Optimize Your Web

As Google changes it’s policy on bidding for trademarked phrases or words brand owners need to beware as trademarks could be up for grap. I was reading Marketing Week the other day and found an article by Ruth Mortimer from Brand Strategy. It was a good read and opened my eyes to the real power Google has over trademarked search terms.

Google is claiming that they want advertisers to use the keywords that are most relevant to them and to their business and Google users.

This will be fun to watch develope and see how brand owners react when the changes start being visible.

I know it is not current, but some of the greatest design I have seen on my travels and or researching on the Internet for London was done by a comany named Templar Downie and promots local historical heros.

The “Local Heroes” campaign devised by Templar Downie extended to Green Park, where the focus was on such UK historical figures as Sir Isaac Newton, Wellington and Queen Victoria.

Really great stuff, visit www.templardownie.com for more information on them.

I believe that Omniture is really happy about Yahoo buying Indextools or as stated on their site “We at Omniture congratulate IndexTools and welcome Yahoo! back to the Web analytics business. Let’s be clear though: this move by Yahoo! was done to compete with Google. IndexTools does not compete “toe to toe” with Omniture.”

Yahoo it seams is not going to go the Google / MSN way with web analytics, but to provide a fully functional enterprise web analytics tool for clients around the world for free.

What happens to Omniture, Webtrends or any of the guy’s selling their tool when a tool like Indextools enters the market and for free.

Read this: Yahoo buys indextools 80% of the functionality of Omniture for free

With Indextools being one of the hottest and sharpest looking web analytics solutions around, I must say it’s a sexy purchase. For many reasons I hope a lot of money changed hands, but I can instantly conjure up many ways in which Yahoo! can make sure it was worth their while, some of them more savoury than others. Eric T. Peterson demystifies some of the possible scenarios in this excellent article on the subject.

It’s not so long since Yahoo snatched up wonderful and precarious Flickr from under me and millions of other users without ruffling too many feathers, and I trust they will treat Indextools with the same respect! Knowing Dennis Mortensen is staying on board sure takes away most of the scepticism that first clouded my mind upon hearing the news, and ensures that I’ll await the next steps with baited breath.

Congratulations to Dennis and all our other Indextools friends. Even more so to you Yahoo! for making a smart move. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and congratulate the rest of us, each step of the way, as the future of Indexhoo unravels.

I heard somewhere that “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Web Analytics are understanding how a website is being used in order to tweak it performance, or is it that simple? It has been said about web analytics that the tool tells you what is happening on a web site but not why and the why might be more important than you think.

Case - the Bank:
I did a project way back with a bank that offered anybody that opened up an account through the Internet that they would match what people inserted to these accounts a pound for a pound, in my case a kronu for a kronu (with some limit though).

They bought advertisements in the national papers and the largest web portals and started promoting this unbelievable offer, but very little happened, they did no know if people came in to the site or if they did why they did not convert.

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I was recently at SES NY and browsing through the wast number of booths at the expo I picked up a small piece of paper named “10 new Rules of marketing” and as I said before this is according to Omniture.

These are the rules of marketing:

1. demand accountability of your team, your agency, your budget, everything. Complete transparency must be completely obvious.

2. Measure what matters; what matters is actionable. Make sure that everything that you measure, is measured in the same way. Action’s where the action is.

3. Automation is the marketer’s new best friend. More automation = more action = more uplift.

4. Customer-centricity is no mandatory for survival.We are moving toward segments of one: individual cusomer.

5. Embrace  the end of the gut-feel test everything. Proving the boss wrong may be the most satisfying part of your day.

6. Relevance rules. Target with the right content and offers.

7. Online informs everything. Every channel is now beholden to the mighty web site.

8. If you don’t have digital expertise you’d better buy some now.It may buy you a market leading postion.

9. Meet the new CEO: Customer Engagement Optimization. Move over big guy-maximizing customer interactions from click to lifetime value will drive your business now.

10. Rules? There aren’t any hard and fast rules anymore. Customers are king, fickle, and move fast, so once you’ve learned the rules, they’ve changed.

And that it, short and sweet. Compliments of Omniture.

On personal notes I am not sure that I agree with the “end of the gut-feel” as for me it has often helped me when there are no demographics and/or measurements to go by and on the topic of automatition, you are talking to a guy tha doubts what excel calculates.

The other rules, specially the number 10 are spot on, enjoy!

A recent study IndexTools has reinforced Microsoft’s claim that their paid search product converts much better than Google’s across a broad range of search verticals. The study was not a small one either, covering over 15 Million visitors from paid search, Indextools found that Microsoft Adcenter adverts converted into sales around 20% better than Google’s AdWords product.

There is a great article on this at Dixons Jones Receptional News Site.

You can also read about the Paid Search Study at the Visual Revenue site.

There is a load of search marketing related conferences coming in what is left of this year.

In the US there is AD:Tech in San Francisco on the 15th to the 17th of April, then there is Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan with SMX Social at Long Beach California, they also have SMX Advanced in June in Seattle. Andy Atkins Krugers has a conference in the UK called the Internet Marketing Summit, that is in London on the 22nd of May. June 3rd - 4th there is a AD;Tech show in Miami Florida and yet another SMX series show now focused on Local and Mobile in San Francisco. In October this year you will find SMX again and now in New York, dates 6th - 8th of October, you can also find AD:tech in New York, but month later 3rd - 6th of November. Am I forgetting something? Yes, SES in San Jose California in August that is also a great show to see. If you want pls. feel free to add more to the list.

Recently I found occasion to reprimand Google for poor Icelandic spelling They promptly corrected the situation and what’s more, lately I’ve seen some indications that Google is tackling Icelandic Grammar! If true, my hat is off to Google. I always give kudos to someone that takes the time to learn our (beautiful but a little challenging) language which is spoken by only 300 thousand people!

Relatively free from outside influence for much of the ca. 1.100 years since Iceland’s discovery and settlement, icelandic has retained an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin or, more closely, Old Norse and Old English.

Unless search engines actively learn the language, Icelandic users have to accommodate for the search engine’s illiteracy by entering their searches in various cases, numbers, genders, tenses and then do it all over again with the definite article etc… I’ll spare you the gory details but believe me… I will be following Google’s learning progress with my fingers crossed. Moreover it’ll make my SEO work so much more effective. Welcome to the wonderful world of inflected languages.

The leader of Multilingual Search Marketing Andy Atkins Kruger of WebCertain is setting up a conference at the British Library, London. International Search Summit Programme looks great with a speaker line-up of such talent as Dixon Jones, Sante Achille a Multilingual Search news blog editor, Barry Lloyd from MakeMeTop and Michael Bonfils and not forgetting representatives of Xerox and Microsoft. Further information can be found at the International Search Summit web site.

 For the register page go to www.internationalsearchsummit.com/register-now.html