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Another bit of must-see-internet-tv. In this one Avinash Kaushik, who is one deep thinker when it comes to Web Analytics, presents his ideas of how analytics should be used and what they can and should provide to web marketers and companies doing business online.

This is not a review of charts and graphs and statistics. It’s as relevant to any online marketer or business manager as it is a challenge to any web analyst. This is forward and aggressive thinking that is ultimately less about web analytics as its now generally practiced and perceived and more about taking the core of how analytics should be practiced and incorporating it into an integrated approach to doing business online.

In fact, not long after it begins Avinash proclaims web analytics as dead. And then he builds a case for its replacement, something he calls Web Insights which attempts to focus on actionable information as opposed to interesting data. He goes on to describe how he executes against this goal at Intuit (where he is Senior Manager for Research and Analytics) and share some very impressive examples.

It will be interesting to see which, if any, of the current crop of analytics vendors can take the challenge Avinash suggests and connect their data (and charts and tables) to a broader set of fundamental business issues. Right now they all seem justifiably buried in wish-lists for more powerful tools on the analytics side, and it’s hard to see anyone really moving towards insight (not that they don’t all already love that word).

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Enough of reading my thoughts on the Eisenbergs talking about Waiting for Your Cat to Bark. Through the magic of the internet, you can listen to Jeffrey Eisenberg present a 1-hr talk on the subject. Not to be missed.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most web sites aren’t really designed for anybody. They’re built primarily to present the information the company (or marketing dept.) thinks is important to communicate. To the degree that users are considered at all, they’re all lumped into one mythical average user, who possesses a jumble of approximate desires. At design meeting you hear phrase like: “people are going to want…” and “we should give them…”.

:: Note: This post is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review or catch up on the last 13 chapter reviews ::

The other extreme is the idea of personalization, where a web site conforms to the individual needs of each user, as expressed in both past behaviors and explicit choices. The problem of course is that personalization is easy with things like online banking and nearly impossible in most other areas; take online travel reservations as one example. My travel habits could be very different between business and personal travel; the urgency of the trip might change my willingness to fly my not-favorite-airline; and the start-time for my morning meeting might decide how important a four-star-hotel is vis-à-vis the hotel’s location.

Plus, how many questions would I have to answer to provide a really complete picture of my travel preferences? And how granular would the sites data categorization have to be to really adjust for every possible personalization combination? The answer to both is “too many”.

“an archetype, a representative of a typical segment of your audience…. Each (sic) represents the different modes customers exhibit when they interact with you… Personas are standing for the various angles from which your customers view their problems and your solutions…Personas give you an in-depth, personal glimpse at your customers and their personal preferences without having to ask every customer to divulge that in-depth personal information.

Personas enable you to segment your audience, usually into a very manageable number of groups and yet still provide those groups with a vastly better experience than if you’d have averaged them all together with a fraction of the effort (and undoubtedly a lot more success) then if you’d gone for the utopian dream of full personalization.

In Chapter 15 we get a lot more detail about personas and the ways that PA defines and uses them somewhat differently than other design and development methods. The distinction lies in the use of personas not just as demographic representations, but also to ‘stand in for buying modalities’ and cover the ‘angles of approach’ of users to content.

What does that mean? Consider the travel examples above: A demographic-only persona wouldn’t account for the differences between a quick business trip and a lengthy personal vacation. People act differently depending on the situation, their goals, how far they are along a process, and other factors. These factors have to be accounted for because they change user needs and reactions.

Remember that personas are ‘typicals, not averages’. Typical visitors are complex and multidimensional, and their activities are impacted by who they are, what they’re doing, their past experiences, and more. By adding these layers to our personas we increase their power and precision – at least in terms of how we interact with the people in the groups these personas represent.

Fleshing out personas in this way naturally narrows the range of visitors to which they apply. Are we risking being too specific and thereby leaving too many visitors behind? I think the Eisenbergs would argue that if you don’t get specific, you’re leaving everyone behind.

In practice, creating these rich and ‘real world’ personas is a very engaging process and almost instantly resets the way everyone involved starts thinking about the content of the website. Just about everyone knows someone fitting each of the defined persona types, and personal anecdotes help prove these personas do indeed well describe real people.

With these people in mind, we’re able to have ‘empathy within the business for the persona’s wants, desires, needs, and problems’ as the book describes. At that point you can begin to build detailed scenarios for interacting with them. And it’s these scenarios that we’ll actually model in the process of using Persuasion Architecture to redesign a website.

Several upcoming chapters will dive deeper into personas and their psychographics, modalities, and angles. This gives us time to allow the idea of ‘typicals not averages’ to sink in and begin changing the way we think about our online communications.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google is now displaying their 'invalid click' numbers within the Adwords interface. (Yahoo, that's your queue.) It's a step in the right direction and they're to be congratulated. But it will not diminish the issue or the debate, which I suspect is their desire.

The reason is that 'invalid clicks' aren't the problem. 'Invalid clicks' is a term they made up to define the click fraud they know about or can reasonably detect. It's the manipulation of "right to life" and the parsing of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" rolled into one.

Much of today's blog coverage gives them the headlines their PR folks want, making it sound like they've solved a problem. But as the comments here point out, they have not.

So we have invalid clicks, and fraudulent clicks, and Andrew over at Traffick adds one more asking why they charge for 'short visits'. While in some cases that can be an indication of fraud, certainly other traffic sources yield short visits so it isn't a conclusive indicator. It does however demonstrate it was a 'worthless click'. Maybe one day we'll get that stat in Adwords.

Clearly this topic is not going away.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the latest post in his Excellent Analytics series, Avinash Kaushik demonstrates how one slight change in the labeling of the data series in a report can transform it from being cold and impersonal into something meaningful with which business managers can 'connect'.

His example is changing the row label for 'Visitors of 3 pages or less' to the more descriptive 'Flirters' which helped the people working on his web site (he works for Intuit) to better envision the situation and more actively focus on potential improvements. (Read the whole post for more details and a better description of the results.)

Two of the dirty-little-secrets of the analytics world are that the distance between interesting and actionable is often great, and that half-a-dozen charts and tables can make anyone's eyes glaze over and yet most report-sets deliver dozens. Avinash wisely sets it as the analysts job to make the data relevant and his choice of the word 'connect' as the goal is perfect.

Bonus Link: Avinash recently interviewed Matt Belkin, VP of Best Practices, at Omniture.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The economy is not yet based on conversations or experiences. So what are we to make of it when Dell lowers earning guidance, takes a hit on Wall St. and some of the leading proponents of ‘life-after-marketing’ take credit?

First the facts. Dell lowered Q2 revenue guidance from $14.4 Billion to $14 Billion. Dell saw 11.6 percent growth in this quarter, remaining the largest mfg of PC’s in the world. DELL stock has lost about 33% of its value thus far in 2006.

Is it even remotely possible to attribute $400 million in unrealized expectation to Dell Hell? If so, how do you explain nearly 12% growth? Isn’t it far more likely that the customer service issues are just one tiny factor in a massively complex situation? Do we need to pretend we’ve toppled Dell with a couple of blog posts just to build confidence that we’re on the right track in the blogosphere?

I firmly believe that companies are best served by engaging in open conversations with their markets. And that we’re seeing the beginnings of a fundamental power-shift based on the ease with which consumers can share experiences and opinions, and discover the experiences and opinions of others. But it’s the beginning of the beginning, and most of the consumers in the world and most of the business results in the world are as yet completely unaffected.

BL Ochman, who I swear I really admire and usually agree with, implies that both the problem and the solution are found in conversations and experiences. In particular, she suggests that the recent stock decline is indicative of the company’s customer service results. But a look at a 10-year chart shows DELL share price going straight up, except for the bubble-burst and the past 12-months. Of course, nobody believes that Dell’s customer service quality was steadily improving and the suddenly crashed last summer.

For explanations as to the recent problems, Wall St. offers a few other possibilities:

… 85 percent of its business comes from commercial entities, and those organizations buy PCs in upgrade cycles, said Charles Smulders, an analyst with Gartner. The last cycle started around 2002, three or so years after companies started buying PCs ahead of the perceived Y2K problems. It's now coming to an end, and business customers aren't expected to upgrade again until they've done extensive testing of Microsoft's Windows Vista… Dell also suffers from a dependency on desktops and U.S. sales, Smulders said. Desktop PCs account for 36 percent of Dell's overall revenue… (but) commercial desktop shipments are expected to decline by 4.5 percent this year… {via News.com]

Scoble attributes Dell’s slide to the fact that his son got a new power supply at the Apple Genius Bar over at the mall, and Dell obviously couldn't replicate that. But in his comments he relates another story: “I had a Dell go out at work once and they just sent a whole new one. It took a business day.”

Away from this debate, Nick Carr uses the Dell numbers to explore a more interesting thesis; that the direct model offers cost efficiencies in production and sales but inefficiencies in support. This may be true in terms of real hardware support issues, but what if Dell tapped its user base for a support wiki and amazing ‘shared experience search engine’? I gotta believe a lot of what makes Dell users unhappy are things that other Dell users know how to solve. If the company centrally delivered the infrastructure to support it, user-generated content may be able to turn around a lot of this mess fairly quickly.

Since I seem to be defending Dell a lot recently, I’ll disclose that I own a Dell laptop, build my own home PC’s with parts from NewEgg, and we’ve bought a dozen Dell PCs and laptops at Commerce360 recently. I’ve had one customer service issue, with a new T620 that died a week after birth, and it was replaced rather promptly (I even talked them out of a component upgrade in the process). I haven’t owned any Dell stock in at least 5 years.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Do users of Google Conversion Tracking or Google Analytics have more of their 'invalid clicks' go uncharged or refunded? That thought occured to me today in thinking more about the Tuzhilini Report, in particular the section discussing 'What Google Knows'. Dr. Tuzhilini makes it clear that Google gains tremendous advantage in fighting click fraud when they have access to post-click information.

So does this advantage result in tangible improvements on an individual account basis? I'd really like Google to answer that question.

BTW: Matt Cutts took up the topic today, as did WebMetricsGuru (who created a quick summary).

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone interested in paid search or click fraud should take the time to read the Tuzhilin Report (pdf) which is a 47-page document written by an independant party to a recent court case concerning click fraud.

It's a complete overview of paid search and an extensive report on the conceptual problem of click fraud and the steps Google takes to combat it. The author had insider-access at Google and covers the topic with a depth that Google themselves generally doesn't.

I'm sure there will be in-depth analysis of this report over the next few days, I'll update this post with links of the best posts I come across.

Bonus Link: A CYA post from Google regarding CEO Eric Schmidt's 'it's a self correcting problem' clickfraud comment. For another view, some snarky but true thoughts from Mark Cuban.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

HuckABuck is a new meta-search engine with the twist that it co-mingles results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, Digg, and Delicio.us - and lets you adjust the priorities among those engines. One would assume other engines would be added eventually.

This is far from the first meta-search engine or twist on the idea. But it reminded me of a trend that I think is one of the most important in search, and yet doesn't get a lot of mindshare amidst the Google Algo Updates and link-spam discussions.

In the video world, the fall of the 'Big 3' has been exhaustively discussed under the 'tag' Exploding Television. In search, I think we're similarly coming out of the era of giants, but the fact has been obscured by the fact that the giants themselves are still growing unlike in the TV world where they were shrinking rapidly.

Google and the other engines themselves are contributors, with the 'invisible' tab splitting search into web|images|news|shopping|blogs etc. Vertical search engines such as those which have appeared in shopping, jobs, travel, weblogs, and other areas are another important component. Desktop widgets, toolbars (some of which aren't from the search giants), search built into the operating system, and a wide range of other solutions continue the fragmentation.

UPDATE: Blake from Huckabuck left a comment that pointed out perhaps the most dramatic explosion - personalized customized search. If each persons results are based on their past history, preferences, social network affiliations, or whatever, then the concept of being #1 on Google is really shot.

This is important to the online marketer because just as Tide can no longer 'talk to america' with 30-seconds on the evening news, you can no longer 'reach your market' by ranking #1 on Google. You've got to figure out everywhere that your category, brand, and company might be looked for and get yourself ranked and positioned in as many of those places as you can. This dramatically changes the nature of the task and of the resources you should put against it.

In practice many people don't even think about search in terms of the 'Big 3' but rather just focus on Google and take what they get from Yahoo and MSN. But it's time to re-define search to include all starting points and put the engines in proper perspective. Yes they drive the majority of traffic now, but as the shopping and travel verticals have seen it takes only 2-3 years for the 2ndary sources to become very significant.

There are several other important implications to this trend, which I'll comment on in future posts. Leave your thoughts on 'exploding search' in the comments.

[via Seth Godin]

UPDATE: The Huckabuck guys posted their own response and comments on the issues raised here over in their own blog.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There is an interesting thing about the following bit of news, which in-and-of-itself matters to almost nobody: "Jason Calacanis has offered $12,000/yr to up to 50 people in return for their 'social bookmarking' rights."

Jason is offering to pay (formerly volunteer) critics for their work, and hire them away from his competitor. Both of which are smart. You can read the details elsewhere, but if he's right about the impact the ROI will make this one of the least expensive marketing programs in internet history. It's interesting because of how it continues to blur the line between amateurs and professionals, the step it takes towards valuing 'user generated content', and the formalization of buying friends to influence people. Despite all this, it's hard to see a rational argument against it.

Think about some simple related actions. For example, how much would it cost to get the Quarterback, Prom Queen, Top Geek, Biggest Pot-head, School Wierdo, Debate Team Captain, Girl-most-likely-to-become-a-porno-star and 10 other influencials at every high-school in America to move their MySpace pages to a new service? Wouldn't that be a great investment? Would MySpace make a counter-offer?

In recent years we've seen all kinds of bribes go directly to consumers - cash-back sites, free-ipods, point-programs of all flavors. Why shouldn't influencers share in the bounty? As a marketer, there's an acceptable cost of customer acquisition - who cares where the money goes?

Of course, there are serious implications in terms of trust - which is a frequently discussed topic in the world of word--of-mouth marketing. But in any case, the pace of radical changes in the roles, rewards, and power-base of nearly every player in the marketing sphere continues to accelerate.

>>> Some good posts on the Calacanis offer and its ramifications : Rough Type, Thomas Hawk, Read/Write, TechCrunch, Business 2.0, HMM

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The goal of establishing a 'relationship' is often cited as the goal or justification for many old and new online marketing techniques. The deservedly revered ClueTrain Manifesto famously said made 'conversations' another goal. I've never really stopped to think about the differences between them (which may explain a lot about me) but in marketing terms, this post about anonymity as it occurs in those two situations made me ponder just that distinction.

The world is a much better place when vendors and customers can engage in quick, reliable, secure, semi-anonymous transactions.

Explaining the remark on Rough Type, the author further said:

"semi-anonymous" was meant to indicate knowing enough about the customer so that the transaction can occur, e.g. you need to know that the customer's credit is good, but not that he's the guy who watches only three Netflix DVDs per year.

He is making a specific point about the distance a customer might want, which is a perspective marketers don't often consider when throwing these terms around.

Playing with the metaphor further, a conversation lasts only as long as it's mutually beneficial. A relationship almost always has periods, if not what seems like eternities, where that is clearly not true. So it's not surprising marketers want to establish relationships, but it's probably a lot more practical and realistic to focus on conversations first. Especially since a relationship of any kind that doesn't at least start with some good conversation is questionable to begin with.

There's a lot to be said against taking any of the marketing metaphors we use too literally, but the power of specific words, in practice, is undeniable. At the moment 'conversation marketing' is my favorite summary of the Cluetrain-and-beyond approach to creating customers. The links above brought that into a little clearer focus.

PS: I coincidentally ordered a copy of a book called 'Conversation Marketing' just two days ago (and I like their blog), and will report back as to how this sways my thinking.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was only a matter of time for Google to transform and recycle its SEO organic algorithm and apply it to the methods placed within their “Google Quality Score”. This latest tactic of analyzing landing pages which are tied to a specific campaign and/or adgroup, is just another way to mold as well as financially reward its (SEM) paid search marketers using their Google Adwords program.

To achieve a high quality score, the marketer needs to create campaigns/adgroups with a strong focus on Relevancy. Basically every step in the setup process needs to be relevant and targeted to a specific message, brand, category or service. This process begins with the initial grouping of highly targeted keywords, followed by multiple Ads/Creatives written with the same targeted message with keywords embedded in the ads and completing the process, a landing page which not only applies the same targeted message, but also uses the same basic SEO techniques which are used at the organic level to communicate that message. These characteristics use the same fundamentals of SEO such as a relevant Title, tag, and H1-H5 header tags, relevant content on the page and well-defined and relevant anchor text.

Of course, this latest trend will not only motivate Search engine marketers at all levels to run back to their computers and re-evaluate all of their campaigns looking at their landing pages as well as their Ads/Creatives and keyword groups, but it will undoubtedly affect marketing budgets where improvements can be made at every aspect of the campaigns from average position down to Cost per click and Click-Thru Rate.

For marketers conversion is the name of the game, and for searchers (and engines) it's all about relevance. These changes can help everyone get more of what they're after.

Greg Meyers is a Search Marketing Manager at Commerce360

Posted by Greg Meyers at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Affiliate Summit East 2006 gave merchants the ability spend quality face-time with affiliates, as well as the staff from networks that may power their programs, such as LinkShare, CJ, Performics, and Share-A-Sale. This important process helps solidify relationships and boost camaraderie- essential for a business that is so virtually oriented.

In addition to those priceless connections, Orlando’s agenda gave merchants the chance to answer some of the questions that continue to dominate discussions during weekly affiliate strategy meetings.

The following are the Top 5 Questions I think “Merchants” could have effectively addressed during the show:

1) Are Coupon Site Affiliates Bad? Panel participants in the session “Debate: Benefits and Liabilities of Coupon Affiliates” hashed out the pros and cons of coupons sites. And, as is usually the case, there is not a simple yes/no answer to this question. David Lewis of ThisNext and 77Blue, represented the CON side. He said it best with his assertion that he’s not against all coupon sites, just bad coupon sites. Coupon affiliates, according to David, can be thought of as “value-added pre-sellers.” He suggested that those sites that add real value are most likely asking themselves how what they’re doing benefits their consumers. Kudos to David for encouraging all of us to ask that question, every day.

Merchants and good coupon affiliate sites need to work together to make sure that codes are not expired, and that offers represent the brand appropriately (something that is answered uniquely for each merchant). The idea of using exclusive coupons for specific affiliates was also suggested as a positive approach – and one that we use often.

The bottom line is that there is no one definitive strategy for working with coupon sites. But I can tell you that whatever policies you decide, it is important that you publicize your stance on key issues in MORE than just your T&Cs. That means – telling affiliates in all the touch point areas (Create Links, Join Programs, Splash Pages) how you prefer to work with coupon sites.

2) Should We Have A Corporate Blog? Dave Taylor , Principal at Intuitive Systems, Inc. gave the crowd blogging best-practices during his session on Tuesday. With great humor, and great ideas, Dave’s presentation would lead any savvy merchant to answer this one with a resounding yes. His follow up newsletter summed it up:

“…Your company won't get to realize its long-term marketing and sales goals without coming out of the cellar, without meeting the varied residents of the blogosphere and engaging them in your quest and efforts. Not crassly, not like a stick over someone's head, but subtly, with respect for the existing values and interests. Done right, it can be astonishingly successful and an example of how your time and effort can often be far, far more valuable than any specific monetary investment.” (Blogsmart News, 7/13/06)

3) Should We Be Using RSS Feeds as a Tool for Affiliates? Brent Hill, VP of Business Development of FeedBurner, proposed two scenarios for growth within the intersection of RSS Feeds and Affiliate Marketing. The first is that more merchants will use RSS to communicate offers between merchants and affiliates. The items in the feed will be offers and those items will be rendered by affiliates as advertisements, updated automatically.

Brent also brought up another great scenario in which Merchants (or publishers) will pay affiliates for subscriber acquisition to their feeds. Brent suggested that affiliates will more and more be getting in the business of “audience development” for feeds.

Both very compelling ideas, and answering this one as Merchant X, I’d say that it’s worth the investment to get your tech team on this one.

4) Is there value to Pay-Per-Click affiliates? This is a hot-topic for every merchant I know, and the issue was well-covered in Orlando. Of course, the answer to this one is- yes! Like almost every other topic on this list, the key is to be strategic about how you execute these campaigns. Rob Key from Converseon described the new emerging era in the paid-search / affiliate marketing continuum: “The Era of Shelf Space.” We need to all get beyond the contentious “Taliban Era” (as he puts it). The real value of PPC affiliates lies in a merchant’s ability to maximize real estate on SERPs (search engine result pages). Merchants should be promoting policies that strategically set bid limits on keywords, hand-pick trusted affiliates to work in partnership with, and utilize select content affiliates for “long-tail” keywords (just to name a few).

5) Are there any innovative, new affiliates out there? I hear this a lot from merchants, and I have to say that it is a very depressing question. Would it be fair for affiliates to ask whether there any merchants out there that aren’t asshats?

The answer to this one is yes, and Affiliate Summit proves it. New and exciting affiliates emerge on the scene every day. Let us not forget that the affiliate channel is often the most efficient of all marketing channels. However, that does not mean it runs on auto- pilot. The key place to start is by addressing the fundamental assumptions we have about our partners and making sure not to generalize based on a few bad apples.

For example, I participated in one-off discussions about meme engineering, virtual world creation, emerging digital economies and goods, instant messaging service bots and the imminent post human experience. I would call that innovation- I would call that very forward thinking. The best of breed affiliates move like digital cheetahs hunting on the vast plains of cyberspace. As an agency, we have to keep the same pace. Affiliate marketing is much like a safari- you see some incredible diversity and creative adaptation- but to make it work you cannot view it from the safety of a jeep- you have be able to navigate the complex jungle and avoid the potential pitfalls.

Naturally, these initiatives listed above often require internal resources prioritization. Like affiliates, many merchants just have so much on their plate that sometimes the “wish I had” items get put on the proverbial back burner. The fine line that defines success or failure is about making the investment and embracing the concept of partnership. You must also test, measure, and optimize, and get help if you need it.

Stephanie Agresta is VP, Affiliate Marketing at Commerce360

Posted by at 4:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's sadly not surprising, to anyone that blogs, that Microsoft Research is reporting that 93% of all blog comments are spam. WebMetricsGuru breaks down a very interesting report on what the spammers are doing and how Microsoft thinks they can help stop them.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Affiliate marketing is growing. Shawn Collins sent some interesting stats last week: The inaugural Affiliate Summit in November 2003 sported only 200 people. I recall it vividly because I moderated the Speed Networking Session; we used a whistle in the old days, not a social networking platform. The following was in June, 2004, and 230 people attended. In June, 2005, there were 550 people. This past January, 2006 in Vegas, the Summit swelled to over 1,200 people.

Since Affiliate Summit East 2006, held in the middle of summer (traditionally a quieter time for events) and not in Vegas, the staff at Affiliate Summit estimated only 800 to 900 people. In a surprising turn, they were very excited to once again top 1,200. Notable since that was more than double last summer.

That’s impressive growth. Beth Kirsch points out, it has indeed become an “institution”.

At the November, 2003 event, held at Baruch College, we wore those peel off name tags. I didn’t because I hate name tags, but you know the drill: My name is ______ [get out your black magic marker].

We’ve come a long way baby. In Orlando, attendees all received big, almost-greeting-card-sized nametags that hung from branded lanyards and which state very clearly, whether you are an “Affiliate”, “Merchant” or “Agency” (with corresponding color-coding, of course).

Badge accessories were also very popular in Orlando. The more obvious “Speaker” and “Exhibitor” ribbons, were complimented with Blogging Pins from the ReveNews Crowd, and even one MSFT MVP pin. I’d like to see “Legend” Ribbons for Wayne Porter and Tim Storm added next year.

The conference reinforced the idea that the most important lesson for merchants is building a positive relationship with affiliates and communicating clearly with the channel. Every merchant has different issues, based on the size of your business, your margins, and the available internal resources. But in any case it’s important to move away from the Us vs. Them mentality. At Commerce360, it is our mission to help our clients understand this space and adopt this attitude.

During my “Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Affiliates” panel, one message in particular seemed to resonate: affiliates should not be shy to reach out to merchants. Well-informed merchants will embrace the conversation.

On a final note, I appreciated and identified with Jim Bouton’s closing message in his keynote address: He reminded us of the two most important things in building a successful business:

• have fun
• be persistent

I naturally embrace both. From what I saw at Affiliate Summit East 2006, so do the majority of individuals committed to affiliate marketing. We are a fun crowd, a forward-thinking crowd and the most persistent people I know.

Shawn has posted other Affiliate Summit Wrap-Ups as well as all of the show presentations, which I highly recommend you check out. Lisa Picarille also did a fine job of summarizing this event; as did many fine bloggers on ReveNews.

Many colleagues got down to the business of writing their blog wrap-ups on the plane ride home. I decided to take a few days to reflect and let the experience steep in my mind like an aromatic tea. Sitting here in New Jersey at my kitchen table, looking out on the flowers on my balcony, wearing my “I heart Affiliate Marketing T-Shirt” (courtesy of Kristin Anderson Hall at Performics - all I can say is – I can’t wait for Vegas- after years of work our industry has finally come of age.

Thanks to the entire Commerce360 team, Shawn, Missy, the great partners we work with every day, and to all my wonderful colleagues and favorite people (you know who you are).

Stay tuned for Part II – Top 5 Questions Affiliate Summit Answered for Merchants!

Stephanie Agresta is VP, Affiliate Marketing at Commerce360 Inc.

Posted by at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My earlier comments on Dell's jump into the blogosphere and the reaction it got from some of the blogerati got quoted (with a slight mis-spelling in the attribution) over at MarketingProfs, by B.L. Ochman of the WhatsNextBlog. As a fan of both the publication and the writer, I'm pleased. Although "Wrongo!" wasn't exactly the reaction I was looking for :-)

Her reaction to the passage of mine she quoted, suggests that she thinks I agree that the Dell episode should convince non-blogging companies that the water isn't yet safe. That was not my intent and if my writing wasn't clear then let me expand on it here; I was trying to suggest it would be unfortunate if this episode slowed the acceptance of blogs, although I feared that it would. My point was one that has now been made all over the net, that giving Dell a little credit for trying and slack while they get up to speed, might have been a better approach.

Ochman is deeply in the camp that wants (or wanted) Dell to somehow jump smoothly onto the cluetrain from a standing start. She's upset that they apparently sought what I'm sure they assumed was professional assistance in their efforts to start a blog. And she advises that what Dell should be doing is:

...inviting customers to tell them what they really love and hate about the company. Ask customers how to move forward. Your customers are incredibly smart, and remarkably creative. Trust them! They can create a far better marketing message than you can. Let them do it.

In the week or so since Dell started blogging I think they've handled themselves, and the initial firestorm, nearly perfectly. They've expanded the range of posts, directly engaged their critics, and included an entry titled 'Real People are Here and We're Listening' (which was incidentally written 2 days before BL posted her 'advice').

The Dell matter has been beat-to-death (giving them the chance to learn that blogging tradition quickly), so there's no need to dive further into the counter-points. I'm glad to have played a part in the conversation. Time will tell, but now I'm betting on a case study that continues the ascent of the business blog.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ranking highly on Google for your top keywords is a priority for any search engine optimization effort. But what percentage of your efforts, budgets, and resources should you apply to that task?

Jakob Nielson provides strong anecdotal evidence in his new UseIt column, showing that his very popular website gets by far its largest chunk of traffic from Google, BUT the other sites that drove traffic combine to provide 35% more traffic than Google does.

Similarly, the top 10 search words and phrases account for a full 10% of his traffic, but 83% of the 110,399 terms that did drive traffic were only used once during eight weeks. And these single-time queries accounted for 3X the traffic of the top 10 terms.

The importance of multi-word terms and phrases is also highlighted, by a great chart that shows the distribution of 1-2-3-4-5 word searches. Short (one and two word) searches dominate the most active searches, but 'long tail' is filled with 3, 4, and 5 word phrases that in aggregate generate an enormous amount of traffic that would be missed if the site is not text-rich and at least somewhat optimized to rank for longer terms.

Look at your on analytics history to see if your results match those of UseIt.com. The lessons from his numbers are clear:

• Don't think about optimizing your site for just a small number of terms. That isn't how people search and it isn't where all of your traffic opportunities lie.

• Use extensive and expressive language to describe the subjects you cover. Searches will find ways to use even more varied language, and you have no chance to capture them if you stick with narrow 'approved' terminology lists.

• Work hard to rank well in Google, but also work hard to gain visibility and links at other search engines and at all kinds of other sites too.

I strongly recommend reading the entire column for more interesting and instructive information.

[via inside analytics]

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my favorite aphorisms is about the difference between doing the right thing, and doing things right. Sometimes doing the right thing is all the matters because there are huge benefits even if the quality of execution is (initially) low. Learning to swim, buying your spouse a birthday present, and starting a company to deliver a cool new software or service are three examples that come to mind.

But in other cases, if you don’t do things right you might as well not do them at all. In Chapter 13 in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, we’re shown that this can be the case when collecting and analyzing marketing data.

The simplest cases are where data is mis-read, mis-interpreted, or selectively applied. Even data-driven marketing is a mixture of science and art, and getting the mix wrong can result in some nasty concoctions.

What appears to be marketing data abounds. There is demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral data. We get it from surveys, research, focus groups, anecdotes, and experience. The problem is there are lots of ways to let the data fool you, especially when trying to use the past to predict the future.

The Chapter gives interesting examples of various types of mis-applied data, and offers suggestions on how to blend, or perhaps more accurately build, data types into “predictive models of scenarios that people will engage in.”

There’s a lot of power in that quote, let's parse it:

• Predictive models – We need to know what’s going to happen in advance, because the web isn’t interactive in real time. A sales-person can change the pitch as they gather clues in a real conversation, but a web site can’t. But a web site can be enhanced and expanded to deliver the near-perfect experience if we know in advance (or figure out over time) exactly what is required.

• Scenarios – Plural. Many. Obviously Different. Clearly the #1 mistake of most sites is the assumption that everyone can move through one set of pages and somehow all be motivated (despite their vast personal and situational differences) to complete the same action.

• People – Unique Individuals. I don’t generally get into the consumer vs customer vs whatever debates, but those terms do make them sound monolithic. As the Eisenbergs’ and others have pointed out selling to the ‘average consumer’ doesn’t work.

• Engage in – Remember that they’re in control. Per earlier chapters, they can and will leave quickly. We need to not only deliver the right path for the needs and motivations we’re addressing, but do so in a way they find compelling. It’s a tall order but the rewards for success are dramatic.

In just shy of 100 pages so far, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark has taken us on a journey through the marketing environment of mid-2006. The old ways of conditioned response don’t work. Customer experiences drive brand perceptions. Their options are plentiful and they know it. The marketers’ perspective is warped, and customer empathy becomes the new imperative. Their buying process used to have to find its way through our sales methods, but not any more. Marketers must anticipate and provide information and support in the ways shoppers want, in the places shoppers want, at the times shoppers want. And we can’t understand them based on isolated data points, but must instead develop a multi-dimensional view in order to meet their individual requirements for not only the goods or services we’re selling but also for the process they apply to the buying decision.

The list above also describes why most web sites have such abysmal conversion rates. Technology aside, most sites still communicate as if it were 1950 or even 1850. What we need is a way to take these changes into account in order to develop a website and communications plan that will be effective in this environment. The Eisenbrothers (my favorite nickname thus far) say they have one, and will introduce us to it over the next 100 pages or so. I hope you’re as eager for it as I am.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the full book review and/or all of the Chapter reviews.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There was a time not long ago, when if a $60B company that happened to be the (or one of the) largest PC manufacturers in the world started blogging, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, and Robert Scoble would have had to excuse themselves to go get fresh linens. But when Dell started blogging yesterday, our boys wasted no time in throwing tomatoes and heaping on the criticism.

Let me first say for the record that I’m a huge fan of Jarvis, respect the effort and enthusiasm of Rubel, and am not the biggest Scoble fan in the world but do think he’s made a positive contribution to the evolution of blogging. That said, I think the three of them, at least initially, all acted poorly on this issue.

The history, for those who don’t know, is that Jarvis wrote about his own personal problems with Dell in a series of posts which are rightly legendary for showing how individual users now have power in the marketing conversation of even the largest brands. Jarvis is a great writer, lucid, and deeply understands the important shift blogging is causing in the communication dynamics - and in large part used what he called ‘Dell Hell’ to teach everyone how it works.

Dell publicly ignored the issue while Jarvis’ posts made it to Business Week, top spots in Google and gained meaningful visibility all over the place. Part of the education Jarvis had provided, however, was invitations and recommendations for Dell to join the conversation.

This week they did. And in 24-48 hours the three largest proselytizers of business blogging had summarily dismissed Dell’s efforts as being ‘a blog in content management system name only’, as ‘failing to get the blog going the way that they could have’ and admonishing them to ‘Listen. Listen. Listen’ (ie don’t talk).

The problem of course, which these three know better than anyone, is that blogging is new, takes time, is risky, and the complexity of Dell’s world (which does extend past the issues of their critics) cannot be covered or explained in a day. As many later voices have chimed in, including it appears Scoble and Rubel (Jarvis refuted the calls for mercy), Dell should be commended for jumping in and given time (and encouragement) to find the right tone and balance in the conversation.

There are hundreds of thousands of companies who don't yet understand why they would want to blog. The fear of 'attacks by mobs of lunatics' is probably the largest inhibitor of blogging growth beyond sheer ignorance. Dell is widely known to be in a tough spot in terms of consumer issues, and as such their brave entry into the blogosphere will be publicized and analyzed widely. It's too bad that the actions of these three important bloggers will, in this case, help re-affirm to many that not blogging is the right thing to do.

Update: Of course The Head Lemur did a better job saying what I meant.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Persuasive Momentum is the subject of Chapter 8 in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and I need a bit myself. So I’m going to include five chapters in this post so we can get into the meat of the Persuasion Architecture chapters of the book this coming week.

Since we now think of buying as a process, it makes sense to consider that each step in the process as a potential point of failure. The pages on our site, and the elements on these pages, are just links in a chain – and we need to find and replace the weak ones where visitors lose interest and abandon us. To do this, we’re told to consider who the visitor is, what we want them to do, and how they might gain the confidence necessary to take that action.

This is another of the ‘worth the price of admission’ moments in the book. Take the time to look at each page, and even each element on the pages of your site, and ask those questions. Pages and elements don’t belong there just because they’re part of some presentation you’re making. They only belong there if they help a visitor to move (or want to move) forward.

The most basic and common error in terms of maintaining momentum, are pages which lack any clear ‘next action’. Sites selling goods almost always move visitors from category groupings to item pages and then display a large ‘add to cart’ button to indicate the desired next step. But service firms often provide service descriptions, and then since there is no next online action, leave it entirely up to the visitor to navigate back to the home page, over to the ‘contact us’ page, or wherever in search of a next step. Think how more likely those actions are if the service description page instead clearly displays the phone number with an invitation to call, or provides a simple web-form to enable the visitor to request that a sales person contact them with a clear understanding of exactly which service they were interested in.

Consider the Dorney Park (an amusement and water park) website. If someone gets to their Admissions page you could assume they’re on the road to spending some money. Since the park offers online ticket purchases with ‘print at home’ tickets, you would think anyone looking at the price list would be clearly directed to take that next step and place an order. Once the money is spent and the tickets in hand, the chances of actually getting in the car and driving to the park are a lot higher than otherwise.

But the Admissions page makes no such effort, leaving the ‘buy tickets’ link only up in the main navigation bar where most people won’t be able to find it, or can easily ignore it. (click the image at left to enlarge it) How many more online orders do you think they’d get every day if ‘order now’ was a large attractive option near the bottom of the page?

This is the most obvious of examples, and one of the simplest of situations. Considering these questions (who are they, what do I want them to do, what do they need to do it) for each of your visitor types, across all of their buying scenarios, and at each step of the process is a large and difficult task. It’s becoming clear that we need a system to develop and structure our communications and provide a process that matches the buying process our visitors are going through. Chapter 9 and 10 make that point. Chapters 11 and 12 I’m going to just skip.

There, I’ve got MY momentum back.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the great unheralded features of SiteCatalyst is the Omniture Dashboard Player, which allows you put a slideshow of your website analytics stats in a resizable window.

This enables you to keep up with what's going on your website while doing other tasks, or even set up a display to share web stats with people in your office - helping to create a metrics-based culture for your site. The player can display any images from SiteCatalyst dashboards - so you can see long term trends, todays' stats (in essentially real time), and 'reportlets' which have progress speedometers and thermometers.

After re-installing the Dashboard Player today, I received an error message saying that the MSVCR80.dll was missing. (Note that I'm using the Office 2007 beta and that may be why.) A web search taught me that this is a piece of the Microsoft .NET framework, and that apparently lots of programs have problems finding this dll. I'm not sure if it was an old one that MS no longer uses but 3rd parties have come to rely on, or why this is common. In any case, I also found a website where you can download the MSVCR80.dll. Then just copy it to "Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/OFFICE12" folder and all is well.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

27 percent of advertisers reduced or stopped spending on click-based advertising. An additional 10 percent said they intend to curtail spending.

Reading the headlines and many regurgitated reports, I initially had several reactions:

1. Duh. In fact, I'm surprised the number is so low.
2. This is amazingly close to the long expected / previously reported percentage.
3. Man those folks at Google and Yahoo sure are full of sh*t.
4. This is terrible and more must be done to stop it (but don't hold your breath).
5. Wait until someone does a study on self-inflicted PPC waste.

Jumping over to read the original SFGate report, I saw the problem. "Advertiser Reported". They didn't measure anything they just asked advertisers how much fraud they thought was occuring. This takes care of #1, 2, and 4. Asking a bunch of people who have long been told that click fraud runs between 10 and 30% (without anyone knowing the original attribution) resulted in an average half-remembered guess of 14.6%. Danny Sullivan wisely and typically breaks it down to show how all the other numbers are then calculated from this original completely unscientific number.

So in fact nobody still has any idea how much click fraud there is. Given that half of all email is estimated to be spam (how good are those numbers, I don't know, but that seems a lot more measurable) and it seems like 80% of all blog comments are spam (that's not just me, is it?), and that on its face it's not too hard to either manually or in an automated fashion execute clickfraud and doing so results in someone mailing you money (ie quite strong motivation), why in the world would the number be so low?http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=219

This leaves me with #3 and #5. The Google and Yahoo folks give their 'we have people watching and a lot of technology that prevents click fraud, and we prevent a lot and pro-actively give refunds' line at every conference in response to the inevitable question about click fraud. I'm sure every word of it is true. But I also don't believe for a second that any of them believes that they're catching anywhere near 50% of the attempts. Nor does anyone in the audience who has spent any time understanding or thinking about the issue.

So let's think about what's implied by the headlines and subtext. Should that really change your PPC behaviour? If you're running paid search campaigns and carefully measuring your returns, and only continuing with campaigns that make you money (at whatever return you deem acceptible) then fraud represents lost potential (ie you could have made more) but numerically understanding it (which you still don't) shouldn't change your current behaviour.

Is it bad? Should it be stopped? Should the engines do more? Are advertisiers partially responsible? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Why are advertisers responsible? Because the vast majority (I use the same source for my stats as the report, I repeat that which I vaguely recall reading somewhere) don't measure or monitor their analytic AT ALL and so don't get to report even the most blatent fraud. To be fair, aggressively monitoring for fraud is very hard work and very time consuming. None of the analytics providers (even Google Analytics) provide really strong tools aimed at this. And only a small percentage of fraud is the '10,000 clicks from Brazil today' kind.

Back to #5. Assume for a moment that 14.6% of clicks are fraud. Even if it's true, it may not be the #1, or #2 largest source of waste for paid search advertisers. Sloppy keyword development - in terms of too many words, poor use of the matching options, missing negatives, etc. - which results in ads running on terms that individually produce very low ROI is almost certainly #1. Curing this requires first measuring results on a keyword by keyword basis and then taking action. I've read the numbers but can't recall them now, but would be SHOCKED if 33% of advertisers have keyword-level ROI tracking.

There are many others; buying ads for items temporarily out of stock, pointing ads at home pages or other landing pages which show no relation to the search or the ad creative, using creative so badly written that it invites clicks from those with intents the advertiser cannot satisify, even good landing pages connected to purchase processes that frustrate users at rates as high as 90% (which we've seen many times).

Click fraud is a huge problem. Both ad networks, advertisers, and analytics vendors need to take it much more seriously. If a fake number is what it takes to raise awareness, so be it. But there is very little most PPC advertisers can do, beyond policing their own results and even that will only catch a tiny fractions.

But don't dispair. There are lots of other things most advertisers can do to dramatically improve their campaigns. Take your anger about the "14.6%" you're losing to fraud and put it to work on other aspects of your campaign - if you do maybe the fraudsters did you a favor.

Update: Check out what the Google CEO thinks about all of this.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my pet peeves about SiteCatalyst is its insistance on including data for the 'None' category in just about all of the 'Commerce' reports. For example, when requesting a summary of inbound traffic generated by natural search engines, the report below is presented (click to zoom), in which the non-organic traffic completely overpowers any sense of the relative performance of the natural search engines.

The relative strength of the search engines alone can be seen in the Traffic Reports section, but not with revenue numbers (and lots of other data points) attached. There is a way to see the relative strength of the engines in Commerce, by simply sorting by some variable where 'None' ranks low, as shown below, but the axis percentages still take the 'None' data into account.

A trick that works in some reports, is to use Advanced Search to include only data elements that do not include the word 'None' but that trick doesn't work on this report.

Anyone know another way around this? Else let's hope Omniture adds a toggle box to turn on and off the inclusion of 'None' data in this and the many other reports where this problem occurs. This was a relatively popular request at the Omniture Summit session run by CTO Brett Error in March. It would be great to get some feedback as to how this, and other requests made there, are working their way onto the future release schedule.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's a play a little game. Was the following excerpted from a speech given by (A) a United States Senator in charge of The Senate Commerce Committee, which does semi-important things like manage bills that could control and regulate the internet, or (B) a psychotic homeless man standing at the corner of 36th and 7th Avenue?

Ready to play? Here's the quote:

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn't going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes. We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [...]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [?]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

The answer, sadly, is (A). Senator Ted Stevens delivered those lines as part of his rational for his vote on Net Neutrality. Yes, the man in charge of possible internet legislation thinks he gets his email the same way that the tellers at his bank get his weekly deposit when he's sitting in his car in lane #2.

You can listen for yourself here.

I wonder how he thinks television works?

[via Wired and Firedoglake]