According to Seroundtable.com and WebMasterWorld Forum there seems to be a small update going on over at Google known as a data refresh.

After reading the posts at WebMasterWorld most people seem to be noticing a drop in rankings. Sometimes as much as hundreds of rankings for their main keywords. Some people seem to be noticing hits towards relatively new sites while others are seeing sites get out of the Google Sandbox.

Hopefully this update doesn't have any major repercussions to anyone's business during this upcoming Christmas season.

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WebTrends Inc recently launched version 2 of their powerful on-the-fly behavior analysis and real-time visitor segmentation product - Marketing Warehouse

New features include:

- High Value Events – which captures actions visitors perform online, without requiring
marketers to ‘reprocess’ data or make changes to their web site

- Visitor 360 – which combines behaviour information with any other visitor information held in other systems, such as account histories, demographics and purchase data

- Visitor Quick List – which enables marketers to pull lists of visitor IDs, e-mail addresses and other attributes into other systems, such as e-mail marketing programmes.

Source: http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news6167.htm

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Why is it that 2 people in different cities can see different rankings for the same keyword on Google (Not just a difference of 1 or 2 rankings, rather 30-40+ rankings)? This is what we have noticed for some of our clients. We know it's not a data-center issue because we've looked into it.

- Could it be based on behavioral targeting?

- Is it to do with Geo Targeting based on where the domain is hosted?

- What about Search History?

If anyone can help add some insight on this topic please post a comment or give me a shout at: mjasra@gmail.com

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"One simple yet powerful way to avoid incorrect modifications is to use duplicate profiles to test out changes to your account settings. This way, you can ensure that you have implemented the settings correctly without affecting the data in your main profile. When you duplicate profiles, the new data you collect appears in several profiles at once, letting you manipulate the duplicate data in different ways. You can then keep the original profile unaltered so it can contain every piece of data collected by the tracking code on your site"

Read the rest here: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2006/11/tip-experiment-using-duplicate.html

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Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Lesley Grossblatt of I/PRO regarding their very cool product made for advertisers/publishers: SPOTSITE.

What is SPOTSITE?
SPOTSITE is an online marketplace where advertisers can search for specific demographics across a broad range of small- to medium-sized websites. Using SPOTSITE, advertisers can more effectively target their ad buys, and publishers can attract higher-quality, premium advertising to their sites.

How does this work?
For example, say an ad agency is selling Cover Girl makeup to 16 year old girls. While a site with 1,000 very loyal 16 year old girls may not be worth Cover Girl's time, 100 sites with 1,000 loyal 16 year old girls each would be. But how does Cover Girl find these sites? They could try to research these sites on their own and negotiate advertising deals with each, but this would be much too time-consuming and expensive. With SPOTSITE, they can instantly access the demographic they need across multiple sites, plus have verified demographic and traffic audits at their fingertips to prove the value of the buy to their clients.

Advertisers can also place and manage buys within SPOTSITE using a simple web interface that integrates with their media planning, billing and accounting systems.

Target Customers for SPOTSITE
SPOTSITE’s target customers are: (1) small- to medium-sized web publishers with loyal niche audiences; and (2) major advertising agencies and media buying firms that need to build online brand identity and recognition for their clients.

Needs/Pains Addressed by SPOTSITE
Advertisers look for demographics, not search terms or broad categories. Most online advertising tools, such as search-based ad marketplaces and ad networks, don’t offer easy ways for advertisers to find a targeted demographic because they simply don’t have that information available. Advertisers can sometimes find the demographics they need in the largest publisher sites (e.g., magazines), but this ad space is scarce and incredibly costly. By combining thousands of sites with detailed demographic information, SPOTSITE gives ad buyers a more efficient and less expensive way to speak to a demographic across multiple small- to medium-sized niche sites.

For small- to medium-sized publishers, SPOTSITE provides a way to attract more targeted and valuable advertising than they could on their own. With SPOTSITE, publishers can expand beyond search and affiliate marketing to sell more valuable brand-focused display advertising on their sites.

Screen Shots
The image below is an excerpt of the traffic report we provide publishers on a monthly basis. Traffic reporting is page-tag driven, and provides information on page views, unique visitors, where visitors came from (both geographically and by domain/URL), where visitors went within the site, and where they went when they left.



The image below is an excerpt of the demographic report that we provide to our publisher customers. Demographic survey questions cover basics such as age, income, education level, but can incorporate customized questions to meet publisher and advertiser needs.



The image below is where advertisers and publishers log into the SPOTSITE system. Note that there are separate logins for the two types of customers because they use the system for different purposes (e.g., publishers list inventory, advertisers search inventory).



When an advertiser runs a search for a particular demographic, the SPOTSITE system identifies all sites in our network: (1) whose audience matches the demographic profile; (2) who offer the requested ad type (e.g., leaderboard); (3) who have inventory available on the dates requested; and (4) whose CPM rate is the same or lower than the rate requested.



The final image is an example of the quick snapshot of information about the site that the advertiser can view while placing a buy. The information includes links to the most recent audited traffic and demographic reports for the site.



More about I/PRO...
Since 1994, I/PRO has provided verified traffic and audience demographic reporting to websites of all sizes, from Autotrader.com to AintItCoolNews.com. We recently introduced SPOTSITE, an online marketplace where advertisers can search our demographic and traffic reports to find the most targeted sites to place display advertising campaigns. To encourage publishers to join our network, we are currently offering our verified traffic and demographic reports at no cost in exchange for publishers listing ad inventory in SPOTSITE.

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I recently received a case study from Michael Stebbins (CMO ClickTracks) detailing how a company (DoublePositive) used ClickTracks to identify Click Fraud and received a $9,000 credit from Yahoo. Here it is...

DoublePositive (www.doublepositive.com) is a leader in connecting interested, qualified consumers with businesses and sales representatives. DoublePositive uses proprietary phone technology and web-based applications to deliver sales leads -- such as qualified mortgage leads--to companies in real time.

Like many businesses, DoublePositive was spending thousands of dollars every month on pay-per-click advertising. But something was bothering Senior VP of Operations Dianne Conley--she was certain that there was something fishy with some of the paid clicks, but had no way to prove it.

At $4-6 Per Keyword, Click Fraud can Cost Big Bucks

"In an industry like ours, we're competing for some of the most expensive keywords on the web," noted Dianne, "With a budget of around $25K a month, and keyword phrases costing anywhere from $4-6 per click, it's easy to see how huge of an impact even just a handful of fraudulent clicks could have. We were using WebTrends for our web analytics, but it wasn't giving us the info we needed with regards to click fraud. I started looking for a click fraud-specific solution and found ClickTracks."

Evidence of Click Fraud Leads to Credit

Using ClickTracks Pro's Click Fraud report, the DoublePositive team first decided to scrutinize two months' worth of data: June and July, 2006. And what they found confirmed their hunches--click fraud was most likely occurring. One glance at the Click Fraud report showed two main areas of concern; In general, conversion rates were plummeting even though PPC spend was increasing. Specifically, their campaigns were receiving clicks from many different foreign countries, even though their campaigns were only set to run in the United States.

With data from the Click Fraud report in hand, DoublePositive's Senior Data Analyst, Tim Watts submitted the company's click fraud refund request to Yahoo in mid-August. And the result? "By mid-September, we were notified that we would be issued a credit," said Tim. "Shortly thereafter, a credit for nearly $9K arrived. The whole process was quite easy and straightforward. I was pleasantly surprised."

"Our Time is Better Spent Creating PPC Campaigns...Not Researching Click Fraud"

The DoublePositive team now uses ClickTracks' Click Fraud report to regularly monitor their pay-per-click campaign performance. "What it comes down to is the fact that our time is better spent creating and monitoring our PPC advertising campaigns--not researching potential cases of click fraud. Using ClickTracks to help us detect click fraud is the most effective, efficient way to make sure our advertising is getting the best ROI," said DoublePositive's VP of Marketing Chris Beauchamp. Chris also mentioned that the company has completely replaced their old web analytics software with ClickTracks.

So what can other companies learn from DoublePositive’s experience? “To start--many companies erroneously believe that click fraud will just jump out at you--all the sudden you'll see a sharp rise in clicks coming from an overseas “click farm”--and that's just not a reality. Click fraud is usually much more subtle and harder to identify,” said Chris.

Lastly, Chris also stresses the value of being patient and watching for patterns. "Click fraud happens over time--not in an instant. Using a log-file based web analytics package like ClickTracks lets us go back in time and compare historic behavior to current behavior."

DoublePositive Marketing Group, Inc. was founded in late 2004 with the specific purpose of bridging the ‘last mile’ of converting traditional (data-only) leads into sales. They specialize in the live Hot Transfer of mortgage leads, insurance leads, educations leads, automotive leads, real estate leads and debt leads. DoublePositive is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland’s high tech waterfront office complex, Tide Point. For more information visit, www.DoublePositive.com

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About a month ago I posted about how I am leveraging FeedBurner's stats by displaying the most popular RSS feed readers above the fold on my blog. There was a comment added to that post from one of PageFlakes' Co-Founders: Ole Brandenburg to try adding PageFlakes to my list (which already included: NewsGator, NetVibes, BlogLines, Google and Yahoo).

So about 3 weeks ago I added the PageFlakes button and had to remove MSN to do so (because it was basically doing nothing for me) and have actually noticed some very good results. PageFlakes is now my number 2 in terms of most subscribers and recently I have noticed a 10-15% increase in subscribers because of it.


What is Pageflakes?
Pageflakes is your personalized startpage on the Internet. Your address book, local weather information, to-do-list, news, blogs and much more – all on one page that you can access from anywhere.

Why should I use Pageflakes?
Until now you had to go to different web sites to check your email, start Web searches, get weather information and so on. With Pageflakes, everything you need is on one page! You can also use Pageflakes t

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Looking for insightful SEO tips and news with a B2B Twist? Well, SEM veteran Jody Nimetz has launched a great new blog covering exactly this and much more - SEO Space (http://seo-space.blogspot.com/)

SEO Space covers topics such as

- Search Engines
- Link Baiting
- SEO Best Practices
- SEO/SEM Conferences
- B2B Tech Companies

You may have seen Jody's writing at Enquiro, SearchEngineGuide and WebProNews Canada so pay attention to what he has to say and definitely subscribe to his RSS Feed.

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Last week I had the privilege of speaking with KnowledgeStorm's Jeff Ramminger. Jeff is KnowledgeStorm's Executive Vice President, Products, Technology & Marketing and has been working their since April 2000. Jeff's immense insight in the area of B2B Tech made for a very interesting interview. So here it is...

Manoj – Could you talk about how you got started at KnowledgeStorm and little bit about your past professional experiences?

Jeff – I have been in technology now for about 25 years, I spent the first 19 with IBM. The important part of that was the last 8 years which were very focused on interactive application development and multimedia oriented things initially: interactive television, CD roms, and kiosks. Starting in ’95 I started running a consulting group at IBM that was building websites for people and we started to do a lot high profile web projects. In particular I had responsibility for the communications sector e-business services team which was focused on all of the cable companies, entertainment companies, media/sports companies. So we ended up doing a lot of development for people who were doing very high traffic/Splash sorts of events and websites. A lot of work for the NHL, NBA, I did the Super Bowl site in ’98, all the grand slams in tennis (Wimbledon, French Open, Australian Open, US Open).

Manoj – WOW! That’s awesome

Jeff – Yeah it was fun, on the entertainment side we did the Grammys, we did the Tony’s, we did sections of West 54th (a music site of Sony’s). We did a lot of very progressive things from an application standpoint and a lot of aggressive things, back then, from a search marketing/analytics standpoint.

Manoj – Were there any perks with this job, did you guys get to go to any of these events?

Jeff – Yeah for me personally there were a lot (laughing), because for something like US Open Tennis my team would be at the venue for 3.5-4 weeks. We’d usually going in a week before to setup sophisticated production systems which included video and still image capture (on automated basis). I personally, since I ran the group and was the interface to the executives/clients, pretty much got to go to everything.

Manoj – Oh my God, That’s like every sports enthusiast’s dream!

Jeff – It was, the first event I did was the Stanley Cup Final in ’96, it was game 6 and the NHL invited me and I brought my 7 year old son where we sat in the press box and watched the whole game. I like perks as much as anybody, but the most interesting thing to me was what you got to learn in the process of doing that in terms of scaling web properties and what things affected performance.

Manoj – Who is KnowledgeStorm’s target market and how do KnowledgeStorm’s services solve users’ pains?

Jeff – Ok, Our target market is B2B Technology vendors. Our job in our minds is to help create awareness and visibility for a given B2B Technology vendor and to generate web leads as a result. This summer we launched some advertising and sponsorships offerings as well. So we have a variety of things we offer to the vendor and almost all of it is focused around creating more awareness and creating actionable lists or actionable sets of web leads that they can deal with. The way we do that is we are not actually a content creator, we are content aggregator so we’ve built a fairly sophisticated online directory of all the content that vendors have. This includes solutions information about their products, white papers, webcasts, and podcasts anything like that which is a content asset they already possess. In essence what we’re doing is organizing that content so that users that are coming to do research for information technology solutions can find highly relevant content and try to understand how to solve their business problem with a particular technology solution.

Manoj – What are KnowledgeStorm’s goals and what does the future hold for the company?

Jeff – That’s a very interesting question, I think from a goal standpoint we’ve always set out to be the place that the users, whether they are IT people or business technology people, would come to find interesting information when they are researching a technology buy they want to make. I think as well as we’ve done in that regard I always feel there is a long way to go in terms of what the potential is for us to create interesting aggregation content that will help users solve a problem. In the process of doing that, we want to try to grow both the volume and the quality of the web leads we’re delivering to the IT vendors. In particular, one of the things we’ve had a lot of interest in and have worked very hard on from a product set is something that we call content intelligence. This is trying not to take what you would think of as traditional Web Analytics but it is trying to take the data that is thrown off as part of an experience that someone has online (what did they search on, where did they click, what documents did they look at) and we try to amass that information into demographic groupings (without exposing individual data because that would be a violation of privacy). We roll-up this demographic information and provide it to IT vendors so that they can be smarter when they market to those people and in particular leverage their content for more opportunity for awareness and lead generation.

Manoj – The next set of questions will be focused towards B2B Tech (in terms of Search Marketing), are these types of companies looking for consultation or help in implementation, are they doing this in-house or are they looking to outsource SEM?

Jeff – It’s all over the board, I think there are a quite a few SEOs/SEMs that have done quite well in the Tech industry because Tech is spending a lot of money online from a marketing standpoint. I think you’ll find that big vendors probably have in-house team or want to have an in-house team if they don’t already. The beauty of the web is the long tail B2B tech market gives you a lot of potential for people who need consulted incisive services on the PPC/SEO/SEM kind of side. We see people left and right spending thousands of dollars on Google. We see a lot of people confused with Google Organic clicks and Google paid clicks on the analytics side. They look at Google in their analytics and they don’t make the distinction between whether they paid for it or not. For a guy like you or a company like Enquiro it’s probably a fertile market.

Manoj – So there’s definitely a need for an SEM vendor in B2B Tech?

Jeff – Absolutely, depending on different levels of markets some are going to need you worse than others. I am guessing Enquiro doesn’t touch anything for less than $20,000/year for consulting but there is probably a good sized medium-large segment of the market you can do very well in.

Manoj – How heavily do B2B Tech companies rely on their websites for things like Lead Generation, Reputation Management or Customer Care?

Jeff – Hard for me to answer the Customer Care one because it’s not really my sweet spot, but on the Lead Gen side there has been a lot movement over the last 3 years where people are having a deeper interest in what their sites look like and what content is available on the site. I can tell you confidently that unlike B2C, there aren’t a whole of people in B2B looking at content for recreation (very few if any). They are trying to solve a business problem. On B2B sites you’ll notice registration barriers (to collect information about the user) and we have noticed from our experience, B2B users are willing to give up their information if they are serious about a business product. We have actually surveyed this as well: users are actually happy to hear from the vendors if they are truly downloading the vendor’s content. Where B2C users don’t like people to intrude or advertising necessarily, in B2B it’s very different because people are on a mission to solve a problem.

Manoj – What are the hottest developments you are seeing in terms of software solutions in B2B Tech?

Jeff – One sort of area that I think is very hot is: SalesForce.com sparked a lot of interest in software as a service. They were really the ones to prove you can do enterprise level applications, software as a service reliably across a lot of clients. Given the bandwidth available on the web, people are very interested in rentable applications. There’s little companies doing interesting things along those lines, people like 37 Signals who are doing 20% of what Microsoft Project can do but you can do it online. The other one that is constantly sort of hot is security; we’ve seen tremendous amounts of focus on security from a standpoint of firewalls. There’s even a new category of security called Extrusion Prevention, the idea of preventing data from leaving your enterprise if you don’t want it to. CRM seems to be perennially hot as well.

Manoj – What do you enjoy most working at KnowledgeStorm?

Jeff – For me the most fun is when you know always that things are coming. I like strategy and looking into the future trying to see what the potential is. What I enjoy is driven by two things. We are in a really fun industry and I have great people that work for me, so my team makes this a lot of fun. And the industry is great because of the pace and the change that is always occurring. I feel somewhat bold about the fact that not only in KnowledgeStorm going things that are very interesting and valuable but, the B2B technology industry, generally speaking, is always the lead or one of the leaders in B2B and a lot of other industries follow behind what technology is doing. So I think it is fun to be in that industry to start with.

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Labels: Enquiro, Eye Tracking

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Brand, Influence and Reach are all very difficult to measure and for many companies they are crucial in understanding the success of their marketing and advertising efforts over the Internet. Through its unique algorithms BuzzLogic is able to provide the ability to measure these items across various segments such as: Public Relations, Corporate Communications, Blogging, Brand/Product Marketing...

What BuzzLogic's CMO, Robert Schettino has to say: "We address a clear marketing need: how to understand and engage with social media such as blogs. We believe that understanding who is influential, and how they are wielding that influence, will help marketers better focus their listening, and better direct their influencer-oriented marketing initiatives. They can use this information to better manage their brands, reputations, products and customer relationships."

How does BuzzLogic do it? BuzzLogic uniquely calculates and surfaces influence in social media by analyzing relationships – who connects to whom, about what and when, and who is listening. Specifically this means that their algorithms look at the relevance of blog posts within a social media conversation; determine the occurrence of these messages over time; analyze the linking attention to and from relevant content; and measure the popularity of the posting site and all its inbound linking sites. They will soon add the ability to define the traffic these blogs sites send back to the marketers’ site. This will probably be implemented through page tagging similarly done with Web Analytics Solutions.

I know that this tools can surely help our B2B clients who are heavily focused in comparing how well they are doing against their competitors (in terms of Brand exposure). I was able to get a demo today and was quite impressed with BuzzLogic's interface, specefically the speed of reporting and ease of usability. Here are some screenshots from our demo using "Kobe Bryant" as our focus keyword:

The image to your right (also from the BuzzLogic application) is a thumbnail of the actual post that was highlighted in the image below. This image also includes a snapshot of key data about this particular post – the influence rank within this specific conversation; its popularity, relevance and reach.















The image below is a summary list, produced within the BuzzLogic application, of the most influential posts on a specific topic at a specific moment.

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Ad Age has just released a very detailed Guide on Search Engine Marketing. I am definitely going to block of an hour or 2 so I can thoroughly go through all the trends and stats. The company I work for, Enquiro, also has a great section under eye tracking.

"IT SOLVES A BASIC MARKETING need: connecting potential buyers to sellers. But until the recent past, search marketing has lived a low-profile life in the media and advertising
world."






Here is the table of contents:

- Overview
The interactive channels marketers are using, and plan to use
- The engines
Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask lead the way
- Categories and keywords
Top terms and the leading sites by category
- Top search terms
Hitwise’s top overall search terms, Nielsen’s top retail terms
- A sample search
Looking for HDTV; top bidders and destination sites
- What words cost
Top terms and the leading sites by category
- Search sells
Preferred tactics; conversion rates by tactic
- Search engine optimization tips
From an interview with i’s David Berkowitz
- Eye tracking
Enquiro’s Golden Triangle and the Google Effect
- Local search
Leading engines by share, top terms, selected markets and local spending
- Mobile
M:Metrics’ top engines by share and mobile search use trends over time
- Click fraud
SEMPO’s study of advertiser and agency reaction
- Agencies
Top agencies by SEM/SEO revenue
- Miscellaneous
Reaching YouTube; How users click


Here is the PDF: http://www.adage.com/images/random/searchfactpack2006.pdf

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This is officially my 100th post at Web Analytics World. 100 posts over approximately 150 days equates to 0.67 posts/day (most of them coming between 10-12 PM at night). To my readers I hope to offer more product reviews, more interviews with industry professionals, and more insight using analytics in the next 100 posts.

To commemorate this achievement I thought I would share and review some of the most popular posts over the last 5 months.

Industry Interviews:

• Brett Crosby - Google Analytics
• John Marshall - ClickTracks
• Dick Costolo - FeedBurner
• Jim Sterne/Marcos Richardson - Emetrics/WebTrafficIQ

Celebrity (Guest) Blogger Week:

• Gord Hotchkiss - SEMPO/Enquiro
• Jennifer Laycock - SearchEngineGuide
• Avinash Kaushik - Intuit/Occam's Razor
• Rand Fishkin - SEOmoz

Tips and Insight:

• Blogger Tips
• Successful Blog Promotion
• Success with Reddit
• Top 10 Rules for Success in B2B SEM
• Leveraging FeedBurner Stats

Product Reviews:

• Analyticstool.com Review
• VisiStat vs. Google Analytics

Articles:

• Overrated Metrics
• Are you Measuring Visitor Engagement and Behavior?
• Measuring Key Performance Indicators
• Analytics: You can't afford NOT to track
• Analytics Analysis for Search Marketers

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Omniture, Inc. announced that SearchCenter 2.3 will be available on November 2, 2006.

New Things You can Expect:

Additional Search Engine Support: Ask.com has been added to the high profile line up of search engines supported by SearchCenter. With these additions, SearchCenter now supports 8 primary search engines and 40+ total search Web sites throughout the content network.

Multiple Currency Support: As companies employ multi-national search marketing campaigns, the ability to manage those campaigns from a single interface is becoming more important. SearchCenter 2.3 now supports the use of multiple currencies for reporting and management of search engine marketing activities.

Support of Yahoo! (Panama) Release: SearchCenter has been updated to support the enhanced functionality of the new Panama release of the Yahoo! search engine that is scheduled for release in Q4 of 2006. Whenever you decide to migrate to Panama, SearchCenter will provide you with a powerful tool to manage your Yahoo! search marketing campaigns.

Enhanced Exception Handling for Google: SearchCenter 2.3 has been enhanced to support the management of exceptions in regards to the Google search engine. This enhanced functionality streamlines the management of trademarked and other controlled keywords and text ad content.

Support of Google Site Targeting: SearchCenter 2.3 now supports the use of the Google Site Targeting feature which allows the search marketer to choose which content network sites will display their ads.

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If you're ever looking for a job in the SEM/Web Analytics industry, check out the Web Analytics Association's Job Board. It's frequently updated and offers jobs at some very cool companies. Here's what they have this week:

Senior Web Analyst Manager of Web Marketing
Company: Ciena Corp
Location: Linthicum, Maryland
Contact: Ross Jenkins (410) 694-5948
Description: The Senior Web Analyst at Ciena is responsible for managing all aspects of reporting and analysis for Ciena.com and contributing to the ongoing success of Ciena’s web marketing initiatives....

Analytics Portal Product Manager
Company: YAHOO!
Location: Santa Monica or Sunnyvale, CA
Contact: LARA LONG (408) 349-1649
Description: YMG Analytics Portal Product Manager Product Manager - Santa Monica or Sunnyvale
Desired Attributes: The Yahoo! Media Group (YMG) is seeking an experienced, hands-on Portal Product Manager to...

Online Advertising Analyst (Inventory Analyst
Company: Walt Disney Internet Group
Location: Seattle, WA
Contact: Gina Jaio (818) 623-3814
Description: Come play a leading role in the growth of the Walt Disney Internet Group, WDIG, the online and wireless division of the Walt Disney Company. WDIG consists of many of the Web's most popular sites...

Online Marketing Analyst
Company: SCA Direct
Location: Fairfax, VA
Contact: Nicole Skuba (703) 293-7564
Description: Leading fundraising consultancy based in Fairfax, VA is looking for an innovative online marketing analyst to help grow our online marketing and fundraising service group. Current tasks include...

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