Skweezer, Inc. today announced a major upgrade to its Skweezer Ads service, which allows customers to serve ads to a wide variety of mobile, desktop, and other Web-enabled consoles through a single ad feed.
This latest release of Skweezer Ads includes innovations that are firsts for the online advertising community. One such innovation is a patent-pending algorithm that dynamically converts conventional text-based cost-per-click (CPC) ads into mobile-friendly ads complaint with standards set by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). Another key innovation is Skweezer Ads' cut-and-paste code that detects a visitor's device type, retrieves appropriate mobile or desktop ads accordingly, and optionally reformats and compresses the Web content for mobile viewing.

Skweezer Ads is now available to publishers through ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, or JavaScript code. This latest version of Skweezer Ads uses "short URL" for easier inclusion into Web sites, RSS feeds, mobile applications, and SMS messages.

The Skweezer Ads back office, located at http://reports.skweezer.com/, has also been updated and includes a new ad formatting wizard allows publishers to use a "What You See is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) interface to customize the way their ads look. Customers also now have the ability to create multiple ads feeds, or channels, for a single account. The signup process has also been greatly streamlined and is accessible at http://reports.skweezer.com/open/signup.aspx.

Skweezer Ads is an online advertising service that supplies both desktop and mobile ads in a single ad feed, automatically displaying the correct type of ad to each visitor. Skweezer Ads customers have the added benefit of being able to use Skweezer's mobilization technology to automatically create a mobile version of their Web site, which is dynamically created whenever a mobile visitor is detected.

Skweezer Ads is the world's first internationally-consumed mobile advertising service, having served mobile ads in over 175 countries since its release in 2004, and was voted Best Mobile Marketing Product in the 2007 Mobile Star Awards.

Labels: adsense

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• The Paypal Handling Cart feature completely broke down
• Cross border payments could not be made as the drop down country list did not work
• Customers have been flooded with hundreds of duplicate subscription emails from Paypal
• Payments from Paypal are no longer associated with the relevant subscriptions
• Some customers have been and are being DOUBLE BILLED by Paypal
• Merchants have not been receiving instant payment notifications or failure notifications
• Merchants/customers are unable to cancel subscriptions

This really sucks for StatCounter because they are unable to invoice any new clients and are often invoicing current clients inaccurately.

These problems with Paypal have already cost us thousands of dollars. We continue to expend large amounts of time and resources on these issues - resources which we would much prefer to concentrate on improving the service we provide to you. We would be very grateful for your patience at this time as we wait for Paypal to resolve these issues.

Labels: statcounter, Web Analytics

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• MobiLensTM, a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage, including device information, data usage, media consumption and demographic characteristics of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users. MobiLens is available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.
• MeterDirectTM, the industry’s first on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists. The M:Metrics metering technology is compatible with more than 280 device models. MeterDirect is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.
• M:AdTM, the first competitive tracking service for mobile advertising that continuously monitors clickable display advertising from a broad representative set of mobile Web destinations to reveal leading advertisers across a variety of market segments. M:Ad is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.

Going forward, comScore will increase the size of the metered panel and will offer measurement of combined Internet usage across both PC and mobile-based online access platforms. The combination of the two companies is expected to result in substantial operating synergies, cost savings and enhanced revenue growth by building a larger customer base, combining two highly productive sales forces, and leveraging comScore’s global panel and scalable technology infrastructure.

In connection with the acquisition, the co-founders of M:Metrics, Will Hodgman, president and chief executive officer, and Seamus McAteer, chief product architect, will join comScore’s management team.

The acquisition agreement was signed, and the acquisition was closed, today, May 28, 2008, having been approved by the comScore Board of Directors and M:Metrics stockholders. The transaction will be accounted for under purchase accounting rules.

comScore is expecting the M:Metrics business to be profitable on an Adjusted EBITDA basis by the end of the fourth quarter of 2008, and to be a significant positive contributor to Adjusted EBITDA in 2009. M:Metrics’ revenues are currently forecast to be approximately $11 million to $12 million for the full year 2008, and will contribute $6.5 to $7 million to comScore’s reported revenues for 2008 post-closing. The acquisition also enables comScore to lower its future tax payments by realizing a cash benefit of up to $7 million through the utilization of up to $20 million in M:Metrics net operating loss carry forward (NOLs).

Labels: comScore

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Gmail Help Center Guru, Sze-jun Tsai has posted a very useful post on the Gmail Blog about configuring your Gmail account on mobile devices using IMAP rather than POP. Sze-jun mentions how frustrating POP can be due to it's limitation to communicate only one way rather than 2 way like IMAP. Sze-jun also provides a simple graphic which explains the benefit of IMAP over POP

There are two ways your devices and clients can communicate with Gmail:

A one-way communication path (POP). Your device asks us for data and pulls it from our servers -- but that's it. Things you do on your device have no effect on the server. If you read a message on your phone, then log in to Gmail, you will see that same message marked as unread. It may start to feel like Groundhog Day.

A two-way communication path (IMAP). Unlike with POP, your devices talk back to our servers and sync your changes automatically with IMAP. When you sign in to your Gmail account in a web browser, actions you've taken on your email client or mobile device (like putting a message in a 'work' folder) will also appear in Gmail (your message will already have a 'work' label on it). This all happens automatically once you set up IMAP, so you don't have to read or sort all your mail twice. This is really helpful when accessing Gmail from multiple devices.

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
4. Select Enable IMAP.
5. Configure your IMAP client and click Save Changes.

Supported IMAP client list

Once you've enabled IMAP in Gmail, just configure your mail client or wireless device to download Gmail messages. To learn about configuration settings, click the name of your mail client or wireless device below.

Mail Clients

• Outlook Express (Windows)
• Outlook 2003 (Windows)
• Outlook 2007 (Windows)
• Apple Mail
• Apple Mail 3.0 (Leopard)
• Windows Mail
• Thunderbird 2.0
• Other*

Wireless Devices

• iPhone
• Blackberry*
• Symbian*
• Windows Mobile 5*
• Windows Mobile 6*
• SnapperMail*

Labels: Gmail

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Search Engine Strategies (SES) will be held in Toronto, Ontario next month featuring a number of our industry's thought leaders. A topic that sprung my interest was on day 2: "SEO Don'ts, Myths, & Scams" featuring the CEO of High Rankings, Jill Whalen. To get some insight before SES Toronto, I was able to catch up with Jill Whalen to ask her a few questions on the topic of SEO Don'ts, Myths, & Scams. Below is how our conversation went:

[Manoj]: On the topic of SEO scams, is this something that is still rapidly growing?

[Jill Whalen]: I wouldn't say that it is rapidly growing, but they are definitely still out there. We get people on our SEO forum all the time asking about the cold calls they get from companies who claim they can place their website in the number 1 spot for $50 and things like that. What they are actually doing is either reselling sponsored ads at a premium and you're showing up in the sponsored section, or in some cases, they get you to download their special toolbar, and then they can show you whatever results they want to show you. This scam is less prevalent today than it used to be as people are more leery of installing 3rd party software these days.

The latest SEO scam is companies who instead of working hard to help you create something worth linking to, make up entertaining but fake news, and the post it on your website as real news, in order to gain links to it. In the media's frenzy to re-print and discuss just about any news they can find, they rarely bother to check sources anymore, and freely link to the original made-up story. The tactic apparently works (at least temporarily), but at what cost to the website's credibility? Google's Matt Cutts has recently weighed in on this issue and stated that the tactic does fall outside of their Webmaster guidelines.

[Manoj]: What myths do you consistently come across in the search marketing industry?

[Jill Whalen]:One of the most interesting is the myth that your Google AdWords can affect your organic rankings. About half the people who believe this myth think that running a Google AdWords campaign will hurt your organic rankings, while the other half believe it will help your organic rankings! In reality, Google is smart enough to keep their paid and organic results completely separate.

Another myth I consistently run across is that frequent respidering of your website will somehow increase its organic rankings. If you are adding new content on a regular basis, then of course it's important for Google to respider your site often so that they will index your new stuff. But if you aren't adding new content, it's not necessarily a problem; you certainly don't need the spider to index the same content they already have indexed. Rankings don't suffer because of a lack of spidering (unless you have some other technical issues going on). Some of the best-ranked pages haven't been changed or added to in years.

[Manoj]: If you were to prioritize a list of SEO Don'ts, what would be your top 3 in terms of biggest impact to a site's online strategy?

[Jill Whalen]: Most of the SEO myths that are out there are fairly harmless -- whether you do them or not, they won't impact your site one way or the other. "SEO don'ts" on the other hand, are a different animal and can very well impact the profile of your website in the search engines. There are so many don'ts that it's difficult to prioritize them, but here are 3 common ones:

1. Don't stuff your page full of keyword phrases at the expense of its readability. SEO copywriting has nothing to do with keyword stuffing. While keyword stuffing may actually increase rankings (temporarily), if your pages read poorly they will be less likely to convert for you.
2. Don't set out to deceive search engines. They want the best, most relevant pages for the search query at hand. Don't fake having the best, most relevant content -- actually have it!
3. Don't design your website in such a way as to make it invisible or unspiderable to the search engines. Unfortunately, a lot of website designers still haven't figured out how to create crawler-friendly websites, which puts those sites at a huge disadvantage right out of the gate.

About Jill Whalen

Jill is the founder of the popular High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum, now celebrating its fourth year. She is also is the host of the High Rankings Advisor, a free search engine marketing email newsletter, and the author of The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines. Regularly quoted in national and industry publications, Jill is frequently called upon to speak at conferences worldwide

Labels: Search Engine Strategies, SEO, SES

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"With our novel approach, Site605 has already provided resource pages for about 100,000 top search subjects, twice the stated goal of Mahalo," said Bob Chandra, co-founder of Site605. "While one person can write 10 informational webpages from scratch in a day, one could review and edit 50 pages in that same time. It turns out that computers do a fine job of producing an initial resource pages. Then, people complement the process by reviewing those pages for quality and modifying them acordingly. So this is the introduction of the human-edited Web as opposed to the purely human-authored web seen on Mahalo or machine-authored results you see on Google."

"The intention is to provide people with an informational resource on a vast array of subjects and to create a model that will scale across hundreds of thousands of search subjects, not just thousands", says Chandra.

Labels: mahalo

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• New Google Site Blog - Google Sites Blog
• SEW Experts: The Challenge Of Mobile Web Analytics - Search Engine Watch
• Search Engine Optimization Tips - Marketing Pilgrim
• Top 10 Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures - PC World
• Engagement in Web Analytics - Redux - Gary Angel
• Universal Tagging Conventions: Towards Web Data Structure Standards - Jacques Warren
• 5 Steps to Successful Behavioral Targeting - Anil Batra
• Introduction to Google Search Quality - Google Blog
• What’s the Best Way to Deal with a Search Engine Algorithm Update? - ASK Enquiro
• Clickthrough Experiment Update - Tim Nash

Labels: Must Reads

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"Improve Your B–to–B Technology Conversions with Real–Life Data from Thousands of Marketers and Business Technology Buyers"

• What drives technology purchases and how to market to the right buyers, key decision makers & influencers with real passion
• Response rates and benchmarks for online marketing tactics as well as for traditional marketing
• How new technologies (social networks, mobile devices, podcasts and blogs) are affecting the ways in which the B–B buyers consume media and interact online.
• How the US downturn is impacting marketing budgets. Compare your budgets to similar sized companies.
• The current rationale for traditional event marketing and virtual marketing.
• The effectiveness of PR, search engine marketing and telemarketing.
  What experts say about technology sales management and measurement.

Labels: marketing sherpa

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• Highly visible scandals such as the White House losing up to 5,000,000 e-mails
• Increased use of e-mails as evidence in corporate trials
• IT's growing concerns over the cost and complexity of managing huge volumes of mail on the network

The logic to consolidate, sort, and index all mail into a single long-term archive is simple. Although EAM tools can be expensive, field experience suggests that successful deployments can yield a fast return on the investment.

These findings come from E-mail Archiving and Management Report 2008, released today. This groundbreaking report evaluates fourteen major EAM suppliers, based on extensive technology research and customer interviews. The 195-page report also provides a breakdown of common usage scenarios to help with selecting an EAM system.

Yet the tension between IT's need to optimize back-up, recovery, and archiving on the one hand -- and Legal and HR's need for better policy management and e-discovery on the other -- is reflected in a marketplace where vendors tend to favor one approach over the other. "The entry of industry heavyweights Google, Dell, HP, EMC, and IBM into this space has not commoditized the technology," notes Pelz-Sharpe, "in part because they all see different opportunities in the market and have adopted different architectures."

"Enterprises looking to deal with e-mail chaos need to tread carefully. It's not just architectures that vary widely -- pricing is all over the map too," argues CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne. "Finding a vendor that meets your needs and your budget requires careful research and comparison of disparate options," concludes Byrne.

The report also found mixed messages in the customer community:

• Global buyers of EAM are motivated more by server and storage optimization of Exchange and Notes environments, and less by the regulatory, legal, and e-discovery concerns that predominate among major enterprises in North America
• Buyers maintain quite polarized views on Software as a Service (SaaS) approaches, with some enterprises going exclusively this route to avoid infrastructure investments and maintenance, while many others consider hosted EAM a non-starter for corporate e-mail

Labels: CMS Watch

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1. Use keyboard shortcuts. Gmail users can speed up their emailing with a few simple keyboard shortcuts. All users have to do to activate these shortcuts is go into the settings menu and turn them on. Then a simple keystroke can open a new email, flip through messages and take you to all areas of your account. This can save time and make it so that you never have to take your fingers off of the keyboard to do anything.
2. Use the advanced search feature. It only makes sense that Google, the most popular search engine, employs powerful search capabilities in its email client as well. Like standard Google searches, there are a number of tricks you can employ to more easily find what you’re looking for. You can check out this list of query words from Google, or you can get some pointers here on how to find just what you’re looking for each time.

Sending and Receiving

1. Use the mute function. Sometimes even the most well meaning of friends include you on conversations you could care less about. These emails don’t have to keep coming up as new mail in your inbox, however, and you can just tune them out with the mute button, a little known feature of Gmail.
2. Auto-forward certain messages. If you’ve got multiple email accounts or if you just want to send certain types of messages to a particular account, you can use Gmail’s forwarding capabilities. You simply just need to set up filters that include the addresses you want to forward from and to, and voila, your mail goes where you want it to with very little effort on your part.

Organization

1. Back up their messages. While your messages are fairly secure residing online, there is always the chance that something could happen to them. If you have important information stored on them this could be disastrous. There are a number of ways you can back up your Gmail so that it’s accessible both online and off.
2. Can easily find unread messages. Sometimes you may skip over unread messages, and it can be a pain to find them when you go back later and want to read them, especially if you get a lot of email. There is an easy way to find all your unread messages, however, using the search feature. This should bring up all unread messages quickly and easily, saving you the trouble of hunting for them.

Extensions

1. Drag files into Gmail. Don’t make sending attachments inefficient by searching through files to find what you need. Just use this extension to drag and drop files right into an email to send them.
2. Integrate with GTD. If you’re trying to make your Gmail more productive, why not make everything in your life more productive at the same time by integrating a popular GTD program right into Gmail with this to-do management extension.

Read the full post here.

Labels: Gmail

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More and more each day you probably see Google's custom search engine functionality appear on site's across the Internet. In fact, I have implemented the Google custom search engine on two of my own sites. If you are looking for a simple way to enhance your users' engagement level on your site then I recommend you take a closer look at Google custom search engine. Below are few of the top reasons I like it so much:

• Giving users what they are used to: More than half the world prefers Google's search results and are comfortable interacting with the search box as well as the search results. Google Custom search engine provides the exact same search experience as Google.com but on YOUR site.
• Building your own search engine is difficult: Have you ever tried designing your own site search functionality, it's definitely not simple. It's difficult to apply the same type of algorithms Google does so that you can sort your results smarter than just alphabetically. With the custom search engine the algorithms are applied for you and you gain all the benefits of the awesome performance.
• Access to deeper content: Many sites on the Internet have some of their best content buried deep within their folder structure, the custom search engine allows your users to find that deep content within 1 click without getting frustrated and abandoning your site.
• Access to new content, not a huge issue anymore: One previous draw back of Google Custom Search vs. a proprietary search was that Google took a little while longer to index newer content which made a given site's internal search results not as fresh. However, with the recent changes, your new content can be made available quicker by leveraging Google's XML sitemaps.
• Customization: Google Custom Search Engine allows you to customize your configuration in many different ways including: look and feel of results, style of search box, placement of ads, sites to search within, ability to introduce AdSense, method of displaying results and refinement labels for popular website topics.

Labels: Google

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Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), today announced a new version of Omniture Test&Target that provides marketers with the ability to more visually design, test and execute marketing campaigns directly on their Web sites. Marketers can now save time and implement changes immediately on their site, increasing the speed and ease with which campaign content can be used for A/B testing and targeted campaigns.

“Testing our site is something that we do constantly,” said Matt Sanocki, director of marketing at Design Public, an exterior and interior creative design retailer. “Omniture Test&Target’s new visual capabilities make a tremendous difference because I can get everyone on my online marketing team involved in the process. It is now easier to design and launch new marketing campaigns directly on the site, making the Design Public experience even better for our customers."

The new version of Omniture Test&Target allows online marketers to:

• Create Tests Visually – Online marketers can create A/B tests and targeted campaigns directly on the Web pages where and how visitors will experience them.
• Deliver Tests Faster – New campaigns and marketing ideas can be tested and implemented as they are conceived.
• Test More Frequently – Because the new interface is easier to learn, teams of online marketers will find it easier to create and collaborate on marketing campaigns, enabling them to run multiple tests more quickly.

“The new campaign creation and testing capabilities in Omniture Test&Target have become an important part of our process for creating and demonstrating value to our clients,” said Nicholas Ward, search technology strategist for Range Online Media, a leading search and interactive marketing agency. “The ability to build and preview tests simultaneously helps us ensure a positive visitor experience during testing and limits the complexity for our team and our clients.”

“Putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time has always been the marketer's dream,” said Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.

“Omniture's Test&Target hands the testing process to marketers and removes the technical and operational steps that have made testing so tedious in the past.”

Labels: multivariate testing, Omniture

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Gigya, today announced that, according to comScore, Gigya reached over 120 million unique widget users worldwide and over 44 million unique widget users in the United States in March 2008. This data was released earlier this month as part of comScore’s Widget Metrix Report.

Global Shifts in the Consumption of Content

Today’s Internet users want to consume content in the places they spend their time, and increasingly those places are social network pages, start pages, blogs and other user-controlled pages. As a result, an enormous amount of content is now being used and enjoyed away from its original source. According to a February 2008 Trend Market report published by Universal McCann, “Social networks, personalized homepages and search engines are becoming platforms for external content. Essentially they [are] becoming the way that consumers organize their Internet experience. All sites are making their content available for publishing elsewhere and widgets are a great way to package and keep control of the content published elsewhere.”

Gigya’s distribution technology is providing the infrastructure for this new phenomenon. Gigya helps publishers by giving them the tools they need to get their content – in the form of widgets – distributed widely through social networks and other platforms, and tracks associated activity. The auto-posting tool also empowers consumers by making it easy for them to grab and share content to their choice of more than 50 social networks, blogs, start pages, bookmarking sites and desktop platforms.

A Widget Advertising and Distribution Solution for Brand Advertisers

comScore also reports that a total of 604 million people, representing 65 percent of the worldwide Internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in March 2008. According to the IAB’s April 2008 report “User Generated Content, Social Media and Advertising,” UGC sites are projected to attract 101 million users in the U.S. and earn $4.3 billion in ad revenue by 2011. With such enormous reach, widgets are now a major focus for marketers looking to reach an audience of social media users in a contextually appropriate way.

Labels: comScore, Widgets

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Pheedo, today announced that Gawker Media, publisher of several of the web’s most popular media properties including Gizmodo and Lifehacker, experienced more than 300 percent growth in RSS advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2008.

"Gawker Media has always made full content feeds available from the beginning, believing that the RSS channel was a valuable and under-levered distribution channel for marketing our content,” stated Christopher P. Batty, Vice President of Sales of Gawker Media. “As such, we're highly committed to helping our marketing partners reach our readers thusly."

“Publishers today recognize that their content is increasingly consumed away from their website by their most loyal, dedicated readers,” said Bill Flitter, CEO and Founder of Pheedo. “We work with premium publications, like Gawker Media, to maximize the enormous revenue opportunity in their RSS traffic.”

“We know the RSS feed business and how to service premium publishers and advertisers personally and responsively,” said Flitter. “Not all companies can provide that hands-on level of service and technology expertise, including a choice of premium ads with CPMs that best fit their audience.”

“Outsourcing the RSS feed monetization scheme made more sense than having our sales people focus on it,” said Erin Pettigrew, Ad Operations and Research Manager at Gawker. “In the first quarter we saw tremendous growth after the Pheedo implementation. Pheedo was the best solution when we needed it the most.”

Labels: RSS

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FutureNow, Inc. (FUTR.OB) and IMC (Internet Marketing Conference) will offer three seminar-style training events for professionals involved in the planning, execution and optimization of new media campaigns. The events will take place over three days, from June 2nd through June 4th, in New York City.

The first event, FutureNow's popular "Persuasive Online Copy-writing" seminar, takes place on Monday, June 2. Participants will learn how to write for different customer segments, format for maximum readability, ensure that sales and marketing copy is easy to find via search engines, and write in a "voice" and tone that persuades visitors to take action.

On Tuesday, June 3, FutureNow's "Call to Action" seminar, led by Bryan Eisenberg, best-selling author and co-founder of FutureNow, is based on Eisenberg's bestselling book, "Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results." This seminar is a crash course on the synergies between web analytics, web design, usability, social media, and search engine optimization by introducing Persuasion Architecture®, FutureNow's patented methodology, which combines these disciplines to merge one's business goals with the goals of one's online visitors. Eisenberg is also co-author of the #1 best-selling Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, and BusinessWeek book, "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark".

On Wednesday, June 4, IMC presents "Mobile Marketing: The Next Evolution" to highlight emerging trends and opportunities for marketing to mobile phone users. FutureNow's Bryan Eisenberg will be presenting, accompanied by Phil Kemelor (Semphonic), Peter Olfe (Yojo Mobile), Eric Hansen (SiteSpect), Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio), Wil Tan (MojiPage), and many more. Location-based marketing is expected to be the big topic at IMC.

All events will be held at the Hotel Pennsylvania (401 Seventh Avenue at 33rd St.) in Manhattan

Labels: SEM

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Labels: CMS

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“The next best thing to an impression or click from a search result is the ability to serve a highly relevant and targeted graphical or textual ad to a consumer while they are still very interested in their search,” says Kevin Lee, a member of SEMPO’s board of directors and its research committee. Lee is chairman and CEO of Didit.

“Online advertisers are always faced with the challenge that there is a finite number of searches occurring daily. Behavioral targeting gives advertisers an opportunity to expand the search marketing universe,” says Lee. Many analysts believe that, when combined with demographic targeting, behavioral targeting of searchers provides a significant growth opportunity for the media industry, Lee notes.

• The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
• Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs.

Labels: behavioral targeting, sempo

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"Managing source content as components was traditionally the domain of technical documentation departments, but has recently expanded to many other business processes, particularly in the wake of DITA," notes Ann Rockley lead analyst on the report. "We're seeing a growing need for CCM across the enterprise to support tasks like regulatory compliance, multichannel publishing, integration of product content across departments, translation optimization, and structured enterprise documents."

"Enterprises looking upstream to manage structured information as XML-based components rather than documents will find a CCM supplier community comprised largely of niche players," argues CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne. "Some vendors have a modern back-end, some have a modern front end, but few have both," says Byrne. Byrne adds, "although many CCM vendors can boast impressive track records in this space, no individual supplier possesses the resources today to address all potential enterprise requirements for structured content management."

• As the first major content technology vendor to play in this space, EMC is the sole exception to this pattern. EMC actually offers multiple CCM offerings. However, EMC’s CCM tools suffer from a legacy of feature overlap as well as high complexity and cost.
• Some enterprises have employed structured authoring tools with mainstream enterprise content management systems to handle CCM requirements by enabling authors to work with content components in traditional repository structures.
• Software usability remains a constant challenge for nearly all CCM implementations and currently limits broader adoption among business users across the enterprise.
• No significant open source players have yet emerged in the CCM space, but buyers can find a diversity of commercial license models, including several software-as-a-service (SaaS) suppliers.

The report may be purchased at http://www.cmswatch.com/CCM/, where readers can also download a sample excerpt.

Labels: CMS Watch

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You might have heard of Omniture's Test&Target product which has the ability to leverage sophisticated behavioral targeting plus Multivariate testing, but you might not completely understand whether it's right for your business or what type of insight it can provide you. I decided to find out some more information by posing some questions to a Test&Target expert, Omniture's very own Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Chris Duskin.

[Manoj]: Please provide an overview of the Test&Target framework and how you have integrated Touch Clarity and Offermatica.

[Chris]: The promise and the challenge of online marketing is the ability to meaningfully engage with your customers. One aspect of the promise is knowing which online experience or content is most relevant. And part of the challenge involves tools that give marketers control. TouchClarity and Offermatica combined as Omniture Test&Target give marketers the best tools to deliver relevance quickly and with very little IT involvement.

Testing, whether A/B/n or multivariate, helps marketers know which online experience is best. What we have learned, however, is that what is best for one group of visitors is not necessarily optimal for another. So testing and targeting are two sides of the same coin. Testing naturally leads to targeting – delivering specific content to specific users for even more relevance. Some basic examples of targeting include different experiences for new visitors than for returning visitors or different messaging based on a visitor’s geographic location. And, the most powerful targeting in terms of delivering relevance is one-to-one targeting based on predictive mathematical models. In a lot of cases, there is maximum benefit from letting an automated system determine the best content for the individual visitor at any point in time based on current intent. Omniture Test&Target is a single product providing all these capabilities, all of which are increasingly required by online marketers.

The integration of TouchClarity and Offermatica has certainly been a big effort, but it has been made easier by similarities between the two systems. Key components of the integration include a single tag or container for content delivery as well a single interface for content management, campaign creation, and user management. In coming releases, we’ll also deliver some very compelling, very powerful capabilities that even further build on the power of analytics, testing, and targeting.

[Manoj]: Why should Test&Target be a part of all ongoing landing page/content strategies?

[Chris]: Because more often than not, what we think will work is wrong. We think hard about the problem, look at all the data, consider all the options, leverage all our experience. But in the end, our traffic has the final say. Without testing and without targeting, relevance is left to chance, and the marketer is in a reactive mode. Test&Target lets marketing get into a proactive position and see in real-time what is effective and driving the business’s metrics.

[Manoj]: How much of a technical skill set is required to implement a customized test?

[Chris]: To be effective, marketers need control. In their tests and campaigns, they need to be able to make content, layout, and messaging changes wherever necessary. And they need to be able to do it quickly. So, Test&Target is designed for marketers who aren’t technical. Familiarity with html can be helpful as can the array of Omniture services options available to Test&Target customers.

[Manoj]: I'd like to know more about the specifics on the implementation of div tags and the fact that users have to pre-load their desired content in to the admin interface.

[Chris]: Our tags are javascript-based and allow marketers to use Test&Target’s online admin tool to change content in the tagged area. Implementing our tags is very straightforward and involves only a few lines of code. Once in place, the tag can be used repeatedly of course. The content that goes into those areas is either created in Test&Target or, more commonly, resides in a content management system. We also have features to allow the bulk upload of content that some customers find useful.

[Manoj]: Can you explain how different types of content are rotated based on predefined configuration or content performance?

[Chris]: Test&Target’s behavioral targeting campaigns allow the marketer to specify content for various site locations. Our algorithms then automatically capture and learn from hundreds of a visitor’s behaviors and characteristics to determine which of the content options to serve to the individual. The traffic to most sites is incredibly variable, and so is the intent of an individual. So a system like Test&Target that not automatically reacts to but is made stronger by this variability is incredibly powerful. This is what we mean by learning algorithms.

In terms of predefined configuration, marketers can also set rules that the models consider when determining what content to show. For example, some visitors may not be eligible for a particular offer depending on their geographic location or based on some other characteristic. Our system takes these rules into account. And, what’s also unique about our approach is that it’s effective for anonymous visitors.

[Manoj]: What factors (metrics) are used to help the system target based on behavior?

[Chris]: Success criteria used by our targeting algorithms can range from basic click-through to revenue events depending on the objective of the campaign.

[Manoj]: How can offline data be integrated?

[Chris]: Our customers load offline data into Test&Target using a set of APIs. A lot of companies that have transactions completed offline leverage this capability. For example, we have financial services customers who measure test campaign success by both online loan applications as well as offline loan approval. The loan approvals are loaded into the system using the APIs. The use of vanity or custom toll-free numbers is another technique some customers use to test different messaging or calls-to-action in both the online and offline environments. In these cases, call center activity is loaded into Test&Target for campaign evaluation.

[Manoj]: How can the Test&Target framework be used with email campaigns?

[Chris]: I mentioned earlier that our tag is javascript-based. We also have a non-javascript version used for configuring test content in emails. A leading coffee chain, a national moving company, and a large technology company have all recently tested email content with great success. This technique is also really compelling since it not only results in more effective email campaigns but essentially allows the content of unopened emails in inboxes to be altered to show fresher content. People are also thinking more and more about optimizing entire experiences rather than just pages. What this means is that testing and targeting don’t occur on a single landing page or even solely on the site. Instead, it starts at the first point of contact with a customer such as in an email, continues across multiple site pages, and lasts for multiple visits. This kind of thinking reflects a real and deep focus on delivering relevance and is at the heart of Test&Target.

Labels: multivariate testing, Omniture, Web Analytics

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