04.14.11
Measuring social with Omnitue Site catalyst
Here’s a useful PDF from Omniture on the benefits of using social and how to track social specific KPI’s using Omniture.
visit here for the Omniture measuring social pdf
11.22.10
Best web design practices validated by solid research
Here’s a great usability article that backs best web design practices with reputable research results such as eye-tracking studies, reports, analytics, and usability surveys.
A few of the topics covered include
- Forget the “Three-Click Rule”
- Google Golden Triangle
- Page load speed
- Below the fold myth
- Site navigation myth
10.06.09
Cross Browser testing
Here’s another must have tool to add to your web development arsenal. Spoon is a Firefox plugin that allows you to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. This tool has proven very useful in testing email campaigns and site designs. As you may have noticed sites may render completely different based on the browser and even the browser version.
Simply navigate back to this page after the install and then click on the desired browser version to initiate that browser.
Spoon.net/browsers
04.06.09
Another Benefit of Contexual Advertising
This is an old SEO trick that is often overlooked. This is that contextual advertisements help organic rankings. The PDF below shows sponsored link that were cached by Google. The original html page had a tracking link that would not be search engine friendly. When the page was converted to a PDF however, the tracking link was stripped out and a link to the homepage remained. The result is a link from a highly reputable site.
contextual advertisements contextual links linking strategy pdf links seo trick11.08.08
Chicago’s subway ads - videos
One of the many things I enjoy about Chicago’s subway systems are the animated ads. Here’s a website which features them. Although subway ads currently don’t fit into my marketing budget I look forward to the day when they do. Enjoy (you may need to have your windows media player open prior to clicking on the link).
04.09.08
Commission Junction mass lead rejection guide
Commission Junction, CJ, doesn’t have an efficient method to rejecting a large number of leads within their interface. Here’s the work around.
- First you’ll need to request a subscription ID. You can do this using the support link within the advertiser interface.
- Once you have a subscription ID, you’ll run a detailed transaction report.
Now download the transaction report to Excel. - You’ll use the detailed transaction report to identify the records that need to be rectified,
- Once you have identified all the “bad” records, copy these records into a separate Excel sheet
- Copy “UQL,,” on a separate column next to the OrderIDs starting from the first till the last row of OrderID
- Copy the two columns of data into notepad
- Replace the extra space characters with a blank
- The final format should look similar to the format below
- Replace the CID(this is within parenteses next to the comapany name on the top right corner of the CJ advertiser interface) and SUBID(subscription ID) with your values
- Once your file is in the format below save your file with a “.csv” extension
- Your final step is to email the file to import@cjdatatransfer.com
remove the <BR> tags”
03.01.08
Yahoo AOL OutLook Gmail CSS Guidelines
My designer got tired of fixing my HTML email code and as a result she passed along a very useful link.
This is a must have chart for anyone creating or modifing HTML emails. This chart breaks down what CSS code is supported by the top email clients including Gmail, Hotmail, Windows Live Mail,Outlook 2003,Outlook Express, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Entourage, Eudora, Thunderbird. Before reading this, I always assumed that Gmail supported background images.
Keep checking this link the author plans to keep the chart updated.
02.28.08
Adwords Max Budget nightmare
As you may have heard, the Adwords team recently devised a new way of increasing each Adwords account spend by introducing a few feature called “Automatic Matching”.
Basically, if you are not spending your daily budget, Google will read the content of your landing page and automatically bid against keywords it encounters on your landing page which you didn’t originally specify within your account. The performance of this new feature is currently being tested by selected Adwords clients. Although automatic matching has good intention, it will cause more overhead for the SEM Manager which will now have to.
- Adjust his/her daily budget and most likely reduce ad exposure.
- Keep track of each keyword which was automatically added by the system.
- Continuously add negative keywords to prevent bidding on unwanted keywords.
- Optimize campaigns due to changes in Quality score
This is a brilliant move from Google to increase ad spend for less experienced PPC managers, but unfortunately it will create more overhead for the veterans. Maybe Google will listen to the outcry of many SEM Managers and add an opt-out option similar to the content match option.
Read the email Adwords sent out here.
01.27.08
America’s most wanted Email Spammers
For anyone doing email marketing, here is a site you should definitely bookmark. Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO). SPAMHAUS provides FAQs on email marketing, glossary of industry related terms, Scam alerts, a lookup directory of known spammers and very useful email tools. My favorite is the top 10 worst ROKSO spammers section.
01.12.08
Essential Competitive PPC Tools
Here are a couple great competitive Pay per click tools, if you haven’t already adopted them.
Spy FU
This is a great Pay Per Click competitive software. Although the pay per click cost and traffic estimates are not exact, at least they provide a fuzzy idea of the competitive landscape.
Spy Fu also plots keyword search trends and provides the ability to export your results into an Excel file.
KeyWord Spy
KeyWord Spy is another excellent competitive Pay Per Click tool. Keyword Spy helps you analyze your competitor’s PPC click campaigns by providing approximate Adrank, ad variations and number of competitors at the keyword level. This is a very useful tool if your considering entering a certain market or if your staying on top of new competitors initiatives. Another use of this tool is the ability to easily spot affiliates bidding on your restricted keywords.
One couple of unanswered questions I have yet to find out regarding these sites are.
1. How are these sites getting this competitive information?
I’m assuming that they are screen scraping the search results.
2. How are they accommodating for personalized search, and search history?
Even if they are not accommodating for personalized, these sites still provide useful information.
competitive pay per click competitive ppc keyword spy keyword tool spy fu
