The Commerce360 Blog

Yahoo's introduction of Ad Quality, which is being officially released on February 5th, is the buzz in the SEM Industry. But is it really going to be an eye-popping event or just another scheme to keep us testing and spending our hard earned advertising dollars. Usually, the first thing that comes to mind if your an SEM geek like myself, is that this is Yahoo’s attempt to mimic Google's ever-popular Quality score. Google’s quality score is reported to consist of relevancy from the keyword level, Ad/creative level and landing page where relevancy – all of which means that SEO techniques are starting to play a significant role in the rewarding of CPC and AVG Position.

Yahoo’s attempt appears to be only a ¾ of the way there. According to the recent Yahoo's Press Release, their Ad quality is exactly what it sounds like, the quality of the Ad/Creative and the impact that is has on it’s users. Yahoo is basing their new Ad Quality on a few common factors: (1) Historical performance (2) CTR% related to competitors & Ad position (3) Yahoo's coined phrase “Expected Performance”.

Now, all of a sudden Yahoo has their own ranking algorithm for determining the winners and losers.

So how do we crack the code? It’s surprising to me that nowhere in the press release is there any mention of word “landing page”. It appears that Yahoo is simplifying the Google quality score algorithm, and just concerning itself with Ads and the selection of keywords of where the ads are being served. Could these other “various relevance factors” include landing pages, relevant keyword groupings and url naming structures? I guess this is their way of keeping their customers guessing on how to save a buck in the long term, while for now forcing us to continue to spend money on testing to see what is really working and what is not.

Greg Meyers is a Sr. Search Marketing Manager at Commerce360

Posted by Greg Meyers at 3:56 PM | Permalink

Gord Hotchkiss today provides some great thoughts on WOM. He keyed off a new study from eMarketer, clarifies how profoundly the web has accelerated its impact, and also helps to further refine the definition of word of mouth:

Word of mouth implies that you're getting an opinion from someone who:

• is familiar with a product or service through personal experience; and,
• can be objective because they have no vested interested in whether you buy the item or service in question.
  

For us WOM is at the stage where we're 1000% sold on it but still don't have the tools to easily convince decision makers who are buried in other priorities. We have large WOM initiatives planned for several new clients, but have a lot of internal work to do to get final sign-off and determine the specific programs and plans to put into action. This new report, and Gord's insights, will really help.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 5:39 PM | Permalink

First Search Engine Optimization was easy, now it’s something you really shouldn’t do at all. In a column on ClickZ this week, Shari Thurow argues that optimizations for the sake of the search engines aren’t that good of an idea.

Miss Thurow apparently thinks search engine optimization is something that happens to you while you’re busy doing other things – like building ‘user centric websites’.

Newsflash: It’s called Search Engine Optimization. It’s about getting your pages to rank highly in the search engines. It shouldn’t then be controversial to actually try to figure out what the search engine algorithms measure and then build or modify sites in ways specifically designed to rank highly.

Yes the algorithms are secret, and so the process requires study, testing, and some guessing. Results are not guaranteed, the algorithms are certain to continue to change over time, and mileage may vary. And of course there are methods and tactics that are ‘over the line’ which I’d reject only partially on moral grounds but largely because those specific methods are likely to only have short term benefits. But there’s a lot of ground between ‘be nice’ and ‘you’re evil’.

I think her distinction of ‘short term vs long term' seo is bogus. There is intentional SEO and there is coincidental SEO.

• Intentional SEO recognizes how the engines work and take that into account throughout site planning and content development. Without defining the boundaries between algorithm chasing and algorithm awareness, it just doesn't' make sense to avoid optimizations that are purely designed to provide the engines what they want to enable a page to rank more highly.

• Coincidental SEO is what happens to most people who build websites without sufficient algorithm awareness – they happen to rank at some level for some number of related terms. Building a website with a strong focus on satisfying the user would likely mean more text, more pages, and therefore more coincidental ranking results. But it would also miss a massive amount of traffic that actually optimizing the website (for the engines) would generate.

In a recent post I wrote that sites need to serve three masters – marketers, customers, and search engines. It’s possible to fully satisfy all three and online marketers should strive to do so.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's an interesting article over at ClickZ concerning Google's inability to accept ads posted through 3rd party ad servers. Larger brands and agencies want to centralize the administration and reporting of their campaigns, and today Google makes this virtually impossible.

It would seem that the increasing attention on 'Quality Score' from both Google and soon Yahoo will also have an impact on the use of paid search as a branding tool. These types of campaigns are far less likely to use strictly verifiable (ie semantically consistent) language in either or both of the ad and the landing page, so one would expect they'd have trouble getting ranked highly and potentially even run for many of the keywords they'd want to target.

It will be interesting to see how that plays out, with the almighty dollars squared off against the pursuit of relevance.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:55 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Search Monetization System. Yes that’s right. Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel has the nerve or ‘nads to call his three-years-too-late replacement of the Overture code base the "Yahoo Search Monetization System". Subtle huh? At least it sounds better than the “Yahoo-Will-Get-More-Money-Out-Of-You System.”

Mr. Semel must really be concerned about getting the YHOO stock price up AND be very comfortable in the fact that most of his advertisers really don’t have a whole lot of choice about doing business with him.

Of course, the real name isn’t very good either. It’s apparently supposed to be called ‘Yahoo Search Marketing’ a descriptive name that in no way makes it easy to distinguish between the software and the broader Yahoo search engine or organic search marketing on Yahoo.

Inside the application itself all the logos say Yahoo Marketing Solutions – so much from brand consistency. Of course everybody refers to it as Panama (including Semel). Just for a laughs someone left the name 'Overture US' in the pull-down menus in the internal reporting system for use when you want to see Yahoo-only reports. And they’ve hidden it at the easy to remember and type URL of marketingsolutions.yahoo.com.

Our experience thus far has been that the Panama interface is quite nice and a massive improvement over the old Overture offering. The internal reporting is good, there are some nice things like the chart of high and low bid prices for a keyword, and the system is snappy in terms of performance.

The transition has been another matter, with poor notification, an insane ‘auto-reorganization’ which is applied to campaigns, and broken/backlogged import methods as the only choice with which to fix the unrequested ‘upgrade’ campaign changes. The whole thing has had all the comfort and class of a shotgun wedding.

You’d think that if someone built a system just to take our money they’d at least try to make it a pleasant experience. And give it a friendly name.

Update: A good list of issues with Panama.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:06 AM | Permalink

It’s a hot day. The sun is beating down and you’re sweating through your clothes. Not far from you are small round coffee tables with glistening chrome water pitchers and these strangely shaped glass containers, each about the size of a grapefruit.

You look in the pitchers and see what clearly looks to be clear, cold, water. Nearby you see a young man who looks just as warm as you, but looking at his face you see an obvious look of relief and in his hand you notice one of those weird glass containers. He took a drink!

As the hours pass you see more and more people, mostly young but not all, boldly grabbing these glass containers, filling them with the liquid from the pitchers, and drinking. They don’t all get the same exhilarated look of relief, but certainly none of them seem the worse for their efforts.

"If only," you think, "someone would take this liquid to a laboratory, verify for me that it is in fact water and tell me exactly how much I should drink. Then I’d know what to do."

This little story is my way of making fun of anyone who needs to pay Forrester $379 for a 15 page report to tell them that blogging is a good idea.

Of course, I realize that nobody is going to pay Forrester $379 to tell them that blogging is a good idea. They’re going to pay Forrester $379 so their bosses and colleagues will believe them when they say that blogging is a good idea.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Next Monday and Tuesday January 29-30 we'll be in Miami Beach at the ERA conference. It's our first-ever trade show booth, so if you're at the show or just in the area please stop by Booth 54 at the Lowes Miami Beach hotel.

To schedule a specific meeting time to discuss your online marketing programs, just email us at info /at/ commerce360.com.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:04 AM | Permalink

Links built the internet. It was the ability to connect two pages or sites with just a link that separated the web from all that came before it. It was the inferred value of that link that created Google.

Today one of the most important and link-rich sites on the internet opted-out of the linking business, at least the Google side of it. They’ll probably reverse that decision within a few days, and they should.

But we are a long way from those innocent days when a link could be trusted. Why do they have to ruin everything?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:10 AM | Permalink

Search Engine Marketing is putting a major dent into the online marketing budgets of many businesses. A December 2005 study done by SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) states that “SEM was a $5.75 billion industry in North America in 2005, and will grow to $11.1 billion in 2010.”

These are astounding numbers, and should encourage us to consider: (1) How much are we willing to spend to get a customer? (2) How much money are we willing to spend to sell a specific product/service?

Paid Search Marketing is a multi-faceted business channel where complexity, relevancy and structure is considered a best practice. During its infancy we measured success based simply on clicks/increased traffic and CTR%. Later the engines and analytics tools enabled us to measure ROI of each campaign and keyword. Today this just isn’t sufficient – you have to drive to a known and acceptable cost-per-acquisition based on not only the required ROI but also gross and net margins on a SKU and keyword-by-keyword basis.

In recent years the paid engines have started to supply all kinds of nifty “bells & whistles” that allow us to try and get the most out of our budgets. But they don’t provide the tools it would take to dig even deeper to find that “right mix” that really makes sense from a business perspective. Why not let us upload acquisition cost targets or margin levels and the report back on net contribution margins after all direct marketing costs?

Maybe they don’t want us to know that we’re losing money while they hope we try to make it up in volume.

Consider this example: Suppose all of your SEM campaigns are well structured and finely tuned. You also have a high CTR%, your CPC is low, and your ROAS is hovering around 150%. In most instances, this is a very successful SEM channel. However, you then realize that your customer acquisition and product margin costs are just breaking even with the achievable 150% ROAS. Even though looks good in reports, it isn’t “cutting the mustard”. After analyzing your margins and acquisition costs you realize that a 250% ROI is necessary to make sustainable profit.

It’s easy to become so consumed with the available analytics and metrics that you lose sight of the context in which these measures and numbers exist. A positive ROI looks great, but it doesn’t mean it’s a worthy investment. To make sure you don’t get caught, know your goals, understand your acquisition costs, and establish a sensible ROI% based on your margins. Then you can closely monitor the metrics at both the keyword, ad-group and campaign levels and ensure that your paid search is really driving your business forward.

Greg Meyers is a Sr. Search Marketing Manager at Commerce360

Posted by Greg Meyers at 12:07 PM | Permalink

I spent most of last week traveling, which unfortunately still means a string of amazingly bad customer service experiences. But one that I witnessed at the Denver International Airport deserves special attention.

While checking in at the gate for my United Airlines flight back to Philadelphia, a guy in a wheelchair rolls up to the counter. He explains to the representative that his leg is broken, he can't move it, won't be able to really fit well in a normal seat, and requests a bulkhead seat.

It's about 10 minutes before boarding, the plane is probably 3/4 full, and it appears most people have already checked in. The rep tells him there is one available, but he'll have to charge him $44 because the seat is designated 'Economy Plus'

There is no way to know if the guy could afford it or not, but he declined the 'offer'. I spoke up on his behalf asking the man behind the counter why he couldn't just give the guy a break and let him have the empty seat. He said he couldn't per the 'rules' and I suggested he contact his supervisor. "Management Don't Care" was the quote I got back.

Mr. broken leg had to be taken back to his seat in row 23 via a special wheelchair that takes people down the aisle of an airplane. They carried him right past the entirely empty bulkhead row which remained that way for the entire flight.

Obviously most of the time we all fly the carrier that goes where we want when we want. But if you ever have the chance to not choose United, please remember this complaintvertisment.

BONUS: I just checked google and there are no results for either complaintvertising or complaintvertisement. Which means this post will be a GoogleWhack tomorrow.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Another day another open position. Commerce360 is looking for experienced paid search marketers to help manage client campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other PPC engines and platforms including the shopping engines.

Despite what BusinessWeek says, paid search campaigns are still in huge demand and we work hard to create competitive and profitable campaigns for our clients - be they large or small. This includes best-practice techniques for keyword selection, creative development, bid strategies, landing pages, and extensive analytics and analysis.

If this is the world you love, and you'd like to work on significant campaigns in an environment that values results - we encourage you to contact us to discuss this position.

Here's the link to this job on CareerBuilder - or read the complete posting below.

{See a full list of currently open positions in our Philadelphia area office.}

Are you a genuine paid search marketing guru? Do you know Adwords and Overture inside out as well as all the real-world tricks and strategies that turn everyday ROI into stunning profitability? Are you at heart a strategic thinker who loves to use analytics to prove to the world that you were right all along? Would you like to help drive the development of a serious paid-search practice and work with equally advanced practitioners of organic search, affiliate marketing, web site analytics, and other related services?

Commerce360 Inc. provides complete online marketing services including paid search program management. We help drive the complete online marketing programs of our clients, working with them to define the strategic direction and then taking responsibility for program execution and delivering measurable results. Fortune 100 companies and leading internet retailers work with us because of our deep expertise in all of the disciplines online marketing and our ability to deliver business results.

We’re looking for an experienced PPC expert to join our team. Our ideal candidate is someone with 3+ years of experience building and managing significant paid search programs on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, with skill at each component of program development and management including keyword selection, ad-text development, bid strategies, optimization, and analytics and reporting. More importantly we need someone with a passion for search marketing and a strong desire to deliver great results as measured by ROI and revenue growth.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design and execution of paid search campaigns on primary and secondary search engines.
- Research and Development of keyword and phrase lists and negative keyword lists.
- Organization of keywords into campaigns and ad-groups for maximum impact.
- Development of a range of text-ad creatives to drive highest possible CTR of qualified traffic.
- Optimization of campaigns using all available data and analytics software.
- Participation in development and critique of landing pages and customer experience.
- Superior client services including both reactive and pro-active communications.
- Execution of the required operational and reporting procedures to support business growth and client satisfaction.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Minimum 1-3 years of heavy pay-per-click campaign management
- Solid technical web experience including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
- Experience in one or more advanced web site analytics packages (Omniture, Coremetrics, HBX, etc.)
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Demonstrated ability to operate and make decisions in a fast-paced and high-pressure environment
- Serious passion and personal interest in measurable online marketing and technology

Commerce360 Inc. is a fast growing online marketing services company. We provide strategic and tactical online marketing support to a wide range of companies located throughout the U.S. The position is in our Plymouth Meeting PA offices, and will require occasional business travel across the U.S. Learn more about us at www.commerce360.com.

To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to jobs /at/ commerce360 /dot/ com

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 6:59 AM | Permalink

Bob Dylan said that 'too much of nothing, can make a man ill at ease' and that can certainly be the case in SiteCatalyst.

When you view many standard reports, including just about all of those produced in the Finding Methods, Campaigns, and SearchCenter menus, the largest numeric value is assigned to None. This is accurate enough - when looking at a report of paid search keywords for example the None value reflects the visits or revenues that didn't come via any paid search keyword.

But these large None values can be disconcerting in the tabular data and just plain mess up the charts by ruining their scale. (Click the graphic to enlarge)

There are two solutions we've found. The first is to simply sort on a metric where None isn't the largest value - this pushes the None value to the bottom and knocks it out of the chart. Often that is enough to produce reports that satisfy.

The trickier solution is to use the Advanced Search dialog box, and enter None into the 'None of these words' option. In other words, find results without the word 'None'. There are a few reports where this doesn't work, but it usually works great. Bookmark your new None-free report and you're done with none.

We hope this trick is someday made obsolete by a simple toggle up in the yellow options area which would eliminate none, and/or by an option in the Display Options to universally turn off the display of what we usually find to be excess data.

{{ This is one of an occasional series of tips, tricks, and ideas for Omniture SiteCatalyst. Comments and additional suggestions are welcomed. }}

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:07 AM | Permalink

A few days ago I spoke with Greg Cangialosi, host of ROI Radio and Founder of email service provider Blue Sky Factory. Our conversation was recorded for Greg's show, and it is now available for your listening pleasure in streaming or download format.

We talked a bit about the history of Commerce360, and a lot about the issues marketers face in deciding between in-house and outside service providers, as well as current trends in paid search, web site analytics, and more.

Greg is a seasoned podcaster, responsible for the first Disney Podcasts among others. And he has just been contracted to write a Podcasting book due out later this year. I've paid attention to Podcasting since it's inception, but this is my first chance to participate.

Thanks to Greg and his associates for the invitation and their efforts to produce the show. ROI Radio has a whole backlist of interesting interviews, and you can even subscribe via iTunes to make sure you catch future shows.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Who are you trying to satisfy with your web site? Don't answer too quickly, it's a trick question.

• If you read too much about search engine optimization, you'd quickly get the idea that every word on (and underneath) your website should be designed to satisfy Google and those who chase it.

• Think about it for a while, and you're likely to say that serving the needs of your visitors is most important - answer their questions, solve their problems, give 'em what they want.

• Be completely honest, and the answer might be 'I just want the boss to sign off on it'. The boss might be the marketing dept, the CEO, a committee, or whomever gets to approve website content.

The real answer should be all three. Your site needs to satisfy the needs of your company, the desires of your visitors, and the realities of the search engines. This will mean some compromise, but it's the path to long term success.

(Inspired by another great post by Nicholas Carr, discussing how newspapers are writing stories with Google in mind.)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:40 AM | Permalink

Why is online marketing so misunderstood? From the broo-ha-ha over whether or not SEO is rocket science to yesterday’s BusinessWeek article declaring the end of paid search marketing (unless you’re a mega-corp) to the discussion of re-branding affiliate marketing to the idea that we’re all off in our analytics expense allocation by 900% - it’s clear there is not a universal definition or agreement or understanding of what-in-the-world we’re all doing.

In many ways it isn’t surprising. Traditional marketing has a long history, full of experience and academic study and debate. Traditional marketers studied this history, received undergraduate and graduate degrees in marketing, and then served apprenticeships (in many cases) at branding and marketing ‘factories’ like P&G. By the time someone gained responsibility or a big fancy VP of Marketing title, they could easily have had 10-20-30 years of experience in a field that had seen consistent but not monumental change since they began.

Online marketing, on the other hand, has been invented in real-time over the past 10 years, and the technical and social environment in which it operates change radically every six to twelve months. The elders have six to ten (or twelve in a very few cases) of experience and vast majority of practitioners have only three to five. We’re an industry in kindergarten (and often act accordingly) with nothing but a few slightly older siblings to show us the way.

The interesting issue is at the intersection - how can traditional marketers really understand the online opportunity and what to do about it? From those we meet in the course of our business, and those I talk to at trade shows etc., I think it’s fair to say they’re frustrated by the lack of clarity in terms of definitions, process, targets, and measurement – all the issues that lead to the ‘debates’ listed above.

They’re trying to embrace it but they don’t know who to trust, what to believe, and how to put anything into context. The results aren’t pretty:

• A lack of context drives paid search budgets to be 10x to 50x the size of organic search optimization budgets. Would any traditional marketer take out an expensive YellowPages ad and then go unlisted in the regular free directory?
• A lack of context spends those huge paid search budgets driving clicks to home pages, generic landing pages, or even 404 pages. Would anyone run newspaper ads day-after-day for out of stock items, or put the phone number for their Cleveland store in the ads run in Buffalo, hoping consumers would be smart enough to ask to be transferred?
• A lack of context deploys large expensive websites without even a single full-time writer assigned to add ‘more and better’ content every day to improve the site’s relevance and quality. Unfortunately this is an error that is probably committed equally frequently offline – very few marketers have figured out that there is close to no such thing as too much relevant information.
• A lack of context builds websites without first developing a clear understanding of who is likely to come and what they want, and an on-site plan for solving these problems in a way that produces the desired business results. Would anyone allow their sales staff to repeat the same script to every prospect regardless of what the prospect said about themselves or explained they were trying to accomplish?
• A complete lack of context allows dollars to be spent on traffic acquisition or visitors to come through a website without sufficiently collecting, reporting, and analyzing data to understand what’s happening. Can you imagine running a retail store as an absentee owner, never knowing how many people came in, what drove them in, how they behaved in the store, but just by seeing the bills and sales receipts?

It’s a business opportunity of course. Our strategy group is very busy helping companies and traditional marketers better understand this world and craft cohesive 12-18 month plans to attack it.

The online debates that inspired this post may also be part of the solution. At their core each of these is forcing a more complete examination and explanation of the components of online marketing. I look forward to many more of these in the months ahead. If we’re lucky perhaps by next year, as we start 2008, the framework for online marketing can be much clearer and better understood than it is today.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:32 PM | Permalink

BusinessWeek claims that small and medium sized companies are being priced out of the paid search market by ‘Brand Giants’ like Best Buy and Zales.

Funny then that Zales isn’t anywhere on the first page results for ‘Diamond Ring’ nor are any other major jewelers I’ve ever heard of besides online pure-play BlueNile.com. But small guys (or big guys with really lousy marketing and web design staffs) diamondring.com, goldmine.com, and worldjewels.net are right there.

Are there major changes going on in paid search? Yes. Are the ‘Brand Giants’ with more budget than sense changing the game in many categories. Yes. Is it the agencies and the tool vendors and engines themselves who are facilitating this wild spending? Mostly. But there is a lot more going on.

• As Andy Beal points out, there is an evolution going on, and in some cases what has ebbed will flow.
• As Nick Carr highlights, big co’s can and do factor ‘branding’ into their willingness to pay.
• It’s also true, or at least published in a study, that 60-90% of the conversions from online search happen offline – so guys with bricks have more ability to eventually capture revenue.

But as the diamond example shows, it’s really wrong to universally characterize ‘Big Guys’ as the cause of click-cost-inflation. Small fry’s can be irrational too. Or they can be smart. The reasonable price for a keyword is the price that makes you a profit – and therefore the more efficient your ability to convert leads to sales, or the better you are at extracting a higher price or a greater lifetime value from customers or a lower COGS from your suppliers, the more you can afford to bid.

So the right reaction to higher click costs may not be to start buying radio ads but instead to reconsider your landing pages, persuasive scenarios, pricing, and everything else that impacts how smart or easy it is to do business with you.

To suggest that this maturation marks the end of the benefit of the web as the great equalizer is just plain wrong. There are zillions of segments where small guys now have a national market that didn’t exist before and there are no big guys to blame if click costs go up. Plus, organic listings can still be won with quality and effort (if you have some time). It’s easy :-)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:37 PM | Permalink

Our friend Shane Atchison of ZAAZ has added his 2007 web analytics predictions to the mix. In some ways it summarizes and feels like a very good wrap up of the other thoughts we've seen, but Shane adds some very wise observations.

I particularly like these two: "innovation will come from 3rd parties" and "human capital will be the largest issue".

And Shane is a man who knows, so I would take stock when he starts calling winners as he does in noting the progress of Omniture (OMTR) and Visual Sciences.

Now if Shane will just explain to all those of us who live a few years behind him what Proto-Analytics is? Is that the next next big thing?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:38 PM | Permalink

Another current open position is for a Web Analyst. As readers of this blog know we take analytics very seriously and are trying hard to live on the bleeding edge of the both the technology and practice of website analytics and analysis. (And we have the scars to prove it...)

We're looking for analysts with a combination of relevant skills and attributes Avinash mentioned recently. Passion for the space is probably #1, and the 'Raw Business Acumen' and communication skills aren't far behind.

We're predominantly an Omniture (OMTR) shop so experience in SiteCatalyst and even SearchCenter is preferred. But of course the tools can be learned if the right abilities are there, so that's not a requirement.

For the full job posting, continue reading below, or see the posting at CareerBuilder.

As before, this is a full time position in our Plymouth Meeting PA offices.

Serious about web analytics? Our rapidly growing online marketing team is looking for a smart, technically savvy, and motivated person to join our Web Analytics practice. We help major retailers, manufacturers, entertainment, and service companies to design, implement, and take advantage of website analytics to drive and improve business.

Analytics are a priority for our clients, not an afterthought. We’re driven to define and implement the best possible tracking systems, integrate with other marketing and business systems, and then provide intelligent and insightful analysis. Our analysts provide leadership, strategic direction and execution to the analysis of website and online marketing activities including; data collection, tools and techniques for performance tracking and measurement, reporting of key performance indicators, providing actionable recommendations for site and marketing campaign optimization, and ad-hoc analysis as needed.

We’re an Omniture Platinum Partner, and primarily use Omniture SiteCatalyst, SearchCenter, and Discover to review web site and online marketing campaign performance for a range of retail and B2B clients. We also support Google Analytics and may occasionally work with clients with other leading analytics platforms.

The ideal candidate has 2-4 years of significant online analysis experience with Omniture, Coremetrics, HBX, or equivalent. Skills should include analytics needs analysis, implementation, report development, analysis, and data modeling. Must have the ability to work with many levels of the organization, while addressing reporting needs at each level. Must be able to work with large amounts of data with the ability to synthesize information and translate into effective and actionable business insights. Analyst must have keen process skills, understanding how to incorporate reports and information into the workflow of the group. Excellent written and oral communication skills are required. Financial or business analysis experience is a plus.

Responsibilities include:

• Leading client discovery process to identify website analytic requirements.
• Creating implementation plans and guides, and assisting development team during implementation.
• Defining KPIs, basic reports, dashboards, and alerts for various client needs.
• Configuring and supporting website analytics software.
• Developing and analyzing analytics reports using the full range of available tools.
• Integrating data and information from additional sources into reports and recommendations.
• Developing clear and insightful recommendations for clients, in written form or for personal delivery.

As a web analyst you’ll be a part of an integrated team driving the strategy and implementation of sophisticated search, affiliate, email, and advertising programs. You’ll analyze demand creation programs, user behavior, and business results and be expected to make substantial contributions to their effectiveness and development.

Commerce360 Inc. is a fast growing online marketing services company. We provide strategic and tactical online marketing support to a wide range of companies located throughout the U.S. The position is in our Plymouth Meeting PA offices, and will require occasional business travel across the U.S. Learn more about us at www.commerce360.com.

To inquire or apply, contact us via jobs/at/commerce360.com
 

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:05 AM | Permalink

While SiteCatalyst offers a wealth of reports and a lot of data, it isn’t unusual to wish you could access relationships between certain data elements that are for some reason not provided.

For example, if you can see a list of referrers (or referring domains), and a list of popular pages, isn’t it natural to want to know which page each of the referrers was pointing too? Or since you can see the list of search engines that sent you traffic and a list of keywords that produced visitors, wouldn’t you want to see which keywords were generated by each search engine? And if you’re paying the surcharge to get geosegmentation so you can find out which states or zip codes your visitors are coming from, wouldn’t you want to know which pages or keywords the visitors from any particular area where using?

I’d admit that I wanted all of these and more, but didn’t know how to get them.

Version 13 of SiteCatalyst introduced the Admin Tab and buried in there is the ability to turn on 2-item data correlations – which provides the solution to all of the wishes listed above and more. Using this feature you can define connections between any two data traffic elements, and then look at either element within or sub-sorted by the other.

When enabled, you get that little grey, yellow and green overlapping circles icon shown at above, which produces a fly-out menu of your correlation options. Choose one and you get a report listing just the correlated data for the item you've chosen. A 'Correlation Filter' option also appears in the yellow bar area above data reports with active correlations. This enables you to define multiple correlation filters simultaneously to view data - show me all pages where engine = google and statue = CA, for example.

I should note that when I say it’s buried in there, I am referring to the fact that everything is buried in there – could there possibly be a more convoluted set of tabs, menus, pop-ups, pull-downs, panes, and buttons twisted into one interface? But that’s a topic for another post…

To define a correlation go into the Admin tab, click the Select and Edit Report Suite link, choose the report suite(s) you want to modify, click the Edit Settings menu, the Traffic command and then Data Correlations sub-command. Now use the pull down menus to set the 2 correlation items and click the Add button. It doesn’t matter which goes on the right or left – it’s a bi-directional correlation. Your choices are submitted to Omniture (OMTR) and the correlations are approved and turned on in about 1 business day. The correlations are not retroactive - you can only see the relationships for data captured after the correlations are established.

You can correlate a single item more than once – for example we correlate Page Name to referrer, referring domain, and Geo Region (State). I should point out that Omniture does offer 5-item and 20-item correlations. So if you want to see Page Name, Referrer, Search Engine, Keyword, and one of your traffic variables each by any other then you’re probably better off getting those turned on as a 5-item correlation rather than individually building a long list of 2-item correlations. But 5-item and 20-item correlations require a call to your support rep and probably an extra fee (depending on your contract). In fact, there is likely also a limit to the number of free 2-item correlations you have access to depending on your contract.

If you aren’t using them, give correlations a try. After just a few weeks of playing around, here’s a list of the one’s we’re creating the most often:

• Page Name and Referrer
• Page Name and Referring Domain
• Page Name and Search Engine
• Page Name and Keyword (we should be doing these four bullets as a 5-item correlation as mentioned above)
• Search Engine by Keyword
• Search Engine by Geo Region (state) (if Geosegmentation is turned on)
• Page Name by Geo Region (state) (if Geosegmentation is turned on)

I’d love to hear other correlations people are using, or tips/examples or comments about correlations.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:43 PM | Permalink

We've got a number of new job openings at Commerce360 and over the next few days will highlight some of them here. All of these are full-time permanent positions in our Plymouth Meeting PA offices.

The first is for a Director of Strategy (see the full job description on LinkedIn). At Commerce360 the Strategy team is responsible for helping to assess the online marketing needs of clients, draft and present strategic and tactical plans, and then manage and oversee the long-term execution of our online marketing services.

This makes it a tough slot to fill - we need someone (a couple of someones actually) who understands most or all of the full breadth of online marketing - search, affiliate, email, WOM, conversion, analytics, etc. More importantly, they must be able to confidently talk to the CEO or VP of Marketing at at Fortune 1000 (or venture-backed startup) to help them understand how they should allocate resources or plan expenses and revenues, and be just as comfortable and skilled working with our execution teams to monitor progress and define direction on day-to-day tactical (and practical) issues in any area.

The job is a great fit for someone who ran online marketing inside an organization and would now like to leverage their skill and experience with a broad range of companies and work in an environment surrounded by online marketing experts and specialists, and with access to tools and other resources that often aren't practical or available in the budget-constrained world of most marketing departments.

To learn more or apply, submit an application through LinkedIn, or contact us at jobs/at/commerce360.com. We'd be happy to have a confidential conversation and better explain the position and answer any questions.

(The full job posting is listed below for those who don't want to visit LinkedIn)

We’re looking for someone who can push the limits of online marketing. We’re a rapidly growing online marketing agency seeking executive level talent with a deep understanding and broad practical experience in serious online marketing. To us, this means knowing how to both drive site traffic and convert browsers into buyers. It also means intense direct experience in organic and paid search, email, affiliate, and advertising plus a passion for improving conversion rates and using web site analytics to understand visitor behavior. Ideal candidates have agency experience, or have managed significant in-house online marketing programs for at least 3 years, and have excellent organizational and communication skills.

Your responsibilities will be to develop strategies and then execute online marketing programs for mid-sized to large companies that have the technical and economic resources to really attack the online opportunity. You’ll be surrounded and supported by a team who not only ‘get’ online marketing, but are defining the innovative techniques and best practices of tomorrow. Your work will be supported by our smart and aggressive specialists (in SEO, SEM, Email, Analytic, Affiliate Marketing, etc.) but you will be depended on for strategic thinking, a clear vision of the online marketing future, and the ability to sell your ideas to senior executives at our client/partner companies.

Position requires physical presence in our Philadelphia-area offices. Competitive salary and benefits. Please reply with cover letter and resume.

Responsibilities:

• Drive development of strategic marketing plans for firms doing $5M - $100M online revenue.
• Develop detailed tactical plans toward specific goals using various traffic acquisition methods.
• Define reporting requirements and program execution using top-tier web site analytics software.
• Coordinate with SEO, SEM, Affiliate, Email, Advertising, and Analytics specialists on planning and execution of marketing programs.
• Work with clients (usually VP Marketing, CEO, etc.) to define, communicate, and review plans and results.
• Work with design and conversion specialists to oversee long term web site improvement programs including major redesigns, incremental changes, and page-specific testing.

REQUIREMENTS

• 3+ years of online marketing experience, in-house or interactive agency.
• Direct responsibility for online marketing programs on web site with over $3M in annual revenues, or equivalent agency experience.
• Intimate familiarity with paid and organic search marketing, email marketing, and affiliate or banners.
• Experience in conversion rate analysis and testing.
• Strong familiarity or expertise with high-end analytics software such as Omniture, CoreMetrics, HBX, etc..
• Excellent interpersonal and presentation skills to work with various interdisciplinary team members.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:33 AM | Permalink

Was there ever a simpler and more controversial topic? Phillip over at Google Blogscoped answered the call of some non-savvy relatives and wrote a generally great primer that nails the three primary directives:

1. Create good content.
2. Make the content accessible.
3. Tell others (hope for links).

His advice is clear, honest, and will produce good to great results for many who today are lost in the dark woods without a flashlight or a map. But then Phillip himself wanders off the trail. After all the good advice he says:

“take a break for a while. And then get back to continue to grow your site. But don’t worry about Google results for the first couple of months, in fact, don’t worry about Google results at all. Your site might not appear in search engines in the beginning, and maybe once it does, your competition will rank higher than you... but these things take time….What you can do, though, after a couple of months, is…”

At which point he gets back to good stuff about checking analytics for keywords and avoiding SEO trickery.

My argument is with the ‘don’t worry about your results, go back to growing your business, in a few months check back if you have time, you’ll win some and you’ll lose some’ stuff. Telling someone who has created a site, has expectations for their online business, and took all the trouble to learn and then optimize, to ‘don’t worry about it’ just isn’t realistic, or good business.

I think at that point he should have told them to immediately get analytics set up and start learning to understand how visitors use their site and where they came from, and pay close attention to new visitors who start coming in from natural search.

Common wisdom is that a) you can’t rush Google and b) results don’t start for a couple of months. Both are dead wrong.

There are things you can do to get a new site or new pages indexed, like turn on Google Sitemaps or get some links. And the more links you get the faster the site or any content is going to get notices. The reaction time for unique keywords like company names is often just a few days – and getting those first links is important and exciting. More importantly, the trickle will start at some point (if everything is going well) and you’ll want to know about it and work to amplify it.

The one other addition I’d make the great opening sections of the post is to explain the idea of keyword selection and covering the diversity of ways different people say the same thing.

Phillip does a great job of recommending and explaining page focus and basic tags, but just behind these concepts a newbie should learn that if some people call your ‘Blue Dog Coat’ a ‘Blue Dog Poncho’ then you’ll want to work that content in or add a separate page for it.

Covering the range of potential keywords for any site could be considered slightly advanced for what he was covering, but in the end it’s a basic point and very important – working in extra phrases could increase traffic by a few or many times – especially if some of the ‘alternate’ phrases are less competitive from an SEO viewpoint.

These suggestions aside, I’ll be bookmarking his post and recommending it.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:48 PM | Permalink

The difference between “doing the right things and doing things right” is one of those phrases that has been stuck in my head for a long long time.

The way I originally heard/learned it was connected to the idea that you had to know when to do each, and that usually it was first important to do the right things (ie get going even if things aren't perfect) but that at some point it became urgent to actually do things right (deliver full quality or potential).

The prevailing wisdom has long been that in business you have to execute to perfection to really win. But in reality you’re better off doing a poor job delivering something that people really want, than a great job at something in which they have little or no interest.

The entire internet has largely been an example. It was initially slow and painful, with limited content and dropped connections – but people came in droves. Remember the first year of online video at the size of a postage stamp? MP3 files largely killed hi-fidelity because small and transportable made ‘audio resolution’ far less important. And online shopping is the king of them all – a very difficult process and often frustrating experience in the early years (and sometimes today) yet compound growth at 25%+ per quarter or more for years on end.

When recently reading some of the classic marketing books, I was struck by how it seemed many online marketers where fighting up-hill battles because they hadn’t stopped to consider or implement sound marketing principles. They were just rushing around buying keywords or optimizing pages and then considering their results only in light of the quality of their keyword buying or landing pages – they didn’t stop to consider that maybe their product was unappealing, their pricing was uncompetitive, or their value proposition was poorly communicated.

There’s a term I heard once and have never been able to find again – maybe it’s terminal point – which is the name for the point in time when a plane is definitely going to crash although it hasn’t yet hit the ground. In other words, after that point, there is nothing that can be done because prior actions have sealed fate (mathematically). There can be a terminal point in business too, when there is no keyword or promotion that is going to save you.

Seth made me think about all this with his post on strategy vs tactics.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:58 AM | Permalink

Reading all those predictions got me thinking about some of my own:

1. Google will release a major upgrade to Google Analytics which will really put the heat on the major vendors. This will be a good thing for everyone (except the other non-major vendors) as the competition will force the competitive vendors’ technical and marketing teams to really move their products, messages and support materials forward.
   
   
2. Avinash’s 90/10 rule will become broadly accepted and even the vendors will begin to admit that analytics software is a tool not a solution.
   
   
3. A new metric – the ROWA – will be born. “Return on Web Analytics” will track the ROI of this newly recognized increase in the cost of analytics (software + people). Shouldn’t web analysts be able to document its’ own contributions?
   
   
4. By the end of the year there will be at least two more analytics consultancies in the U.S. (or depts. within larger agencies) with at least 20 people devoted to web analytics. (I think the analytics group at ZaaZ is that large already but don’t’ believe there are any others today. Please comment if I’m wrong.)
   
   
5. By the end of the year at least major one analytics vendor will demonstrate beta software, or announce the upcoming release of, a completely revitalized web analytics application that isn’t pageview-centric but instead starts with the broader goals of the business and its traffic sources, website, content and people (as suggested a few days ago).

In other words, they’ll stop making us twist our heads to fit our questions to their data, and will instead start presenting data (and more) that answers our questions.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A bunch of the smartest web analytics bloggers took part in the New Years tradition of making predictions, and someone on the WebAnalytics Yahoo Group took the time to compile links to all of them. Since I hadn’t quite got around to making mine yet, I’ll comment on those I found the most interesting:

• Mr Kaushik says “2007 will be a banner year for Web Analytics education (books, blogs, seminars, conferences).”
  There is no doubt that more and more people will wake up to the need to understand web analytics, so there will be more books, blogs, and conferences. But I don’t think the real crazy-go-nuts boom will hit until ‘08 or ’09. By then emetrics will be nearly as large as SES was in ‘06. (I hope Jim Sterne is ready).

• Avinash also says that “Pay Per Click (sometimes called SEM) analytics will continue to be important but cede mind-share and control to Search Engine Optimization analytics.” How I wish this were true (and said so just the other day). But the $$ and the development effort is all over the paid search world, and I expect both the explosion of paid search reporting and bid management tools to continue and only a relative trickle of better SEO tracking to emerge.

• Lastly AK suggests “More Analysts and Web Decision Makers will realize the futility of torturing click-stream data and embrace qualitative measurement options”. Some will but not enough. As long as the analytics tools present menu after nested menu full of reports, the majority of users (especially new ones) will look at these reports and think they’re supposed to be able to learn something from them.

• Mr Peterson thinks “Smart people will stop freaking out about how "Web 2.0" is going to be measured and will begin to develop rational and reasonable models for tracking emerging Internet technologies and business models.” Again I agree there will be some progress, but I don’t think the ‘freaking out’ will even slow down, nor will the pace of web 2.0 changes which keep putting pressure on both tools and analysts, and I predict that the ‘How to track web2’ sessions at emetrics ‘07 and ’08 will be standing-room-only.

• Eric also mentions that “those with the right tools to identify click fraud may not particularly like what they find.” The ability to document a significant amount of click-fraud across a wide range of PPC campaigns has the potential to be the most important story of 2007. If there is a ‘web 2.0 bubble’ nothing would deflate it as fast as this. I’m just not sure yet if the nature of this fraud (which I do instinctively believe is very significant) lends itself to being detected given the limitations of the infrastructure on which the whole system rides.

• Mr Angel thinks “agencies will finally emerge as a significant factor in the web analytics space... and there are going to be lots who will screw it up pretty royally.” He’s very right on both of these counts.

• Gary also provides which I think is the most interesting of all the predictions with “The pendulum will swing back – at least a little way – from ASP solutions to internal solutions for web analytics.” I don’t know about that but find it very intriguing.

• The GA Experts say that “Microsoft will release ‘DeepSoft’ or whatever they rename Deepmetrix, and it’s likely to be free.” And like everything MS has done in this space for the last three years, it will have absolutely no impact on anything.

• GA also says “web analytics terminology will simplify and become more business orientated and less technical.” I really don’t think this will happen – jargon doesn’t go away as adoption increases – or we wouldn’t have RSS, trackbacks, SERP reports, CPC or ROAS. The old guys don’t want to give it up and the newbies want to join the club.

UPDATE: I added my own predictions.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:08 AM | Permalink

Late last year in reaction to some SEO/SEM in-fighting, I offered some comments on organic search optimization. Another element of the debate was how the work of organic search optimization compared to the effort (and required skills) for paid search management.

While both tasks generally fall under the umbrella title of ‘search engine marketing’, in reality organic and paid search marketing execution have very little in common. The skills, tools, and even personality characteristics which I’d associate with organic and paid optimization are in large measure dissimilar.

Both paid and organic search remain a definite mix of art and science, but with the relative percentages are inverted. Organic remains largely art while paid search is dominated by science. The lack of clear organic analytical information, as mentioned in the previous post, is one significant reason.

While a lack of technology and control make organic search optimization difficult, it is ironically the increasing sophistication of management and reporting tools that make paid search management increasingly tough for the casual practitioner.

Driving a paid campaign means deciding on and controlling an amazing list of variables: keywords and phrases, campaign and ad-group organization, match types, negative keywords, bids, repeating all of these on each different engines, the engine content networks and their controls, the text ads for each keyword group, day-parting, geo-targeting, landing pages, and PPC analytics (CTR, CPC, Ave Pos, and ROAS at minimum).

The issues and twists associated with each of these aspects are significant, and those arising from their interaction and interdependence boggle-the-mind. (I'd list them, but who wants to read a 10-page blog post?) The ways to make really bad mistakes and places to exercise terrible judgment are numerous.

So is paid search management harder or easier than SEO? What in the world is the point of any comparison? Is one better than the other? At least that is an interesting question.

My answer tomorrow.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:41 PM | Permalink