Date Archive: January 2008

Strange controls on a fridge have little impact. It just takes me an extra minute or so to adjust it so it stops freezing the lettuce in the back of crisper. For a retail site, there’s no similar level of commitment. Design oddities, poorly-labeled buttons, and counter-intuitive shopping processes lead directly to abandons, brand damage, and lost sales.

Yahoo open-sources some truly amazing code, such as YUI.

Legal analysis of copyrights and jurisdiction, as each relates to web marketing.

I demonstrate how RKG Duck can cluster keywords into related buckets.

AdGroups are useful for folks managing small programs, and an essential construct in making Content advertising work well. However, for a large complex search program, AdGroups are simply in the way. In this post, we’ll dig into how and why we don’t pay too much attention to the engines’ advice on AdGroups.

Our hapless Duck picks 2000+ MFA spam pages in 48 hours.

One of of this blog’s posts progresses to the final round of the SEMMYs — the award for best PPC blog post of the year.

Amusing: hacking Google analytics via Yahoo pipes.

Because they overcome the typical (and non-trivial) challenges with such panache, it’s worth your time to check out to the great “runway videos” on IsabellaOliver.com.

Yesterday on SearchEngineLand we announced the opensourcing of RKG Duck, a powerful tool which lets you run filters on the Windows clipboard.

Marty Eisenstein shares some presentations on web intellectual property law. Part 1 covers trademarks.

Congratulations to Ryan Gibson that his recent blog post, “Starting from Scratch: A Paid Search Primer”, was nominated for a best-post-of-2007 award.

We often hear references to “the Long Tail” of search. But the length of the list is secondary to the value it’s bringing to the program. Quantifying the “thickness” of your tail can be a good check on the overall health of the program.

Marty I. Eisenstein is a senior partner with Brann Isaacson, a law firm specializing in direct marketing law. Marty shared his thoughts on tax law, gift cards, and general legal best practices for online retailers.

From this month’s Catalog Success, fourteen important ideas for paid and natural search going into 2008.

I’m looking forward to presenting at Internet Retailer’s new Web Design Conference, January 30- February 1, in sunny Miami.

Because we use our tools to build ever better tools, our technological prowess is increasing exponentially fast.

Something broke on my computer and Windows insisted on opening all folders in new windows. Hebert Jeremy’s registry hack finally solved this.

Finding the right message for your PPC ads is important, and testing is a key component of a well run program. But too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Find out the sometimes hidden costs of over doing the copy changes.

Ken Auletta profiles Google in this week’s New Yorker.

Jos. A. Bank’s marketing e-mails work. But each time I get to the site, basic problems with site design and usability prevent me from ordering online.

I’m a Shop.org fan, and this post is an unabashed plug for the upcoming Strategy And Innovation conference in Orlando, January 22nd through January 24th.

Steve Souder’s new book, High Performance Web Sites, is excellent. He describes how front end design choices can speed up a site by 10 to 20%.

“Will the web turn everyone into a direct marketer? My short answer is: everyone’s gonna try.” Paul Farris

Too many online retailers lack IT agility, despite having great developers. Why? How much blame should be placed on their development methodology?