"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

Labels: ad:tech, Web Analytics, WebTrends

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.

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.

Labels: Semphonic, Web Analytics, Webmetricsguru.com, Xchange Conference

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 keyword searches for the Xbox 360



For the full story visit the Hitwise Blog.

Labels: Wii, XBox

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?

Labels: Facebook, Flickr, MySpace

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.

Labels: KPI

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.

Labels: Blogger, Google, Technorati

Despite all of the “so-called experts” predicting the rise of Yahoo, Ask, or MSN, Google is not losing any ground in search volume. In fact, they are growing stronger every day.

Of course, the higher the volume the more advertisers will spend. As long as Google still has this much of the market share, from an advertiser view point, it doesn’t matter how great any other “algorithms” are. Advertisers will spend where the customers are and clearly they are on Google.

Below are the most popular search engines, by the volume of searches, as reported by Hitwise.

Rank	Search Engine	7/21/2007	7/22/2006
1.	www.google.com	64.40%	60.37%
2.	search.yahoo.com	21.66%	22.39%
3.	search.msn.com	7.27%	11.72%
4.	www.ask.com	3.21%	3.34%
5.	www.live.com	1.94%

** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com

Labels: Google, HitWise, john ellis, MSN, Yahoo

Well, on August 14, he'll be "inside the beltway" at The Washington DC Web Manager's Roundtable. Jim will be in town giving a talk about "Marketing Optimization: The Holy Grail of Continuous Improvement." If you're in the DC area its a great opportunity to catch Jim.

I started attending Web Manager's Roundtable nearly a year ago, and I've found it to be an invaluable asset for learning and networking. Julie Perlmutter founded the Roundtable in 2003 to provide senior web managers, directors and VP’s from enterprise level organizations the opportunity to meet regularly and discuss with experts in the field the topics that concern them most.

If you live in the Washington, DC area, and you don't know about the Roundtable, I suggest you get on the invite list to upcoming events. Just send Julie an email at: julie@justshowup.com.

_____________________________________

Posted by: Phil Kemelor
VP, Strategic Consulting Services - Semphonic
Analyst - CMS Watch Web Analytics Report
Author - The Executive's Guide to Web Site Measurement and Testing
Blog - CMS Watch Analytics Channel

Labels: internet marketing, Jim Sterne, Washington DC, Web Analytics, Web Managers Roundtable

I watched a very interesting video on the Google Reader blog where Robert Scoble takes viewers through his process of going through his Google Reader (which contains hundreds of feeds).

In the video, Robert Scoble talks about specific things he looks for while "shuffling" through the array of feeds in his reader. The items he mentioned were custom to his thought process however, many can cross over to a multitude of different users:

• The article headline in which he scans for keywords.
• Graphics - Scoble mentions that images slow his scanning process down and this is how TechCrunch became popular, by introducing an image into each post.
• Number of Links - Scoble addresses links as "information density" and the number of links is related to the amount of research the author has done.
• Author - Scoble gives higher credibility to authors he knows vs. any "Joe Smith."
• Body Content - Factors such as content length and keyword density are important for this item.

Robert Scoble apparently checks his feed once or twice a day, so what does he really find interesting? Here are some things you can write about which might cause him to give your blog a second look:

• Technology which is dramatically new
• The Video Space
• Google vs. Microsoft
• Anything Apple related
• Battlefronts such as Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe flash

Check out the video for yourself: http://www.viddler.com/explore/masterlock77/videos/1/

Labels: RSS

Have you looked at your blog's stats lately and noticed that your blog's traffic is starting to plateau. Blogging is not simple, it takes a lot of hard work to continuously come up with new ideas for content and blog promotion. I remember last year at this time there were some excellent blog promotion strategies, however even some of those suggestions have been over exhausted. Some of these useful but sometimes over used suggestions included:

• Creating top 5, 10, 20 lists
• Submitting your blog to blog directories and Dmoz
• Using your blog's URL in your email signature
• Linking to your blog in MySpace

Thinking outside the box these days becomes challenging because the box is SO big. If you're looking for something new, give some of the blog promotion strategies below a try. They may not lead to instantaneous traffic nor are they necessarily easy to implement, but they will help you build your brand and help grow your long term traffic:

1. When writing a blog post trying using full names of organizations, using organizations' stock symbols and linking them to their Google Finance page (if applicable). Google Finance often has a section for blog posts related to an organization. If your post makes it onto a popular company's Google Finance page you can expect some decent referrals.
2. Release a free PDF of your blog's top posts or write a 4-5 part series on a given topic and develop that series into a PDF to give away for free. Within the PDF provide links for people to subscribe as well as information regarding advertisement opportunities.
3. Blogs such as the Google Blogs and Seth Godin's Blog have trackbacks turned on, meaning if you link to one of their posts that blog post will automatically generate a link back to your original post. This strategy has to be done in the right context because I definitely don't recommend linking to these blogs' posts in irrelevant context or overusing this tactic.
4. Rather than simply linking to your blog within your Facebook profile, develop a community surrounding your blog by developing a Facebook group. This can really expand virally if you have a large network of friends.
5. Reignite past hot topics with updates. If you wrote about "How Google Makes Money" last year, consider writing a quarterly or year update to this post.

*BONUS: People absolutely love widgets and apps, so I am going to give you a suggestion for an app to build: FeedBurner offers an API which allows you to retrieve a given blog's subscribers (if it's enabled), I would love to see an app which quickly allows you to compare subscribers between bloggers or EVEN better take a page out of GoogleFight's book and develop a FeedBurner Fight application.

The most fun and most difficult part of blog promotion is to be creative, although with millions of bloggers in the blogosphere it can become awfully challenging. To be successful, a blogger has to find their 'zone' and motivation, mine often comes when I start scribbling ideas on a piece of paper rather than typing them directly into my laptop. Sounds a little old school but it works.

Labels: Blog Promotion, Blogging

Search Engine Strategies San Jose is less than one month away and the 4 day event contains break-outs/sessions which are jam packed with information goodness. I have looked over the 4 day schedule numerous times so I can understand the difficulty in choosing which sessions to attend. I have taken the liberty of creating the perfect SES San Jose conference schedule (geared towards the "advanced users").

Get my SES SJ conference schedule via Google Calendar:

Day 1

9:00am-10:30am: The Search Landscape
11:00am-12:30pm: Universal & Blended Vertical Search
2:00pm-3:30pm: Personalization, User Data & Search
4:00pm-5:30pm: Searcher Behavior Research Update

Day 2

10:30am-12:00pm: Ad Testing: Research & Findings
1:30pm-2:45pm: Converting Visitors Into Buyers
3:15pm-4:30pm: Video Search Optimization
4:45pm-6:00pm: Landing Page Testing & Tuning

Day 3

10:30am-12:00pm: Search APIs
1:30pm-2:45pm: In House: Big SEO
3:15pm-4:30pm: SEM Pricing Models
4:45pm-6:00pm: B2B Tactics

Day 4

9:00am-10:15am: SMO: Social Media Optimization
10:45am-12:00pm: Meet The Web Analytics Players
12:30pm-1:45pm: Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One

Complete Agenda Coverage:

Agenda Day 1 - Aug 20
Agenda Day 2 - Aug 21
Agenda Day 3 - Aug 22
Agenda Day 4 - Aug 23

Labels: Search Engine Strategies, SEM Conferences

With ad:tech Chicago about a week away I thought I would recommend some conference sessions you absolutely MUST attend. ad:tech Chicago features 3 Tracks all with multiple sessions that I want to attend:

• The State of Measurement, Performance and Optimization
• Evolving Consumer Behavior and the Advertising Value Proposition
• ad:tech Exchange Series: Where Do We Go From Here?

Here are the sessions which peak my interest and where you can probably find me:

Tuesday July 31

2:30pm - 3:30pm
The Path to One-to-One Marketing: The State of Behavioral Targeting

3:45pm - 4:45pm
The Empowered Consumer: Are We Losing Control of Our Brands?

Wednesday August 1

12:00pm - 1:00pm
Tactical Search Strategies: Local and Mobile Search

3:45pm - 4:45pm
Monetizing Web 3.0

5:00pm - 6:00pm
Multi-Platform Marketing

For speaker and more in-depth information about these sessions at ad:Tech Chicago, visit:
http://www.ad-tech.com/chicago/conference-ch.asp

Labels: ad:tech, SEM Conferences

The Google Analytics Blog has confirmed more enhancements and updates for its users. July's updates include:

• Many reports now have a "Go to:" box that lets you jump to a specific row within a report table.
• The ‘Content by Title’ report now allows you to drilldown to see all URLs that share a page title.

• Many users prefer the more readable Content by Title report over the URL-based Content Drilldown and Top Content reports. However, drilling down on a specific title in the Content by Title report hasn't allowed you to find (and therefore analyze and fix) URLs sharing the title. Until today.

• The default Map Overlay view is now by Country (instead of the Continent)

Labels: Google Analytics, Web Analytics

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to test drive a product called VisitorTrack - developed by NetFactor. VisitorTrack is a lead management tool geared towards sales/marketing professionals. Once installed on your website, VisitorTrack has the ability to track visitors on your website and correlate them back to their organization (flagging visitors from fortune 4000 companies), address, phone, referring search engine/keyword and the number of pages they viewed. Furthermore VisitorTrack integrates with Jigsaw data so you can pinpoint executives from the companies who visited your website. VisitorTrack is very useful for B2B companies who are looking for more qualified leads in their sales process.

VisitorTrack comes with a Free 10 Day Trial, so I recommend trying it out for yourself. Below is a sample of VisitorTrack's interface (click image for full view):

Here are some additional features of VisitorTrack:

• HotLeads - Pinpoint those companies most interested
• Instant eMail Alerts - Automatically receive eMails on those Visitors meeting your criteria
• User Defined Alerts - Customize alerts for Customers, Prospects, Competitors, and more
• Affordable - Most clients see a low cost-per-lead measured in pennies to a few dollars
• CRM Integration - Export the data you need in a report format, or for CRM integration

Labels: Lead Management

Labels: Industry News

I was recently asked to contribute to The DM News Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing. Below are some highlights from the article …

Pay-per-click advertising is, at its basic level, paying for ad placement in search engines.

That is pay-per-click for the basic user. Unfortunately, most PPC advertisers are basic users. Pay-per-click is much more then paid advertising. Not only is PPC the best return on investment available, but it is, or should be, at the heart of all marketing campaigns. Pay-per-click can provide customer analytics through ad testing, geo-targeting, match types and discovering SEO targets. PPC advertising provides an instant view into the mind of the customer at an extremely low-price.

Ad Testing
Ad rotation gives the advertiser great insight into the mind of the customer. For instance, do customers click more on ads that offer “Free Shipping” or “Free Item with Purchase?” Another example, do discount mentions convert better than guarantees?

Geo-targeting
Geo-targeting resolves any geographic uncertainty about customers. For example, more customers from Region A may click on ads. However, more customers from Region B may actually convert and purchase.

Learn the customer’s language with exact keyword matching
Exact Match is the most targeted option available. It only shows ads when the exact phrase is used. Exact Match will provide instant feedback into the language of the customer. It is not to say there is not a place for other match types. Ideally, all variations should be tested. In fact, Exact Matching will inevitably bring in fewer visitors than other forms of matching. However, Exact Matching is a great way to gather instant customer analytics.

Discover highly targeted keywords for organic search rankings
Instead of creating search engine optimization initiatives to tackle hundreds of keywords, the top converted pay-per-click keywords are targets. Site content, link building, and various other search engine optimization techniques can push these elite keywords. Advertisers do not have to waste time trying to get rankings on keywords that do not convert. The numbers are provided; it does not matter where the competition is ranked. By following the pay-per- click keyword statistics advertisers are able to get instant customer analytics to use for search engine optimization efforts.

With PPC, there is very little guesswork in marketing. By analyzing pay-per-click reports advertisers can pull dramatic customer analytics. With that knowledge all marketing campaigns can benefit, thus eliminating traditional guesswork from traditional advertising.

** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com

Labels: john ellis, pay-per-click, ppc, Web Analytics

KnowledgeStorm Inc. announced yesterday the launch of FindTech Blogs, a collection of blog sites for B2B business and technology professionals. FindTech Blogs organizes aggregated blog content into categories to make finding relevant content easier.

"Two of the big challenges with blogs are finding content that is relevant and
accessing that content easily," said Jeff Ramminger, executive vice president,
KnowledgeStorm. "FindTech Blogs addresses both of these by aggregating quality
B2B-specific blog content and by evaluating blog content to ensure that it is
accurately categorized. In our blog and RSS feeds study, we found that 60% of respondents don't subscribe to a RSS feed, so this aggregation enables them to easily stay current on relevant blog content."

Here are some of the hottest search topics:

COLD
Windows Applications
Banking White Papers
RFID
Email Marketing
Biometrics
Email Management
Free White Papers
CRM Software
Enterprise Software
Video Conferencing Software
Performance Management
Small Business Software
Enterprise Resource Planning
Document Management

Labels: B2B, B2B Tech, Blogging

• comScore Also Reports Microsoft Search Search Rise
• ComScore: Google Sites Got 49.5% Of US Searches In June
• Google Loses Search Share, Microsoft Gains
• Google Keeps Top Search Spot in June
• Google and Yahoo Drop in Search Engine Market Share
• Microsoft Pours on Heat as Search Front-Runners' Pace Slackens
  

Labels: AOL, ASK, Google, Industry News, MSN, Yahoo

We currently track several million domains; however, we are most confident in the data for the top 1 million domains. As with all things on the Internet, the smaller the sites are the harder it is to track them consistently. If you would like to contribute to the Compete community and make this data even stronger, please install the Compete Toolbar which you can find on our Tools page.

Keyword Share is the percentage of total referrals a site receives from
a keyword compared to other referral sites.

Site Share is the
percentage of all search referrals to a site from a keyword.

Average Monthly Search Referrals is the running three month average of the total
volume of search referrals that a site receives.

Site Share is the percentage of all search referrals to a site from a keyword.

Keyword Engagement is an index which represents the amount of time all people spent on a referral site after entering the search term or phrase (keyword). The "Keyword Engagement" metric is indexed to 100 with 100 representing the term that resulted in the most amount of time spent on site.

Keyword Effectiveness is an index that combines the total number of people referred by a certain term and the amount of time those people spent on the referred site. The results are indexed to 100 with 100 representing the most effective term.

Keyword Share Advantage is the difference on a percentage basis in "Keyword Share" for each of the sites of interest.

Site Share Advantage is the difference on a percentage basis in "Site Share" for each of the sites of interest.

Engagement Advantage is the difference on a percentage basis in the average time per search referral for each of the sites of interest.

Labels: Compete, Web Analytics

Labels: Click Tracks, coremetrics, costs, Omniture, unica, vendors, visual sciences, Web Analytics, WebTrends

Labels: Industry News

Considering Google uses A/B testing to optimize the performance of their pages, shouldn't all site owners do the same? If you haven't noticed, Google's Gmail home page has been running a small A/B test to help promote new Gmail sign-ups. In Google's case, they are running an A/B/C/D/E test.

Gmail's test consists of random sign-up buttons all with unique messaging which will help Google select the most enticing version in terms of new user registrations. Below are 5 different samples Google is using for Gmail registrations:

Setting up an A/B test is fairly straightforward and here somethings worth considering if you want to setup one of your own:

• Select one element on a landing page or conversion page and focus your testing on that element


• Determine how many different versions of that element you'd like to test.


• Each version of the element will need to be served up randomly to users and Javascript (or other scripting languages) is an excellent way to do this. Furthermore each element will have to be given equal amount of page views.


• Analytics is very important because you need to be able to track the number of page views to each 'version' as well as the amount of conversions each 'version' delivered.


• Create a dashboard for yourself comparing the performance of the different 'versions.'


• Run the test long enough so that you have ample data to make a decision on which 'version' to go with.


• Repeat the A/B test process because there is always room for improvement.

I orginally published this post at SearchEngineGuide

Labels: Google, Web Analytics

The team at RoboReplay have also coined the term Cinelytics:

There are two or three other services like RobotReplay out there, and we couldn't find a common name to describe them. So, we made one up. RobotReplay complements existing web analytics tools like Google Analytics, StatCounter or ClickTracks, and generates little 'movies'. We merged 'cinema' and 'analytics' and got 'cinelytics'.

Labels: Ajax

The entire work week could have been spent reading hours and hours worth of useful articles and blog posts but since that's not possible, here are some posts/articles worth reading:

SEM

• New Social Site targeted for Search Marketers released by Danny Sullivan and SearchEngineland: Sphinn
• Google Acquires Postini, a Security Company, for $625 Million - SE Round Table
• ASK Enquiro: Is Personalization the Path to Follow?
• Facebook IPO Coming Soon - Ross Dunn for the StepForth SEO Blog
• Bradley Leese at SearchEngineGuide: Building a Web Site Theme With Silos Part 2 of 3

Web Analytics

• 10 Cool Things With Clicktracks by Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch
• WebMetricsGuru: Multivariate testing and Instant Personalization using Affinity Targeting
• Visistat Beta 3.0: Web analytics stats via AIM from the Web Analytics Book
• EpikeOne Blog: All About Google Analytics Goals
• Web Analytics World: iPhone User Agents and Analytics

Labels: Must Reads

With all the talk over the latest search engine optimization buzz words, we often forget about the basic necessities for search rankings. Yes, all of those advance techniques work, but only if every effort has been exhausted through the basic fundamental steps for obtaining higher search engine rankings.

Labels: john ellis, rankings, SEO

FeedBurner is now integrated with Blogger so that users can redirect their Blog's feeds over to their FeedBurner Feeds. See the FeedBurner Blog for more information.

Why is redirecting so important?
We're glad you asked. By redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary. Why so? Sometimes, publishers inadvertently fragment their feed audience by offering more than one feed address on the blog itself or within their autodiscovery tags (the method by which feed readers automatically detect the address of your feed for syndication purposes). This results in some subscribers not being counted, and no one wants that in a world where everyone should count for something. By redirecting your feed, you can consolidate any straggler subscribers and greatly improve your ability to effectively measure your audience.

To redirect your Blogger Feed simply log into Blogger, select Site Feed and then update the Post Feed Redirect URL similar to the image below:

Labels: Blogger, FeedBurner

Over at the Aviva Directory you can find yet another great post, this time it's about 10 US Laws Every Domainer Needs to Know.

With top-level domains appreciating at as much as 94% per year by some
estimates, it is little wonder that domaining is the new ‘hot’ industry in
the internet world. But despite the rapid growth of domaining,
there is surprisingly little consensus as to what industry best practices are,
or even what laws apply to domaining. In this article we try to sort through the
legal and accounting mumbo-jumbo to explain ten of the most important US laws
when it comes to domaining and provide some simple and straightforward tips for
safely navigating them.

The top 10 Laws Consist of:

1. Domain Sniffing


2. TradeMark Issues


3. What Legal Entity Should I Use?


4. What State to Legally Form Your Company In


5. Piercing the Corporate Veil


6. Is your business a “business” or just a “hobby”?


7. Donating Domain Names


8. Employees v. Independent Contractors


9. Inaccurate Registration Information


10. Depreciating v. Deducting Your Domains

Read the full post here: http://www.avivadirectory.com/domain-law/

Here are some other useful posts from the Aviva Directory:

• 21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch
• 99 Tips to (Cheaply) Brand a Start-up
• Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Grow Your Business
• How To Get Started As A Domainer
• 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know
• Grade Your Website: 31 Free Online Tests

Labels: Domainer

Tamar Weinberg has posted a very comprehensive list of tools developed using Digg's API. The list consists of 29 Tools:

1. diggwatcher
2. The Digg Noise Filter
3. Digg Entourage
4. Digg comment viewer
5. Digg CommentSpy
6. Digg Charts
7. Digg Alerter
8. Digg Wordweb
9. Digg Expose
10. DiggCity
11. Smart Digg Button
12. Digg Pics
13. Diggtris
14. Duggback
15. Diggest
16. Digg widget
17. Which Stories are Popular on Digg?
18. Wheel of Upcoming
19. Digg Heat Map
20. Digg Friends Venn Diagram
21. Digg Radar
22. Map of Digg Friendship
23. Digg Status
24. DiggGraphr Desktop
25. D’Lite
26. Digg Watch
27. Mini Digg
28. Digg Top

For the complete and detailed version visit: 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API

Labels: Digg

* To insert the current volume of Google stock:
=GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "volume")
* To insert the current price of Google stock:
=GoogleFinance("GOOG") and =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price")
* Alternatively, the stock symbol and/or the attribute values can come from spreadsheet cells. For example, the function can be:
=GoogleFinance(A2, B1)
In this case, the attribute specified as a string in cell B1 would be returned for the stock symbol in cell A2."

Labels: Google

I was reading Adotas this morning and noticed an article titled Google To Acquire Facebook? Google has been on a purchasing frenzy as of late and the acquisition of Facebook would further strengthen their arsenal. However a $900 million pending deal with MySpace (who provides Google with 11% of Google's traffic) and a no-compete clause makes Google have to tread very gently. Google does not want to end up losing MySpace to Yahoo!

Personally, I think the purchase of Facebook would have quite a positive outlook for both Facebook and Google, here's why:

• Facebook would receive hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in return.
• Google would get access to more personalized information from the millions of Facebook users. This would help Google in offering the most relevant search results.
• Google would gain yet another point of access to user behaviour data including upstream/downstream data at Facebook, Popularity of Groups / Locations / Users / Applications and time spent.
• Google could display contextual advertising throughout Facebook, furthermore they could offer users the ability to display AdSense on their profile/group pages allowing them to make money through Facebook.
• Facebook would receive enhanced search functionality.
• Google would have the ability to integrate many of its other services including gadgets, maps and checkout.
• If Google opened up Facebook profiles publicly (outside of the log-in), users and groups would become indexed in the organic search results. Public profiles would also allow images in Facebook to get indexed in Google's image search. Facebook users tag their images and this would make the images very relevant to search queries
• Google could apply authority based on the amount of friends a user has or the amount of people a group contains.
• When Google purchases a company they often make many services free, as they did with FeedBurner. Perhaps with FaceBook they would offer gifts and polls (and related demographic data) for free.
• With Google's resources and deep pockets Facebook could receive numerous enhancements.
  

Facebook provides an excellent service and if Google does plan on acquiring Facebook they will have to work fast because Microsoft and Yahoo! are most likely lurking very close behind.

Labels: Facebook, Google, Industry News

• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; XXXXX like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/241 Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; XXXXX like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A477c Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; XXXXX like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A477d Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A498b Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A535b Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538b Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Kevin) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A566a Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C9 Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3
  
• Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A522a Safari/419.3
  

Michael Jensen of SoloSEO has also provided an excellent tip on how to pinpoint iPhone referrals using Google Analytics.

"So to check for iPhone visitors, open up Google Analytics, go to Visitors, then to Browser Capabilities, then to Screen Resolution. Look for 320 x 396. You may be asking (if you are a crazy iPhone maniac like me) why not 320 x 480? The viewable area of the browser goes down to 396 in height with the address bar area, etc."

Labels: Industry News, Web Analytics

SEOs have always been hesitant in recommending the use of Flash within websites and the Search Quality Team over at Google's Webmaster Central Blog has confirmed these hesitations.

Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing.....even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can

• Use Flash only when needed such as for rich media and not for primary content
• Leverage sIFR so that non-Flash reader can read the page
• Make sure you leave an HTML link on splash screen which are comprised of Flash

Although Google can't index Flash files with the same performance as they do textual content, I see this barrier being removed as Google's Spiders become increasingly smarter. Until then, it's best to use flash wisely.

Read the full post here.

Labels: Google, SEO

Bidvertiser is a service which allows businesses to market their websites on relevant industry websites and allows publishers to earn money by placing ads on their blogs/websites through a pay per click type service. I signed up as a publisher and was up and running in about very quickly. Once you are registered (which takes about 2 min) publishers can choose a variety of different templates of ads to embed on their websites. Publishers are also given the option to earn money through Bidvertiser's referral program.

Here's an overview of the service:

Advertisers

Run your ad on our pay per click advertising network and start receiving new targeted and easy-to-convert prospects in less than 10 minutes:

1. Browse our categorized directory of websites
2. Select the appropriate sites for your business
3. Set your desired geographic targeting
4. Create your text-ad
5. Set budget and capping
6. Your ad is up and running

Advertisers: Promote your Website with BidVertiser. Get $20 in FREE clicks.

Publishers

You get paid for every visitor that clicks on an ad. Bidvertiser's goal is to enable you to make as much as possible from your advertising space, by letting advertisers bid on your ad space. Bedvertiser pays monthly, either by check, or instantly through PayPal with a minimum of only $10

BidVertiser will always display the highest bidders on your site, assuring the maximum revenue possible at any given time.


This post is a Sponsored Review

Labels: Sponsored

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. I first heard of Photosynth late last year and was re-introduced to it after reading a post by Marina over at SearchTank. Marina provided a great analogy of Photosynth comparing it to when Microfiche first came out:

"The scalable pictures remind me of how revolutionary microfiche was when it first came out, enabling tons of information to be stored in such a small format. This would be a fantastic application for a digital archive. As well as the more obvious map applications, I think this technology could be applied to information discovery such as an interactive encyclopedia as people tag their images with information about what is contained in them. Viewers would be able to browse the images, jumping in and out of images as things caught their attention." - SearchTank

Here's a video of its architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas, demoing the product:



Want more insight on Photosynth? Check these sites out:

• Microsoft Labs: Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth
• Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth at Wikipedia
• MSDN: PhotoSynth: What. How. Why.
• Scoble: The best demo at Web 2.0 Summit: Microsoft's Photosynth ...
• GalaxyGoo Blogs: PhotoSynth
• Ming the Mechanic: Photosynth
• Seadragon and Photosynth demo at TED2007
• Metaverse Friday - Photosynth
• Everyscape: Google StreetView Meets Micosoft Photosynth Meets Yahoo's Flickr - SearchEngineLand
• Photosynth. Wow. - Digital Blue Global
  
  

Labels: Microsoft, Photosynth

Web Analytics World isn't the only place you can find my writing, if you're browsing the web you may discover some of my writing at these other fine publications:

The Web Analytics Association


WebProNews


Search Newz


SearchEngineGuide


SearchEngineLand


Ask Enquiro


Internet Financial News


SiteProNews


SearchBrains


SearchEnginePosition