I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I probably won’t post much until the New Year! See you all then!

Earlier this week Ask was testing a new search interface dubbed Ask X. The most insightful review I found was on Marina Garrison’s Blog Search Tank.

Marina is the Research Manager at Enquiro Search Solutions, she holds an MBA and has been in the Search Marketing Industry for over 3 years.

The left column is now devoted to navigational options including keyphrase, results types and options to narrow and expand your results with related keyphrases. Some of these options were available on the original results but were moved from the right to the left side making them more visible. The lists are restricted to just a few suggestions of alternate keyphrases but longer lists are available as pop-up boxes if you click “More”.

Read the rest here…

The NBA (National Basketball Association) is a little off topic from my regular posts however it’s something that really interests me so I thought I would share (I incorporated some Technorati stats to help add some focus).

There have been 2 very hot topics of late:

1) The New York Knicks vs. Denver Nuggets brawl which happened a few days ago. At the end of it 7 players were suspended almost 50 games. With Superstar Carmello Anthony going for 15 games and forfeiting $650,000 in salary.

2) Allen Iverson (one of the premier players in the league) getting traded to the Denver Nuggets.

I thought I’d check on Technorati to see how much Buzz was being generated by these 2 stories and from the graphs below it looks like these topics are fairly hot right now.

As a side note here are my thoughts on the Allen Iverson Trade: Adding Iverson is a great addition for Denver but I am not sure how much he will be able to share the ball with the rest of his teammates. Iverson has always been to known to be a prolific scorer and shot taker but fellow superstar Carmello Anthony also likes to shoot a lot – so something has to give. Adding Iverson makes Denver a stronger/quicker team but if he doesn’t get along with everyone he could also destroy the team.

Earlier this month it was announced that Google will be no longer giving out keys to its SOAP based Search API.

This has some developers worried and it has me a little worried to because we have developed some cool little proprietary apps using the SOAP API. I am wondering if they are eventually going to shut off access it completely, causing many developers to re-code their apps using the Google Ajax API.

Martin Lamonica’ s article at CNet News had some interesting thoughts:

Perhaps Google is trying to influence technical debates–it also has developed GData, another data access API. But ultimately Google is likely favoring the Google Ajax Search API for business reasons–that is, they expect to see more better Web applications and more traffic through that method

.

Here are some interesting articles/posts I have read this week:

- Avinash Kuashik interviewed Mike Moran of IBM
- Jason Barby goes into detail about Omniture’s latest offering: Genesis.
- According to the latest numbers from WebSideStory, Firefox’s share has risen from 9.84% in mid-October to 10.7% currently.
- Chris Diede over at SmartBiz does a nice overview of Google Analytics.

Powered by WebTrends Inc. True Optimization technology, the on-demand solution is designed to automatically determine which combinations of networks, keywords, positions, creative and landing pages perform best and allocate advertising to the top-performing combinations across major search networks, including Google, MSN and Yahoo – http://www.websitehostdirectory.com/article1024.html

Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss “tagged” me in this game of blog tag which allows bloggers/industry professionals to share 5 facts about them not known to everyone else. Here is Gord’s List.

Here are my top 5:

1) I am/was a fairly decent athlete – In high school I was named athlete of the year in back to back years and also made it to provincials (equivalent to state championships) for triple jump. Now I play competitive volleyball 3 times a week.

2) I was born in Nawanshahr, India. It’s a city located in the state of Punjab about 7 hours North of New Delhi. I moved to Canada when I was 4.5

3) During Christmas season I really don’t mind the busy shopping malls and long lines (as long as there is Christmas music playing)

4) Although I have lived in Canada most of my life and in the city of Revelstoke for 6 years (where they get enormous amounts of snow), I very much dislike the snow, winter and even skiing.

5) I really enjoy movies but a few movies which I can watch over and over include: Groundhog Day, Crimson Tide and Hook.

I tag: John Marshall, Matt Jacobs, Matt Belkin, and Bill Tancer.

Last week’s series on Identifying and Solving Client Pains was concluded with Eric Peterson. I’d like to continue with that same topic this week with Akin Arikan.

Akin Arikan is Sr. Segment Manager (Internet Marketing) at Unica Corporation.

Here are Akin’s thoughts…

It always drives me crazy when traditional marketers question the accuracy of web metrics while pouring a gazillion marketing dollars into TV, print, and outdoor advertisements where they use panels or focus groups to calculate ROI. Ahmm, … doesn’t that seem a bit schizophrenic? But one area where traditional marketers do catch their Internet colleagues red handed is the measurement of the effects between the online and offline. Or more precisely, the typical ignorance thereof.

You are not alone if it seems ironic to you that we use complex algorithms to optimize how many cents exactly we will spend on online advertisements or search keywords, yet we use the online results as our sole input. Meanwhile, studies conducted by Comscore and earlier by Dieringer Research Group show that (depending on the industry) 60% or more of the purchases resulting from Internet activity may actually happen offline rather than online. Trying to optimize your online investments without taking the offline results into account is a bit like trying to sail across the ocean orienting yourself by the position of the moon instead of using your compass or GPS.

That’s nice Akin. So how do we go about it then, wise guy? I separate techniques into two groups, namely 1.) those that aim to measure effects on a 1:1 basis, i.e. for each individual customer, and 2.) those that don’t go down to the 1:1 level but measure aggregate effects. I recommend you start with 2.) first before you go down to level 1.) even though you you will find the biggest rewards there.

For ROI assessment at the aggregate level there are multiple techniques that you will have heard about at conferences such as SES. For example you can inject unique 800 telephone numbers into your web site when visitors click through from particular advertisements. Anyone who calls can be attributed back to that advertisement. But what if you are buying many paid keywords, would you need an 800 number for each? No, there are companies that offer clever tricks for making it unnecessary to have a different number for each keyword. But how about store sales? You can offer online coupons that people will apply offline. You can offer “buy online, pick up in store”. You can offer online product configurations that people can print and bring to the store if they represent a sufficiently high value to them. If nothing else works, you could experiment by shutting down your online advertising in a particular region to measure how offline activity will go down with it.

The proposed techniques help with estimating the effects of online to offline, but are not precise enough for 1:1 marketing. For example, if you wanted to e-mail a discount promotion to someone who browsed but did not complete a hotel reservation online, then wouldn’t it be vital to first make sure that this person has not completed a reservation by phone for full price yet? Here you can use techniques that have been applied by your colleagues in direct marketing for many years. Namely, as long as you can identify the customer on each channel you can reconcile their interactions on the back-end. For example, take a hotel web site. You cannot know who an anonymous visitor to your hotel web site is. But if I go to Extended Stay Dot Com for the umpteenth time to make a new reservation, more likely than not, they know exactly who has been browsing because I have completed reservations on their site recently and my cookie allows them to identify me. Likewise, when I call and make that reservation via the phone I identify myself with my name, even my credit card. So they could put 1 and 1 together to know that I just browsed the web site but should not be sent a discount offer because I have meanwhile completed a reservation by phone. This kind of cross-channel response attribution has been common practices in direct marketing for many years. If you want to spare yourself having to reinvent the technology from scratch take a look at software suites such as Unica’s Affinium suite for Internet Marketing (http://www.unica.com/) that already comprises many multi-channel capabilities in this regard.