This makes it easy to monitor the web for mentions of your brand — or for mentions of your competition, or your key execs, whatever — via a RSS reader.

I use Google Reader for RSS. Here are some of the searches I’ve set up to scan blogosphere, the news wires, Technorati, and Twitter:

(click image to enlarge)

Simple, relatively comprehensive, and free!

• Monitor Your Brand With HowSociable.com Monitor your brand across 22 social media sites. ...
• The New Distinction: “Housefile vs. Aquisition” Meets “Brand vs. Non-Brand” Even from a previous buyer, an order following a non-brand search is likely incremental....
• Search Tip: Brand vs. Non-Brand Results For many search advertisers, paid search ads on the retailer’s brand name (Brandname”, Brand Name”, BrandName.com”) generate 20% to 50%...

There are many different types of Paid Search agencies. Some rely on the engine’s UI and spreadsheets to do their work, the more sophisticated have either built or rented a tool set to use for bidding, ad management, etc. Some in this last category expose their UI to their clients, while others, like RKG, use their proprietary tools on behalf of their clients.

The tool providers call around and offer tours of their products and I usually take them up on it…once. It’s always interesting to see where others are in the evolution of the industry. Most of these tools do the basics very well and would be a huge help to an agency just wading into the space.

That said, on the all important analytic front the best of these systems is about where RKG was in 2005 — not bad, but nowhere near where we are today. Sometimes they ask: “what would RKG need to see in this tool that would make you seriously consider switching?” “A reflection of my corpse.” is my honest, but not so helpful response.

Without going into the underlying statistics, the data architecture, methodology and other important differences the biggest weakness is perhaps in the limitations of the UI. I’m not talking about specific features that are missing, I’m talking the limitations inherent in any UI.

I’ll show you a screen shot of the most powerful piece of RKG’s UI:

Yep, it’s just a blank query window. In that nothingness, our analysts have the flexibility to find and do anything and everything. The power to custom-craft any data, any analysis, any bidding enhancement to fit just the ads and data you intend cannot be hard-coded into a UI.

The drawback to infinite flexibility and that power that comes with it is that we can’t expose our UI to our clients, and we have to hire remarkably sharp people who can learn to be power SQL users and train them. We’ve had to grow slowly relative to others — still 315 on the Inc 500 list, but — and only recently moved from having one full-time sales person to having 2.5 FTEs on Marketing/Sales/PR.

We think the benefits far outweigh these inconveniences. As I’ve argued before, you can’t lead in this space if you’re using the same core technology as others; the ability to add features and tools as needed is irreplaceable, and the power and flexibility gained by having thoroughly trained sharp analysts with the power to code anything they need into the system cannot be supplanted.

It is easier to follow a different path, but we think we’ve found the right one for our firm.

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• “Power 150″ Top Marketing Blogs Honored to make to the Power 150 List of top marketing blogs....

Last week, Yahoo publicly announced their new Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) program. Since at least the middle of last year, Yahoo has been testing a feature that would allow advertisers to add videos, custom search boxes or images to their traditional text search ads. According to the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, the small group of advertisers who tested this last quarter “saw click-through rates rise by as much as 25 percent” along with “improved brand exposure and conversion rates”.

On the surface, the concept piqued my interest. But as I learned more, the program seems more aligned with Yahoo’s bottom line, than with those of their advertisers.

Initially, it appeared that the program might present opportunity to test and capture higher click-thru by using images to leverage brand awareness that has been generated by offline efforts. Unfortunately for now (the program is still in very limited Beta), Yahoo RAIS has limited the images, custom boxes and videos to “select” brand keywords. It’s not available for incremental paid search terms where there’s lots of competition for the traffic.

As we’ve pointed out in the past, there’s a distinct difference between traffic on your brand terms and traffic on your incremental (non-brand) search terms. If I search for a brand like “Staples” or “Staples Office Supply”, I’ve likely heard about Staples from another source, before doing the search.

Fortunately for Staples, (and many retailers) the results pages for these brand searches are already dominated by Staples natural and paid search links. Clicking on just about anything on the page will get me to the Staples site. In these cases, the incremental value to the advertiser seems extremely limited by RAIS options. Perhaps most helpful for those in the midst of re-branding or logo change (Tropicana, anyone?).

I’d be curious to see how the CTR increase was measured by Yahoo for their test. Did the presence of an image increase the overall CTR of the SERP (meaning the total clicks on natural AND paid links INCREASED) or did the image in paid search simply attract attention and effectively move clicks away from the natural listing?

Anecdotally, we’d expect that having a presence on both paid and organic links for non-brand searches may help boost the overall SERP CTR for your ads, but I don’t believe the same would hold true for branded clicks when the brand links are as omnipresent as Staples.

Even if I was in doubt about the incremental benefits of RAIS, it’s probably worth testing, right? After all, brand clicks are typically cheap. Not so in this case.

Yahoo’s been very quiet about the pricing for the program, but it doesn’t appear to be charged on a cost-per-click basis - at least as it exists in Beta. Rumor has it there’s a monthly fee to participate in the program that runs well into the five-digits!

If Yahoo would really like RAIS to work on a more broad scale, there are two changes they could make to create a more attractive program for advertisers:

1. Make the program available for any keyword, or at least any keyword above a particular traffic threshold. I’d love to test the incremental value in Staples placing their logo next to their ad for “office supplies”, when the page is filled with competitive results. It should help to set their ad apart as searchers may recognize the logo from offline branding efforts.

2. Charge the advertiser a fair rate that they can tie back to ROI. Perhaps a distinct premium-per-click that they can opt in to, based on participation in the program. Whether it’s an additional $.30 or 30%, the advertiser could then calculate their final CPC and understand the added value that RAIS is driving.

Ultimately, Yahoo’s bottom line will be best served by creating products that better align with advertisers’ goals.

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• The New Distinction: “Housefile vs. Aquisition” Meets “Brand vs. Non-Brand” Even from a previous buyer, an order following a non-brand search is likely incremental....
• Feb ‘08 Paid Search Market Share: Google Gains, Yahoo Loses, Economic Slowdown Not Observed Across our clients, from January 2008 to February 2008, Google picked up 2.3 points of ad spend share. Across our...

Here is Google’s FAQ on this migration, and here is an extremely helpful Google page providing known bugs and workarounds.

Q: What Feedburner bug did RKGblog encounter?

A: We got 502 and 503 errors on our primary RSS url, feeds.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog. We use a FeedBurner (FB) service called MyBrand to preserve our domain in our feed URL. If you are not using MyBrand (you should be), then migrating from old FB to the new Google account is just pushing one button. If you are using MyBrand, you also have to follow the instructions on this page on adding a CNAME so FB has DNS authority to serve that subdomain for you.

The bug is that the feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand page doesn’t work as you’d expect. To make it to work, you first need to hit the deactivate button, then hit activate. Deactivation is the magic step. Be sure to note your feed-specific domain name(s) before deactivating, as doing so will clear the text field. Once you ‘deactivate’ and ‘reactivate’, add the CNAME as per the instructions, wait for the DNS to propagate, and flush your local DNS cache, all should be working.

Q: Why use FeedBurner at all?

A: I can think of eight reasons to use FB for RSS.

• SmartFeed. This sends the right flavor of RSS based on the requester’s user agent string.
  • Is this still relevant in 2009? Unsure.
• BuzzBoost. This is a Recent Posts widget.
  • Nice, but we’ve seen homepage loading delays because of this. We’ll be replacing the FB widget on our homepage with a static include, generated hourly by a trivial cron script.
• Bandwidth. FB fetches RSS from your site when pinged, then FB handles all the requests for your feed from the outside world. Free bandwidth.
  • Nice. Thanks, Google.
• Adserving. You can use Feedburner/AdSense to insert ads into your feeds.
  • We don’t put ads in our RSS. Thus, not relevant to us.
• FeedBulletin. Provides a RSS feed on the fetch health of your feed.
  • Useful. We could use our Nagios system to monitor our feed availability, but FeedBulletin/FeedMedic is already there.
• Site analytics. FB used to provide very nice site analytics for blogs. They just dropped those in favor of Google Analytics.
  • Sigh. I found the FB data, presentation, and UI far better than the GA replacement. I miss those clickable french fry charts.
• Email. Feedburner can maintain an email list of people wishing read your RSS via email.
  • Useful and appreciated. Be aware that migrating this list elsewhere could be difficult, as discussed here.
• Subscriber counts. This was FB’s strength, imho. FB grabbed subscriber data from the user agent strings of the various ‘bots taking its feeds, then aggregated subscription and reach counts for each publisher, time period, and feed item. Rick Klau discussed FB data collection here. Note FB counts can be manipulated.
  • While some suggest weak methods to approximate FB stats, I don’t know of any good alternative to FB for subscriber and reach data. Unfortunately, FB’s counts have been fluctuating wildly recently, causing some to question their usefulness.

Q: Why MyBrand? Why serve RSS from your own domain?

A: FB says MyBrand “allows publishers to showcase their feeds by serving them from their own domain.” While there may be slight branding benefit here, the key issue is transportability. If your subscribers are signed up through a FB url, you can’t easily change that without losing subscribers. By having your feed URL on your own domain, you can move on and off FB (or anywhere) as needed.

Every company with a blog or a RSS feed should ensure that their feed URL is on their own domain. No exceptions.

For example, RKGblog lives at feeds.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog. That looks like our servers, but we’ve delegated the feeds-dot subdomain to FB by setting a CNAME on our DNS machines. Requests for that URL go to FB servers, which return our cached content and tally our stats. You can see this by pinging feeds.rimmkaufman.com: the response comes back from ghs.l.google.com.

If we wanted, we could direct that URL back to our Wordpress RSS URL, taking FB out of the loop. Our subscribers wouldn’t notice any change.

Q: Do all Feedburner publishers have to migrate from old FeedBurner to the new Google-login Feedburner?

A: Yes. The switch is mandatory by Feb 28, 2009.

Q: Are RKGblog’s Feedburner subscriber and reach counts still fluctuating? Are they still half their prior levels?

A: As of 1/26/09, yes to both.

Q: Are there any good alternatives to Feedburner?

A: I don’t know of any myself, but I’m not a RSS expert. Please comment below with suggestions. I’m especially interested in alternative feed analytics options.

Q: What is the DNS cache, and how does one flush it?

A: DNS maps names like ‘www.rimmkaufman.com’ to IP address like ‘216.197.64.53′. Your local machine keeps a cache to save time. When working with DNS, you need to clear your cache to see your changes immediately. To dump the DNS cache on a windows box, pull up a DOS window (Start > Run > cmd) and enter ‘net stop dnscache’ then enter ‘net start dnscache’. On a linux box, use ‘/etc/init.d/nscd restart’.

Update 1/30/09

FB seems to be working fine. Our feeds appear stable. Reach and subs counts are still half their early January levels. Suspect the halving will be the new normal.

• Feedburner To Google Account Transfer Considered Harmful: We Advise Waiting Feedburner users: we recommend delaying migrating to Google Accounts as long as possible, as the current process is broken....
• Gossip: Google Buying Feedburner? Vecosys reports rumors Google is buying Feedburner. ...
• Did Your RSS Counts Drop After Migrating to Google Accounts? Our RSS subscriber counts are down 50% and our reach numbers down 60% after migrating from Feedburner to Google. Is...

What makes Twitter interesting is just how easy it is to use.

Here’s my rough timeline of web ease-of-use.

In 1989 comes the web. Putting content on the early web is hard. Getting a server, learning apache, hand-rolling HTML, maintaining consistent headers and footers and navigation. Many steps, difficult to execute manually.

In 1997 comes blogs. Free (or nearly free) web-based content management systems. Suddenly, all the tedious HTML and CSS details vanish. Web publishing becomes easy. Web publishing explodes.

In 2006 comes Twitter. Type a sentence, and blam — it is online. Reach the entire world, instantly, for free. Zero complexity.

Twitter’s rapid growth, I think, owes much to its blinding simplicity and speed.

Taking an online order will never be as simple as Twitter’s 140 characters. Bill-to, ship-to, gift options, multiple payment types, shipping options — e-commerce is a complex beast.

But.

There’s a lesson for online retail in Twitter’s growth: people prefer easy-to-use fast web apps. And so use them more.

• What 37Signals “Getting Real” Can Teach Online Retailers Online retailers seeking more agility in their web development should give "Getting Real" by 37Signals a thoughtful read....
• Twitter-sized Attention Spans Attention. Spans. Shortening....
• Google Microformats Will Have Large Impact On Online Retail — Not All Good For better or worse, this is where online retail is heading, and your marketing and merchandising teams will benefit from...

I helped out by designing one of the advanced modules, Auditing Your Paid Search Campaigns.

Here’s the blurb:

Module 10: Auditing Your Paid Search Campaigns
With an investment as large as paid search, it’s necessary to carefully evaluate your campaign from time to time. Learn how to look for errors, malfeasance, and opportunities that can greatly affect your campaign’s ROI. Learn the foundation of costs and sales; keyword, URL, and copy basics; economics and shape of a campaign; and advanced topics including conversion, bid management, and click quality.
Presented by Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Rimm-Kaufman Group
DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification Program, Level II

Alternatively, if you’re interested in auditing your paid search campaigns but haven’t the time to do it yourself, give my colleague Ryan Gibson a call at (434) 970-1010.

We provide no-obligation PPC checkups for any retailer spending more than $25k a month, free.

We also conduct comprehensive PPC audits for retailers (overhaul, due diligence, relaunch, etc) on a paid project basis.

• Voters Are Searching But Candidates Aren’t Responding: Google & Yahoo Political Paid Search Advertising by ‘08 U.S. Presidential Campaigns FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 13, 2007 Contact: Steve Bosley The Rimm-Kaufman Group Phone: (434) 970-1010, x 105 steve@rimmkaufman.com PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH...
• Paid Search Market Share by Engine: Yahoo Resurgent? We took a look at "Market Share" of the big three engines over time and saw some interesting trends....
• “Starting from Scratch: A Paid Search Primer” Nominated For Best SEM Post Of The Year Congratulations to Ryan Gibson that his recent blog post, "Starting from Scratch: A Paid Search Primer", was nominated for a...

Hi Mike –

Sorry to bug you again. I know you have more important issues on your plate. But could you ask your customer relations team to assist the JCP customers seeking your help via our blog?

This story starts almost two years ago, in February 2007, when I blogged on your Shop.org keynote.

Since then, many of your customers have found our blog while looking for you (our blog comes up 2nd on ‘Mike Ullman‘ on Google). Some examples:

• Ken Haddow reports a poor experience with the JCP optical department in Boyton Beach, FL
• DD Williams had difficulty redeeming an Amex gift check in Riverdale, UT
• Kenneth Carney bought some defective jewelry in Bayshore, NY
• Andrea Gray needs help with a defective mattress
• Theresa Colston had problems with your photo processing
• Richard Burns has concerns with his JCP credit card rate
• Patrice Larkin wishes to ask you a question
• Joshua brings up some customer service issues
• Bernard Bartels had problems with the optical department in Erie PA
• Viktoria May reports poor customer service at the Sephora counter in Shreveport, LA
• Jerome needs help with a hutch
• A woman in IL sent us $22 to make amends for shoplifting from JCP as a teenager; we forwarded you her check
• Rachel Harper, a former employee, seeks assistance with a HR problem
• Hank White has concerns with JCP credit card limit
• Susan Scott wonders about JCP policy regarding “Merry Christmas”

We’ve passed along these comments to a JCP corporate customer relations manager. She’s been very responsive and courteous, but our readers aren’t aware of that.

Word-of-mouth expert Andy Sernovitz told us that following up blogosphere complaints and compliments is the highest return marketing activity. We’d agree.

Our web analytics software indicates that many thousand people have viewed these complaints so far.

Your or your staff are welcome to comment here, providing instructions how to get help from JCP customer relations.

Responding would balance the negative impressions from the comments and could help your brand.

Best wishes –

Alan

Alan Rimm-Kaufman
President, Rimm-Kaufman Group

PS Nice job on the JCP “Dog House” viral video — kudos to your advertising team.

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• Mike Ullman, J. C. Penney CEO: Hello again! We receive more customer service requests for J. C. Penney....
• JCPenny’s Mike Ullman on Customers And Change Ullman on the typical Penny's customer: "She has too little time, too little money, and two little kids."...

• Talking Click Quality With Danny Sullivan
• Interviewing Andy Sernovitz: “Would Anyone Tell A Friend About This?”
• Jim Novo: Are You Sure Your Marketing Really Works?
• Jim Lecinski, Managing Director, Google: 10 Best Practices Shaping The Future Of Marketing
• Interview: Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik
• Times They Are A’ Changing: Larry Joseloff On Affiliate Marketing
• Patrick Bryne: How I Screwed Up At Overstock And How Our Customers Fixed it
• Harry Joiner: How To Hire Top-Notch Online Marketing Talent
• Forrester’s Carrie Johnson: Search Is.
• Catalog Choice Executive Director Chuck Teller Talks Opt Outs and Consumer Choice
• Google’s Rick Klau Discusses RSS and Recent Changes To Google’s Indexation Algorithm
• Title Nine CEO Missy Park Talks About Taking Risks, Building A Brand, And The Transition To Retail
• Hamilton Davison: Catalogers, Unite!
• Steve Spangler: Make It Big, Do It Right, Give It Class
• Interview: Attorney Marty Eisenstein On Nexus, Gift Cards, The FTC, CAN-SPAM, And Other Legal Best Practices For Online Retailers

And that concludes our “most read” series. Done recapping until late next year. (earlier parts 1, 2, and 3)

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Color scheme chosen by user; word size proportional to frequency; layout controlled by algorithm. That said, I like how “clients” ended up more prominent than “google” — that’s certainly how we view the world, too.

And here’s the current NYT homepage.

Amazing how a handful of words can capture the mood.

Below are some of our most popular non-PPC posts, about online marketing topics more generally.

• When “Statistically Significant” Isn’t
• Yahoo’s Steve Souder: How $20 Can Speed Up Your Site By 10%
• Web Secrets from 1925: Prioritizing for the Attention Economy
• New Video: Save Time On Your PPC Projects Using RKGDuck
• Great HR Phone Screen Question: What Skills In A Team Member Would Best Complement The Candidate?
• The Best Book For Learning Mathematical Modeling
• 45 Web Marketing Ideas For Online Retailers (Video)
• Water Balloon Stunt + Digg Homepage = 33,000 visits in 24 hours

Bonus fun link: “I dropped the toothpaste,” said Tom, crestfallen.

A great Thanksgiving, everyone.

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• 45 Web Marketing Ideas For Online Retailers (Video) I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video....