2007 July

WebTrends Releases Marketing Lab 2 – ad:tech 2007

July 31, 2007 By Manoj Jasra 2 Comments

Reporting Live from ad:tech Chicago: WebTrends Inc., unveiled WebTrends Marketing Lab™ 2, an integrated suite of business solutions that optimize site performance, build customer engagement and drive more effective and targeted marketing. Joining an award-winning lineup of solutions including WebTrends Analytics™ and WebTrends Dynamic Search™, WebTrends introduces two new solutions that are powered by its open, enterprise-class data warehouse: WebTrends Score™, a patented technology that improves the way marketers quantify visitor engagement and measure the value and interests of customers, and WebTrends Visitor Intelligence™, a full-featured, multi-dimensional reporting and analysis solution for enterprise organizations that require deep visitor and marketing intelligence.

“WebTrends Score is a patented technology solution that evaluates visitors’ online behavior by quantifiably measuring the level of engagement or interest they have in content, products and services. By establishing rules that assign values to specific visit and visitor activities, marketers can go beyond conversion to evaluate the success of their efforts using realized and potential customer value. Score values can then be applied to consumer targeting activities, such as email, site personalization, offline direct marketing, as well as to campaign enhancement such as automated paid search optimization. This allows marketers to effectively target consumers and improve campaign performance.”

With WebTrends Visitor Intelligence, you can:

Identify, target and engage the people behind your web site visits.
Combine online behavior with existing offline customer data, such as CRM or demographics, to build a comprehensive Interest Profile that builds over time.
Replace mass marketing with relevant conversations that are based on the interests of your visitors, and keep them continually engaged.
Quickly identify and target groups of individuals with the most value to your business and highest potential to act.
Fuel email, behavioral targeting, and CRM solutions with richer online visitor data and set up triggered follow-up based on the actions a person takes on your site.
Incorporate critical online consumer insight into corporate dashboards and enterprise systems, such as CRM or a customer data warehouse, to provide a complete view of your customers.

I will get some further insight on Marketing Lab 2 from WebTrends’ CMO Tim Kopp, so stay tuned.

View the Full Press Release

Filed Under: ad:tech, Web Analytics, WebTrends

ReviewMe vs. SponsoredReviews.com

July 31, 2007 By Manoj Jasra 5 Comments

ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews.com are 2 of the elite services when it comes to managing relationships between bloggers and advertisers. As a blogger I recommend using both services rather than putting your eggs in one basket however there are some noticeable differences between ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews.com. Note, these points are mainly from a bloggers perspective.

Advantages of ReviewMe

Both services make it easy for users to sign up but ReviewMe has the superior interface in terms of management and overall appeal.
ReviewMe allows bloggers to update their ratings at any time (which is based on RSS Subscribers, Alexa and Technorati).
ReviewMe has a very simple to use affiliate program which includes affective use of their branding (the “Me” character).

Advantages of SponsoredReviews.com

SponsoredReviews.com pays out 65% commission to bloggers vs. only 50% from ReviewMe.
SponsoredReviews.com allows Bloggers to bid for opportunities (and has a strong emphasis on this) whereas with ReviewMe, the advertisers are give the task to find the right blogger. ReviewMe has introduced campaigns for Advertisers to help provide more opportunities for bloggers.
SponsoredReviews.com does a better job in helping bloggers produce the most effective posts. This is done through tips and the SponsoredReviews.com blog.

Personally I have had more success with SponsoredReviews.com but it varies from blogger to blogger. If you asked John Chow, I am sure he would say ReviewMe is the better choice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Measuring Social Media with Web Analytics at XChange Conference

July 30, 2007 By Now.Seo 1 Comment

Post by: Marshall Sponder – author of www.Webmetricsguru.com and frequent blogger at www.Smartmobs.com, and www.biggreenblog.com.

Recently, I wrote a post on Smartmobs.com titled Strategies for Applying Web Analytics to Social Media and mentioned the Semphonic XChange Conference on September 20th and 21st in Napa Valley, which is going to be focusing, quite a bit, on Social Media Measurement.
Manoj Jasra, the author of this blog, is also going to present at XChange, as will I (and Manoj asked me if I would be interested in posting, from time to time here at Web Analytics World …. and how could I pass this opportunity up?)

Aside from the wonderful scenery and great wine we’ll be drinking as we soak up the Northern California Sun, here’s a list of the Symphonic XChange Sessions that focus on Social Media Measurement:

Social Network Analysis facilitated by Manoj Jasra
Measuring Second-Life by Marshall Sponder

I’m looking forward to hearing Manoj’s presentation on Social Network Analysis … all HANDS ON Stuff …not the fluffy stuff you get at SES and Webmasterworld (recycled presentations and stories that without the actual steps and data taken)….what you get at XChange is the real stories of how it was done and how to do it …. what Web Analysts do to get the data, the issues that come up and ways to harness Web Analytics to solve business problems.

We’re also coming together to share knowledge – and I bet many attendees will share their experiences with Social Media Measurement – often we learn most by sharing and hearing what others are doing.

The subject I’m going to speak about is Second Life Metrics using a combination of of techniques and methodologies including Web Analytics (Coremetrics / Surfaid), In World Analytics (Code4Software’s V-Tracker), Online Lead Tracking (Seibel/Brio), In World Survey Data (using Questionnaires, both In World and “Punch through web forms”, Online Event Tracking and Buzz Monitoring of Second Life Events via Social Media Crawlers such as Blogpulse, Google Trends/HotTrends, to name a few.

I’ve never really been to Napa Valley before – but like I said, I love the wine, and I bet the food at COPIA http://www.copia.org/ is pretty darn good – maybe better than good.

And as many of you might know, I author http://www.webmetricsguru.com/, where I write a great deal about Second Life and other 3D Virtual Worlds as an adjunct to Web Analytics.

Also, this spring, I was elected to the Board of the Directors of the Web Analytics Association as the Director of the Social Media and Community Committee of the WAA. The Social Media Committee is working on creating a standards definition for Social Media Measurement – and if you come to the XChange Conference you get to hear all about it. We even rolled our own, white label Social Network, invite only, for members of the Social Media Committee to communicate with each other and collaborate in real time.

So, all of that, plus some neat presentations and real, hands on knowledge will be at the Semphonic XChange Conference on September 20th and 21st, which you can sign up for here, before it’s sold out.

Filed Under: Semphonic, Web Analytics, Webmetricsguru.com, Xchange Conference

Xbox Takes Over Wii and Playstation 3

July 30, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Bill Tancer over at the Hitwise Blog reports that Xbox 360 has taken over the Nintendo Wii in terms of the most searched for gaming console in the United States.

“So what is driving the increase in searches for Xbox 360? It appears to be a
combination of hype for new games, rumours of a price drop and no doubt some
queries about the recent problems.”

Top 5 Most Addicting Apps/Services

July 30, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Apps/Services that are addicting are doing their job correctly, engaging their users. Do you ever find yourself using the same application or website for an extended period of time? Of course you do, below I have outlined the services I find most addicting:

Facebook: It offers so many different ways to keep to users engaged. A few of the things Facebook does well is: allow people to share many different things about their lives with their friends, it easily allow people to see what their friends are up to and finally locating/adding old friends is a breeze. The recent craze with Facebook has been with the hundreds of applications you can ad to personalize your own profile.
MySpace: This service does many of the same things as Facebook does, but in my opinion, Facebook’s interface is a lot easier to use. MySpace’s ability to allow users to completely modify thier profiles is one of it’s most addicting features.
Bust a Name: I found out about this service through ProBlogger.net and I recommend it to anyone looking to purchase a new domain. Users input domain names and Bust a Name will tell you if the .org/.com/.net version is available on the fly (using ajax type functionality). Bust a Name also offers an additional feature where users can put in a few related words to their domain and Bust a Name will provide sample domain names for users to select from.
Octagate SiteTimer: Octagate is a website load time tool which shows users exactly how fast each image, script, object, and file takes to load. Once you finish with your own site, you’ll want to see how fast competing sites are loading.
Flickr: This was 5th but still takes up a lot of my spare time using it. Flickr offers a very user friendly photo upload tool and the ability to tag/describe photos. With hundreds of thousands of users, it’s very interesting to see the types of photos other users are sharing.

What services do you find most addicting?

Filed Under: Facebook, Flickr, MySpace

Manage KPIs with Balanced Scorecard Designer

July 28, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Balanced Scorecard Designer (BSC Designer) is software that simplifies the process of creating and managing Balanced Scorecards or KPI groups. With BSC Designer you will be able to create a set of key performance indicators, define relationships between groups, goals, and specify the importance of indicators. BSC Designer gives provides a flexible way to calculate performance values depending on indicators’ settings, such as min/max values, target values, measurement units. The resulted Scorecard can be exported into MS Excel file for further processing.

With BSC Designer you can create a set of Key Performance Indicators and group them into categories. Each category and each indicator (goal) have a relative weight, which tells about importance of this indicator. You can define your own relative weights or use balancing function, so BSC Designer will calculate the values itself.

The indicator (goal) also has a current, min and max values. Depending on optimization strategy these values are involved in calculation of the performance within metrics’ category and the total performance of the Balanced Scorecard.

Once the scorecard was designed it could be exported into MS Excel for further usage and integration with businesses systems, such as CRM or ERP. A better option is saving the designed scorecard and sharing it with co-workers both as a .bsc file (native BSC Designer file type) and MS Excel file.

Sample Scorecards:

Marketing Scorecard
Brand Scorecard

Measure marketing KPIs for the following categories:

Web Investment
Presentation
Supply Chain
HR
Real Estate
Sales
Brand Evaluation
Call-Center
Help Desk
IT Security

This is a sponsored review.

Filed Under: KPI

10 Online Services Which I use Daily

July 27, 2007 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Since blogging has become a regular habit of mine I have developed a daily routine which consists of using some popular services that help me get through my day. These services help me with communication, assessing blog performance and staying up to date with industry news. In no particular order these services consist of:

FeedBurner: Could be one of the best feed management services available. I use FeedBurner to get insight on a number of metrics: Outgoing clicks, Subscribers, Item Use, and number of downloads.
Gmail: There was a time where I used to use Yahoo Mail and Hotmail almost everyday and now both of them have been surpassed by Gmail. It keeps communication simple, quick and effective.
iGoogle: On my iGoogle page I have feed widgets setup to keep on top of SearchEngineLand, Search Round Table, Marketing Pilgrim, Matt Cutts and many more news portals.
StatCounter: For real time stats in order to quickly measure the effectiveness of daily posts I prefer using StatCounter.
Google Analytics: StatCounter is great, but Google Analytics is definitely a level ahead. I am really taking advantage of the newly added customized dashboards.
Technorati: It is a great tool to measure the popularity and authority level of your blog through the number of back-links.
MyBlogLog: I enjoy seeing new members join the Web Analytics World community it also provides me with a quick snapshot of the most popular links on my blog.
Blogger: Over the last year I have published pretty close to 400 posts using blogger. It may not be the absolute best blogging software, but it does the trick.
Google/Yahoo News: Both are easy ways to see the hottest stories for any given industry/topic. These news sources also help generate blog post ideas.
Google Toolbar Spell Check: Not a post or email goes out from me without using the spell check on Google’s toolbar.