The Commerce360 Blog

Right after convenience the thing most of us like about shopping online is that we can almost certainly find better prices than those at the local retailer. Say goodbye to that. The Supreme Court just overturned a 96-year-old rule that made it nearly impossible for manufacturers to require certain minimum pricing for their products in the retail channel.

In other words, Motorola can now mandate that their bluetooth headsets sell for $79.95 rather than the $24 at which I've been able to find them online. Palm can now dictate the the Treo 755 never be sold for less than $499. In other words, the rest of the world now gets to enjoy the pricing control previously reserved for Steve Jobs and iPods :-)

As with all other heinous reversions of rights and practices, this one is cloaked in twisted logic that claims it's for the good of society: By allowing companies to dictate not only the price at which they sell good at wholesale, but also the price at which resellers must sell at retail, we all benefit because it "makes it easier for a new producer by assuring retailers that they will be able to recoup their investments in helping to market the product."

In other words, no companies have been able to successfully create, launch, or retail products for the last 100 years because this horrible tradition of discounting has made business just plain unprofitable. Finally this ruling will allow business to return to America. (Never mind that all known facts are to the contrary - this is a justification for policy change, it need not be reasonable, rational, or factual.)

So stock up on whatever you crave. Prices are about to go up.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:23 AM | Permalink

Search Engine Optimization sure seems to be a controversial topic. It’s Easy. It’s hard. It’s dead. It’s alive. It's BS. It's Real. It should be done in-house. It should be outsourced. All that plus hundreds of blog posts every day, thousands of forum messages every hour, and a conference just about every week.

But who really understands this somewhat obscure art and science? Do the marketing VPs or online marketing directors who decide to allocate budgets and resources?

Apparently not. How else can you explain the fact that paid search gets 8X the budget allocation of organic search, and yet generates only about one quarter of the clicks?

And within those organizations that do make the decision to invest in organic optimization, do the insiders that need to support the execution of an SEO initiative know how it works and why it’s important?

Certainly not in my experience or that of the other professional SEO’s I recently talked to about this topic. In fact, just about everyone you’d need to assist in search optimization is pretty likely to work against it. Consider the following profiles - caricatures to be sure - but not far off the mark in my experience.

• Marketing Manager – Generally supports SEO or the project wouldn’t get started, but usually knows next-to-nothing about what it really entails in terms of the breadth and depth of technical, content, and design changes to the website that will be requested or required. When the magnitude of these change requests appear, they often focus on negotiating down to what’s feasible given the internal politics instead of managing the politics to get the necessary changes done. In the end, they get a sub-optimal result – hoping they can somehow get 80% of the benefit from the 20% of the changes that made it through. Of course they won’t.

• Web Developers– Doesn’t know much (or anything) about search optimization, doesn’t really care, and sees all the SEO requests as changes to what they’re planning or the ways they’re used to building site/pages. Frequently have an easy-going ‘I’ll do whatever they want me to’ attitude going in but as development moves along somehow the SEO requests often get shaved in order to ‘make the schedule’. In other words, they were all seen as ‘nice to have’ requests and not ‘must have’ requests.

• Product Managers / Merchandising Managers – This one is the most surprising. You would expect these folks to be naturally included to present clear and complete information about their products. They’ve been limited picture-price-paragraph in catalogs and brochures for years that suddenly in a medium with free incremental space you’d expect them to go wild – extolling the virtues of their products at length. Doesn’t usually happen. More commonly see the need for deep rich content and extra work (we don’t have long descriptions or up-to-date feature lists on all these products!). Seem to think prospects will buy their goods or services just because they’re selling them. Forget SEO and better rankings, shouldn’t they want to deliver more information in pursuit of higher conversion rates and more revenue?

• Graphic designers / Web designers – While it’s almost possible to understand how web developers have made it to 2007 without any idea about the methods of SEO, how did so many people who design websites for a living make it this far without becoming at least minimally aware of this stuff? The battle here of course comes down to form over function, with ‘text’ being a four-letter word for ‘aesthetically unappealing’ and anti-aliased .gif files somehow frequently ending up the lynchpin of the designs.

• CEOs / Senior Managers – These folks shouldn’t have to know about SEO, because those functionally closer to the projects should have it covered. But since they don’t most are left to notice (or be told) that their sites don’t show up on the first page in Google for some keyword they decide is critical (like their core product name or category) and then they spring into action. Calling in the Marketing Manager (described above) they then hear a long and confusing list of reasons and finger-points as to why the site/page doesn’t rank: the developer had technical limitations due to the platform and the design that graphics and marketing wanted doesn’t index well for some reason, and the product managers are working on generating more copy, and it’s basically an intractable situation but next year they plan a site redesign and they’ll hopefully get it right then. They’re left believing that SEO is an intractable problem and with the view that paid search is at least ‘actionable and manageable’.

Herein lies the real problem with SEO.

While the potential benefits are easy to articulate (who doesn’t want high volumes of free traffic from the search engines) as a marketing discipline it has something of a branding and positioning problem and even when projects are approved and begun the real-world implementation very frequently turns into a protracted and very difficult process.

A lot of the reason is the perspectives and motivations of the players, as described above. But there’s another massive problem too.

More about that in the next post.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The question really isn’t whether SEO is dead or not. As long as people want to get their pages and content listed and linked in Google and the other engines, the process of increasing the odds of that happening will exist and it will be called Search Engine Optimization.

Never. Gonna. Change.

The question is whether or not the algorithms (and their human assistants) are so darn good and in fact measuring the actual level of satisfaction that your pages and content bring to real users so well that by optimizing your site for the users you have in fact done everything you could possibly do to increase your chances of the search engines ranking you highly for all of the search phrases relevant to your content.

That is the idea that Mike Grehan, and then responsively Bryan Eisenberg are getting at. Make the people happy and the engines will take care of themselves. It’s also the ‘Don’t Worry Make Them Happy’ song the Google Webmaster Guidelines have been singing for years.

Trouble is, it just isn’t true. The search engines don’t rank based on customer satisfaction. They develop indicators and proxies that they hope/believe should highly correlate to customer satisfaction, but keyword placement, word context, link structures and the dozens or hundreds of other variables they track don’t always hit the mark. The current results prove that.

So until Google starts surveying visitor satisfaction and using that data to rank sites in their engine (not a bad idea, but one that brings its own issues), it’s not yet time to cross SEO off your to-do list.

NOTE: I want to make clear that I completely agree with both Mike and Bryan on the importance of working hard to improve the core quality and satisfaction delivery of websites. I’d even strongly agree that it should be the most important thing you focus on. But we aren’t yet at the time or place where it’s the only thing you need to do.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It will probably only last a second or two. In the scheme of things it’s a relatively small shift of weight. There is no danger they’re going down, let alone for the count. But let’s enjoy it.

The New York Times and Jason Calacanis have found the Achilles’ heel and with some justice it’s deep in the heart. The Algorithm.

As fast and as smart as it is, it can and is gamed on a very consistent basis. Although the larger miracle of general quality and accuracy has created a brand image that overcome reality time and time again, and despite the irony that there has probably been more progress made to improve the results in the toughest spots in the past twelve months than in the previous five years, it still remains true that the more likely there is money attached to your search, or significant diversity surrounding its concept, the higher the probability that your results will NOT be the 10 most relevant in the world.

The fact that humans can do a better job isn’t really even an argument. The issue is speed and scale. The brilliance of what Jason is doing at Mahalo is the idea of taking on the top XXX thousand most popular searches and letting the algo’s have the rest. It’s still a bear of a task, in terms of coordinating and avoiding conflicts of interest (real or imagined), but the rise and domination of Wikipedia clearly says it’s not impossible.

A lot of the response from Matt Cutts sounds very defensive. ‘People turn on our computers, and people wrote and loaded the software…’ but in the end he seems genuinely open to having people edit results. That of course would be the smart thing to do, both functionally and competitively. Google could certainly arrange to have the top 10K results human edited in very short order. They don’t even have to make a big switch, just offer a tab at the top, or preference or alt search button (‘algo search’ vs ‘editor says’). Let users opt-in to these results when available, or switch to them when the machine is being out-witted by 100K spammers just out for their commissions.

It’s amazing how competition drives better results. And how a little press (mainstream or blog-o-based) magnifies the significance and pressure generated by anything. I have no doubt that the ‘human-assisted’ arguments inside of Google will heat up and make more headway tomorrow than they did last week. I’m also sure that Mahalo and lots of other competitors will be equally spurred on to leverage their progress into even greater success. And that’s good for all of us.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:36 AM | Permalink

When Mike Grehan says SEO is Dead it’s a little like Martha Stewart telling you that Twinkies with candles make a fine wedding cake. Yet that’s what he said. The release of Google Universal Search Results and the new Ask had so much impact on him that a man who’s probably spent as much time as anyone trying to grok the engine’s algorithms seems to have thrown up his hands and cried uncle.

His argument, if I understand it correctly, is that these newfangled results are so darn good, and so attractive with all the images and videos and maps and pricing and other useful stuff, that finally ‘better marketing counts’ and SEO techniques are now just plain uninteresting. He implies that getting a text listing on these multimedia pages isn’t even worth the effort.

This is where I lose him. Don’t you have to ‘optimize’ to get a listing near the top of that first page regardless of the type of content you hope to have listed? Don’t you still have to be selected as one of the 5-10 most relevant results in the world to appear on that page? Isn’t that selection going to be done based on some scoring criteria and isn’t SEO the process of figuring out that scoring criteria and then putting those points on the board?

It’s impossible to argue that if it’s relevant to the search term anyone wouldn’t prefer to have an image, or video, or other piece of visually interesting content appear. But when that’s not relevant or possible I’m sure most would be happy to have a top text link with good title copy and a great descriptive snippet. Isn’t search engine optimization still the only way to get that spot? What exactly am I missing?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 6:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Long ago I heard somewhere that half of all the searches done on Google every day were brand new – Google had never (ever never ever) seen them before. I’ve repeated that stat a lot over the last two or three years, never having been able to attribute the source.

So imagine my pleasure and surprise to find a brand new reference to Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering saying that “20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees today, have never seen before.”

Wow. It doesn’t even matter that the number is ‘only’ 25% - a few years later it would have to be lower – that is an amazing number. Google does between 2 and 10 billion searches per month. It’s been at that for several years now. And every day those slippery humans ask for 50 million or more things that nobody has ever thought to ask about in that exact way before. Wow.

I’m not exactly sure what this means for search marketing, other than showing that along with the algorithms and the competition and the way results are grouped and presented the actual inventory is a moving target as well. In paid search ‘broad’ and ‘phrase’ match probably take care of most of these new searches (or at least those in your area of interest). For organic optimization it certainly favors the ongoing development and growth of content – the larger the site and the richer the language the better the odds of having an exact match of all or part of these new search phrases.

What do you think it means?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You can, by the way, tag your RSS feeds to be tracked as a campaign in Omniture. Just add tracking codes to each URL in your RSS feed. Below is part of the the MovableType template for the ATOM feed for this blog - note the ?cid=rss codes as in each URL.

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>?cid=RSS_C360_blog_title" /> <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="<$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml?cid=RSS_C360_blog_title" />

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>?cid=RSS_c360Blog_<$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$>" />

Any SiteCatalyst users who have other tricks or implementation tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:02 PM | Permalink

With the recent Google purchase of Feedburner, I presume we'll soon see RSS subscriber stats included in the Google Analytics reports.

This is great for anyone who relies on Google Analytics and blogs or uses other RSS feed distributions as part of their online marketing - RSS is just another channel and should be included in traffic reports alongside of search and email. I didn't see this talked about when the acquisition was being discussed, but this is a big win for Google Analytics.

I've never understood why the analytics vendors didn't try to compete with Feedburner themselves - or buy them - a huge new channel and tracking opportunity emerges and NONE of them even bother to try and capture it. Assuming Google eventually moves the entire Feedburner UI into Google Analytics they'll all regret it even more.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:51 PM | Permalink

By the way - wasn't something like this the original widget?

And where exactly are the cool web analytics widgets from the major vendors that let me share interesting stats with my site/blog readers? Not just 'page view counters' but cool configurable stuff with selectable metrics or metric-slide-shows and graphics etc.

Omniture has their cool Dashboard Player - how about widgetizing that? Come on guys, have a lunch-hour developer contest or something.

You'd think they'd want the branding visibility even if they don't want to just give us some cool toys.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Comscore says that in April 2007 there were 177,000,000 unique viewers for widgets - which by their definition are "data files that can be embedded into a site’s HTML code and are typically displayed in a small viewing pane on the site." And they seem to have skipped YouTube, so that would have probably increased the number by at least a couple...

Most widgets have controls or interactivity options for users, so who knows how many clicks took place inside these widgets? Nobody. And that's a problem.

Widgets currently exist outside the purview of web analytics - you can't track the clicks inside widgets on your site, and if you distribute your own content in widgets you can't incorporate those 'remote' views or interactions either.

So web analytics are ignoring the Widget Economy. As the numbers above show, this is a material oversight. Analytics vendors need to get themselves together and create a standard widget reporting mechanism, and present it to the widget developers of the world, pronto. Widget consumers (bloggers in large part, but other sites too) then need to demand that the widgets they support embrace this standard, enabling them to track the clicks that take place within these wonderful little windows.

By any expectation we're at the very start of Widget World. Time for the analytics folks to join the party.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that the Sopranos ending is out of the way, there's just one more secret left - The Future of Web Analytics.

I'll be revealing the answer to that one this Weds evening at the Web Analytics Wednesday event in Philadelphia. I'm pleased to have been asked to speak at this event, and hope this reveal doesn't spark the same level of controversy as that other one did.

In case you aren't familiar, Web Analytics Wednesday is the world's only distributed networking event for web analytics professionals. Open to everyone, practitioners and vendors alike, Web Analytics Wednesday is a free event allowing you to meet folks with similar work interests.

If you're in the area, please join us at 6pm (RSVP requested). The event is being held at Teikoku Restaurant @ 5492 West Chester Pike - Newtown Square, PA 19073 - Phone: 610.644.8270

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

Web Analytics is struggling for the soul of online marketing. At least it should be. There is far too much time and money spent badly, far too many users subjected to horrible web experiences, and far too many misplaced priorities – all the very things that good analytics and analysis can help prevent.

And although they might not see it in these grand terms, many of the Analytics Elders have been talking lately about some fundamental issues that we as practitioners need to get right before what has traditionally been the tail can finally start wagging this dog.

First we have the relative role of tools and talent. Avinash now famously proposed the 90/10 rule for allocating analytics budgets. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t meant to be the literal dictate some like to argue about but was intended to be a theoretical ideal and probably a little bit of an exaggeration intended to make the point that 10/90 split found in most companies was really wrong. The vital point here is that it doesn’t matter that you buy (or install) web analytics it matters that you do web analysis.

Eric Peterson suggested the debate shift from money to time, and more specifically that 20% of time be spent on hiring and 70% of it on the actually doing of the work. More importantly, he makes the case for a known and repeatable analytic process so that results aren’t based on raw talent and individual superstars, both of which are in short supply. I’m sure he’s right but it will take a lot of effort and discipline to define these processes and given the huge range of efforts that analytics can measure I think this one’s going to be a long time coming before most companies (or the analytics world in general) have so many processes well defined that it doesn’t take an exceptionally skilled analyst to deliver a constant stream of valuable and actionable insights.

The second issue is that of exactly what analytics should deliver: reports or insights. Avinash proffered the 20/80 rule (again I believe as a guideline) for allocating time between reporting and analysis. While ‘less reporting more analysis’ has become the analysts’ theme song, the idea that any reporting that does get delivered should be ‘actionable’ has also become a frequent refrain. Gary Angel effectively took the counterpoint in this debate when he argued that it isn’t practical for reports and KPIs to be actionable because the KPI itself cannot contain enough context. With some great examples and follow up posts (#1 and #2) he clearly demonstrates both the value and process of analysis – while setting a simple goal for reports which justifies their existence even if they aren’t actionable: “Reporting is designed to provide information back to key decision-makers within an organization about the web channel.”

Eric wrote a reply to Gary’s post that is worth reading, and Jim Novo did a fantastic job of putting both into some larger context. My own sense is that KPIs and reports are vital for understanding, which is in and of itself important and the prerequisite to ‘actionable insights’ for both the marketer/executive and the analyst.

Finally we have a step which I’d never heard discussed in the context of analytics but clearly is part of the analytics process. Bryan Eisenberg pointed out that the step after actionable is action. Analytics only works if you have reports, and analysis, and someone ‘talented’ enough (Bryan’s word) to take action.

Talk about raising the stakes. Now to be successful with web analytics we need to choose and properly implement the right software, gain complete and accurate data capture, select the right KPIs, define and prepare the right reports, have the time and skill to perform analysis and define insights (with the inevitable trackbacks for more tagging, data, and reports), possess the ability to recommend actions based on those insights, AND find a client (internal or external) who has the awareness, authority, and resources to go make significant changes to campaigns, web pages, offers, or whatever else needs changing.

Of course this last piece (the client) isn’t really the last step – they’ll need to be pre-qualified as having the right attitude and proclivity to action way up front, informed and updated throughout, and probably play at least a semi-active role in the acceptance of the analysis and recommendations. In other words they aren’t just going to do what you tell them.

I don’t know that there’s any aspect of online marketing which is moving faster in its development than web analytics is right now (both in technology and in practice) but I also can’t think of any areas that has further to go or in which more is at stake. My instinct is that as a group we’re not going to make it – and that broadly speaking the metric-less marketers will keep driving their boats into rocks without even knowing it for quite some time to come.

Having said that, this is an astounding opportunity for those who can make it work. I would suggest that the sky is the limit for both salary and influence for those who can really demonstrate command and the ability to execute to the potential of this space over the next few years.

And it’s worth pointing out what should be obvious - there are a very impressive group people writing and working to bring maturity and ultimate success to this market space. I came across all of the above referenced articles in just one session catching up in my RSS reader. Those I’ve linked here and another dozen or so really smart folks are certainly going to make it a good and interesting fight.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our friend Avinash Kaushik's book is now available, and the Commerce360 copies arrived today. I've only skimmed it thus far, but it looks great and I really can't wait to dig in this weekend. Anyone who reads Occam's Razor already knows the man can think and write and has a tremendous perspective on web analytics - so go get a copy!

It's also worth pointing out again that Avinash is donating 100% of his royalties to charity in the form of The Smile Train and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) - so don't just buy one, order a case or so for the office (and use the link at left to order and the Amazon affiliate fees will be donated too).

To help promote the book, Avinash has asked for photos of his readers, so here is one from some of the Commerce360 team:

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:30 PM | Permalink

Bounce rates are public enemy #1 in the world of conversion, because they represent the number of times visitors slam the door in your face without even getting to know you. The good news is that bounce rates could be dropping considerably in the near future.

The bad news is that the reason isn't that web sites are improving so dramatically that more visitors will more immediately recognize a path to their goal and therefore continue clicking deeper into the site. It's because web-page previews are starting to appear in search engines (and other places) so visitors can reject you without the hassle of having to even visit your site in the first place.

Instead of slamming the door in your face they'll just be driving in and out of the parking lot. The trouble is you won't even know they came because since they didn't load your page the drive-by won't show up in your website analytics. Conversion rates will skyrocket (yeah!) but this could give the false impression that your home page (or any other web page for that matter) isn't really bad - when in reality it probably is.

The new ASK 3D is the example I saw today that got me thinking about this. There have been other tools like this include SnapShots that can be added to any site. As these tools become prevalent and more full featured, it's another major shot across the bow of website analytics as we now know it.

Of course, there is a simple solution. The preview technology guys (Ask, SNAP, others) could be kind enough to send us a tagged ping when our previews are viewed. Maybe even include the keyword (in the case of search, the URL in the case of SNAP) where the preview occurred. Quick, someone call the WAA or our Analytics Lobbyists in Washington...

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)