I was browsing through the Google Blogs using my Yahoo Pipe and noticed that there have been a couple pieces of cool news item floating around at the the Gmail and Google Checkout blogs.

Gmail Updating Code

So recently the Gmail team has been working on a structural code change that
we'll be rolling out to Firefox 2 and IE 7 users over the coming weeks (with
other browsers to follow). You won't notice too many differences to start with,
but we're using a new model that enables us to iterate faster and share
components (we now use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the Contact Manager can be seen in several Google apps). A few other things you will notice are some new keyboard shortcuts and the ability to bookmark specific messages and email searches.

Google Checkout Adds 5 New API Features

* Name Parsing: Provides the first name, last name, and full name of the buyer and
order recipient in separate fields new order notifications.
* Google Promo Notification: If an order is placed under a Google promotion, you can require new order notifications, charge amount notifications, and refund amount notifications to include the promotion amount.
* Ship-to Phone: Returns the buyer's ship-to phone number in new order
notifications.
* Billing Phone: Returns the buyer's billing phone number in new order
notifications.
* Improved Notifications: Prevents a merchant from improperly acknowledging a new order notification by requiring their acknowledgment to specify the serial number of the notification.

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I know it's really short notice, but Tom Leung of Google Analytics will be holding a free online webinar titled: Website Optimizer: Creating & Launching Experiments.

The online seminar, Website Optimizer: Creating & Launching Experiments, builds on the first and is designed for those who have previous experience with Website Optimizer or other site testing tools. Tom will give a step-by-step demonstration of how to successfully launch multivariate and A/B experiments, and he'll also answer your questions.

Website Optimizer: Creating & Launching Experiments (Intermediate and advanced users)
Thursday, November 1st, 2007 10:00 - 11:00am PDT

Register to attend.

Labels: Google Analytics, Web Analytics

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ClickTracks, http://www.clicktracks.com/, the Web analytics solution from J.L. Halsey (OTCBB:JLHY), announced today it is the recipient of the 2007 Partner in Excellence award given by WSI, the leading global provider of Internet solutions to small and medium sized businesses, headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

Earlier this year, WSI and J.L. Halsey, a provider of integrated marketing technology solutions, announced a new partnership whereby WSI will offer the suite of ClickTracks Web analytics tools through WSI’s global consulting network. To date, close to 300 WSI consultants have signed on to integrate ClickTracks into their strategy of recommended solutions to clients.

“J.L. Halsey welcomes the opportunity to work with WSI in delivering ClickTracks’ easy-to-use Web analytics tools to our global SMB entrepreneurs,” says Sylvie Moreau, vice president of corporate business development for J.L. Halsey. “One of the attributes that WSI finds of great value is ClickTrack’s quick setup. WSI consultants can immediately start working with ClickTracks and providing insight and actionable advice to their clients to increase ROI of their online marketing programs,” Moreau says.

J.L. Halsey’s ClickTracks solution is WSI’s first analytics partner, chosen for its innovative, customer-friendly approach to Web analytics and data reporting. The collaboration marks the first of future partnerships between the companies, with a host of integrated solutions available from J.L. Halsey, including Lyris List Manager, EmailLabs, EmailAdvisor, Hot Banana and the soon-to-be launched PPC bid management solution, BidHero.

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CMS Watch has found that IBM's Web Content Management (WCM) technologies have been stagnating at a time when competitors are paying greater attention to web publishing toolsets.

This analysis stems from CMS Watch's 2008 "Web CMS Report," released earlier this month, which evaluates 30 major Web Content Management (WCM) offerings. As part of its ongoing research, CMS Watch interviews hundreds of web managers around the world.

IBM's competitors have been busy in the past year. Microsoft rebuilt its WCM services from scratch under Office SharePoint 2007. EMC is re-investing in Documentum's WCM capabilities. Oracle acquired Stellent, an ECM vendor with a strong focus on WCM. None of these products are without their flaws, but each has seen substantial attention of late.

In the meantime, IBM's Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM) product remains a generation behind, and it is conceivable that IBM may simply elect to acquire a WCM vendor to fill the gap. CMS Watch cautions that IBM WWCM customers may risk the kind of painful upgrade or even replacement of the kind endured by Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) licensees when Redmond rewrote that tool under SharePoint.

To be sure, the IBM WWCM product has some strengths. It can be integrated with WebSphere Portal Server, and the contributor interface has been localized in multiple languages.

However, WWCM customers tell CMS Watch that the product remains weak in the following areas:

- WWCM comes in two different versions (a Java edition associated with WebSphere and a Lotus edition attached to Domino), which is confusing for buyers and appears to have dissipated development energy
- The product is comparatively feature-poor, especially with respect to globalization services, at a time when many large customers are re-examining their web publishing operations in a global context.
- WWCM suffers from a legacy of bugginess (somewhat redressed in a recent dot-release), a comparatively very quiescent customer community, and much less publicly-available information than other IBM server products.
- Experienced WWCM consulting and integration talent appears in particularly short supply

Labels: CMS Watch, IBM, Industry News

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Hitwise, today announced the launch of a new Clickstream report - New and Returning Visitors. This new data is invaluable for understanding the percentage of new and repeat traffic a website receives, which sources of traffic provide the greatest volumes of each type of visitor and where new and returning visitors go after visiting a website.

Utilizing this data allows marketers to analyze a competitor’s audience in terms of new and repeat traffic and further understand the strategy and effectiveness of competitive marketing programs. For example, New and Returning Visitors data can help determine if competitors are more focused on traffic-driving campaigns or retaining existing visitors. In addition, New and Returning Visitors allows marketers to:

Gauge the effectiveness of online partners, such as search engines and other traffic- driving websites, like social networking sites, in driving traffic to a website.
Identify where New or Returning Visitors go after visiting your own website for insights on how to stop churn.

The New and Returning Visitor data is updated daily, weekly and monthly and available on the top 10,000 websites visited by Internet users from the U.S. sample of 10 million users.

Some examples of the data include:

• Among Social Networking websites: 6.23 percent of traffic to Facebook.com consisted of new visitors for the week ending Oct. 20, 2007.
• Among Online movie rental websites: Of the traffic going to Netflix.com from Google, 24 percent was from new visitors for the week ending Oct. 20, 2007. Of the traffic going to Netflix.com from Yahoo! Search, 34 percent was from new visitors.
• Among Political candidate websites: Traffic to Ronpaul2008.com consisted of 52 percent returning visitors for the week ending Oct. 20, 2007. Traffic to HillaryClinton.com consisted of 28 percent returning visitors.

The New and Returning Visitors data is calculated by Hitwise’s proprietary data collection software that determines whether an anonymous user has visited a website in the previous 30 days. A New Visitor is classified as a user who has not accessed the website in the previous 30 days. New and Returning data is also available in the UK and Australia markets.

Labels: HitWise, Web Analytics

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I was trying to determine which map site (Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or Google maps) had the greatest market share and was surprised to see how dominant Mapquest still is. All the numbers below from Hitwise, Compete and comScore (2006-2007) indicate that Mapquest still owns the majority of traffic. What this tells me that Mapquest has done a good job retaining visitors even though their interface lacks the sophistication of Google/Yahoo maps.

Labels: Google, Yahoo

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Labels: Halloween, HitWise

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HitWise’ Bill Tancer recently noted that Ask.com has experienced a lift in weekly market share. The question is, did Ask.com’s new marketing campaigns cause this?

Well, like all broadcast messages it’s hard to tell for sure. They are definitely better and less offensive than the previous “algorithm” commercials. They seem to be getting closer to the mark, but yet still way off.

However, Ask.com is trying too hard at mass marketing. Mass marketing is dead.

Unfortunately, there is a lot missing from Ask Sponsored Search program that we can not buy into. Until we can get it, I can not recommend the product to friends and family.

Ask.com could save time and money by going after a small, yet ignitable audience … us. As online marketers, if we like the product we will spread the words.

Online marketers need to “buy in”, before Ask expects others to adapt. By following PyroMarketing rules, Ask.com can make small steps that can prove wonders.

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

Labels: ASK, HitWise, john ellis, pay-per-click, ppc

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Omniture is at it again, this time set to buy Visual Sciences. Visual Sciences is known as the product which provides the deepest segmentation and analysis of any of the analytics vendors. This acquisition will give Omniture an even greater market-share in the web analytics space. It will be interesting to see the pricing model and the integration of Visual Sciences with Omniture's suite of tools. I really like Gary Angel's thoughts on this news.

Omniture Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Visual Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: VSCN) in a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $394 million.

The combination of Omniture and Visual Sciences creates a company with substantial scale and resources to deliver industry leading products and services that address the rapidly expanding online business optimization market. The combined company will be able to accelerate investments, meet a wider set of customer needs through a richer solution set and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets.

"With the tremendous growth opportunities we see in the online optimization
market, we believe that in addition to being financially accretive to our
shareholders, this is a strategic investment that will drive increased value for
customers and partners," said Josh James, CEO and co-founder of Omniture. "We
are facing a very significant opportunity defined by the rapid growth of online
advertising and online business in general. This acquisition enables Omniture to
accelerate our investments in advanced solutions that drive customer success as
well as create further opportunities to cross-sell our growing portfolio of
products to a combined customer base of more than 4,000 customers."

Under the terms of the agreement, Visual Sciences shareholders will receive $2.39 in cash per share and a fixed exchange ratio of 0.49 shares of Omniture stock for each Visual Sciences share, on a fully diluted basis. Based upon Omniture's closing price on Wednesday, October 24, 2007, this yields a total consideration of $18.04 per share. Upon the close of the transaction, Visual Sciences stockholders will own approximately 13.7 percent of the combined company on a pro forma basis.

"Omniture is a leader in online business optimization, and absolutely the right
company to leverage our technology and resources for the benefit of the
industry. The combined company will provide our customers with a richer solution
set, faster innovation and greater access to unique industry and business
expertise," said Jim MacIntyre, CEO of Visual Sciences. "We look forward to
bringing these two great teams together."

The acquisition, which is expected to close in early to mid 2008, is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval of stockholders of both companies and regulatory approvals. The transaction will be accounted for under purchase accounting rules.

Labels: Omniture, visual sciences

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With Microsoft's recent 2% ($240 million) purchase of Facebook it's quite interesting to look at some online market share numbers for Facebook - provided by Hitwise:

• Facebook.com was the ninth most visited website (as ranked by Hitwise) in the U.S. receiving .96% of all Internet visits for the week ending 10/20/07.
• U.S. traffic to Facebook.com has increased 102% YOY comparing the week ending 10/20/07 versus 10/21/06.
• Among a custom category of leading social networking websites, Facebook.com received 15% of U.S. visits for the week ending 10/20/07. That was second most among social networking websites behind MySpace.com, who received 76%. Windows Live Spaces received .40% for the same week.
• Facebook.com received '9.90%' of its U.S. traffic from Search Engines for the week ending 10/20/2007. Of that traffic, MSN Search and Live Search combined for .46% to Facebook.com last week. Google sent 6.82% percent of U.S. traffic while Yahoo! Search send 1.34% of traffic for the week ending 10/20/07.
• U.S visits for Facebook.com among users ages 35 and over have increased 19% comparing the week ending 10/20/07 versus 10/21/06.

Coverage of Microsoft Purchasing Facebook Share

• Bangkok Post: Microsoft buys into 15 billion dollar Facebook
• Seattle Times: Microsoft-Facebook deal: Highlights from the call
• Wallstreet Journal: Microsoft Bets On Facebook Stake And Web Ad Boom
• MarketWatch: Microsoft's investment upstages Google love-fest
• Wired News: Three Reasons Microsoft Underpaid For Facebook
• CNN Money: Revised: Facebook and Microsoft Expand Strategic Alliance
• SearchEngineLand: Microsoft Makes $240 Million Investment In Facebook
• Marketing Pilgrim: Facebook Sells 1.6% to Microsoft for $240 Million
• Tech Crunch: Facebook Takes the Microsoft Money And Runs.

Labels: Facebook, Microsoft

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Online retail websites saw an increase in traffic during the summer months in 2007, Hitwise reported today. Online traffic to the Hitwise Retail Index, which consists of the leading 100 U.S. retail websites, increased 10 percent from June to August in 2007 compared to 2006.

August 2007 saw the largest amount of traffic among the summer months with 11 percent increase year-over-year. July 2007 also saw a double digit increase, growing by 10 percent. The traffic among the Hitwise Retail Index has continued to grow in the fall as U.S. visits in September were up 15 percent compared to September 2006.

U.S. Market Share of Visits to Top 100 Retail Websites*
Month	2007	2006	% Change
June	2.08%	1.90%	9%
July	2.15%	1.96%	10%
August	2.15%	1.93%	11%
Avg. Traffic Percentage	2.12%	1.93%	10%
September	2.51%	2.18%	15%
The data is based on the U.S. market share of visits among a custom category of the top 100 retail websites from a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * indicates that the top 100 retail websites excludes websites from the following categories: auctions, classifieds, subscription services, DVD and video game rental, reward point collecting and coupons.
Source: Hitwise

“As we head into the 2007 online holiday season, the healthy increase in visits
to the retail category this year versus last is an indicator that we will be
seeing a strong showing for online retail in the fourth quarter,” said Bill
Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise.

Top Websites

Amazon.com was the most visited website among the top 100 retail websites during the summer months. Amazon’s average market share of U.S. visits from June to August was 11.52 percent followed by Wal-mart with 5.37 percent. Target received 4.81 percent of visits, Half.com received 4.45 percent and Dell.com rounded out the top five websites with 3.49 percent.

Top 5 Most Visited Retail Websites* Between June - August 2007
Rank	Name	Domain	Avg. Market Share %
1	Amazon.com	http://www.amazon.com/	11.52%
2	Wal-mart	http://www.walmart.com/	5.37%
3	Target	http://www.target.com/	4.81%
4	Half.com	http://www.half.ebay.com/	4.45%
5	Dell USA	http://www.dell.com/	3.49%
The data is based on the U.S. market share of visits among a custom category of the top 100 retail websites from a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * indicates that the top 100 retail websites excludes websites from the following categories: auctions, classifieds, subscription services, DVD and video game rental, reward point collecting and coupons.
Source: Hitwise

Labels: HitWise, Web Analytics

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So you were all excited when you first discovered Facebook
Groups and noticed that all the cool kids had their own group so you quickly
jumped on the bandwagon to create one for yourself. You went through the
process of creating an enticing title/description, selected the perfect logo and
then proceeded to invite all your friends to join...but now
what???

Promote Discussion: It's difficult to get your members to
initiate conversation, however since you are quite familiar with your vertical
it allows you to get the conversation rolling with questions related to hot
topics. Discussion boards are an excellent way to share ideas and get
multiple perspectives on a given topic.

Labels: Facebook

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• Download the free white paper: 7 Web Analytics Sins, And How to Avoid Them: Web analytics solutions from ClickTracks Analytics allow visual analysis of web site visitor behavior. Using web log files generated by your web server or our JavaScript page-tagging method.
• How to Optimize for Ask: Ask's portion of the search market is a mere 4.3% (src. Hitwise) so it is understandable that optimizing for Ask is a low priority in the eyes of many webmasters.
• 5 Ways Google Analytics Can Help Increase Traffic to Your Website: Everyone wants more web traffic! The place to start mining for traffic data is right in your own backyard: your free Google Analytics application (www.google.com/analytics/). You can use these techniques with all analytics packages, but we'll lead you through the exact Google Analytics reports.
• Web Success Marketing Info BLOG: Highly Recommended Keyword Research Tools: The place where Web Marketing Specialist, Marci Rosenblum shares her knowledge, observations and ideas on how to have an Effective and Successful Direct Response Marketing Plan and Website Presence!
• Enquiro Research: Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer:
  - What Influences a Technical Buyer throughout the purchase decision, and how to leverage those influencing factors on your website.
  - What Technical Buyers are looking for on your website, and how to build up your "content arsenal."
  - How to get Technical Buyers to put you on the top of their short-list.

Want to join our Facebook Group? Click here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4987100546

Labels: Facebook, Web Analytics

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• Top 20 Most Visited Websites from custom category of top 100 retail websites (U.S. only)
• Top 10 Shopping Search Terms among rotating categories
• Top 10 Visited Shopping Websites among rotating categories
• Top Four Fast Moving shopping websites
• Links to Latest Online Shopping related Blog Posts by Hitwise research analysts

Labels: HitWise, Web Analytics

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Feed subscribers are quite possibly your most loyal readers therefore it's important to grow your subscriber community as much as possible. With Google's purchase of FeedBurner as well as their own proprietary subscriber calculating technology don't be surprised to see feed subscribers becoming a variable in Google's ranking algorithm. In today's post we'll talk about how to increase your feed subscribers with some very simple tips.

1. Prominent, Accessible and Ease of Use: Make your subscription buttons available on all pages and place them above the fold. Using technology like FeedBurner you can get a sense of your subscribers' favorite feed services and begin making subscribing to those services even easier.
   
   
2. Repeat in Footer: Something that has worked well for me is adding the subscription option to the footer of each individual post. What this does is remind visitors to subscribe after reading one of my posts.
   
   
3. Add Option in Emails: In FeedBurner you can also publicize your feed's content by placing a widget in outgoing emails. Through this widget people can also subscribe to your feed.
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Subscribe by Email: Depending on what industry you're in adding an option to subscribe by email can dramatically increase your subscribers. Many authors of travel sites have noticed that email is even more popular than feed readers.

Increasing Feed Subscribers: Additional Resources

• The Blog Studio: How to Increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 Days
• Pro Blogger: 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
• Daily SEO Blog: Increase the number of subscribers to your blog overnight
• Copy Blogger: 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Rob Malon: Decrease Bounce Rate - Increase Subscribers and Visit Time
• Internet Marketing Students: How To Increase Blog Subscribers
• Jimmy Thakkar: Techniques to increase subscribers for BLOG
• Ades Blog: Increase your RSS subscriber count with FeedSmith
• Garry Conn: How To Increase RSS Feedburner Subscribers
• Jonh TP: Tips To Increase Your Blog Subscribers

Labels: Blog Promotion, FeedBurner

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Text Links MarketPlace is a new alternative to Text Links Ads, Link Worth and Text Link Brokers. In order to begin selling links you must insert a snippet of PHP code onto your website - which is a prerequisite, your site must be able to execute PHP.



Here are the benefits from a website publishers perspective:

• You'll be able to sell links on every page of your website.
• Automatically sell links to thousands of advertisers.
• Receive payouts every month in advance, via PayPal, Check, Wire, or any other applicable payment method.
• Easy code installation using "copy-paste" method.
• The price for each link is calculated automatically. It mostly depends on Google PageRank (PR) of each page, website category, link popularity, and number of outbound links.
• TNX commission is just 12.5% from each party involved in transaction.

Text Links MarketPlace also has a convenient income calculator where you can determine how much money you can make selling links. The calculator does this based on the number of incoming links to your site, the number of pages in your site and the distribution of PageRank amongst those site pages.

Publishers and Advertisers can sign up here: http://www.tnx.net/register.php

Text Links MarketPlace also has developed a point based affiliate marketing program:

What can a partner do with earned "TNX-points" ? There are several
options:

1. Use them to advertise his or her own websites to improve traffic and search engine rating.

2. Accumulate "TNX-points" on the account and observe how they grow in value
as the system becomes more efficient due to increasing number of participating websites.

3. Sell "TNX-points" to the system, or send them to another participant of the TNX network, who will use it to promote his projects. Each participant has the right to transfer its "TNX-points" to any other participant (without commission) and set his own price.

This is a sponsored review

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It's been a busy schedule for me this week and last being at WebTrends' Engage and Emetrics Washington DC back to back. Here are some of the stories that you should definitely check out:

Search Marketing

• Search Engine Land: The Big SMX Social Media NY '07 Roundup
• Top Rank Blog: Top SEO Blogs on Google Reader
• SEO Space: What Influences B2B Tech Buyers During the Purchase Process?
• SEO Book: Google Lowered My PageRank, Was My Website Penalized?
• SE Journal: Google Docs Mobile Launched
• Search Insider: Infomediating A Broken Marketplace
• Live Search: Announcing Live Search 411 (1-800-CALL-411)
• SE Guide: 9 (+1) Tips For Writing User-Friendly Content

Web Analytics

• Occam's Razor: Kick Butt With Internal Site Search Analytics
• Epike One: Introducing Urchin 6
• Web Analytics Princess: Emetrics Washington 2007: Consumer segmentation, personas and tribes, aren’t we drilling down into the same thing?
• June Dershewitz: What is the Career Trajectory in Web Analytics?
• Phil Kemelor: Web Analytics for Government Agencies
• Web Analytics Book: Hitwise Launches Lifestyle V3.0

Labels: Industry News, Must Reads

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Bill Tancer over at the Hitwise blog wrote an interesting blog post this morning explaining the "Facebook Slowdown" theory (which reportedly is a very hot but inaccurate topic around the blogosphere). Using Hitwise, Tancer shows that Facebook's recent slowdown is due to seasonality.

As you can see in Hitwise's market share graph below, this same slowdown happened last year as well. It makes sense that activity would be greater during the summer where people, especially students, have time off to use Facebook more often.

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• Why Blog?
• What Makes A Blog Unique?
• Creating Community through Subscribers
• Developing Relationships
• Content Strategies
• Leveraging Social Media and Networking
• Metrics and Measurement
• Strategies that haven't worked for me
• Strategies that have worked for me

Below is a copy of my presentation from Emetrics Washington:

Labels: Blog Promotion, emetrics, Web Analytics

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Hitwise, today announced that Google accounted for 63.55 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending September 29, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.55, 7.83 and 4.32 percent respectively. The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.75 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain	Sept 07	Aug 07	Sept 06
www.google.com	63.55%	63.98%	60.93%
search.yahoo.com	22.55%	22.87%	22.29%
search.msn.com	7.83%*	7.98%*	10.87%*
www.ask.com	4.32%	3.49%	4.28%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 9/29/07, 9/01/07; 9/30/2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Source: Hitwise

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key Industries

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing September 2007 to September 2006, the Travel, Entertainment and Business and Finance categories received double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - September 2007 Category Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, Sep-07 Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Search Engines, Sep-07 – Sep-06 Percent of Category Traffic from Google, Sep-07 Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, Sep-07 – Sep-06 Health and Medical 44.43% 3% 28.61% 5.75% Travel 32.51% 14% 21.16% 23.39% Shopping and Classifieds 25.55% 2.20% 15.77% 6.05% News and Media 20.89% 8% 13.28% 11.01% Entertainment 20.81% 14% 12.38% 16.96% Business and Finance 17.00% 19% 10.27% 30.56% All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users. Source: Hitwise

Labels: HitWise

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