The credit for this infographic goes to SEOBook for a job well done.

What’s a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of text stored on a user’s computer by their web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data.

What do cookies have to do with online marketing?

Good question - while cookies are mainly used in the world of web development and programming, they can be an extremely powerful tool for an online marketer. As an online marketer we mainly have two jobs: generate leads and qualify leads so that sales can follow-up on the “hot” leads first while allowing marketing to nurture the not-so-hot leads further. Cookies can’t help with generating leads, but they certainly can help with qualifying leads by helping to streamline the process of gathering more information on your prospects.

Do you have an example of how cookies can be used in online marketing?

Absolutely. Let me walk you through a recent example…

At the company I work at we do a lot of online webinars through either GoToMeeting or WebEx. As you probably know, when you create a webinar in either of these services they automatically create a registration page for you that is hosted on their servers. Typically, you will just promote the registration page that is hosted on either gotomeeting.com or webex.com, and call it a day. This is actually a HUGE mistake. Here’s why…

By sending all your traffic to GoToMeeting or WebEx, you miss a PRIME opportunity to drop a cookie on your prospects computer. You should be creating a registration form on YOUR website that when a user registers, it drops a cookie. Why is it important to drop a cookie? Because as soon as you can collect a user’s information (through the registration page) and drop a cookie on their computer, you will be able to track things like when a prospects comes back to your website, what pages on your website a prospect viewed, how many pages on your website a prospect viewed, etc. This type of information is hugely important for qualifying a prospect.

That’s it? What else can you do with cookies?

Here is another example of a creative way to use cookies to qualify prospects… Above I talked about how we now have everyone register for webinars through our own website in order to drop a cookie on their machine. We decided to take this idea one step further. When a prospect registers for a webinar, we now send them to a short survey that is positioned in a way that asks for what they would like to learn on the webinar. The key to this survey is that it appears to be anonymous to the prospect, but in reality we are able to match up the prospects survey responses and map it back to their lead information in Salesforce.

This short survey typically asks two questions that are optional:

1. What would you like to learn from the webinar?
2. What specific questions would you like to see addressed on the webinar?

We then will put 3-4 additional questions that are required and help us qualify the lead. Here are a couple of examples, but not the questions that we ask:

1. How many employees are at your organization?
2. Do you have budget for [enter your product/service]?
3. What other products/services are you currently evaluating?
4. Etc.

Our last webinar had over 350 people register, and using this method we were able to capture ALL the lead qualifying information we needed on 71.2% of the registrants. This allowed our sales team to immediately follow-up on the leads that were PERFECT fits for our product and had budgeted projects. Also, by knowing exactly what the prospected wanted to learn and what questions they had we were able to arm our sales team with valuable information that allowed them to tailor their conversations and address the prospect’s concerns/pain-points.

Do you use a product/service to accomplish this?

Yes we do. We currently use HubSpot with Salesforce integration. All the lead capture and webinar registration pages on our website are HubSpot web forms. As soon as someone lands on our website, HubSpot will drop a cookie. This cookie will then collect information while that person is browsing our website. As soon the visitor completes a HubSpot web form, we then become aware of that person’s identity and all their contact information is synced up to Salesforce where the sales team can then get access to it. Through HubSpot, the sales team is also aware of which pages the visitor has viewed, how many pages they have viewed, and when the visitor returns to the website.

Was this post clear? I’d love to get your feedback…

SyllabusCentral currently has over 13,200 members and is adding about 20-30 new members a day. The site generates about 8,000 unique visitors per month and about 94% of those visitors come directly from search engines. The average visitor spends a little over a minute on the SyllabusCentral and will view a little over 3.5 pages.

Things we did right:

1.) Outsourced document hosting to Scribd

When you are building a start-up it is important to understand that you can’t do everything. When you try to do too much, quality will suffer and you will have done a lot of things just okay. One of the cool things about creating a start-up today is that you don’t have to build every new technology in-house. One of the key decisions we made with SyllabusCentral was to outsource all our document hosting (in our case syllabi hosting) to a third-party service called Scribd. Through Scribd’s API, we were able to use their document hosting and viewing service to do things like convert a Microsoft Word document into an embeddable format that was easy to work with and provided our users a great user experience. If we had tried to develop this technology in-house, it would have taken us months and the end product wouldn’t have been nearly as good as Scribd’s solution.

2.) Focused on SEO

A decision we made early when designing the architecture for SyllabusCentral was to have a maniacal focus on search engine optimization (SEO). We knew that we had a significant opportunity to drive a lot of free search engine traffic though organic rankings since long-tail keywords like professor names, class names, and school names with the word “syllabus” appended to them had little competition and lots of searches.

3.) Made it super easy to upload syllabi

If you can make your website easy-to-use, you dramatically increase your odds of success. This is one of the things we did really well. One example of this is using Scribd as our document hosting and embedding solution. Traditionally, it was very difficult to view Microsoft Word documents on the Web. You either had to download the document to view a document, and even then sometimes you wouldn’t have the right version of Microsoft Word or the user uploading the document would have had to convert it into a PDF, which for the average internet user isn’t an easy task. With SyllabusCentral, all our users had to do was browse any file on their desktop and they would then be able to view the syllabus right in their browser regardless of the file type. Back in 2008 there were very few websites using this technology, so it was a competitive advantage for us.

4.) Made it super easy to request a syllabus from a professor

The other thing we did that was innovative was to make it super easy to request a syllabus if a syllabus wasn’t already on the website. All a visitor had to do was enter the professor’s email address and the class that they would like to get the syllabus for. We’d then send the professor an email that came from SyllabusCentral notifying the professor that one of their students has requested that they upload a syllabus to the site. All the professor would then have to do is click a link, browse the syllabus on their computer, and click “upload”. The entire process from start-to-finish would take no more than 30 seconds.

5.) We served a need in the marketplace

Finally, SyllabusCentral was serving a real need in the marketplace. At the time, the idea for SyllabusCentral was solving my own need. As a college student at the time, I thought to myself that wouldn’t it be nice to be able to view the course syllabus while picking classes and have it so that you could order your textbooks online in advance of the first day of classes. When I searched online, I found that a similar site did not exist, so I decided to fill this void in the market. Today, 94% of our traffic is from student searching for syllabi online.

Lessons learned:

1.) Chicken or the egg

In order to attract visitors to SyllabusCentral, we needed an extensive library of syllabi. But in order to build an extensive library with thousands of syllabi, we needed thousands of visitors to upload syllabi. This was the problem of the chicken or the egg. How do other companies solve this problem? Usually with money, which unfortunately for us was something that we didn’t have access to at them time. Had we had some money to spend on hiring cheap labor to find and upload syllabi all day, we probably would have been able to reach a tipping point where we had enough syllabi on the site to make it extremely useful. Hitting this critical mass is crucial for any start-up.

2.) Monetization

Monetization is a big buzz (or taboo) word in the start-up world. While SyllabusCentral had a solid plan to monetize the site, it required a large and active community to execute. The eventual model was to have students viewing syllabi weeks in advance of classes starting. If we could establish this behavior, then we’d be able to automatically scan the syllabi for an ISBN# of the textbook for that class and offer the student a price comparison of the textbook of that class. The student would then be able to order the textbook, have it arrive in time for classes, and save a couple hundred dollars per semester in the process. Sounds good, right? If only SyllabusCentral reached the critical mass to make this a viable business model…

3.) Think big, but start small

When we started SyllabusCentral, we had high expectations for the site. Right away we tried to conquer the world. Looking back, this was probably a mistake. A more strategic approach would have been to smart small, prove out the business model, and then slowly expand. Had we focused on 3-5 schools from the start and focused on really making those schools successful by establishing a large library of syllabi and a strong user base, we would have then felt more comfortable investing more money into the business and expanding to additional schools.

4.) Have a solid marketing plan in mind

Promoting a new idea is never easy. Right away we realized it was going to be very difficult to acquire new members at a low cost. We knew we’d have to rely on word-of-mouth and organic search engine traffic in order to really grow the business. While organic search engine traffic has been great, we never reached the critical mass of syllabi on the site in order to really get the word-of-mouth engine going. If you are starting a business, make sure you have a solid plan to acquire members at a low cost. If you have a capital intensive marketing model, you will need to have a high lifetime value of a member in order to justify every marketing dollar you spend.

5.) Cyclical businesses can be difficult

One of the things that made it really difficult to identify trends and adapt the site accordingly was the fact that students typically only register for classes two times a year usually around November and then again in April. This made things difficult because if we wanted to test a new idea we’d basically have one shot to get it right, and if we got it wrong, we’d have to wait another 4-6 months to test it again. While this type of business is nice in that it is very exciting two times a year, it can be frustrating in that you don’t get that slow steady growth with continuous tweaking and improvement.

There are many usability testing tools out there today that allow you to see how a visitor is interacting on your website. A couple interesting, but expensive, services include ClickTale and UserTesting.com. ClickTale records the mouse movements of actual visitors on your website and then aggregates all the data to give you interesting statistics. If you are a subscriber of ClickTale, you can actually login and watch recordings of every Internet Explorer and Firefox visitor that has come to your website. ClickTale is an awesome technology, but the service starts at $99/mo for the cheapest package. Also, since visitors being recorded by ClickTale don’t actually know they are being recorded, there is not audio or feedback from the actual visitors.

The other interesting service in the usability testing space is UserTesting.com. UserTesting.com is a service where you pay $39 for a video recording of someone actually browsing your site and the user talks through what they see and experience as they are on your website. The one downside to using a service like UserTesting.com is that the users viewing your site may not be your typical user as these are people who are getting paid to provide this service, therefore there opinion can be bias.

So how can you do usability testing on your website for cheap?

The innovation solution that Dan Shapiro outlines is using a service called screencast-o-matic.com. Their basic version is FREE and their premium plan is a whopping $9/yr - yes, that is $9 per year, not month. Using this service you can then go out and recruit usability testers. Where can you find usability testers for cheap? Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. On Mechanical Turk, you should be able to find people willing to do a quick usability test of your website and record their screen and voice using screencast-o-matic, all for as cheap as $2-$5 per recording. Now how is that for cheap usability testing!

Script for Microsoft Excel Macro:

Sub DelDups_TwoLists()
Dim iListCount As Integer
Dim iCtr As Integer

‘ Turn off screen updating to speed up macro.
Application.ScreenUpdating = False

‘ Get count of records to search through (list that will be deleted).
iListCount = Sheets(”Sheet1″).Range(”A1:A10“).Rows.Count

‘ Loop through the “master” list.
For Each x In Sheets(”Sheet2″).Range(”A1:A3“)
‘ Loop through all records in the second list.
For iCtr = 1 To iListCount
‘ Do comparison of next record.
‘ To specify a different column, change 1 to the column number.
If x.Value = Sheets(”Sheet1″).Cells(iCtr, 1).Value Then
‘ If match is true then delete row.
Sheets(”Sheet1″).Cells(iCtr, 1).Delete xlShiftUp
‘ Increment counter to account for deleted row.
iCtr = iCtr + 1
End If
Next iCtr
Next
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
MsgBox “Done!”
End Sub

How the Microsoft Excel Macro Works:

The script is very simple to use. Just open up Microsoft Excel and put your “Master” list in the first column of Sheet1. Then put the values that you want to delete from your “Master” list in the first column of Sheet2. Next modify the ranges of each of your lists (to make this easy I have highlighted these values in red). Then simply go to “View” -> “Macros” -> “Edit” -> and copy and paste the macro script. To run the macro, go to “Run” -> “Run Sub/UserForm” or just click the green run button. That’s is! It is that simple…

• Medium (organic, PPC, referral, email, webinar, press release, etc)
• Lead Source (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
• Keywords (What keywords did the visitor search?)
• Referring URL (Where did the visitor come from?)
• Landing Page (What was the first page the visitor visited on our website?)
• Form URL (What was the URL of the form that the user filled out where you collected this information?)

We will use a combination of techniques including parsing the cookie set by Google Analytics to save these lead source details into PHP variables. We’ll then be able to pass these variables into our lead capture forms as hidden fields, so that when a lead registers on our website or fills out any type of form, we’ll be able to track these lead source details.

Let’s get started…

First, I’m going to give you the code. This code should be included in the header of every page of your website. Hopefully your website has one PHP file that makes up the header of every page of your website. This file is usually called header.php. If you have this file, you can dump this code right into that file.

<?php
//DEFINE COOKIE DOMAIN, ALLOWS SCRIPT TO BE USED ACROSS MULTIPLE DOMAINS
$domain = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
$domain = “.” . ltrim($domain,”www.”);

// SET COOKIES FROM GOOLGE-ANALYTICS COOKIE
$info = $_COOKIE['__utmz'];
// Get rid of id stuff
$holder = split(”u”, $info, 2);
$string = “u” . $holder[1];
// Parse String
$ga_vars = split(”\|”, $string);
foreach ($ga_vars as $var) {
list($key,$value) = split(”=”,$var);
if ($key == “utmcmd”) { setcookie(”Medium”, $value, time()+100000000, “/”, $domain); $medium = $value; }
if ($key == “utmctr”) { setcookie(”Keywords”, $value, time()+100000000, “/”, $domain); $keywords = $value; }
if ($key == “utmcsr”) { setcookie(”GAsource”, $value, time()+100000000, “/”, $domain); $gasource = $value; }
}

// SET REFERRING URL
if (!isset($_COOKIE['Referer'])) {
setcookie(”Referer”, $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], time()+10000000, “/”, $domain);
$referurl = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
} else { $referurl = $_COOKIE['Referer']; }

// SET FORM_URL VALUE
$formurl = “http://”.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

// SET LANDING PAGE
if (!isset($_COOKIE['LandingPage'])) {
setcookie(”LandingPage”, “http://”.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], time()+10000000, “/”, $domain);
$landingpage = “http://”.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
} else { $landingpage = $_COOKIE['LandingPage']; }
?>

Here is a description of each variable and how they are tracked and saved…

Medium

Medium is parsed from the Google Analytics cookie. You will need to have Google Analytics installed on every page of your website in order for this to be tracked. When a visitor comes to your website, Google will drop a cookie that contains important information about that visitor. One of the variables saved in this cookie is Medium, so we parse the Google Analytics cookie and save the Medium into a variable called $medium.

Lead Source

Lead Source is also parsed from the Google Analytics cookie just like Medium. It is saved into a variable called $gasource.

Keywords

Keywords are also parsed from the Google Analytics cookie. This variable will not always be set, but if the visitor comes to your website via a search engine, it will record which keywords they used to visit your website. This variable works with all the major search engines - not just Google.

Referring URL

This code records the URL that the visitor clicked through to your website with. The code saves the Referring URL in a cookie, so the original Referring URL is preserved. It is saved into a variable called $referurl.

Landing Page

This is the first page that the visitor visits on your website. Like the Referring URL, a cookie is also used to save this URL so that it is preserved. It is saved into a variable called $landingpage.

Form URL

This is the URL of the page that the visitor finally is on when they fill out the lead capture form. This variable will update as the visitor navigates your website. A cookie is not used. It is saved into a variable called $formurl.

That pretty much sums up the script. In another follow-up post, I will write about how to pass these variables into a form as a hidden field and save it into your database. Look for this post shortly…

• What information should we be tracking?
• What information is important to marketing?
• What information is important to sales?
• What information is important to executive management?
• How do we track this information?
• How do we present this information to marketing/sales in a way that it can easily become actionable?
• How do we tie all our systems together (SalesForce, HubSpot, ClickTale, etc)?
• How to we lead nurture and lead score?
• When should a lead transition from marketing to sales?

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially for start-ups with limited resources and tight budgets. However, I would argue that properly tracking leads or new member activity is probably one of the most important things any start-up can do. The information and insight obtained through analytics will answer many questions like:

• Where are new members/leads coming from?
• What is my cost per lead? cost per new member? cost per sale? total lifetime value of a customer?
• Where should I be allocating more advertising dollars? less advertising dollars?
• What part of my website is converting? not converting?
• Are social media leads more profitable than webinar leads?
• For those leads that turned into sales, what common traits/activities do they possess?
• How do I nurture and educate a lead so they are ready to buy?

Those are just some of the questions you’ll be able to answer and then act on. If you are a start-up that has received VC money, these are the exact questions your board of directors and investors will be asking. They will be very impressed if you can give clear, reliable answers to their questions.

So with that said, where/how do we begin?

I have identified the following lead source details that every start-up should be tracking today (this is just a start). In a follow-up post, I will include a detailed step-by-step description on how to properly track this information. Here are the lead source details:

1. Medium (organic, PPC, referral, email, webinar, press release, etc)
2. Lead Source (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
3. Keywords (What keywords did the visitor search?)
4. Referring URL (Where did the visitor come from?)
5. Landing Page (What was the first page the visitor visited on our website?)
6. Form URL (What was the URL of the form that the user filled out where you collected this information?)

Keep your eye out for my follow-up post on how to track all of the above web analytics and lead source details.

Darren Rowse declares “I want you to use your personal blog as a launch pad for your dream career. The personal blog is the new resume of the revolutionary.” When I read this, I couldn’t agree more.

He goes on to write, “The revolution is new, but the revolution is real. I invite you to leave the confines of the box everyone lives in and be a revolutionary.”

Please stay tuned to my blog, I have some exciting stuff planned in this area. It is my goal to revolutionize the way students and graduates think about finding jobs and defining their careers.

So, what is next for Facebook? My prediction, and as a developer I can’t wait for this to come, is that Facebook will roll-out its equivalent to Google Adsense, except it won’t really be like Adsense. Imaging this… You have a website built on the Facebook Graph API where users login with their Facebook account. Now imagine that all you need to do in order to get extremely targeted ads on your website is to add a snippet of code. Facebook will then serve up revenue shared ads on your website that are targeted to 1.) everything Facebook knows about the user from their activities on Facebook, 2.) content on your website, and 3.) information that the user has volunteered on your website that you pass on to Facebook’s ad algorithm. Now how is that for convenience and effectiveness as a publisher?

I would image that this is probably coming pretty soon and probably would have been here one or two years ago if Facebook Connect hadn’t been such a flop. Now that Facebook has their new Graph API and 500+ million users, we are going to be seeing a lot more websites allowing users to login with Facebook. I would expect that Facebook will roll out this type of advertising relatively shortly. My time horizon for this feature is 6 - 12 months, and when it gets here - watch out! It’ll certainly be fun to play with as a publisher/developer and will escalate Facebook to a whole new level in terms of online dominance, competing with Google, and revenue figures.

You are probably thinking that in your day-to-day activities that you don’t have many repetitive tasks, and I thought the same thing when I first discovered iMacros. But after learning different ways to use the iMacros plugin and being a little creative, I have been able to discover several tasks that I can save several hours each day with iMacros. iMacros has a great wiki and by spending a little time learning and experimenting I have been able to learn how to run loops from Microsoft Excel files and also to execute copy and pastes by saving what I copy as a variable and then using the variable later in the iMacro script. When you start to get your feet wet with iMacros you really start to see how powerful this plugin really is.

Your probably thinking that from my enthusiasm for iMacros that I am going to insert an affiliate link at the end of this blog post, but it is completely free and I have nothing to gain. I just think that iMacros should be part of everyone’s arsenal of tools when working online.