Date Archive: March 2007

Attention. Spans. Shortening.

Econ 301: Commoditize your complements.

NEMOA is freely sharing some great presentations from their Spring 2007 conference. Some real gems.

I’ve been enjoying Sally McGhee’s book on Outlook tips for managing email, tasks, and calendar intelligently.

The good folks over at the American Marketing Association say they still have some seats for their “Hot Topic: Search Marketing” in San Francisco on April 20th, but that spots are filling up fast.

Rebecca Lieb’s article on Google Browser Sync champions its potential for improving web measurement but bemoans the likelihood of its adoption.

We conducted a study in 2006 to determine if non-brand (and/or specific) searches were providing an “assist” for subsequent brand (and/or specific) searches. This is often called the “search funnel.” In agreement with recent Travelocity results, we found the “funnel assist effect” to be quite small.

For many search advertisers, paid search ads on the retailer’s brand name (Brandname”, Brand Name”, BrandName.com”) generate 20% to 50% of their search-driven tracked sales. Most of these sales aren’t incremental.

Thoughts on Don Libey’s interesting 12/11/06 DM News column.

Checking that PPC sales tie out across different tracking systems sounds rudimentary. In truth, it is. Nonetheless, a PPC order audit can be highly instructive, as there are so many places that tracking can awry.

From Ilker Yoldas, a flash demo of post-click navigation.

“Meails”: self-important marketing spam emails which only care about the sender, not the recipient.

Honored to make to the Power 150 List of top marketing blogs.

Early movers get to shape conventions. If you show up late, it helps to be large.

Google’s new Website Optimizer tool show that some of the folks at Google understand the importance of conversion rates. Their Broad Match algorithm shows that not everyone at Google gets it.

My favorite quote from the first day of the NEMOA show was from Kevin Hillstrom, formerly of Nordstrom.

A quick post to note our article on lo-fi prototyping for a more efficient web design process (March issue of Multichannel Merchant mag.)

Google releases pay-per-action beta for content network.

Microsoft has released Strider Search Ranger, which helps content advertisers determine the IPs of the “publishers” snarfing up their ad budgets.

Great post by Avinash Kaushik on the role of head vs. tail terms in paid search.

Last week’s experiment of mashing up blog post headline from breaking news stories flops. As always, solid content wins, tricks lose.

It is neat to revisit a topic area after some time away and note quantum improvements in search relevance.

Read the Boxes and Arrows interview with Barry Schwartz.

The inside scoop on Alberto Gonzales, the Viacom / YouTube lawsuit, and Angelina Jolie.

Google overhaul its privacy policies, will dump user-specific search data more than 18 months stale.