2008 January | Certified Knowledge

Microsoft has been testing their new free analytics program for a while and a new round of invites has recently gone out to those wishing to try out analytics.

A few important troubleshooting tips if you have an invite:

You may have to visit the page a few times before the signup process runs smoothly. It looks like the initial errors where the pages were erroring out have been fixed.
Ensure the email address of the invite is the exact same as the email address in your adCenter account
Once you have the code and place it on your site, you have to wait for statistics to accrue before you can add advanced options such as:
- Goal setting
- Outbound link tracking
- Event tracking
Be patent. While trying to write this post, the system has been unavailable about half of the time I’ve clicked on a link within the analytics interface.

The most interesting feature is the ability to segment your analytics by age, gender, occupation, and geography. This is most likely associating website visits to passport accounts and other Microsoft data which is similar to how adCenter’s targeting works.

While Microsoft doesn’t know everyone’s information, and the ‘unknown’ category is by far the largest, the additional data can be quite useful for slicing and dicing data.

Screenshot of segmentation by Age. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Gender. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Occupation. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Geography. (click image for full view)

While the interface is still a bit basic and erratic, the above segmentation data is not available in any other free analytics service that I’m aware of.

Using Microsoft adCenter Analytics combined with Microsoft adLabs can give you some powerful analytics to help engage your audience in new and meaningful ways.

2 Comments »

by brad

Quality Score is Only Affected by Exact Match Impressions

1:01 am in Google AdWords by brad

I had a long assumed thought confirmed by Google: Quality score is only based upon the exact match for a keyword.

Impressions and clicks that occur from expanded broad match do not affect your quality score.

While it is important to bid based upon conversion metrics; I often find it useful to use broad match combined with a search query report to help identify each keyword’s universe.

12 Comments »

by brad

The SEMMYS, Controversy, and Analytics Blogs You Should Read

9:16 am in eWhisper's Notebook, PPC Tracking by brad

Matt has taken the best posts from his feed reader over the past year and organized them into categories for judging the best posts of 2007. It’s usually easier to judge a blog then individual posts, so this is a pretty ambitious endeavor.

Of course, the SEMMYS are highly controversial and generating its fair share of buzz.

Personally, I’m judging the Analytics and Local Search categories.

I also have two blog posts nominated for SEMMYS:

which I find nice for someone who only blogs part-time (at best).

As the awards are based on Matt’s last year’s feed reader – you can see the problems:

Matt can’t read every blog post
Matt’s reader could be skewed away / towards certain types of blogs
How can you nominate blog posts in the future
How can a panel share and collaborate on next year’s posts

Regardless of the complications of the first year beta-SEMMYS; Matt has put in quite a bit of work, and he does read a significant number of blogs. Kudos for trying to pull off an ambitious project that involves the actual post over the entire blog.

I’ve already given Matt a few additional blogs (especially in analytics) to read for the upcoming year to expand the SEMMYS for 2009.

I find very few good analytics blogs. What I’ve seen is that more and more analytics blogs are focusing on Google Analytics. While there is a need for GA blogs, there is also a need for non-GA blogs as well.

If you’re looking for analytics blogs, here’s a list to start with:

Occamâ€™s Razor
Google Analytics Blog
Web Analytics World
Web Metrics Guru
Unofficial Google Analytics Blog
Luna Metrics
Web Analytics Association
Web Analytics Association RSS feeds (I also like the articles)
Optimize and Prophesize (some metrics plus other commentary)

I’m looking for more blogs that really talk about A/B, multivariate, focus, and other testing areas (as well as good non GA blogs) if anyone has suggestions. I’m sure there is also a good blog about Google’s website optimizer, I just haven’t found it yet.

1 Comment »

by brad

Web Based Applications Need to Set Offline Data Free

8:29 am in eWhisper's Notebook by brad

Do you use multiple computers?
Are any of your computers ever offline (plane flights)?
Do you use a mobile phone?
Do you write email or notes on your phone?
Does your phone sometimes lose Internet connection?
Have you ever lost work because you tried to save an online document (even an email draft) and lost the document because you Internet was down?
Have you been unable to access your files online because the website was down?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then you probably want programs that are not just ‘in the clouds’ but also sync the clouds to your grounded files.

A web based program does not truly set us free unless it has these features:

Online access
Offline access
Online / offline sync
Mobile access
Offline mobile access
Mobile sync

An example of this functionality would be the ‘ideal Google notebook world’. Could you imagine how useful Google notebook would be with this feature set:

Online access as current
Utilizing Google gears (or even it’s own downloadable program) for offline access
Online / offline sync
Mobile access as current
Mobile program to keep notes on phone
Online / Offline mobile note sync
Control panel showing which mobile notebooks (or local computer files) to sync

This type of functionally isn’t just adding new features to programs, it’s easy to a major difference between Google and Microsoft when examining offline and online syncing of information.

Offline information is outside of Google’s core competency. Even with the Google Gears integration with GMail, there isn’t an ‘Outbox’ so one can write mail while offline and then the mail sends when one connects. Instead, one can only read some email offline and the functionality pretty much ends there. On the mobile side, while their web access is fairly well done, and very quick; one does not have access to all GMails’s features, such applying a label to an email.

One the other side of the spectrum, Microsoft’s Hotmail might be one of the best examples of ubiquitous access points with cross functional syncing capabilities:

Online access via website in browser
Online / Offline / Sync access with Live Mail
Online / Offline / Sync access with Outlook connector
Integrated with product set via Outlook connector
Mobile access via website in mobile browser
Online / Offline / Sync mobile access by download and send from phone
With Active Sync or Wireless Sync one can sync Hotmail (or Outlook) mail, notes, calendar, and tasks with a mobile phone
With Active Sync or Wireless Sync and Outlook connector, one can enter new information on a phone, computer, web access, or mobile access and all that information will be shared and synced with each of the other devices and access points.

As it becomes easier to connect to the web, online applications such as Apple’s iPhone/iPod Touch webapps will play a larger part of our life; but our connectivity availability is not 100%, which is required for Apple’s newest useful innovation.

The future might be webapps and cloud computing. However, until a day arrives when we’re 100% connected, the safety net of controlling and syncing our data regardless of access point availability will increase productivity, drive adoptions, and prove a more friendly user experience.

1 Comment »

by brad

links for 2008-01-12

6:37 pm in eWhisper's Notebook by brad

Google Checkout Trends

Google launched trends for their checkout product. Some interesting research for eCommerce sites.

(tags: trends)
The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft : The Blog Herald

Nice article on stopping content theft. In conjunction with my post on getting traffic from scrapers, these seem to work well together. http://certifiedknowledge.org/blog/scraper-sites-steal-your-content-use-them-to-build-your-traffic/

(tags: copyright)