, r2i has seen an increase in ROI.

“Optify Connect allowed us to connect offline activity with online activity, bridging the gap between offline and online marketing campaigns,” said Devita. “Using Optify, we were able to directly tie attendees of our open house event to prospective and closed business, which has provided great value in terms of ROI.”

Additionally, r2i was able to synch Optify Connect to its existing Salesforce account, which enabled the company to provide detailed insights to its Business Development team.

“At a high-level, Optify Connect provides historical behavior, trending insights that enable us to make valuable business decisions, and now we have a complete view of leads that had previously been anonymous,” said Devita. “Granularly, our Business Development team is able to effectively nurture leads based off previously exhibited lead behavior. Optify (powered by the Optify Connect capabilities) provides the intelligence necessary for both marketing and sales decisions.”

Why is the Digital Agency Market’s Tail Growing Longer?

Administrator — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:30:00 GMT

The evolution of digital marketing agencies and the overall online marketing sector is a conversation that demands attention. The world of digital marketing is moving so fast that we should expect to see an increasing number of B2B marketers who want an agency regardless of which inbound marketing software provider they use.

The average marketing team simply cannot keep up with, nor do they have the expertise in, the number of digital channels and cross-channel campaigns available to them. It is inevitable that marketers will need a service partner to help them prioritize resources and efforts, along with providing specialized channel expertise. In fact, the market demand is so large that we predict the digital marketing agency segment to double in the next three years.

The more we study the market, however, the longer we see the tail growing, especially for small, local and metro-area agencies. So while the big guys like WPP and Publicis will see their share of growth, a more interesting phenomenon is the massive growth in the digital marketing agency tail, meaning the smaller, more local agency. An academic framework below helps explain why.

Porter’s Five Forces – Quick Overview

Porter's Five Forces Analysis is a framework for industry analysis and business strategy development formed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School in 1979. Industry attractiveness in the Porter context refers to the overall industry profitability. An "unattractive" industry is one in which the combination of these five forces acts to drive down overall profitability.

Porter’s model includes five forces we will glance at briefly:

• Threat of new competition

• Threat of substitute products or services

• Bargaining power of customers

• Bargaining power of suppliers

• Intensity of competitive rivalry

Using this model, companies can analyze the attractiveness of an industry and determine if they can get a favorable (above normal) return if they decide to step into that market. Let’s take a look below at the incentives and opportunities to step into the digital agency market based on this framework.

Threat of new competition – low barrier to entry

A profitable market will attract new entrants that will eventually saturate the market, cutting prices and making the profit margins low to minimal. Barriers to entry like technology and setup costs, will limit entries to the market extending its future profitability.

One of the largest barriers to entry in the digital marketing world is account control and executive relationships. Very few agencies can undertake the cost and time to break into a Fortune 1000 client like P&G or Ford, where the large incumbent agencies already have many relationships and internal referral business. At the same time, few agencies have the scale to execute massive campaigns for Fortune 1000 clients even if they could win the business. So the threat of new competition at the high end seems small.

Head down market, to a mid-size enterprise in $25m-250m revenue range, and a different dynamic appears. The big agencies have too high a cost structure in billing rates due to their size and overhead to be competitive in this arena. They also lack all the client relationships to the many regional businesses in this market. So a large opportunity exists for new competition. In the local metro areas, small owner-operator agencies with local contacts in small family owned businesses see the same opportunity in the hyper-local markets.

The low cost strategy of entry is contributing to the rapid expansion of digital marketing agencies; start an LLC, print a business card, put up a WordPress site and you’re ready to go.

Threat of substitute products or services – software is a complement, not a substitute

Unlike competitors, substitutes are products outside of the industry that can substitute for the need of your services and by that reducing the overall size of the market.

The emergence of marketing software can be considered as a threat of substitution to the digital marketing agency, but that would be a mistake. Agency clients feel the need for advice, expertise, and execution assistance as digital channels proliferate regardless of whether or not they have inbound marketing software in-house. Therefore, as the digital marketing world expands so will the digital marketing agency market.

Ultimately, inbound marketing software is a complementary product that helps increase the “pie” by providing a platform on which to train new hires with less experience, standardize service delivery, deliver consistent reporting metrics to clients and more.

Bargaining power of customers – the tail grows longer

Bargaining power is determined by the ability of the buyers to put pressure on digital agencies. The bargaining power of customers is influenced by the ratio between the number of firms and the number of buyers (supply and demand).

As more and more money is being invested in digital marketing, budgets inherently are under greater scrutiny. Customers engage with their professional purchasing organizations with more heavy-handed negotiating tactics. Consequently, campaign reviews become more ROI-based and metric-focused.

When this happens, the cost structure of the large agencies and their associated high, billable rates to support huge campaigns, premium services and account control at P&G and Ford becomes a barrier to move down market. Therefore the mid-market, including local businesses, begins looking at more cost competitive agencies, which provide more bang for the buck for their business size.

As the availability of smaller agencies grows, the effect of increased bargaining power is not so much about pushing down the profitability of the market than it is pushing out the agency market tail to service smaller companies with less overhead costs and leaner cost structures in local markets.

Bargaining power of suppliers – unorganized suppliers

Similar to the bargaining power of the customers, suppliers have the ability to put pressure on firms in the industry with increased cost for materials, high switching costs and over-reliability on specific suppliers or distribution channels.

But in an industry that relies heavily on labor, the primary suppliers are employees themselves. Given the job market since 2008, many folks are just happy to have a job. Therefore few people are secure enough to negotiate with their employers about increased pay and benefits.

Intensity of competitive rivalry – going local

Said to be the determining factor of the overall competitiveness of the industry, the intensity of competitive rivalry is influenced by the strength of the major players in the market, the levels of competitive advantages and the market potential.

At the high end of the market, the competition for Fortune 500 accounts is especially fierce because the prize, or “market potential”, is so large. This same level of competition is not nearly as apparent neither in the mid-sized enterprise nor in the small business market where the individual prize for any given account is relatively small. Also, the digital marketing agency ecosystem is local and relationship-based like many services industries even though the Internet has made physical location somewhat irrelevant.

Clients still like to have a face they can talk to, meet for coffee and periodically meet in-person. Additionally, since the market is highly fragmented and tiered (small agencies treat small businesses, big agencies treat big companies), no distinct leaders have emerged, and the market share is distributed.

With a localized market, no true leader and highly fragmented industry, the intensity of competitive rivalry in the segments below Fortune 1000 remains quite low. This encourages many large agency veterans to break out and start their own shop.

Digital Marketing Agency Growth Will Be Concentrated Most in the Tail

The framework of the Porter Analysis leads to a simple conclusion we are seeing daily in the marketplace. The demand for digital marketing agency services is extremely large, while the barriers to entry are low for target clients in the small and mid enterprise sectors.

We've seen an exponential rise in the overall digital agency industry, but that growth will continue to be concentrated in the long tail of small agencies. Will there be a consolidation and bundling of services through marketing software, acquisitions and new technology, or will this market continue to be fragmented and tiered? Only time will tell. But for now, look around at your local indicators of agency growth in the tail.

About the Author: Rob Eleveld, the CEO of Optify, is an evangelist on the Digital Marketing Ecosystem and a seasoned expert in both developing and executing successful go-to-market strategies. At Optify, he is setting the company's course on building software that helps B2B marketers and digital marketing agencies excel and profit in their quickly changing online world.

Are You an All-Star Marketing Athlete?

Allison Howen — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 17:47:00 GMT

You may not be able to beat Tom Brady on the football field, but with a little investment in planning and inbound marketing strategies, you have the ability to be an all-star athlete within the marketing industry – according to a recent study from Optify.

The inbound marketing software provider announced the findings of its first annual survey on the B2B marketing athlete, which are individuals who have mastered multiple channels, tactics and techniques to become successful within the marketing industry. The survey found that 47 percent of marketers were labeled as “Star Performers,” because these marketers consistently met their lead-generation goals by investing more time per week on planning, as well as exhibited the highest scores for attitude and focus.

According to the study, marketing athletes tend to be very productive – with 82 percent reporting that they spend the majority of their time on activities important to their business. The most time-consuming task is content creation and management, with 30 percent of respondents claiming to spend more than 15 hours per week on these tasks and 40 percent spending between 5-15 hours. To break down tasks even further, the areas that occupy the most of marketers’ time include content (30 percent), lead generation (17 percent) and website management (16 percent).

The study also found that star performers tend to invest more time and effort into inbound marketing tactics such as content creation, PR, SEO and social media. However, when it comes to tactics, social media is undoubtedly the most popular choice – with 91 percent of respondents claiming that they are social media experts. In fact, more marketers spend at least 15 hours per week on social media than any other tactic, and only 16 percent report spending no time on social media. On the other hand, paid search is the least popular tactic with 57 percent of marketers not spending any time in this area.

It is also important to note that even though 73 percent of respondents claim to spend less than five hours per week on planning, it seems as though this is a very important task that shouldn’t be overlooked. This is because 42 percent of star performers report spending more than five hours per week on planning, while 14 percent report spending more than 15 hours per week on this task.

“Marketing athletes are the unsung heroes of B2B marketing, and this survey puts into perspective the amount of work and knowledge they possess,” said Rob Eleveld, CEO of Optify. “The study confirms our many discussions with customers and prospects; marketing athletes work across multiple channels to achieve their aggressive goals. We are building Optify to help them manage and track all their marketing campaigns in one single place.”

Other findings from the study reveal that most marketing athletes handle key marketing activities in house. However, a large percentage of respondents also outsource expertise-heavy and labor-intensive tasks to contractors and digital marketing agencies, such as Web design and maintenance (45 percent), SEO (35 percent) and PR (33 percent).

To sum up the study, key factors that set star performers apart from their peers included more time spent on planning and execution in areas directly related to generating revenue, and less time spent in non-productive areas like administrative work. Additionally, star performers tend to have a more positive attitude and focus more time in vital areas like lead generation and content development.

Optify Adds Closed-Loop Email Marketing

Linc Wonham — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:30:00 GMT

Business-to-business software vendor Optify is expanding its inbound marketing solution by adding closed-loop email marketing to its suite.

Optify’s closed-loop system expands the sales pipeline from every email drop and measures more than just click-throughs and leads. The new solution provides sales teams with a list of the contacts that showed the most research activity on their company’s website after receiving the email, rather than just those who filled out a form.

“The new email marketing application is a valuable addition to Optify’s Inbound Marketing Suite because it allows us to execute campaigns to a very targeted subset of our house list,” says Benjamin Christie of GourmetAds. “And when they respond, Optify automatically appends their previously anonymous visitor history from our website to their contact record. The ability to track all of our online marketing efforts in one integrated solution is another huge plus we’ve seen.”

The new addition includes the following key features:

•    Closed-Loop Visitor & Response Tracking: Online marketers can track all of their visitors’ online research activity, driven by all of their marketing programs, including email campaigns.

•    Contact Manager & Activity History: Automatically ties a contact’s anonymous visitor history to their record the first time they click your email.

•    List Segmentation: Segment campaigns to target specific subsets of a master list. Optify makes it simple to create and manage various lists within one account.

•    HTML Email Builder: Create personalized emails through a simplified process of customized templates, or cut and paste existing HTML directly into Optify.

•    ExactTarget Embedded Technology: Seamlessly built on top of the ExactTarget Embedded email delivery platform giving Optify customers an enterprise-class email platform with industry-leading deliverability rates.

Optify’s email marketing solution is available immediately with the Professional Edition.

How Does Breaking News Affect Search Results?

Michael Garrity — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:15:00 GMT

Business-to-business (B2B) inbound marketing software provider Optify has released new data about the differences in the way that search engines react during breaking news events.

The study specifically looked at three hot-button news topics from the past few years: the Japanese tsunami, Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple, and Amanda Knox's return to Seattle after being released from an Italian prison.

Optify conducted the study by identifying specific keywords for each event that would drive the highest volume of results on Google and the Microsoft-owned Bing. The evolution and performance of these keywords were observed on each search engine over a period of time, and Optify found that to react to the news, both Bing and Google made dramatic changes to their search engine results pages (SERPs).

Both sites diminished or eliminated the presence of sponsored content, increased the amount of results containing integrated or multimedia content, and pushed recent news content to the top of the page at the expense of ranked results. Overall, about 70 percent of all the content shown above the fold was breaking news.

However, there were some expected differences. Mainly that when it comes to surfacing news results, Bing favors the most recent results and those coming from MSN.com, also Microsoft-owned. Google prefers authority and reach and serves more results from "prominent" publications.

The study ends up concluding that organizations with higher authority and social reach tend to do better in a breaking news cycle.

Optify Rolls Out Partner Program

Michael Garrity — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Online marketing software and services provider Optify recently launched Optify Partner Program for Agencies, which will assist online marketing agencies in increasing revenue and efficiency by implementing Optify's pre-existing capabilities.

According to the company, using the Optify Partner Program will help agencies to improve their proficiency in SEO, social media, lead generation and marketing analytics.

One opportunity presented by the program is the ability to sell Optify directly to clients and offer extensive training, support and account management to quickly get agencies up and running with the product.

Some of the benefits of the program include the ability to grow an agency business using additional software solutions, scale advantages with volume discount pricing and an agency product that features multi-domain management and APIs tailored for custom reporting.

"If you're a digital marketing agency providing services for clients, Optify's Real Time Marketing Software Suite can help deliver world-class solutions," says Optify's Vice President of Sales, Sam Wheeler, "We've seen success from early participants who have gained new business, become more efficient and seen dramatic growth in traffic and leads for clients."

Optify Partner Program for Agencies incorporates all of Optify's editions, from Basic to Professional to Enterprise.

Optify Launches Basic Edition for Small Businesses

Linc Wonham — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:35:00 GMT

Online marketing software provider Optify has upgraded its Professional Edition and announced a new Basic Edition focused on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. New to both editions are an onboarding wizard and keyword auto-suggest feature.

The $99-per-month Basic Edition for smaller businesses supports a single user, provides 250 tracked keywords and includes one global search engine. It also offers page optimization, link tracking, lead scoring and tracking, social media monitoring and Twitter for Business.

For larger enterprises, Optify continues to strengthen its $499-per-month Professional Edition and includes all the features of the Basic Edition plus support for 10 users, multiple Web domains, custom reporting, multiple lead scores, phone and email support and bundled QuickStart and Success Services.

“We’re building a world-class suite of software and services for online marketing success,” says Brian Goffman, CEO and co-founder of Optify. “With these new editions, we are bringing an even higher level of capabilities to companies of all sizes – whether you’re a large in-house marketing department or a solo, SMB marketer just getting started.”

Optify Announces Enhanced SEO Keyword Reporting

Linc Wonham — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 21:07:00 GMT

Real-time Web marketing software provider Optify has announced a new set of advanced keyword reports. The new release is designed to help scale out global and local SEO efforts for Optify customers and help measure success with enhanced reporting capabilities.

“SEO is a mission-critical part of enabling customers to find you, and the rules are always changing,” says Brian Goffman, CEO and co-founder of Optify. “These new features are a direct result of our customer's requirements.”

Included in the new keyword reports will be the following:

Grouped Keywords: This feature will allow companies to more quickly and easily measure and share success on unique SEO campaigns, specific SEO focus areas, and identify seasonal changes and opportunities.

Competitor Keywords: New formats enable customers to compare keyword-ranking performance and trends across market competitors on individual keywords, groups of keywords and keyword campaigns.

Keyword Trends: Trend reports enable customers to identify the movers and shakers among keywords for themselves and competitors. Marketers can better understand SEO opportunities and threats and react immediately.

Visit Optify for more information on the firm's new set of keyword reports.

Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Administrator — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:35:00 GMT

Marketing automation software is here to stay. No longer an emerging trend or the domain of a select few savvy businesses, these software platforms streamline sales and marketing departments by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Sounds good, right? But what do these solutions really enable your organization to do, how can it benefit search marketing efforts and who are the real leaders in the space?

Users of marketing automation software platforms, typically those responsible for marketing a website or business (search, email, social, advertising), are able to specify criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes that are then interpreted, stored and executed by the software. While that undoubtedly sounds complex, the objectives are simply to increase efficiency and reduce human error. One possible cause for a lack of adoption in small and medium size businesses is that these solutions come in a variety of forms with a lot of feature cross-over. Before moving forward it is important to understand the various classifications of marketing software.

- Marketing intelligence software tracks behavior (what activity did the user engage in and where) for the purpose of understanding intent, enabling marketers to improve targeting based on interest and vertical market. Appropriate for any size organization.

- Marketing workflow focuses more on budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, collaboration, asset creation and management internally within an organization. Marketing workflow solutions are typically designed for larger enterprises.

- Marketing automation software focuses on lead generation with marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in products/services. The best solutions on the market couple marketing technology with sales processes as delineated by a CRM program.

These are very broad definitions of the marketing software classifications that should help identify what type is appropriate for your business and in particular your search, social, email and advertising campaigns. Ultimately, any marketing software should aid in performing functions and tasks including analyzing marketing campaigns (and customer behaviors), managing those marketing campaigns, and organizing and storing customer data. So who are the best of the best in the marketing automation software business? WM has listed a few top tier vendors below.

Eloqua

Marketo

Pardot

Optify

InfusionSoft

RightNow

Genius.com

NetSuite

Aprimo

Loopfuse

Silverpop

Unica

Top Search Position Gains 37-percent of Clicks

Linc Wonham — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:00:00 GMT

Real-time Web marketing software and services provider Optify recently conducted an SEO study with the goal of determining a new click-through-rate (CTR) curve based on recent changes to Google and Bing’s search engine results pages. Previous CTR curves include the famous 2006 AOL CTR curve as well as several other more recent attempts to provide updated curves.

Optify used a small sample set of its client database that was constructed from organic keyword visits by a variety of B2B and B2C websites. The research revealed that click through rates for the top three results on search engines are highly concentrated and account for nearly 60 percent of all clicks, with the top spot achieving nearly 37 percent of the clicks on its own.

The study also showed that lower cost-per-click (CPC) terms see more than 30 percent of clicks on the top results, while higher CPC terms receive fewer than 20 percent of clicks on the top result.

“Optify’s research was directed to understand whether changes in search results have influenced click through rates, and how business marketers can focus their efforts,” says Erez Barak, co-founder and vice president of products at Optify. “CTR curves are the cornerstone of the SEO industry, and we wanted to provide up-to-date insights to enable marketers to promote and grow their businesses online.”

Key findings of the study include the following:

• CTRs on the top search results are high, despite additions to results and format changes. Ranking first on the second page has greater value than ranking at the bottom of page one.

• There is a negative correlation between CTR on organic results and the cost of sponsored results. As CPC value goes up, there are fewer clicks on organic results.

• Search volume affects CTR. Long-tail terms show higher CTR on page one than higher-traffic terms. This means that marketers can get significant impact even from lower-traffic terms.

In the increasingly competitive search marketing climate, measuring page rank and search volume is not enough to be successful. Businesses need to carefully track not just where they rank on search engines, but also the CTR of those keywords and whether to target them with paid or organic search strategies.

Visit Optify’s Organic CTR Curve Study for more information.

Optify Adds Social Features and Cloud APIs

Linc Wonham — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Real-time marketing software and services provider Optify is extending its reach into organic search and social media. Closed-loop social media capabilities, enterprise-ready keyword features, link and page reports and the launch of Optify for the Cloud are among the new offerings included in the company’s updated platform for online marketers and publishers.

Optify’s new dashboard widget for Twitter for Business enables marketers to create and schedule tweets across multiple accounts, organize Twitter campaigns, score social media visitors and leads and track results from total visitors down to the individual lead. Marketers can also now track social media’s influence on SEO using the Pages application, which adds key indicators such as Facebook Likes and Shares.

The new release also includes Keyword Reports, showing keyword position over time and relative to competitors; Links, for link management; Pages, enhanced with social media metrics, and workflow and reporting features to optimize and align content for discovery.

Optify also announced cloud APIs that enable a broad range of custom reports and third-party applications to be powered by Optify data. Users can systematically enable data reporting in Excel, Tableau and other services.

Optify integrates with Salesforce.com and is now available on AppExchange.

Optify Enhances International SEO, Real-time Lead Scoring

Linc Wonham — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:40:00 GMT

Optify, a leading provider of hosted, enterprise search engine optimization (SEO) and social media software, has introduced some upgrades to its real-time marketing solution. New features include the extension of Optify’s international SEO capabilities, the addition of marketing ROI dashboards for Salesforce.com, and improvements to Optify’s real-time lead scoring capabilities.

“Optify delivers enterprise-class traffic generation, lead conversion, social media and ROI measurement for a variety of customers, including technology startups, online publishers and e-commerce vendors,” said Brian Goffman, co-founder and CEO of Optify. “These additional capabilities will enable marketing and sales teams to further drive success and measure results from their investments in the real-time Internet.”

Below are some highlights of the upgrade:

International SEO: Enables companies to efficiently manage worldwide search campaigns. Enterprise marketers can research keywords, track keyword performance and report business results in more than 30 countries, including the UK, Australia, France, Japan and India.

Salesforce.com Marketing Dashboard: Adds support for Chatter and a new marketing dashboard. Optify users can view ROI from SEO and social media through to leads, opportunities and revenue. Salesforce.com Chatter integration enables real-time updates of key customer events, such as visits to an important web page or registration for a webinar.

Lead Scoring: Enables marketers to filter and prioritize visitors and leads based on key criteria. Optify supports multiple lead scores incorporating a wide variety of measures, including profile data such as company size and number of employees, and behavioral data such as repeat visits or registering as a lead. Updated in real time, lead scores can trigger key events in third-party applications like ExactTarget, and are integrated into Optify for Salesforce.com.

Optify Dashboard: Enables individual users to customize their views to meet business needs. For example, SEO users can set up widgets to see what keywords are driving traffic and leads, while sales teams can use their website feed to view the latest information about website visitors and leads. Extensive reporting capabilities enable any report to be turned into a customized widget, allowing users to fully control their experience.

Optify customers include LexisNexis, Microsoft, Marchex, SchemaLogic, Corensic, The St. Petersburg Times, Payscale, AdReady and Varolii, and the company says they see on average more than a 300-percent increase in leads and conversion rates, and more than a 100-percent increase in website visits over a period of four months.