2008 March

Real Time Analytics Monitoring

March 31, 2008 By Manoj Jasra 2 Comments

Technology Leaders, will offer its customers immediate access to ALERT, a powerful analytics alerting and monitoring product that delivers real-time alerts via email as well as the ability to quickly locate the most dynamic reports.

“Our ALERT product innovates the way customers interact with analytics reporting,” said Andrew Edwards, a Managing Partner at Technology Leaders. “ALERT gives you the news about your analytics”. Using ALERT, a customer can receive emails about reports that have changed from their historical norms; then click through to the most dynamic reports. They can adjust the sensitivity of the alerting function. Additionally, they can locate new trends otherwise hidden from typical dashboards and ‘top pages’ reporting. “ALERT saves analysts time,” said Edwards, “by letting them find important trends in minutes, not hours.”

Rand Schulman, a Boardmember at Technology Leaders adds, “Having been a senior executive at analytics vendors like WebTrends, WebSideStory and KeyLime, I know that the market has been looking for a product like ALERT for a long time.”

“We’ve been working closely with analytics customers since 2003,” adds Edwards. “We have identified that the most pressing need was for timely, actionable data. We created ALERT to enable customers to focus only on the data that matters.”

ALERT is designed to work in conjunction with leading web analytics tools.

Filed Under: Web Analytics

US Government using Google

March 31, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, US Intelligence is turning to Google in order to help out with their organization of top secret documents. This includes documents related to North Korea as well as al Qaeda. Google’s larger plans are to go past its traditional consumers and move onto organizations such as schools and corporations:

In addition to the intelligence agencies, Google’s government customers include the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the state of Alabama and Washington, D.C.

Many of the contracts are for search appliances – servers for storing and searching internal documents. Agencies can use the devices to create their own mini-Googles on intranets made up entirely of government data.

Additionally, Google has had success licensing a souped-up version of its aerial mapping service, Google Earth. Agencies can use it to plot scientific data and chart the U.S. coastline, for example, giving ships another tool to navigate safely.

Spy agencies are using Google equipment as the backbone of Intellipedia, a network aimed at helping agents share intelligence. Rather than hoarding information, spies and analysts are being encouraged to post what they learn on a secure online forum where colleagues can read it and add comments.

Filed Under: Google

GM Leads in Online Ads among Auto Manufacturers

March 28, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

source comScore: General Motors was the top online advertiser among auto manufacturers in January, delivering nearly 1.7 billion total display ad views in the U.S., followed by Toyota (1.4 billion) and Ford Motor Company (1.1 billion). General Motors also led in reach, with approximately 103 million unique individuals receiving their display ads during the month, followed by Ford which reached 95 million people and Toyota which reached 62 million. But, both General Motors and Ford were outmuscled by Toyota in terms of ads delivered per person reached. Toyota delivered a frequency of 22 ads per person during the month, compared to 16 for General Motors and 11 for Ford.

Top Auto Manufacturer Online Advertisers by Total Display Ad Views January 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Ad Metrix
Advertiser	Total Display Ad Views (000)	Share of Voice*	Ad-Exposed Unique Visitors (000)	Average Frequency
General Motors	1,687,065	32.8%	102,574	16.4
Toyota	1,356,782	26.4%	62,428	21.7
Ford Motor Company	1,075,831	20.9%	94,987	11.3
Honda	377,863	7.3%	57,923	6.5
Nissan	291,666	5.7%	31,262	9.3
Chrysler LLC	123,868	2.4%	22,142	5.6
Hyundai Motors Inc.	95,246	1.9%	16,723	5.7
Volkswagen	60,498	1.2%	7,126	8.5
Suzuki Motor Corporation	42,491	0.8%	15,389	2.8
Harley Davidson	35,287	0.7%	6,109	5.8

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Microsoft Sharepoint Server Report 2008 – CMS Watch

March 27, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is repeating history as it mimics the allure and pitfalls of Lotus Notes, according to research released today by CMS Watch, an independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

SharePoint exploits traditionally underserved collaboration needs for information workers laboring within Office tools, and fulfills a common desire to easily create disposable workspaces, CMS Watch found.

Like Notes in a previous decade, IT often embraces SharePoint as a simple answer to myriad business information problems. But the platform can easily morph into a technical and operational morass, as repositories proliferate, and IT comes to recognize that various custom applications require highly specialized expertise to keep running properly.

CMS Watch also found:

- Prior to the advent of SharePoint, simple collaboration services were remarkably clumsy or absent in many content management and knowledge management systems. “By focusing on basic file sharing,” argues contributing analyst Shawn Shell, “SharePoint addresses an immediate need for many small and mid-sized businesses, as well as autonomous enterprise departments.”

- As a collaboration platform, SharePoint does have its drawbacks. Explains CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne, “Customers readily shared their frustrations: Redmond’s rather belated embrace of Web 2.0, SharePoint’s poor support for individuals working on multiple different teams, as well as its cumbersome and incomplete integration with Outlook.”

- Unfortunately, as you grow very large SharePoint environments, the controls that enterprises would want to see simply don’t exist natively within the platform. “Whether it’s the lack of a workflow-based provisioning process, or enterprise-level administration, or the ability to effectively categorize large numbers of documents or PowerPoint slides, SharePoint remains ill-suited to enterprise-wide collaboration and knowledge management,” notes CMS Watch analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

These findings stem from “The SharePoint Report 2008,” a 190-page evaluation of SharePoint from an enterprise perspective, which assesses the platform’s suitability for different business scenarios across various customer tiers. CMS Watch evaluates technologies from a buyer’s perspective, testing tools and debriefing licensees about actual implementation experiences.

Filed Under: CMS, CMS Watch

Online Competitive Intelligence Factors

March 27, 2008 By Manoj Jasra 3 Comments

Coming from an agency, there are often times when there is need to perform a competitive analysis for a client in order to better understand the client’s position in the competitive landscape. The main purpose of a competitive analysis should be to gain awareness of the competitive factors analyzed and to leverage the client’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) to their advantage. So what kind of factors should be included in an online competitive analysis? Below are a few that I feel should always make the competitive analysis list:

Domain Age: The age of your domain can have an affect in the way search engine determine authoritativeness for your site. Theoretically, the longer the domain has been active, the more value it receives from search engines. Webconfs has a great tool for calculating the age of your domain and your competitors’ http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.
Search Engine Visibility: Take your vertical’s main keyword basket and analyze how visible your site is compared to its competitors in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and AOL. Comparing the number of top X rankings can give you a sense of your keyword market share.
Site Traffic: This one is difficult to compare unless you have access to your competitors’ analytics, however Compete.com’s search analytics does a fairly decent job of providing some insight.
In Bound Link Quality: Using a combination of Yahoo Site Explorer and a batch PageRank checker you can begin to determine the quality of back-links for a given domain. The quality of links is more important than the quantity.
In Bound Link Anchor Text: The quality of links is partially based on the theme of the linking site as well as the anchor text that is linking to you. Image or branded links aren’t as high quality as keyword rich links. http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php
Meta Tags: This maybe considered simplistic and old school but meta description and title tags are still important in SEO. Analyzing description and title tags can help you determine which competing sites best differentiate themselves as well as the messaging the site is providing visitors.
Paid Search Campaigns: On the other side of the fence their is sponsored campaigns and a tool like SpyFu can give you some insight on PPC competitors and keyword costs.
Blogs: Got a blog? Check out Blog Juice from Text Link Ads, which looks at Bloglines, Alexa and Technorati to compute a “juice” score.

This online market research video walkthrough demonstrates some of the key principles involved in assessing your sites online strength and benchmarking your competitor sites

Filed Under: SEO

User Interactions with Images and Video on Websites

March 25, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Enquiro Research has just released another eye tracking white paper: Barriers on a Website, which explains how users interact with graphics and rich media in the navigation of a website. This whitepaper reveals:

How graphics can act as barriers to website user navigation.
How graphics can coax users towards essential website information.
If multimedia on a website creates a “wow” factor or a trap.

Download Now!

Barrier scanning is a term given to the type of scan behavior that deviates from the ideal user flow due to those on site design elements that can impede, redirect, or coach a certain type of user engagement. This is important, because this is this type of behavior that is working in combination with the value of your content, benefit messaging, and relevance to cause your websites to have high abandonment rates, low conversion rates, and lower ROI.

Understanding barrier scanning can greatly improve your website’s ability to resonate with your market by helping to make navigation and conversion paths more in-line with an intuitive user response, by making your page more dynamic, and by giving your content a better chance to sell to your unique visitor.

Source: http://www.enquiroresearch.com/barriers-on-a-website.aspx

Filed Under: Enquiro, Eye Tracking

Google News and Gmail Updates

March 25, 2008 By Manoj Jasra 1 Comment

Users of Google News now have the ability to add comments to individual news items. Comments give people related to a news story the chance to directly respond to it. These comments are linked to alongside the normal media coverage for that story. This feature helps provide more perspectives on a particular story without sacrificing the quality of our coverage. Additionally, these comments provide a unique insight, because they come from individuals who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to share their responses.

Gmail’s codebase has been revamped and this allowed Google to push out more of Gmail’s features to Google Apps users. Employees, students and other Google Apps users will soon start seeing useful features like these: