StatCounter has made yet another addition to their web analytics framework by adding the ability to label IP addresses that visit your site.

Here's the offical post from the StatCounter Forum:

How this gives value to users:

- Help you identify click fraudsters
- Make it easier to see when "the competition" has visited your site
- Identify recurring visitors
- Let you see just how many times your mom has been admiring your site...

So no more spreadsheets, no more post-it notes, now you can name IP addresses which visit your site.

- Login to your account.
- Click the stats for your project.
- Click "Recent Visitor Activity"
- Click the new "Label IP Address"
- Give it a description and you're DONE!

Labels: Web Analytics

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FeedBurner has added to their publisher engagement metrics by expanding their Headline Animator service to include Headline Animator Stats

For the tens of thousands of you currently using FeedBurner's Headline Animator service, you'll notice a new "Headline Animator Stats" option on your Analyze tab. FeedBurner is reporting "Views," the number of times your Headline Animator was requested and displayed on a web site, in a feed, in email or anywhere else (for example, in a feed via email that you're viewing on a web page). This first step on content promotion metrics points out where people are most frequently seeing your content promotion widget. We have several more pieces of work on the Headline Animator front to finish off and then we're going to start weaving together all of the content measurement pieces we provide into a unified engagement dashboard.

I have been using the headline animator in my email signature so it will interesting to eventually see the level of click throughs back to my blog.

Labels: Web Analytics

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I was recently asked to review a product by Submit Suite called Website Popularity. Website Popularity basically tells a person how they are ranking on various measurements across the Internet. I was impressed with the speed at which it returns the data as well as the amount of metrics it returns. The cost is a one time fee of $50. This tool can be best used for many reasons:

- As a sales person who needs to provide a quick analysis for a prospect regarding their competitive landscape
- A strategist who needs to report on the ongoing performance of their SEO efforts
- A technical strategist who wants to take the exported results in order to create their own formula or performance grade.

Here are the metrics Website Popularity returns:

Pages Indexed

- AllTheWeb
- Altavista
- Google
- Inktomi/Hotbot
- Msn
- Technorati
- Yahoo

Inbound links (IBL)

- AllTheWeb inbound links
- Altavista inbound links
- Google inbound links
- Inktomi/Hotbot inbound links
- Msn inbound links
- Technorati inbound links
- Yahoo inbound links
- Alexa Linking websites

Popularity (PageRanks)

- Alexa rank
- Yahoo rank
- Google page rank
- Netcraft rank

Indexed pages

- Google's indexed pages
- Yahoo! pages indexed
- MSN pages indexed
- Gigablast pages indexed
- Exalead pages indexed

Social taggings

- Del.icio.us bookmarks
- Digg.com mentions
- Reddit mentions

Important directories and site listings

- DMOZ links
- .EDU links
- .GOV links
- Wikipedia listing
- Yahoo Directory listing
- Google groups listing

Press and media mentions

- Google News
- Yahoo News
- Google blog presence
- IceRocket blog presence

SEO informations

- Domain visibility
- Domain visible from
- Actual IP

Labels: Product Review

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The newly-elected SEMPO Board of Directors for 2007 is:

- Chris Boggs, Avenue A/Razorfish
- Massimo Burgio, Global Search Interactive
- Fionn Downhill, Elixir Systems
- Dave Fall, DoubleClick Inc.
- Duane Forrester, Sports Direct Inc.
- Sara Holoubek, Free Agent Consultant
- Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro
- Bill Hunt, Global Strategies International
- Kevin Lee, Did-It
- Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing
- Tanya Rietze, Hewlett-Packard
- Dana Todd, SiteLab
- Dave Williams, 360i

Eight of the 13 members are returning as Board members from the 2006 group: Chris Boggs, Sara Holoubek, Gordon Hotchkiss, Bill Hunt, Kevin Lee, Jeffrey Pruitt, Dana Todd, and David Williams. The 13-member board will serve a one-year term. The new board will elect officers in March and have its first meeting during the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York City, April 10-13.

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SEMPO in conjuction with Radar Research and IntelliSurvey have recently completed a research study (the State of Search Engine Marketing survey) on the topics of Video and Mobile search adverstising. The study concluded that search marketers wanted to pay the same or less for Mobile/Video search advertising than traditional search marketing strategies.

Here are some key points found from the study:

- Two in five respondents say they want to pay the same for video search as they pay for traditional search advertising
- 66% of the respondents say they would be interested in contextually targeted advertising attached to video search results
- 53% say they are interested in video ads compared to 33% who indicated an interest in text only
- SEMPO survey reports that almost half of the respondents will not pay any premium for mobile search
- 60% of the respondents are interested in contextually targeted advertising delivered to mobile search users


Marketers simply don't have the same comfort level and trust in the ROI with Video and Mobile as they do with traditional PPC advertising. I expect this comfort level to increase as we see more reliable testing with the Mobile and Video platforms.

Labels: Research

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I have been experiencing slow website load times over the last little while so I thought I'd investigate and find out what the causes were.

The first tool I used was: Web Page Analyzer which has the ability to analyze all the various components and code blocks of a website. The main areas of importance include:

- Page load time at various Internet connection speeds
- The size and number of objects within the specified page
- Detailed Analysis explaining a list of recommendations.

My blog's recommendations included compressing images, reducing the total number of images, optimizing JavaScript/CSS, reducing the number of scripts and reducing the overall size of the page.

Secondly I used: OctaGate which quickly showed the load times for every widget, script and feed item on the page. From its analysis I was able to determine that one of my alternate feeds coded in the meta tags was taking 4-5 seconds to load.

Both of these tools should be used frequently to monitor website load times because making your content readily available to your visitors is one of the most important things you can do.

Labels: Tips

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Avinash Kaushik has challenged Web Analytics vendor ClickTracks to release more advanced features of their free analytics product: ClickTracks Appetizer. In exchange Avinash will be teaching next week's ClickTracks Seminar: online marketing and web analytics techniques

Here is some background on the ClickTracks/Kaushik Challenge:

The Challenge
We were recently challenged by the author of Occam's Razor, Avinash Kaushik, to enable more features in Appetizer. The short story is that we agreed, but you might find the 'why' and 'how' to be interesting—and get a little view of the less-conformist thinking of ClickTracks' marketing department.

The Dilemma
We've never hid the fact that Appetizer is primarily a learning tool and a very useful 'taste' rather than a comprehensive web analytics solution. We measure the success of Appetizer by how many people attend our free classes each month. It's true. Folks who learn good web analytics practices tend to favor (or buy) ClickTracks' more powerful products. However, if we enable too many features, Appetizer could conceivably eat into sales of our $19/month Analyzer service or our $295 Analyzer software product.

The Answer
So, like a good web analytics team, we decided to do a test. We'd enable the Site Overview in Appetizer for 90 days. After 90 days we'll measure. If the growth rate of Analyzer continues uninhibited, and we see a spike in attendance in the online classes (in theory, more future buyers), then the Site Overview remains enabled. We also asked Avinash to teach one of the classes.

Personally I think this is a win/win situation. ClickTracks gets an expert Analyst to teach a class in exchange for the enabling of some extra features in ClickTracks appetizer (which is a bonus for end users).

Labels: Click Tracks, Web Analytics

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Keyon Hedayati over at the Google Analytics Blog has posted about a useful option for a Google Analytics Resource: The Google Analytics Forum. Topics covered in the Analytics Forum include:

- Analytics Basics
- Tracking Your Site
- Your ROI
- Troubleshooting
- Urchin 5 Software
- Miscellaneous

For further discussions and questions, Google Analytics also has its own Google Group. For advanced implementation needs I would recommend the services of ROI Revolution or EpikOne (both have very in-depth knowledge of Google Analytics).

Labels: Google, Web Analytics

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Whether it's data refreshes, index updates, supplemental result cleanup or major algorithm changes, your website can experience traffic plunges while Search Engines update their frameworks. During this time it is important to sustain your traffic in order to keep your business going. The following is a list of strategies in order to help you sustain traffic while search engines undergo updates:

• Multi-phrase PPC campaign with Yahoo, Google, MSN or Miva


• Advertise at Business.com, LinkedIn or popular Industry related bloggers' sites (ProBlogger, Marketing Pilgrim)


• Yahoo's Paid Inclusion


• Write compelling content and leverage Social Bookmarking with Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Netscape, Furl, My Yahoo, News Vine, Stumble Upon, or Dzone


• If you're a blogger, leave useful comments at popular blogs or Forums


• Create a Squidoo Page


• Generate Press releases at PRWeb and PRLeap


• Create your own Yahoo Pipe


• Email Campaigns

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Usually Google is the search engine known for its innovative new products. Lately, I’ve noticed some interesting developments from Yahoo! which have started to peak my interest. Yahoo! has had a slow start to 2007 with their latest statement of revenue falling short of financial predictions. However, I expect to see much from Yahoo! in the near future because they don’t want to relinquish anymore of their strength in the online space (especially to Google and MSN). The products that have recently been released and have caught my attention are Yahoo’s Suggestion Board and Yahoo! Pipes. The Yahoo! suggestion board is similar to a voting based system that Digg and Reddit have already been using for quite some time, whereas Yahoo! Pipes is a new concept where information from various resources can be outputted to a single location.

Yahoo! Suggestion Board

The Suggestion Board, dubbed the Tango project is simple way for users to communicate bugs or enhancements on many of Yahoo’s products. Voting for the submitted topics help Yahoo’s team assess the need for attention per issue. “In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback,” from the Yodel Blog. Some of the Yahoo product feedback categories include: Autos, Travel, Pipes, SiteExplorer and Food.

Many Digg users criticized Yahoo! for duplicating Digg’s framework, however I agree with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch that Yahoo! didn’t do anything wrong and is not a competitor to Digg. Yahoo’s system is focused on getting feedback on their own products whereas Digg serves the purpose of a broader range of topics. Topics on the suggestion board are also not news items while Digg Topics are in large portion news related.

However, how well is the suggestion board going to work? I believe it could work fairly well. The suggestion board has a lot of good things going for it, including a clean/simple interface, a user driven framework and a searchable database of topics. If this spreads anything like Yahoo! Answers does, Yahoo! can count on having a unique way to understand how to improve their products for years to come. The framework is very new and I definitely see Yahoo! adding features such as: Top Users and News for Product improvements.

Yahoo! Pipes

“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” Using a drag and drop type of interface users can select a set of sources (XML Feed, Google/Yahoo Search Query, Flickr), identify user inputs, apply operators (sorting, programmatic looping, truncate, concatenate, translations with Babel), and output it to a single location.

In order to grow the Yahoo! Pipes community Yahoo! has added sections such as documentation, discussion boards, and the ability to view other users’ pipes. On the home page you can find featured pipes as well as news on the latest updates to Yahoo! Pipes.

I do have to admit that the interface is a little clunky and it does have somewhat of a learning curve. Having some programming knowledge is also a nice bonus when trying to use some of the advanced modules. There have been times the interface crashed on me and I was unable to save my changes, however I think that this product will continually see improvements and enhancements. I was able to develop a simple pipe of my own which included combining 2 feeds, sorting them by date and applying an English to Spanish filter.

Some of the “hottest” pipes include: New York Times thru Flickr, Merging all the Official Yahoo! Blogs and Techcrunch Citations.


As I mentioned before, I think we’ll see Yahoo! continue to build additions to their portfolio of products or enhancements to existing tools in order to remain competitive. Yahoo’s suggestion board and Yahoo! Pipes are a great start to 2007 and the purchase of MyBlogLog late last year was also a great addition. I am interested to see what else Yahoo! comes out with and I plan on trying to stay on top of it all.

Labels: Yahoo

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On Wednesday the SE Round Table Blog noticed a thread on WebMasterWorld regarding a potential Google Update. Matt Cutts did comment saying he was sure that an update was not happening.

I've noticed my blog hit with a few changes in Google over this last week. I say hit because the changes were not positive. Here are my symptoms:

- Pages Indexed down on a few data centers from well over a hundred to 7-9. These data centers also reported that my home page was not indexed.

- Organic Search Referrals down considerably. They usually account for 50% of my traffic and have lately been accounting for less than 20%

- My blog is not indexed in the Google Blog Search anymore (and I have tried re-submitting)

Has anyone else noticed considerable changes for their website in Google?

Labels: Google

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This week was a big week for Omniture Inc. Not only did they announce the acquisition of behavioral targeting company, Touch Clarity, but they also released version 2.0 of their powerful analytics segmenting software: Discover.

I was very lucky in getting an interview with Chris Parkin (Sr. Director of Product/Solutions Marketing at Omniture) before the release of Discover 2.0. Here's the interview with Chris Parkin.


powered by ODEO


Omniture Discover 2.0 Key Features:

- Real-Time Segmentation: Allows users to create and simultaneously compare multiple customer segments and key performance metrics to identify and optimize the most profitable customer segments
- Multi-Dimensional Site Analysis: Provides visual analysis of site navigation by customer segments using color, size, movement, position and volume which helps businesses to improve site design to drive an increase in desired customer actions such as: revenue, subscriptions, form completion, pages viewed, trips booked, etc.
- Virtual Focus Group: Provides deep insight into the unique site experience of an individual customer within a selected segment to better understand their requirements and preferences in order to make changes in real-time site design, content and promotions to enhance the customer experience
- Advanced Fallout Analysis: Allows users to dynamically builds and analyze the effectiveness of online processes to more effectively improve customer conversion or understand content interest
- Dynamic Path Flow: Helps interactively explore unique customer paths to optimize content placement and page navigation

Download Discover Data Sheet
Download Online Marketer's Segmentation Guide

Discover 2.0 Screen Shots (click for full view)

Labels: Web Analytics

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I have done a fair bit of interviews over the last year and have started using audio and podcasts in order to share the content with my readers. My process is quite simple and I'd like to share my procedure for publishing an audio interview. Thanks to my colleague Cory Bates for helping me with my first podcast.

1. If you don't have a FeedBurner account get one, and make sure you've declared yourself as a podcaster. FeedBurner recognizes media files which allows other people to subscribe and download your media via Itunes or Juice.
2. Before your interview make sure you have a decent quality phone which produces minimal static. Remember you'll be using the speaker phone option in order to record the audio.
3. Purchase a Digital Recorder, I suggest something with at least 128 mb of memory so that you can store more than one interview on it if needed. I have been using an Olympus recorder: http://www.audio-discounters.com/vn-3100-pc.html, it's relatively in expensive and works well.
4. I always try to move the recorder back and forth to whomever is speaking in order to pick up their voice more clearly.
5. Once you have finished the interview, download a copy of Audacity. Audacity will convert your audio track to mp3 (which is required for FeedBurner) and will also help in fine tuning the audio track for noise and normalization.
6. Once you convert your audio track to mp3 make sure to fill in the required information for: Author, Title, Genre (select speech).
7. Upload the mp3 to a location on the Internet, copy the URL of the mp3's location.
8. When you're posting the interview onto your blog make sure you specify the link to your mp3 somewhere in the post. This will allow FeedBurner to recognize the podcast and make it subscribable.
9. If you want to embed a copy of the audio track I suggest using a service such as Odeo. Odeo generates the code for embedding a music player within your post and also helps promote your interview through its own site.
10. Before you publish, make sure to specify some content for your audio (it always helps to keep SEO in mind).

That's pretty much it, once you develop a process it doesn't take more than 15-20 min to get your audio/podcast up and running.

Labels: Blogging, Podcast

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I recently setup a blog using WordPress and I am glad I did because I didn't realize how fantastic WordPress was up until now. I have been using Blogger for quite a while but I have to admit, I believe WordPress is a superior product.

Here are 11 things I love about WordPress (many may already know these, but I thought I'd mention them anyways):

1. Ease of Setup: I don't have much experience with PHP or MySQL but it literally only took 5-10 min to install WordPress. Download the code from the website, upload to your website using FTP, create a MySQL database, change a few config settings for the database connection, browse to the admin page and WordPress walks you through after that.


2. Meta Tag Plug-in: This allows for custom meta tags for all posts, pages and categories. Installation is quite easy, simply download a plug-in, copy to your plug-ins folder, activate it in your admin and voila, you have custom meta tags right in your editor.


3. Templates: Check out Themes.WordPress.net for over 1,000 different WordPress Templates.


4. Support/Documentation: WordPress forums are very helpful, if you've got a problem someone else probably has had the same issue and now has a solution for you.


5. Customizability: If you've got some programming knowledge like I do, you can really take advantage of WordPress by being able to update page sections (side bar, footer, header) and add widgets


6. URL Re-writer: In the admin section you can configure how you want your blog's URLs to appear (permalinks). Rather than the default query string structure, WordPress allows you to convert URLs so they are Search Engine Friendly. WordPress even generates code for your .htaccess file so that your URL rewriting works without any issues.


7. Editor WYSIWYG/HTML: The Blog editor comes with your standard HTML/WYSIWYG modes and I really like how you can add your posts to various categories, change post authors and upload files.


8. Clean Code: Search Spiders prefer clean coded websites and after viewing the code source of the blog I setup, I was impressed with how clean the code was. No embedded JavaScript or CSS, no extra line breaks and comments, only the necessary HTML and content.


9. CSS Style Sheet: There are often times when you have to update a CSS file and you don't know where to begin because it's so massive because it contains hundreds of classes and styles. The template I chose came up with a relatively small CSS file with all the classes and styles named intuitively.


10. User Management: Adding/Editing users is a breeze. WordPress also allows 5 or 6 different types of User accounts which gives administrators much flexibility. Some of the user roles include: Administrators, Editors, Contributors, Authors, and Subscribers.


11. Flickr Plug-in: I wanted to add a simple way to manage photos on the blog, so I did quick search on Google and the first result was a list of WordPress image plug-ins. One of them was a Flickr Plug-in which allows you to import your Flickr images right into your selected page.

So there you have it, as I come across more cool features I will continue to Blog about them. I will also mention downfalls I notice as well.

Labels: Blogging

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Yesterday I was looking at my blog's top organic search referrals in Google Analytics and started to wonder what ranking each phrase had in the Big 3 search engines. Google and MSN have always traditionally brought more referrals than Yahoo and the referrals to ranking correlation proves that (My blog ranks for far less keywords in Yahoo than it does in Google and MSN). MSN showed that I rank for more authoritative phrases such as WebTrends, Blog Promotion and Web Analytics, whereas in Google I could start to see more of a Long Tail effect happening.

The top referring keywords in January were as follows:

iphone june
web analytics
webtrends
visistat
eye tracking study email
poll daddy
statcounter
key performance indicators
web analytics world
manoj jasra blog
blogger tips
manoj jasra
search marketing fact pack 2006
iphone june 2007
omniture actionsource
blog promotion
clickshift
google update
omniture flash tracking
actionsource
yahoo search api
ask x
brett crosby
"link to dollar ratio"
omniture

If any of the above phrases ranked in the top 30 they showed up in the report below.

Search Engine	Keyword	Rank	Page
Google	"link to dollar ratio"	4	1
Google	actionsource	3	1
Google	brett crosby	9	1
Google	eye tracking study email	7	1
Google	manoj jasra	1	1
Google	manoj jasra	16	2
Google	manoj jasra blog	1	1
Google	manoj jasra blog	2	1
Google	omniture	22	3
Google	omniture actionsource	3	1
Google	omniture actionsource	18	2
Google	omniture flash tracking	1	1
Google	omniture flash tracking	17	2
Google	poll daddy	3	1
Google	poll daddy	2	1
Google	statcounter	16	2
Google	visistat	4	1
Google	web analytics world	1	1
Google	web analytics world	2	1
Google	webtrends	12	2
Google	yahoo search api	8	1
Yahoo	brett crosby	2	1
Yahoo	manoj jasra	1	1
Yahoo	manoj jasra	12	2
Yahoo	manoj jasra blog	1	1
Yahoo	manoj jasra blog