ThatsWiki - Digital Learning to develop Strategic Thinking and Execution.

Gartner conducted a survey in UK, canada and USA with 315 marketing executives and predicted the figures of digital marketing spend will increase by 17% in the year 2015 as most of the respondents are pro digital marketing expenditure. Gartner research director Jake Sorofman, also mentioned that is's very difficult to gauge upon how much spend is going to increase as the companies are maintaining seperate digital marketing budgets. 



Although, digital platforms are transforming the ways of marketing, Print and broadcast still dominate the advertising spend as many companies yet to hit double digit mark in sales revenue from digital platforms apart from UK.

Srikanth Akella would like to connect on LinkedIn. How would you like to respond? Srikanth Akella

Google has released a new feature to track the mobile usability issues in webmaster tools. A link has been placed under Search Traffic in left menu of the webmaster Tools interface. 
Mobile usability reports show usability errors of various types such as Viewport not configured, touch elements too close, small font size, flash usage, content not sized to viewport. One can observe all these in the below image to get better idea.

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How to use mobile usability reports?
Webmasters can start using this report to measure the mobile webpages performance and corresponding errors. This report helps to identify the grey areas and fix them to make the website compatible for several devices.
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Srikanth Akella would like to stay in touch on LinkedIn. Srikanth AkellaSr Manager at Bip & Sum Software SolutionsHyderabad Area, India

Let's understand the difference between Exit rate and bounce rate. During a session if the visitor views multiple pages and leaves at a certain point will contribute to Exit rate. If the visitor leaves the page as soon as after landing on the page without pageviews will contribute to Bounce rate. Page exit of any form, including bounce rate criteria, will be used to compute the page exit and reversal is not true.
Also Read: User Behavior Causes of Bounce Rate.Behavior:Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate


1) Bad Navigation one of the main reason why a visitor leave your website. Visitor often confuse how to find the related content or unable to identify the links to your important sections due to bad navigation. Group all the important links of your website and place them in main menu and don't bury the links into the content.
2) Too Many Ads may cause the website visitor leave your website which often causes to page exit and bounce rate as well. This occurs by clicking on the ad or annoy…

Google Rolled out Pirate algorithm update and many torrent sites were affected.

Sitemaps: We all know that sitemap submission is an important part of the optimization and XML sitemaps are big in size downloaded less frequently than RSS/Atom feeds which are quite small with latest updates only.Never include the duplicate pages of the canonical pages as they the original copy has been already included. Also, Don't include the url's blocked by robots.txt into the sitemaps.
How to bring your local business into online to improve the common goals such as increase revenue? Maile Ohye explains it indetailed:



Get your local business listed in local business search results of google by creating a google plus page. Once you fill the form with correct address, google will send you a post card with a PIN number to be entered online in your account to verify the store presence. Once you are done with the verification process your business listing will appear in the maps and local search r…

2014 Insights of Search Engines Optimization:




Search engine Rankings matters as long you can attain traffic from keywords that are relavant which cannot generate macro and micro conversions. This gives raise to several questions on what you should focus on:

1) Should focus on most important/profitable products or services.

2) Making changes to the website to increase the conversions.

3) Identify high converting keywords and Ubersuggest and Keyword Planner from Google helps to find more related terms to your main keyword to develop keyword strategy. In addition you can use the tools such as Semrush and Majesticseo to know more terms used by your rivals.

4) Prepare and execute keyword strategy to use them effectively in your website.

5) Start Using long tail keywords which in turn include your main keywords as most of your competitors still focusing on the two-term keywords. Long tail keywords can easily be incorporated into the scentences while including the main keywords (2-word) …

Nigeria: A nightmare scenario of Ebola raging unchecked among millions of slum-dwellers in Africa's largest city has given way to a rare example of a victory over the virus.

Ban Ki-moon has launched another urgent appeal for funds to help fight Ebola after a United Nations drive for donations fell short of its target. Ebola has killed about 4,500 people so far, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Airline notifying 800 passengers linked to flights taken by nurse infected with Ebola.

Ebola on camera doesn't look as bad as you might think. In a video released on Thursday, we got a short peek inside one Ebola patient's room.




The schools were closed after officials learned that students and an adult had either been on a flight with or had come into contact with Amber Joy Vinson, a nurse infected with Ebola. 
A congressional committee criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as officials said Nina Pham, a nurse infected with Ebola, would be transfer…

Google releases new tag manager helps to digital marketing to gather fast and flexible data to analyse the use behavior on which you can depend for further analysis and make smarter decisions. Little head's up with terminology change in rules vs triggers. What once called as rules are now triggers and macros are variables.


 Image: google.com ​


Predictive analytics is going to play bigger role to develop digital marketing strategy in identifying market trends and understanding customer needs and preferences.


IMG source: api.ning.com


To get best out the predictive analytics make sure you define the goals of your digital marketing strategy. This could leverage the below advantages:

1) Nurture the leads. 2) Customer centric. 3) Design the campaigns according to market trends. 4) Create opportunities and revenues. 5) Improve user experience. 6) Be the first to predict the changes in the market trend.



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Google's top 25 U.S. search-ad buyers alone spent $1.34 billion last year. Amazon spent $157.7 million on Google U.S. search ads in 2013, by far the most by any company, according to Ad Age DataCenter's first ranking based on data from AdGooroo, a Kantar Media company focused on search marketing.  adage.com



Google's 25 largest U.S. search-marketing advertisers in 2013


Walmart and Sears, amazon's competitor in retail e-business stood 7th in the paid search expenditure with $59.7 million. Homedepot, BestBuy, Target and Macy's couldn't be able to make in the top 10 and stood 15th, 18th, 20th, and 23rd respectively.

Core strengths of Amazon.com are Search & Social traffic, wide affiliate networking, excellent customer satisfaction alongside wonderful user shopping experience using the cloud computing and web Services.

No interaction whatsoever with entrance/first landing page of your website by the visitor during a session shall be treated as bounce rate.

Causes of bounce rate:

1) Usability issues

    Bookmark a page to load in a browser tab everytime user opens a new browser and not interacting with the page can be considered as bounce rate.

    Several other attributes constitute to user behavior that can be considered as bounce rate.

2) Site Design

    Though the pages are tagged properly and still experiencing the high bounce-rate try change the design and layout of the landing pages.

    Optimize the pages with relevant search terms that bring more users.

    Use Menus with links that can lead to more appropriate information which user may find relevant (or intended to visit) to the entrance page.
3) Found the information required quickly and left the page.

You can do very less about the this case except changing the time settings in analytics to appropriately measure your bounce rate.

4) Single page sit…

Local inventory ads now available in the USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia. Local inventory ads help the shoppers to check the availability of the item at their nearest store before they visit and 83% of the shoppers are using store-only product ads now available on desktop devices. This would allow the retailers to list their inventory to right customers at the right time. Local inventory ads help the customers to find the low price options during the times of online out of stocks and last minute shipping cost increase.



Google Manual Actions on PBN's Private blog network?

Google has reportedly taken action on sites participating in private blog networks, also known as PBNs. On September 18th, Google sent out widespread manual action notices via Google Webmaster Tools to these sites for "thin content" spam.

what type of queries trigger the structured snippets from showing up in the search results?

Structured snippets are available for Company profiles, Super…

Sometimes we find it too hard and unable to understand the facts behind drop in the rankings and traffic. One of the best places as a webmaster/website owner is to visit the Links to Your Site section in the Google webmaster tools. Review all the three sections "Who links the most", "Your most linked content" and "How your data is linked" and record all changes to compare with your previous data to observe and understand the changes. I recommend, all the webmasters should maintain a back-up of these metrics periodically and If you don't have the past data please start taking backup's from now onwards. In either case, follow the below steps:
1) Identify the links which are relevant and try to analyse the strength of the links. 2) Identify the links which are not relevant. 3) Try to find out the links with repetitive/irrelevant anchor text from both sets you identified in step 1 and 2. 4) Based on the Strength and Anchor Text of the links and other prio…

What is a bounce rate? Bounce rate is a percentage of single page visitors to a website. Most website owners like the visitors to participate/complete in either macro or at least micro conversions to monetize their website or to increase the loyalty. Micro conversions include fill out a form, read more, subscribe to newsletter etc. Macro conversions are to register with website or buying a product or service.


But if the visitor bounces soon after landing on the page it indicates: 
1) Visitor didn't find what he's looking for  2) The website/page is too difficult to work with (Ex: taking too much time to load, Many pop-ups or ads)
How to overcome Bounce rate issues?
Use the benchmark averages of bounce rate given below and define your expectations/goals inline with industry standards.  Retail/E-commerce Sites: 20-40%Lead Generation: 30-50%Content Websites: 40-60%Blog: 70-85% Landing Pages: 70-80%Service Sites: 10-30% Tip: For low organic traffic retail sites and lead generation…

When it comes to content marketing there is a fierce competition via online media. So, it's time to power-up your content with high quality, enticing and attractive with visuals to grab the attention of the target audience. Visuals help you to increase the user/customer engagement, loyalty and conversions. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter have started accommodating more videos and images on to their news feeds or posts to grab more attention and participation of the visitors to increase the engagement and returning visitors. Pinterest, being 4rth best social media site, is taking steps to accommodate more visuals into their feeds for better user experience. Not convinced? Read below reasons how visual content helps.



"A picture speaks thousand words." 1)) Visual content grabs the attention of target customers/visitors. Huge volumes of content units are generated on Daily basis with 2 million videos and 140 million tweets. With all those content which is free …

Hootsuite.com help to manage all your social profiles at one place. Webmaster/Social-Media-analyst  can compose and send updates to their facebook, twitter and many other social media streams such as pinterest, linkedin and Google+.

Hootsuite offers the following solutions to any website owner who want to manage social streams/activities quite easily at one place:



Social Media Management: 
Manage your entire social lifecycle from one dashboard by scheduling Tweets and Facebook posts. To measure your social ROI you can create and customize analytics reports.
Streamline your workflows to share and assign tasks and receive real-time notifications. Distribute workload amongst team members irrespective of location and access  conversations.
Scale your team securely without sharing your passwords and work together with clients and team members to increase productivity with appropriate permission levels.
Social Marketing: 
Optimize the influence of the social outreach. Build globa…

After planning in the project management the project will enter into the Executing the project. Various techniques to execute the project includes:

Techniques and Tools: Executing the baseline project plan: The job of the project manager is to initiate the execution of project activities, acquire and assign resources, orient and train new team members, keep the project on schedule, and assure the quality of project deliverables.Monitoring project progress against the baseline project plan. Using Gantt and PERT charts  can assist the project manager in doing this.Managing changes to the baseline project plan.Maintaining the project workbook. Maintaining complete records of all project events is necessary. The project workbook is the primary source of information for producing all project reports.Communicating the project status. This means that the entire project plan should be shared with the entire project team and any revisions to the plan should be communicated to all interested part…

Cookie policy in europe law insists that the website owners must give information about the cookies installed in their website user/visitor systems. Cookies help the website to store the information locally in the web browsers of the visitor to track the future visits and advertising purposes. 
Cookiechoices.org is produced by Google to provide the publishers with easy-to-implement tools to help publishers, which can help them meet their legal obligations to get user consent. These tools also help to gain appropriate consent on websites and mobile apps. For mobile apps one-time pop-up alert is adequate you can customize the language in which you can present the alerts. 
For the ease of Implementation google provides code examples for both forms of 2 basic tools they offer such as 1) splash screen and 2) navigation bar.

Performance and it's control in an advanced project is a cumbersome activity and especially to overcome the difficulties associated with measuring performance & it's success. The key is to focus on the important and basic aspects of any project, Namely: 
1) Timescale 2) Resource 3) Quality 4) Scope
 Also, Project manager has to focus on the performance analysis to enable a better management of the project.
Timescale: Timescale is obviously an important aspect and requires a special perspective to manage it better in advanced projects. Project manager has to understand what lies beneath the timing and not just timing as advanced projects deal with difficult and most advanced tasks to be accomplished. The general direction of the final goal to be achieved keep changing while progressing through the project which makes it more complex. 
As shown in the above figure lack of certainty at the start of the project gradually improves as the project progress. Project managers shou…