July 30, 2004
Google Gets Lousy InvestorRank
As Fred Wilson from A VC points out, Jim Cramer is 'not always right, but rarely totally wrong". Look what he has to say about the Google IPO.
As I mentioned three months ago, the Google-Guys set themselves up for a fall by promising to be saints. I listed four un-saintly things they'd already done, and now Cramer nails them with a fifth : "talk about shareholder democracy but then you do the single most anti-democratic thing possible: issue two classes of stock".
At least that move has some direct benefit - they keep unilateral control of their company. Heck, Wall St. could probably understand and begrudgingly respect greed and power. But each of these other moves appear to be part of the candidacy for sainthood. Looks like they need a new campaign manager.
Secret Tip: Delete The Useless
While it may sound like marketing advice from Forrest Gump, it's actually insightful marketing advise from Forrester Research. As originally reported in Internet Retailer, and reprinted and annotated by FutureNow, the study in question sought to discover why online conversion rates are still so low.
What they found is that (drumroll please...) the content on most sites is not helpful to the people visiting the site; and it's poorly written to boot.
In other words, most web sites are terrible salespeople. They don't identify or qualify their prospects and adapt to their needs or speak their language. Instead, most sites develop a pitch (their site content) and even though it fails about 98% of the time they don't take the hint and improve it.
Forrester suggests web marketers start by looking at their log files or analytics, and deleting all the content on your site that very few visitors bother to look at. That doesn't actually accomplish anything - other than opening up a few k of space of your server - but I suppose it's a nice ceremonial process.
The more important work is in improving the content users actually do see. Of course, that requires another Secret Tip: Add The Useful.
July 23, 2004
Search Yourself
The words 'search marketing' usually bring up thoughts of Google and Yahoo. But Tower Records found it could increase conversion rates by 50% by improving it's on-site search. Wow.
Realizing its site search wasn’t producing results that would convert visitors into purchasers, Tower Records deployed a new search and navigation tool last fall from Mercado Software. Search-to-sales conversion rates rose 50% and customer satisfaction ratings “went through the roof,” Kevin Ertelll, vice president of e-commerce, tells InternetRetailer.com.
On site search is a feature that most developers and ecommerce packages either don't support, or don't support well. Most inexpensive 3rd party search add-ons aren't very good either. There's a class of higher end products that can work very well (as these Mercado results demonstrate). Hopefully this success will motivate more entrants and broader recognition that search is an important part of how people use your site, not just how they find it.
(Original info via MarketingVox)
July 21, 2004
Password = "Last Gasp For The Old World"
Boing Boing and Wired comment on the absurd trend of news sites to require passwords to read their web pages. Beyond the fact that they're cutting off users, the article describes the security risks they're creating.
A Seven Word Phrase For New Surfboard
Onestat.com reported on the average number of words people type into search engines, confirming that search phrases are getting longer.
Of all the search phrases world wide, 30.09 percent of the people use 2 word phrases, 26.83 percent use 3 word phrases and 16.60 percent use 1 word phrase. More and more people use now 3, 4 and 5 keywords since the last measurement. The global usage of 2 word phrases has decreased with 2.49 percent from 32.58 percent to 30.09 percent since February 2004.
This means you have longer and more complicated phrases to target, but also means you can get your listing in front of more people if you take the time to figure these out and optimize for them. (via SearchEngineJounal)
Number of words in search engine searches - July 2004
1. Two word phrases 30.09%
2. Three word phrase 26.83%
3. One word phrases 16.60%
4. Four word phrases 14.83%
5. Five word phrases 6.76%
6. Six word phrases 2.81%
7. Seven word phrases 1.13%
All numbers are an average of the last 2 months.
July 19, 2004
Mis-Spelling Your Way To Fame and Fortune
As if she doesn't have enough problems, now people are mis-spelling her name - 598 different ways.
While funny, it makes clear the important point that there's a lot of opportunity in optimizing your pages for folks who aren't good spellarz. One example: Some digital camera sites I was working with increased traffic by over 20% by adding pages that used the spelling 'Cannon'.
(via Search Engine RoundTable)