Tracking the Growth of Competing Sites

Seach Engine Smorgasbord
Five top-ranked search engine optimization blogs and five top online marketing blogs for your reading pleasure.

1. Tracking the Growth of Competing Sites - 2007-06-26 03:01:42-04
   Post offering general tips on how to track the growth of competing sites.
   
2. Switching Page Extensions & SEO (i.e. ASP to PHP) - 2007-06-26 08:00:23-04
   A Cre8asite Forums thread asks what are the search engine optimization implications of switching from ASP to PHP? This is a fairly basic SEO question but it is a good one. This question applies to changing any URLs, not just...

   

   
   
   
3. Is Google Universal Search Harder Than One Box Results For SEOs - 2007-06-26 08:10:39-04
   Cre8asite Forums is holding a small poll of their members, asking if it is harder to optimize for Google's Universal Search as opposed to OneBox results? Right now, the majority of people feel it is not harder because it "follows...

   

   
   
   
4. Google's Modular Personalized User Page Patent Applications - 2007-06-26 08:13:17-04
   Google has come out with four patent applications on the customizable personalized user pages that they offer, with modular applications and informational pieces as the centerpoint of those pages. The document discuss the use of different approaches, such as iframes, Ajax, RSS feeds, and other ways of presenting information on that page. Perhaps the most [...]
   
5. Turning Off Google Personalized Results - 2007-06-26 08:39:05-04
   If you are logged into any Google property (Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Docs, etc.) while doing a Google search, your results may be personalized, without you really knowing it. A WebmasterWorld thread discusses just that. It is funny, because often you...

   

   
   
   
6. Future of Online PR and Reputation Management - 2007-06-26 08:50:02-04
   For this post I am using for inspiration (with attribution) a recent post headline from Steve Rubel, "The Future of PR is Participation, Not Pitching". As with most "this tactic is dead" posts, I think the reality is that while pitching the media as we know it today is in decline, it will always provide [...]
   
7. Andrea Learned: Men, Women & Philanthropy: Who Gives? - 2007-06-26 09:06:01-04
   

   I recently presented to a conference audience of amazing people in the philanthropy "business" in Cambridge, MA. A number of them were women who had been young during prime feminism-emerging times in the 60s/70s, so the comments from the audience were all the more telling.

   One woman spoke of continuing trouble convincing the men in her organization that focusing on women was worth the effort; another spoke in frustration at hearing the same conversations and issues come up at this conference as did some thirty years ago; and another questioned if she had to start to think like a man in order to "sell" marketing to women.

   As these audience members know, the fact that there is still a "sell" involved at all is ironic - since charity really begins with women. As Celinda Lake and Kellyanne Conway wrote in their book What Women Really Want, single women, in particular, are 37% more likely to be charitable donors than are single men. The authors also point to the varying profiles of female givers in general (not just single women):

   "They are business owners with new wealth, widows and other women with inherited wealth, and even middle-class women who consider charitable giving a moral and civic responsibility."

   But, even given powerful facts like the above (and from what I heard at this conference), it still seems necessary for women to switch back and forth between their own ways and "male-think" in order to motivate men in traditional industries (and beyond) to give marketing to women the time of day.

   I have been talking with a lot of men lately who have admitted that this may well be the case. Marketing to women has been presented in a very womanly way and it has not appealed - even given the strength of the opportunity - to their business brains.

   Now.. here's a question:

   Is it easier/more comfortable for women to learn and speak in a man's "language" in order to persuade them of an idea/opportunity than it is, alternatively, for men to learn and speak in a woman's "language" about something they want to convince us of? My guess is that it is easier for women.

   NOT because men in traditional industries are any less capable/persuasive, but because there remains a sort of societal taboo in a man's tapping his more feminine side - especially in the "man's world" of business. There is no such taboo on the other side. Women have had a lot more experience just forging ahead into unknown territory to get things done - and it all started with that feminist movement decades ago.

   How can we now inspire men to forge ahead into this unknown women's territory, in philanthropy and beyond? We can study this particular men's market, learn about their "customer community, " and gather and utilize their feedback - all in order to deliver the message in a way that resonates: a.k.a. marketing 101 (or transparent marketing as outlined in my book, Don't Think Pink</em>). So, that's what I am going to do over this next year - apply my marketing truths to the conundrum and see what I can discover.

   Steeped in established protocols and tradition, philanthropy may well be the final frontier for proving the women's market worth (literally and figuratively). Thanks, finally, to the input of the women who work in that realm, my new mission has bubbled to the surface. I'll keep you all posted.

   
   
   
8. Google AdWords My Client Center Bug Removes Linked Accounts - 2007-06-26 09:08:31-04
   I have been tracking a Google AdWords bug via a WebmasterWorld thread for several days now. The bug is that AdWords professionals who have linked client accounts within the My Client Center (MCC) are unlinking - so AdWords managers cannot...

   

   
   
   
9. David Reich: A New Frontier in Product Placement? - 2007-06-26 09:08:45-04
   

   Product placement became a hot topic a few years ago with the influx of placement on TV reality shows, taken to its most blatantly obnoxious peak by Donald Trump on NBC's The Apprentice.

   Product placement has been around for decades, perhaps getting most noticed by marketers back in 1982 when Steven Spielberg's little alien ET expressed his preference for Reese's Pieces. It could have been M&Ms, Milk Duds or healthy carrot sticks, but for a price -- Reese's Pieces it was.

   Product placement on TV is nothing new. Game shows have been doing it forever, with companies paying hefty fees to have their products given away as prizes. Back in the early 1980s when I was doing PR for Jaguar, we had a press fleet in Hollywood that was used primarily for "placement" of the British cat in TV shows and theatrical films.

   Originally, placement people had relationships with property masters and they made under-the-table deals so a bottle of Sprite might be in an actor's hand instead of whatever happened to be in the prop closet. But the studios caught on and now fees from product placement are often factored into a film's budget, alongside income from licensing and other marketing deals.

   Now there seems to be something new in product placement -- product placement in ads themselves. Say what?

   I'm told there's an ad running for a Dodge SUV that includes footage of guys drinking Pepsi. It doesn't apperar to be a cross-marketing tie-in. Since the Pepsi logo is shown clearly in the ad, could this be the start of a new wave of product placement?

   I can imagine some possible benefits for the adveryisers. For the primary advertiser who's buying the time, placement income eases the burden of the buy and frees up money for other media buys or other marketing efforts. For the marketer buying the placement, they get the GRPs at a lower cost than going it alone. And both companies get a break by sharing the cost of production of the spot.

   The company buying into someone else's ad might also get the reflected glory or credibility from the primary sponsor.

   I mentioned this online the other day, and Matt Dickman responded, suggesting sharing ads could work well for some categories such as the recent Nike Father's Day spot featuring Tiger Woods. He thought an ad like that, where timely delivery is relevant, could easily showcase UPS or FedEx. Ryan Karpeles recalls seeing an auto ad recently where an iPod was clearly shown, but with no specific mention by name. An example of product placement or just coincidence?

   I know the networks have rules regarding multiple sponsors in a single ad, so I don't think we'll get to the point of rampant clutter within a 30-second spot. But it does open some interesting possibilities, as well as some challenges. If done well, though, product placement in TV ads could work for all involved, including the viewing audience.

   It could be the next frontier in product placement.

   
   
   
10. Avinash Kaushik: Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever? - 2007-06-26 09:12:14-04
    

    It is quite likely that the biggest challenge for you is that you are spending tons of time, energy, and budget on web marketing efforts yet conversion rates (or ROI) are stuck in the 2 to 4 percent range, or perhaps a bit higher for your direct marketing efforts.
    

    
    You are trying really hard to figure out how to improve the performance but you are stymied by the fact that there is ton of data and you have no idea where to start. Ms. Bounce Rate to the rescue.

    Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool. It is easy to understand, hard to mis-understand and can be applied to any of your efforts.

    So what is this mysterious metric?

    In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave "instantly".

    Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.

    Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.

    It is usually measured in two ways:

    • The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
      
    • The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

    Either definition is fine, each has its own nuance. Please check what your tool's definition is.

    So how can you use it?

    Start by measuring the bounce rate for your entire website. Any decent web analytics tool will give you this as soon as you log into it. You'll understand better why your conversion rate is so low, if you have made changes over the last x amount of time then watching a trend of bounce rate is a sure way to know if the changes you are making are for the better.

    Now you are ready to dive deeper.

    #1: Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources.

    Your goal is to figure out if some sources of traffic are sending you particularly terrible traffic compared to others. In your web analytics tool simply go to the Referring URL's / Sites report and look at this number.

    

    For this site both myspace.com and simplyhired.com is not sending great traffic, while their direct marketing campaigns (#2 and #3 above) seem to be doing much better.

    Action: Do you need to revisit relationships with sites that are not sending you high quality traffic? What is the call to action that is causing people to come to your site and bounce? Are your email, affiliate, other marketing campaigns yielding low bounce rates? You get the idea.

    #2: Measure bounce rate of your AdWords, AdCenter, YSM (PPC) campaigns.

    In my humble experience this is one piece of analysis most agencies and companies overlook. Sure we measure conversion and roi and revenue, but are you measuring bounce rate for your PPC campaigns? Remember you can only convert if people are staying for more than five seconds on your website!

    

    This screenshot shows the bounce rate of traffic on each keyword compared to site average, very cool view. Sadly most traffic for this time period is performing worse than site average (so literally you could be sending money down the, well you know what).

    Action: First, stop bidding on those keywords, then do a deeper analysis of how good your landing pages are, and your other campaign attributes (maybe your campaign for refrigerators is being targeted to people only in the great state of Alaska!).

    #3: Measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages.

    Now it is entire possible that your efforts are stellar (as they usually are) but it is your website that is letting you down. There is what to do to make your case.....

    

    What pages are bouncing traffic like a perfectly formed elastic material and which are great at welcoming traffic with open arms into your website? Pull up the above report in your web analytics tool and find out.

    Action: Check to see if the right calls to action are on the page? Is the content optimally organized? If the above pages are your campaign (direct marketing or paid search campaigns) landing pages then are they delivering on the promise of the email piece you had sent out or the search keyword? Answer these questions and consider multivariate testing to improve page performance .

    Would you agree this is a awesome metric? It won't have all the answers for you, but it will help you focus very quickly on what's important, show where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting.

    As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.

    Mr./Ms. Marketer meet Ms. Sexy Metric.

    
    
    

11. Threadwatch Blog Closes Down - 2007-06-26 10:08:03-04
    The SEO community is suffering a big loss. Aaron Wall has announced on Threadwatch that he is closing down the site on Friday for a number of reasons: bad publicity, edgy news, gossip, decentralization, spam, and having other priorities in...

    

    
    
    
12. Google Reader Downtime: Solved - 2007-06-26 10:20:28-04
    Yesterday, users reported that Google Reader was not refreshing feeds and TechCrunch picked up the story. A Google Groups thread has also been monitoring the downtime, eventually with Mihai Parparita, a Google Reader Engineer, informing the community that the problem...

    

    
    
    
13. Google Maps Supports User Generated Reviews - 2007-06-26 10:34:48-04
    According to a Google Groups post, Maps Guide Brian has informed us that users can now write reviews for businesses in eleven countries. The catch: you need a Google account to do so. To write a review for a business,...

    

    
    
    
14. Seeing Geotargeted Yahoo Ads from Another Country - 2007-06-26 10:52:15-04
    Last week, I wrote about how to see geotargeted Google ads from another location. The solution, for Google, is relatively simple: add location attributes and values to the Google ad preview page. However, this time, a DigitalPoint Forums member asks...

    

    
    
    
15. Yahoo Chief Sales Officer in the US Resigns - 2007-06-26 11:15:17-04
    In what may be a response to Terry Semel's departure from Yahoo, WebmasterWorld moderator martinibuster reports that Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's Chief Sales Officer, has left the company. Search Engine Land reports that Millard will be working at Martha Stewart...

    

    
    
    
16. The Results Are In - How You're Getting Your Diggs - 2007-06-26 13:07:05-04
    

    Last week I asked you all to let me know how you get your Diggs. We received a good amount of response which included a mix of answers that covered the spectrum of possibilities. I also want to extend my gratitude to everyone that participated. I really learned a lot about the Pronet audience. Let us begin.

    If you write great content, then eventually you will get there. - JakeNudge

    Since the only reason for Digg to exist is to socially select the best contents, I think number 6 [good content] is the only one acceptable. - PELUKA

    It was obvious that the majority of the responders believed that good content was enough to get Diggs. The tough thing about Digg at this point however, is that there is so much content being submitted, it can be hard to get enough people to look at your article. (This is why their planned friend recommendation system will be so important)

    Good Content alone may be the ideal, but I don't think it will ever be the case no matter what Digg tries to do. Digg is too much like the real world. People who already get attention or have the resources to get attention will get it. - Chris Sandberg

    A few people stated that supplementing an articles submission by using a mix of the available methods, whether shady or not, are what is needed. I think that this can be done in a non-intrusive manner, but seldom is. Many times, people will spam links or beg for Diggs using email, Facebook, or IM. My favorite comment of the discussion spoke out against some of the shadier methods of promotion.

    I tend to think paying people to Digg is pretty unethical, but I don't see any problem with letting someone know your content made it onto Digg, assuming it's a one or two time thing. If "friends" were to start spamming me with "Digg this" requests that'd be... well... spam. - Jeremy Steele

    Even well-known Diggers can get caught up in the trap of forced promoting rather than letting the Digg system work organically. As Jeremy stated above, sending repeated messages with "Digg this" is spam, plain and simple. Please don't spam.

    
    
    
17. Don't Miss the Hollywood Opening Tonight - 2007-06-26 15:12:01-04
    

    I am moderating a panel of film industry icons next week during the LA Film Festival. You can join in during a live online session - I want lots of Duct Tape readers asking questions! The event signals the kick-off of an aggressive effort by OPEN to build an online small business community that features a collection of ideas, expertise, and resources you need to grow your business.

    Event Date: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - Time: 7:30 pm PST
    Panelists: Sydney Pollack, Lawrence Bender, and Nancy Meyers

    Get your questions ready ? you?ll have the rare opportunity to submit questions for the panelists and simultaneously connect with other small business owners through a live chat.

    This event can only be viewed online ? sign up for free today.

    
    
18. 8 Simple Rules For Social Media Marketing in Business to Business Markets - 2007-06-26 15:23:23-04
    B2B folks tend to struggle with social media marketing. After repeatedly being asked the question of how b2b folks can use social media marketing, I've come up with a handful of rules that apply. If you're not willing to comply, chances are you should stick to direct marketing and cold calling people. 1. Get on the [...]
    
19. Does LinkedIn Really Need to Worry About Facebook? - 2007-06-26 19:42:08-04
    

    When the news first broke that LinkedIn would be releasing a developer API, both the way they marketed this move and the way the community responded to it seems somewhat unreasonable. LinkedIn is a specialized social network and they shouldn't really be worrying about Facebook, at least not yet.

    Chairman and founder of the business oriented social networking site, Reid Hoffman told Dan Farber that the site would be releasing developer APIs so that it can better compete with Facebook by becoming more of a platform. Nick O'Neill further tells us that since Facebook opened up their site about a month ago, many people have been reporting that they are receiving more and more professional contact requests through this site rather than LinkedIn. First of all I find it hard to believe that this is a large concern and even if there are statistics to prove otherwise, this should only be a short-term worry.

    LinkedIn is known for having a clear focus in mind. The site doesn't aim to do many things at once, rather is strictly a business-oriented social network and is damn good at that. And keeping that in mind, even if Facebook was to launch some sort of competitor, just take a look at the sites' demographics and you tell me which one you would rather be a part of for professional social networking.

    LinkedIn Demographics

    The site has over 11 million users including recruiters from venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Greylock, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. The average LinkedIn user is 39 years old and makes $139,000 a year.

    Source

    Facebook Demographics

    Though the site is slowly trending towards an older crowd a large number of the site's over 25 million users are still in the 18-24 year range with the average user making an of $76,000 a year (high-end estimate).

    Source

    I think LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke had it right when he said, "We want LinkedIn to go wherever your business network would go. If it's social, we'll leave that to Facebook. But if it's about money, then it's LinkedIn." And that's what they should be thinking about.

    
    
    
20. Website Sustainability: What Percent of Your Traffic Comes From Search Engines? - 2007-06-26 20:10:28-04
    If you have a site that earns far beyond your living costs, and it is almost entirely reliant on search for income, then one of the best moves you can make for the sustainability of that site is to lower the percentage of traffic that comes from search by creating other traffic sources.