The Pre-Commerce Blog

A Little Blogsterbation

Thinking and reading a lot about Blogs today. First a great fisking of the Business Week cover story by the guy who runs BlogAds. (Read the actual BusinessWeek story here.) Then, a CIO article about how blogs are impacting business from that viewpoint. And finally, a blog conference that actually looks like it's worth attending (and I might) in NYC this week. Free webcast also available.

PS: Blogsterbation is just a cute little name for blogging about blogging. I try to avoid it, but it seems to happen anyway...

Web Analytics Challenges

An article on ClickZ today calls analytics 'the bedrock of interactive marketing'. Whether this is wishful thinking or just lazy writing is unclear, but the article does include some interesting insights into the issues with applying analytics to online marketing. Some of the better quotes: * The (sic) dilemma begins when an analytics tool is plugged in, turned on and starts spitting out reports, then ends with a general lack of interest and finally dies in a fog of ennui. * True customer and business understanding does not come from online metrics alone -- they come from a combination of online data, offline data, order data, financial data, and external data. * The analytical culture is different from the general business culture at most companies. In the high accountability business model, people are driven by testing and performance-based results. * Most Web Analytics solutions provide such an overwhelming array of reports that most users cannot focus on the key metrics that drive successful outcomes. * Although the data we have is precious in terms of helping us understand visitor search behavior so that we can optimize our algorithms, finding the manpower to conduct the analysis is difficult. These insightful comments point to just some of the challenges in using analytics to make better decisions. But dispite the difficulties there really is no choice - without analytics you're flying blind.

Paid Search Marketing Expert Wanted

Our business continues to grow, and we're looking for SEM experts to drive client campaigns. Here is the ad we're running:

Are you a genuine SEM guru? Do you know Adwords and Overture inside out as well as all the real-world tricks and strategies that turn everyday ROI into stunning profitability? Are you at heart a strategic thinker who loves to use analytics to prove to the world that you were right all along? Would you like to drive the development of a new paid-search practice along side equally advanced practitioners of organic search, affiliate marketing, web site analytics, and other related services?

If so, The Pre-Commerce Group is looking for someone like you. We’re a growing, profitable, east-coast-based but clients-everywhere technical marketing agency. And our paid search business is booming so we need a superstar to come and get in front of it. If you think this could be you please send us an email to jobs /-AT-/ precommerce.com and we’ll set up a confidential conversation.

Business Blogging Gains More Visibility

Investors Business Daily is the latest mainstream publication to notice the corporate blogging trend, and brings us the same editorial vision that spent the whole of the Internet boom screaming about impending doom. They start with a reasonable statement:

Proponents of blogs say the medium is an unmatched tool for getting your message to customers. That includes reaching existing customers, prospective customers and ones that might be under the radar.

But then they jump into lazy, thoughtless sensationalism.

But with these opportunities come risks. Unlike a company Web page or press release, which is usually carefully vetted before it is posted, blogging is more of a spontaneous action. Blogs allow instantaneous posting by anyone with password access to a firm's authoring software. Plus most blog postings are quick and short. They aren't typically written with a lot of reflection or caution.

In many ways, blog postings resemble e-mails. But with e-mail, the message goes to a specific group of recipients -- though it can always be forwarded endlessly. With a blog, an inappropriate posting could do more damage.

Post an entry about the attractiveness of the new assistant or whether the company might go public, and it's there for the whole world to see.

While blogs do provide a great way to say stupid things in a very public way, defining spontaneity as the key attribute of blog posts is wrong. I think informality is the key, which is something different altogether.

Blogs give companies a chance to talk about their products and services, and areas of interest and expertise, in a human voice that has been ruled out of most other forms of corporate communications. This is why they're resonating with people - both consumers (no I don't hate that word) and marketers (though I do hate that one).

And just for good measure, IBD includes a completely impossible statistic, but at least they don't even claim that it's true:

There are no exact figures on how many companies are blogging these days. But it's estimated that around 45% of the largest 1,000 publicly held companies in North America have blogs or plan to start them sometime this year.

Yahoo for Easy Track (Overture)

Tracking the specific keyphrase that drives paid search is a critical component of using analytics to drive your online marketing, but the process of tagging your PPC URLs to provide you with data has been a painful incremental step in an already cumbersome process. Not any more - at least on Yahoo Search.

Yahoo Easy Track automatically adds the keyphrase you purchased, the keyphrase the user searched, and the search type (content, standard, or advanced) to the inbound URL so your analytics package can capture and parse this data.

Google Adwords should add this feature immediately!

(Yahoo's help file describing this feature is in the extended entry.)

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What is Yahoo! Easy Track?

Yahoo! Easy Track is designed to provide more detailed information to advertisers who analyze their Web server logs. By clicking the "On" button, your existing URLs will be appended with information that will allow you to determine traffic by keyword, match type and raw search query.

Please Note: Yahoo! Easy Track may not be appropriate for all advertisers. While Yahoo! Easy Track has been designed to work with a broad set of technologies and platforms, we recommend that you test your links and closely monitor your traffic after opting in to this feature. There are several reasons why Yahoo! Easy Track may not work:

* Collision: You may already be using one of the parameter names Yahoo! uses within your URL (OVKEY, OVRAW or OVMTC)
* Length: Adding this extra information may exceed the URL length that your system can handle (usually up to null characters)
* Brittleness: Your system may only function with a single source variable
* Formatting: Your URL may require "non-standard" formatting to work. For example, your system uses a "#" symbol instead of a "?" to indicate the start of the query string. Check with your ISP or Webmaster if unsure.

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What are the values I might see for each tracking parameter for Yahoo! Easy Track?

OVKEY will show the keyword (or phrase) you entered, e.g., Used Car
OVRAW will show the keyword (or phrase) a search user entered, e.g., Honda Used Cars
OVMTC will show the Traffic Type used to match your keyword with the user's keyword - Content, Standard, and Advanced

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How will the parameters for Yahoo! Easy Track appear in my Web logs?

With Yahoo! Easy Track enabled, you'll see three additional parameters (and their corresponding values) appended to your existing URLs.

PDF Success Metrics

Offering PDF downloads is a great way to distribute certain types of information, and the act of downloading a file is a good 'success metric' that tells you something about a users level of interest. Unfortunately it's sometimes difficult to track downloads, and requiring an email registration before enabling the download severly reduces the number of people who will download your file.

A new service from Remote Approach allows you to tag your PDF files in a way that will allow you to distirbute them freely and yet get notified when people open and read it. You'll even find out if they send it around themselves and how many subsequent readers the document gets to. (more from Yahoo News)

As a reader I might not love the idea of what documents I open being tracked - that's certainly not how we think about PDF files today. Apparently the Remote Approach software neither documents nor transmits anything personal - just the fact that 'someone' opened and read the document. But it's not hard to imagine more intrusive versions of this technology.

But while it's innocent, as a publisher or marketer I'm hungry for the data, and plan to give it a try.