Breaking News!

The Performance Marketing Association (PMA) is reporting that a Colorado advertising tax bill (HB-1193) is going to be presented to Committee next week.  Now is the time for anyone living in Colorado and working in the Affiliate Marketing and Online Advertising industries to get ready to make your voice heard!

If you haven’t heard about it before, the advertising tax (also called the “Amazon Tax”) is an attempt to bring some income back into the budgets of the states by forcing online merchants and companies to charge sales tax for online purchases and sales.  The additional paperwork and accounting trouble that this brings is enough to make major companies like Amazon opt to kick out all the affiliates that live in a state with the advertising tax.

Whether you are an affiliate, a network, a merchant, or an agency, this tax could have a huge impact on your business, and it’s not going to be a positive one. Even if you aren’t personally involved in the industry, you might have family and friends that are, and you can still make your voice heard.

The main need right now is for people to send an email to decision makers.  It only takes a second to send an email, and it could have a potentially massive effect on whether this bill passes or not.  The PMA has been effective in squashing similar bills in other states, and now it’s our turn in Colorado.

To get involved, all you need to do is register your support with the PMA so that they can keep you updated when the time comes to take action.  Simply go to http://performancemarketingassociation.com/advocateform.html and fill in the form.  It’s free, you don’t have to join the PMA or anything like that, it’s just a mailing list so that they can tell us who to email and even give us templates to make it super easy.

Together we can stop the advertising tax!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Related posts:

1. Colorado Advertising Tax UPDATE
2. Amazon Says “No” To Twitter Links
3. Stop Cheating Yourself Out Of Money

This post is the third article of our new series “Global Web Design“. Throughout this series we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look at what’s happening in the web design scene worldwide. We started with Russian Web Design and Web Design in Ireland. We continue now with Mexico and next week with Israel. If you would like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us so we can discuss the details.

Land of tequila and mariachi, home of Chichén Itza (one of the new seven wonders of the world), amazing beaches, cheerful people, beautiful women… and last but not least, inspirational and creative Web designs for the entire world. Ours is a great country, with more than 110 million inhabitants, over 30% of which to date are connected to the Web.

Design has always been integral to our culture: the majestic pyramids built by the Aztecs; the numeric symbol “zero” created by the Mayans (who, by the way, were the architects of the great Chichén Itza); the colonial buildings influenced by the Spaniards and French; beautiful paintings by well-known artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo; and now today’s great architects and artists, design firms, interactive agencies and software engineers.

The portfolio of Roberto Avila, a designer from Mexico.

To gain greater insight into Web design happening in Mexico today, we interviewed many people in the industry: freelancers, digital marketing managers, creative interactive agency reps and a few bloggers.

State Of Affairs

A lot is going on in our country, and many companies and brands in Mexico are definitely noticing the impact of great Web design. Digital marketing is growing fast. People working in this industry have not had to face a crisis. Mexico grew 20% in the first quarter of 2009. Why? Because everyone recognizes the importance of shifting to digital.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Mexico (IAB), in 2008 only 4% of budgets were designated for digital marketing. If we compare this to countries like the UK, where digital marketing budgets were bigger than TV budgets, then we have a good reason to be optimistic about the future of digital marketing and Web design in Mexico. Bianca Loew, Managing Director of IAB Mexico, states, “The Internet is the ideal platform for companies to interact with consumers.”

DesignWeek Monterrey 2009, an original design from Mexico.

Most companies understand the value and power of good design. We have seen different brands try out a lot of digital marketing strategies, but still much work is to be done on coding standards, usability and persuasion. Few websites are truly prepared for the social media revolution. But great agencies are willing to provide quality information to help everyone get ready!

“Near-shoring” has become a must for many US and Canadian companies. A lot of work is being outsourced to Mexico for digital marketing and Web design and development. We have seen a lot of Argentinean agencies in our market, which has been a very good push for competition, and this will surely drive innovation and creativity.

Voices of People In The Industry

To gain some insights from the people working in the web design industry in Mexico, we asked Miguel Calderon (founder of Group W), Gustavo Ross (founder of Activamente) and Rodrigo Gama (founder of Publicidadenlinea.com) to share with us some insights about the current state of web design in Mexico.

Q: What is your perception of the Web design environment in Mexico?

Miguel: It’s improving, perhaps slowly, but there are interesting developments. What happened with traditional design years ago is happening with Web design today: we are following international trends instead of creating new and better proposals. We’ve missed our identity as a country. Therefore, there is a big opportunity to create proposals that will be followed abroad in the near future. However, the incursion of big designers and illustrators from traditional media to digital media will trigger great websites.

Trost

Gustavo: With the introduction of pre-fabricated and self-service platforms, such as WordPress and Joomla, designers must become more specialized. Whether they start by creating professional templates aimed at the Mexican public or with professional design interfaces for business applications and portals, deeper knowledge is needed to improve usability and front-end technologies such as AJAX.

Some time ago, we left behind websites for which only graphic design mattered. Today, designers have to be much more comprehensive and knowledgeable about technology and the needs and habits of the common consumer.

Rodrigo: The market for Web design in Mexico is growing significantly every year. The quality in design is improving fast, but the larger companies are the ones willing to invest in and pay for experts who develop attractive Web designs. Websites for small companies and independent projects are usually made by students, independent designers and freelancers, and their owners do not yet have a comprehensive understanding of attractive Web design: usability, programming, social networking, search engine optimization, etc.

Carrera Bonafont

A lot of effort needs to be made by organizations such as AMIPCI (Mexican Association of Internet) and IAB Mexico (Interactive Advertising Bureau Mexico) to publicize the benefits of digital marketing. This causes the market to mature, and developers are taking advantage of this knowledge. I strongly believe that in a couple of years, the quality of many Mexican websites will have a greater impact in Latin America.

I would like to stress that many of the Web design projects in Mexico are done by traditional advertising agencies. Most of the time, such agencies have neither the knowledge nor experience of the Web to develop effective websites, and they work only on what they have committed to their customers. Most of the time, they don’t introduce best practices or standards or even do usability testing.

Monterrey Fashion

Q: What makes an outstanding design agency in Mexico?

Miguel: Fortunately, designers and illustrators are already becoming vital for Web design environments. Every day, traditional and digital design become more integrated. It is a broad topic, but I encourage you to look deeper into Alberto Cerriteño & Zoveck. They do very few Web projects, but their websites could not be understood if it wasn’t for their extraordinary work and creativity.

Rodrigo: In my personal opinion, the best agencies are the ones whose core business is the Internet. They usually have a team of experts in different areas, such as design, programming, usability, marketing and online advertising.

Nrmal

Gustavo: I am thrilled to see that website producers have become more professional, leaving behind the Flash and intros in favor of functional pages designed for the user rather than the designer.

Outstanding design agencies… Those with a more holistic view of the needs of their clients, notwithstanding conflicts of interest, and who focus on generating good business results. The best designers are those who think of the end user, not of the prize.

Enough! Show Me The Good Stuff

Tequila can really fuel creativity, as you’ll see! Web designers and interactive agencies here have done a great job. Here is a taste of what we Mexicans are capable of.

GOAL by Gonzalo Alonso, a Mexican in Argentina. What’s really cool about his blog is that he has two skins: one of Asterix and another of Star Wars.

Tu Deseo Bon O Bon

Alberto Cerriteño

Modena

Detective Stripes

Tixinda

Face Face Face

Movistar

Ed Fladung

Banamex

Campus Vida

Catalina Estrada Paralevis

Vtbic

Bicentenario Nuevo Leon

Danup

8reclutas

Nextel Rock

Poster Media

Showdown Interactive

Energy Lab

Rexona Clinical

Oscar Carnicero

Ivana Breu

Mandalah

Interactive Agencies In Mexico

High-quality interactive agencies can be found all over Mexico. Some have won prestigious international prizes, including the acclaimed Cannes Lions. Here are some of our most renowned agencies, listed in alphabetical order.

Abargon

Códice

Crossmedia

D10 Studio

Element Studios

Gamol

GrupoW

Gelattina

IA Interactive

Interalia

Kansei Lab

Latin3

Media Agency

Design Bloggers in Mexico

Blog Vecindad

Dementez

Bioxd

Therror

Infected FX

Yolisto

Asfalto Tecnicolor

<thinkinginweb/>

Related posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Global Web Design: Russia
• Global Web Design: Ireland

© Pablo Hernández O’Hagan for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 70 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: showcases

Investing money in online advertising always carries some level of risk. Whenever you increase a bid price, it is a calculated risk that the additional spend will produce more profitable sales. 

 Of any form of advertising, PPC carries the least risk since success metrics are available almost immediately. Even so, there is a temptation to minimize all risk.

Even though the following 5 tips are all low-risk & high reward, they are often considered too risky by weak-kneed advertisers. 

 These are the exact risks you should be taking if you want to strengthen your profits.

1.  Be liberal with your daily budget

Are you making direct sales through PPC advertising? If so, what use do you have for a campaign budget? Keywords often have seasonal and/or news-related spikes in traffic. When setting a conservative budget, you risk missing out on the revenue this additional traffic would generate.

The potential sales loss of a constrained budget poses more risk to your bottom line than some crazy clicking event of unqualified traffic. You can always scale back your bids if the traffic decreases in profitability. An unexpected surge in profitable traffic, on the other hand, is usually hidden in historical reports of lost impression share. Your budget should probably be at least double your average daily spend.

2.  Play in the same pool with your SEO

There's enough traffic for both PPC and organic listings. Some advertisers are afraid they'll waste money if they bid on keywords that rank well organically -- such as their brand or product name. Yes, you will probabably pay for some clicks where the visitor would have otherwise clicked on your free listing. But you will also get some additional clicks where the visitor would have clicked on a competitor ad or another organic listing.

The result of bidding on your organic keywords is typically a net profit. If you aren't convinced, do your own test. Bid on your organic keywords for a week. See how many additional visitors came to your site from those PPC keywords versus the organic counterparts. Take the PPC cost for these keywords and divide it by additional conversions you got. If this is still an acceptable CPA on the marginal sales, continue the practice.

3.  Keep optimizing your sales funnel

A profitable sales funnel should be considered a starting point, not finish line. Yes, that new ad might decrease your CTR. Yes, that new landing page might decrease your conversion rate. Yet if you are consistently keeping the good and throwing out the bad, you will ratchet up your success to increased profitability. Don't be afraid to test new things.

4.  Bid on competitor brand & product keywords

It may seem obvious, but the word "competitor" comes from the word "compete." This is the same terminology used in professional sports. The goal of the competition is to win (get the sale). Yes, sometimes the opposing team gets mad when you make an interception. The ball was, in fact, meant for their own team. Yet there is no disputing that interceptions are perfectly within the rules of the game.

Don't be a PPC pansy. This is a real life competition and the strong survive. I'm not advocating breaking the rules or doing anything unethical such as putting on the other team's jersey

Darren Barefoot is the co-founder of Capulet Communications, a web marketing firm specializing in high-tech and sustainability clients. Darren is co-author of a forthcoming book about social media marketing, “Friends with Benefits,” writes a blog at DarrenBarefoot.com, and is on Twitter @dbarefoot.

As much as anything, we use Twitter to share links. Most active Twitter users, from those that just joined to seasoned vets with thousands of followers, use Twitter to share the things they come across during the day. In fact, Twitter has become such a popular link sharing medium, that over the past year, my firm has seen Twitter climb the rankings of referral traffic for a number of client sites. Sites like Tweetmeme and Twitt(url)y even attempt to pick out the most popular links on Twitter.

Particularly in the tech space, we frequently see Twitter among the top ten traffic sources in Google Analytics. But for social media marketers, an important question has remained unanswered, what sort of click-through rate can you expect on Twitter?

How Much Traffic Comes From Twitter?

Endeavoring to answer that question, I asked my Twitter followers to complete a two-question survey:

1. How many followers do you have?

2. If you use a service like Bit.ly, how many clicks does your average shared link receive?

To date, I’ve received about 60 responses. Not enough to qualify as statistically significant, but a good start nonetheless. Please also note that I’m not a statistician, so read the following analysis with that in mind.

To get the average click-through rate, I just divide the total number of clicks reported (2,168) by the total number of followers reported (75,222). That gives us a rate of 2.8%. That suggests that if you share a link with your 1000 followers, 28 of them will click it.

More Followers Means a Lower Click-Through Rate

As you might expect, measuring Twitter’s click-through rate isn’t as cut and dry as that. There is a clear relationship between the total number of followers and the click-through rate. The more followers you have, the lower your click-through rate becomes. I’ve created a scatter graph to illustrate this phenomenon. To keep the diagram readable, I’ve removed the top two reported follower counts:

Mitigating Factors

I’m uncertain about what impact bots spidering Twitter and following links are having on these results. Further, when a URL gets retweeted, you’re adding the retweeting user’s followers to the mix. So the retweetability of your initial tweet and the likelihood of your followers to retweet at all play a role. Time of day may also be important. That is, if your followers are mainly located in a single geographic region, and you tend to tweet during that middle of the night, fewer of your followers might actually see your tweet, driving down your click-through rate. Lastly, I asked those who completed the survey to pick an “average” number of clicks, so results are influenced by each respondent’s potentially unscientific estimate.

What This Means for Marketers

As a marketer, a click-through rate of 2.8% is a pretty decent outcome. It’s lower than the average for email newsletters in most industries, but it outperforms the vast majority of online advertising stats that I’ve seen. As one of my colleagues said about Twitter a while back, “Twitter is a fantastic lens for focusing attention.” I’m not sure it’s “fantastic,” but it beats a lot of other traffic generation strategies.

If you use a tool like Bit.ly or Tr.im to track links, please consider taking a few seconds and completing the survey or leaving your responses to the survey questions in the comments so that I can add to my data set.

More Twitter resources from Mashable

- Inside the Minds of Twitter Users

- HOW TO: Build Your Thought Capital on Twitter

- 5 Reasons Why URL Shorteners Are Useful

- 5 Very Weird URL Shorteners

- HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kertlis

Reviews: Google Analytics, Twitter

Tags: clickthrough rate, ctr, links, twitter