Date Archive: April 2007

Matt Cutts and Tim O’Reilly note that Google is being held to a higher privacy standard than other firms who have far far more data on us (e.g. ISPs, credit card companies, credit bureaus, etc). They’re right.

Business today means flying. Seatguru.com and Flightstats.com can help make flights a little more pleasant.

“The biggest single difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that today you tend to get one 46-year-old CEO in Web 2.0 companies, whereas in Web 1.0 companies you got two 23-year-old-co-CEOs…” — Joseph Lassiter, HBS

A sensible way for a paid search marketing agency to charge for their services is “capped percent of ad spend.” If useful to readers, our standard SEM pricing is $3000 / 12.5% / $9500, per month per site. The monthly cap goes higher for highly complex retailers.

More from Avinash Kaushik on How Web Analysts Should Spend Their Day.

Celebros provides site search, navigation and merchandising solutions for e-commerce websites. Recently, we had a chance to interview Celebros CEO Michael Crandell about site search in the world of online retail.

My favorite answer to the question, “what is a brand?”. Our answer: “brand is what you do every day.”

Interesting post from Tim O’Rielly on Google’s 411 service as data harvesting strategy.

RobotReplay is a cool new tool for recording and watching user behavior on your site. We’re looking forward to trying it, even if it may leave us with a few unanswered questions.

Shipping isn’t really free, even when retailers price it at zero. Amazon raises (lowers?) the bar again, with negative $5 shipping for the Endless.com launch. The direct marketing industry shudders.

More wisdom from “The Wizard”, FeedBurner’s founder Dick Costolo. To whit: focus on goals, not competitors.

Rajesh Setty offers 20 “Things They Didn’t Tell You About Blogging.”

A quick follow-up to Tuesday’s interview with Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist.

How the computer really moves the cursor.

Assorted interesting links: Josh Bell, Eric Schmidt, Matt Linderman, and Joe Madsen.

Vintage Tub and Bath sells unique bathrooms fixtures online. We had the chance to interview Allan Dick, Vintage Tub’s Chief Marketing Officer & Senior Plumbing Evangelist, about his experience growing a web business from startup to a specialty category leader.

Yahoo confirmed our suspicion that since geo-targeting locates a user by IP address, if an IP address cannot be determined, the user goes into an “Unknown” bucket. Thus ad campaigns limited to “US Only” are not visible to these Unknowns, and traffic drops off; Unknowns are only served ads from campaigns set to “Entire Market”.

We recently had the enjoyable opportunity to interview web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik.

Good banners vs. search post from Fred Wilson.

Google grabbed the DoubleClick deal. Here are revised observations and prognostications.

Even though a pay-per-click bid management system can seem like a black box, here are nine ways shine some light into the system to get a rough sense of performance.

Pausing for a moment to say thanks.

We’re removing rel=”no follow” tag from our comment links. We link generously.

While aggregate spend on all three engines were up in absolute dollar terms, Yahoo slipped back a tiny bit relative to Google in terms of percentage share. None of our clients mandate a priori budget levels by engine. Thus, an increase in spend on an engine reflects an increase in click quality, such as improved conversion or sales per click, relative to the other engines. Your mileage may vary.

Neil Daswani, Michael Stoppelman, and the Google Click Fraud Team released a fascinating report on Clickbot.A.