Quantcast
You are here: Home / 2010 / Archives for March 2010

Twitter Growth Rate is Higher Outside of US

March 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A recent post from the Sysomos blog discusses the findings of a study they conducted focusing on the growth of Twitter and its stickiness as a service. This study was based on 1 billion tweets.
Summary of the findings below:
  • Twitter growth rate outside US is 8% which is higher than the 5% growth rate within the country.
  • Rate of contribution by new users has remained steady over past 4 months, suggesting continued user retention.
  • Users who have been using Twitter for over 9 months are becoming more and more active, reflecting strong stickiness to the service.

Filed Under: Twitter

Voice of Customer Meets Analytics & Testing

March 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By: Rand Nickerson, CEO, OpinionLab


OpinionLab announced enhanced integration of its customer-feedback offering with web analytics: voice-of-customer (VOC) tools can now integrate data from web analytics and multivariate and A/B testing platforms such as Omniture Test&Target, giving site managers the ability to layer page-specific customer feedback over analytics test results. By revealing the reasons that govern user actions, this data helps companies identify issues more efficiently and leverage key insights across the entire website or organization, exponentially increasing the ROI of every test performed.

OpinionLab’s patented, opt-in comment card is unique in its inherent compatibility with A/B and multivariate testing, and works both with or without existing testing platforms. The non-intrusive, always available feedback link collects streaming VOC data without interfering with or distracting from users’ authentic experience with pages under review.

Steps to successful integration:

  1. Identify key business objectives that can be addressed by integrating the data sources
  2. Define key data elements used in the integration: web analytics variables, testing platform variables, and OpinionLab (testing platforms are not a requirement)
  3. Activate and tag the OpinionLab comment card(s)
  4. Enable custom reports through your analytics tools. Examples include correlations between page names or test suites and ratings or open-text comments.

Screenshots of new integrations below:

Filed Under: voice of customer

5 Best Practices for Google's Content Network

March 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Advertising in Google’s content network effectively is not an easy task to accomplish, so the Google Adwords blog has created a great set of best practices to help you get started on the right foot. Some of the best practices are detailed below, but check out the Adwords blog for the complete insight.
  • Setup the same starting CPC bid as your Search campaigns: We recommend starting with the same maximum CPC bid as your Search campaign ad groups. Once AdWords has collected enough data, our smart pricing technology will automatically optimize your bids on the Content Network to give you more profitable clicks.
  • Set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your website: Install Conversion Tracking on your website to measure the sales and leads (conversions) you get from each ad group and placement.
  • Exclude poor-performing sites: Get more qualified traffic and boost conversions by excluding sites that perform poorly for your campaign, based on the number of clicks, the average CPC and the number of conversions.
  • Focus your keywords and exclude less relevant keywords: Add more keywords that describe your product and ad group theme in greater detail. Also, add negative keywords to refine your targeting and prevent impressions on irrelevant sites.
  • Expand your keyword list to get more traffic: Once you have finalized your ad group themes, use the AdWords Keyword Tool to get keyword ideas. Enter ad group theme descriptions or keywords under the ‘Descriptive words or phrases’ tab. Select the 5 to 10 most frequently searched keywords and save them to your ad group This will help to ensure that your list stays highly relevant to your ad group theme.
Filed Under: Google Adwords

MoshiMonsters.com Gaining on Club Penguin and Webkinz

March 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

According the latest post from the Hitwise blog, MoshiMonsters.com (a children’s social networking/gaming site) has started to make some noticeable traction against Club Penguin and Webkinz. Below is a summary of the post:


  • Moshi Monsters offers visitors the chance to adopt a pet monster and take care of their monster by earning a virtual currency called ‘Rox’ through solving educational puzzles that test math, logic and vocabulary skills.
  • The volume of visits to MoshiMonsters.com increased 23x within the Entertainment – Games category for the week ending March 20, 2010 as compared to the same week last year. In comparison, visits to Club Penguin increased 20% last week year-over-year while visits to Webkinz were down 41%.Last week, Google.com was the highest referral source to MoshiMonsters.com, responsible for 24% of the upstream traffic to the website and 74% of those visits were from returning visitors (meaning visited the website in the past 30 days).
  • The share of returning visitors from Facebook and YouTube, the 2nd and 3rd ranked websites for referrals were even higher at 82% and 86%, respectively.
  • As with the UK, the visitors to Moshi Monsters tend to be from affluent families that are likely be more willing to pay for a membership to use the website.

Filed Under: HitWise, Social Networking

New eBook – Demystifying Twitter Marketing

March 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Recently I helped contribute to a new eBook called Demystifying Twitter Marketing which takes a deep dive into the world of Twitter. Starting from the foundations of Social Media all the way to professional uses of Twitter such as Zappos/Starbucks, our eBook offers great insight into how you could leverage Twitter for yourself.

We have made the book available for free to read online here, otherwise for only $15 you can download the Twitter eBook for yourself to use and reference at your leisure. Download Here.
Below are some of my favorite sections of the eBook:

  • How can Twitter be used?
  • Twitter Applications for Business
  • Twitter Analytics for Marketers
  • Finding Prospective Clients using Twitter
  • Executive Tweets, Politicians, Celebrities and Brand media Tweets
  • Bringing Quality to Tweets
  • Demographics / Data
Filed Under: Twitter

North American SEM Industry to Grow 14% in 2010 – SEMPO

March 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Today SEMPO released its annual State of Search Engine Marketing Report. Key findings from the report included:
  • The rise of social media marketing budgets, although still modest compared to search engine optimization and paid search, represents the biggest opportunity for search marketers this year.
  • Around half of companies (49%) are reallocating budgets to search engine marketing from print advertising. More than a third (36%) are shifting money away from direct mail and almost a quarter are moving budgets from conferences and exhibitions (24%) and web display advertising
  • The research highlights Google’s dominance as a search engine, with 97% of companies paying to advertise on Google AdWords. Nearly three quarters of companies (71%) pay to advertise on the Google search network while 56% use the Google content network (keyword targeted)
  • More than half of advertisers (56%) and agencies (62%) say that Google keywords have become more expensive over the last year. Meanwhile, only around a third of advertisers noted an increase in Yahoo (32%) and Bing (29%) keyword costs.
  • From a range of trends and marketplace developments, company respondents are most likely to say that the personalization of search results is having an impact. Just under a third of companies (31%) say this is “highly significant” and a further 44% say it is “significant.” Agency respondents felt the “rise of local search” was the most significant emerging trend with 38% saying this was “highly significant” with 47% labeling it as “significant.”

Filed Under: sempo

iPhone Prevails in TouchScreen Comparison

March 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment
MOTO Labs tests the sensitivity and resolution of current smartphone touchscreens such as the iPhone, the Google Nexus One, the Motorola Droid, the Palm Pre, and the Blackberry Storm 2.

Filed Under: iPhone