I really find some of the newer AdWords/AdSense ads spooky!!!!!  Look at this picture of my last blog post on difference between how visits are counted in two web analytics packages.

I just want to make it clear I have nothing to do with that picture - it’s being streamed by AdSense and in this case - it’s clearly not applicable to my post but it did get clicked on.  IN other words, the Advertising is effective in getting me jarred and clicking on the Ad but because it’s upsetting me to see the picture - I don’t think it you’d get much of a positive response (I guess it depends on who the picture is of).

However, the possibility exists that by running a picture next to my blog post - people who read the post will associate the picture with my post and that can have un-intended consequences of deminishing the value they put on the post.  

If I had my way I would not allow photos to appear as ads right near the top of the blog post - it conveys the impression it’s either the author of the blog post or the subject of the post.

For my last blog in the month of August 2006 I’m covering the difference between two popular web analytics packages in how they define  "visits" to a site.

No two web analytics programs will count traffic in exactly the same way - and usually, even two versions of the same web analytics programs count traffic differently.  I was reminded of that today when I got hold of my web stats for another blog during all of August using AwStats.

At the same time, I started using Performacing about 2 weeks ago.

While I started the Art blog 2 months ago and the traffic is beginning to pick up - the two packages I’m comparing count visits differently; the top numbers are from AwStats while the bottom is from Performacing.

Honestly, which numbers would you follow?  Why?

Avinash Kaushik has one of the best posts on Google Analytics and AdWords that I’ve read; he cleared up some concerns many are having with allowing Google to collect your Web Analtyics and PPC Advertising.

Here’s the main reason why Google would have a hard time making sense of your Analytics and PPC data:

"Most of you who read this blog, and I, actually work with Analytics tools and I think we can safely say that this is a non-trivial challenge to overcome even when we use dedicated analytics tools and just for one company. Think integration of WebTrends and Omniture and ClickTracks etc with our PPC data and getting even half decent insights fast enough. It is really complicated, no matter how you look at it.

If we can’t even do it well for one company, ours, for Google to do it for the rest of the world and all the different business models and acquisition strategies is a non-trivial challenge.  Even though there are examples of extremely efficient arbitrage, specifically in the foreign currency markets, I am skeptical that it is “easy” for Google to find “insights” and do so in a timely manner to over charge us and do so while balancing that against real ROI Google would get for itself.

I also left a comment on Avinash’s blog saying I’m not really worried about Google merging Google Analytics and AdWords to get more information about each user, for the reasons mentioned above.

Interesting concern about new tools being created to obscure your search clickstream after the AOL’s search engine debacle. 

Right now - hardly anyone uses such tools - so there’s nothing much to worry about - but what if a lot of people started to use a new, and completely valid solution called TrackMeNot.

"It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles."

That would put a monkey wrench into many of the keyword research tools .  I don’t think this will actually grow to become much of problem - you’d have to have several million people using TrackMeNot before results were affected.

Sometimes it costs more to be right than to be wrong; often it’s better to allow your customer to be right even when they could be wrong and sometimes you need to accept something that’s faked in order to win in a larger way.

I like Seth Godin’s post for establishing a way to deal with fake coupons (esp since Google will now be making them searchable online):

"When I was in business school, we did the McDonald’s case. Part of our preparation was to go to the nearby McDonald’s with a stopwatch and clipboard. We walked in the door and stood just long enough to get noticed. Boy did those guys hop to attention. Then we went to another McDonald’s and performed the following experiment (please, please do not try this at home, just take my word for it). We ordered a milkshake and a Big Mac. Ate half the Big Mac. Drank half the milkshake. We put the Big Mac remainder into the milkshake cup and went to the counter, "I’m sorry, I can’t drink this shake, there’s a Big Mac in it." They gave us a new one.

Why?

Because McDonald’s didn’t want counter people making decisions about who to say "no" to. It was worth the expense of humoring idiots like my study group for the brand power of knowing that counter people didn’t alienate people on a sliding scale."

All this started when a Starbucks coupon got redistributed too often and Starbucks decided not to honor it any longer.

"Check out this sign posted at Starbucks today. It reads:

"An email offering a free Starbucks iced coffee beverage was distributed by Starbucks partners (employees) with instructions to forward it to their group of friends and family. Unfortunately, it has been redistributed beyond the original intent and modified beyond Starbucks control. Regretfully this email offer will no longer be valid at any Starbucks location effective immediately."

If I was going to embarrass employees and ick out patrons by design, I am not sure I could have done better. The McDonaldsization of Starbucks continues."

Seth’s second rule seems to work the best here:

"Rule #2: if something gets out of hand, and you made a promise, better figure out a way to keep it. This sign is an ineffective response.  If it were my call, I’d take advantage of the "one coupon per customer" presumption and put a little tick on the buyer’s driver’s license or similar… just enough to slow down the particularly egregious scammers (who in this case aren’t really scammers. Starbucks asked for it).

So find a way to validate your customer, even if they come into your store/business with a fake coupon.

I just preordered a copy of Brand Simple by Allen P. Adamson (Managing Director, Landor Associates NY)  - heard about the book from MarketingShift.  

Usually, I get a gut feeling when a book is good - I got that feeling about The Long Tail, way before it was out and pre-ordered it.   I’ll doing the same thing here - as I want and need a good book about branding.

MarketingShfit posts that very short Online Video ads are more effective than longer ones:

"……….insightful analysis on ClickZ about consumer tolerance of ads, which shows that 5 second ads will likely be the way to go.

Consumer irritation grows quickly after 5 seconds, so using short spots in between free videos for Lost or Grey’s Anatomy would be a beneficial mix. Also, the same short ads could be used on TV, as the writer points out that DVR users often rewind to see the last few seconds of ads before a show resumes when skipping past ads. "

I have been telling clients (and anyone who’ll listen) that HitWise provides more precision in search traffic measurement (to sites other than your own) than any other competitive analysis product.  Hitwise was able to show:

"The market share of visits to Kayak has increased by 64% in the past 6 months (week ending 8/26/06 vs. week ending 2/25/06). In the US Travel Report we showed the downstream categories from Kayak, which for the most recent week were Travel Agencies and Transport sites (includes airlines and car rental sites). "

One of the things that is HitWise does - categorize traffic by industry segment (both upstream, or traffic coming to Kayak, and downstream, or traffic leaving Kayak and going somewhere else- this kind of segmentation is fundamental to understanding the impact of traffic.  For example, downstream traffic (leaving Kayak) - 75% of it went to another travel site:

And half of that 75% went to a Travel Agency (38.83%) while very little of it went to book Cruises!  What that might mean, is people don’t want to book a cruise vacation using Kayak - but they will book a flight or Kayak will be effective in routing traffic to other travel agencies.  One of the things I might question is calling Orbitz, CheapTickets and Travelocity travel agencies - as I think of them more as online booking sites where as I would call Liberty Travel - a travel agency.  

No matter - it’s partly in how  Hitwise can categorize traffic of sites you don’t own or have analytics to (99.99999%) that makes it worth buying for businesses that need percision data analysis.

Another chart shows that HitWise is feeding Orbitz, CheapTicket, Travelocity, etc by doubling the traffic to such sites from 6 months earlier.

If Hitwise could not categorize the upstream and downstream traffic, it would be almost useless - it’s power is it does this

But lets face it - the reason for that (and it’s not in the article) has got to be:

There’s more AdSense advertising by those sites on Kayak - and then it makes total sense that Kayak would have doubled traffic to say….Orbitz.   

Now this is where it gets really interesting from a Web Analyst point of view - if Orbitz were to connect traffic from Kayak.com to a doubling of conversions (or at least more of them than before the advertising) - using internal analytics AND HitWise data, it will valadate both the source of traffic and the value of that traffic.

In other words, to get the fullest value from HitWise, you need someone to pull the site conversion data and match it up with the HitWise data.  With out that piece, the tool is still good as a competitive analysis and forcasting tool but not as a conversion analysis - which it can also be.

LeeAnn’s article goes a great deal farther than you’d get using free tools - but stops short of where it could go had it been married to say…Orbitz own site analytics.  In fact, I personally mentioned such a solution to HitWise at SESNY06 to HitWise.  At that time I was connected with a project to merge industry segment data by reverse IP lookup to HitWise’s categorization of traffic from industry segments going to competitor sites.  With the HitWise data AND…….my own site analytics merged….you’d have the keys to kingdom.

For example: you know how much traffic your site gets (because you can look at your own web analytics)  and you can compare what HitWise shows as your traffic and come up with a good idea of what your competitors traffic really is.

You can do a lot fo stuff like that with HitWise - yet the full value of the product seems to be largly unrealized - judging by stories I have heard of people who buy HitWise then only use it a couple of times a year.   

Lee Olden came up with 2 social media optimization tools to make it easier  to share and promote of your content.

"The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

What’s different about this tool from other social bookmarking tools and our own previous version is that the social bookmark links are presented in a drop down menu to save screen space."

I have not tried this tool yet - looks interesting! 

The next tool is a RSS Button Maker

"The second tool is the RSS Button Maker. You can see the result of this tool by putting your cursor over the orange RSS icon at the upper right of your screen on this blog. A list of the top RSS readers folds out so you can subscribe using your favorite reader.

Both of these tools help conserve screen real estate and also help to socialize blogs."

I would consider both tools to be "enablers" of social bookmarking, social media optimization and worth trying as often little things can drive more qualified traffic to your site.

It sounds like the article in MarketingProfs on  Creating Branded Keywords and Driving Their Search Demand Through Buzz by Jeremy Swiller goes well with many of the Buzz Marketing posts I’ve made over the last 6 months so I thought it would be worthwhile to go over the article and add my input.

"Creating branded keywords is no different from creating a need for your product, except you’re packing the punch of your business offering into an easy-to-remember phrase. The real benefit lies in developing a new channel of revenue based on a need that only your company can fulfill. "

Want to point out that branded keywords convert much better anyway and I had found this particularly true for my architectural clients who often sell house plans on a keyphase containing their name (which is part of their brand).  I have seen this over and over again.

"…Web sites that specialize in travel, mortgages, or consumer electronics should take particular note of this tactic. "  Or…."Sells unique, valuable, beautiful, one-of-a-kind products… that you and five other people have heard of".

Ok, that would go along with what I just wrote about Architects as house plans go along with mortgages as part of the home building industry.  Also, one of my friends’ wife has a side business selling dishwasher covers, this would also apply to her.

"Reasonably estimates that it’s going to be a while before your Web site cracks Google’s top 10 for highly competitive terms such as "digital camera" and/or your marketing plan requires a high ROAS on a PPC campaign. A newly branded term would have no competition, but it could quickly have search demand if promoted properly. "

Also true; but you’d need to create a large enough demand to drive significant traffic - lets’ see what Jeremy has in mind.

Here’s where it gets tricky - you first have to determine if what your unique "branded" term is going to be and what attribute of your product or service it promotes - that’s not that easy and it might be a good idea to get help with it and not try to come up with the branded term  yourself because:

The keywords needs to be easy to say and remember and support your brand and there are naming rules that seem to help (ie:a keyword such as "triple-trimmed steaks" would support the keyword term "steaks." This is beneficial for your SEO campaigns). 

Other considerations suggest hiring a professional branding expert to come up with right branded term for your business.

In terms of creating Buzz the article suggests you first "identify those individuals and help educate them on your niche within your marketplace"  - in other words, you need to do research first.  Once you figure out who the influential are then you have to reach out to them and get their support (that’s not easy for everyone to do - some people are better at it than others).   The author suggests using Targeted Press Releases to reach and engage influentials.

Also, reaching out to other bloggers is an important Buzz activity - esp to blogs that link to your competitors:

"Bloggers: This tactic is similar to courting other media, and it requires some planning and thought. Determine which blogs are linking to your competitors and check the context. You’re looking for bloggers who are constructive, but honest. Become frequent readers of their blogs (if you aren’t already), and be sure to constructively respond to posts when appropriate. Ask industry-related questions and show a genuine interest in the subject matter. When applicable, use your branded keyword to answer a posted question."

The rest is just standard SEM, doing targeted media buys, etc.   I think the part with reaching out to other bloggers that link to your competitors and have good quality content is the most interesting idea that came out of this article by Jeremy Swiller.