andreas' blog

2008-05-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

If you're using Google Adwords, pay attention: the page's load speed is now a factor in the Quality Score. If your page opens slowly, you lose points. Visitors don't like to sit around and wait for pages to open. Get rid of Flash, shorten the pages, etc.

2008-04-23T08:38:00.001-07:00

Google + Yahoo? Microsoft + Yahoo? I was asked at a conference what I thought about Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo. I said "Irrelevant." Google has 90% market share. Yahoo has 6% and Microsoft has 3%. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, they have 9%, but Google still has 90%. It won't affect Google. What if Google buys/takes over Yahoo? Again: Irrelevant. Google goes from 90% to 96%. Not much of a difference.

2008-03-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed the White House warnings of "possible terror attacks" come whenever there's bad news about the Republicans? Warning? Or distraction? Here are five years of Bush's fake terror warnings.

2008-03-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

Larry and Sergei forgot to feed the meter. Google Adwords earns around $20 billion per year, but they forgot to pay $35 to renew their security certificate. Shall we set up a Paypal donation box to help out Google? :-)

2008-03-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

I made a List of Breakfast Places in Silicon Valley.

2008-02-26T18:45:00.001-08:00

If you see a car with a broken exhaust pipe, you can report it to the California Air Resources Board. If the car is smoking, it creates smog and air pollution. See andreas.com/faq-smog.html for a link to their form.

2008-02-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

What happens when your doodles get out of control?

2008-02-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

Indeed.com has jobs listings, plus two useful tools:

- Table of Salaries: See trends and comparisons of salaries for your job. Add multiple jobs and compare the salaries (e.g., "blogger vs. webmaster vs. journalist"). This will give you serious ammunition when you demand your raise :-)

- Trends in Job Listings: In a dead-end job? Try "blogger, webmaster, journalist" and see which one is dropping!

2008-02-09T19:10:00.001-08:00

Free Google Analytics Debugger. SiteScanGA.com will check your site to see if the Google Analytics tracking code is set up correctly.

2008-01-26T10:17:00.000-08:00

Time to refresh your website's look? Does your website's design look like 1997? Are your webpages fraying around the edges? Web design is much easier now. You can buy templates for $25-50 at sites such as HyperTemplates.com and TheBestDesigns.com. Get ideas at a huge collection of website designs CoolHomepages.com. Your webmaster should be able to implement these.

2008-01-22T22:37:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Analytics: Not to be left out, Microsoft is releasing their own analytics tool. It's free. I signed up for it and I'm trying it out. It's in beta and still a bit buggy. It looks very cool. More in a few days.

2008-01-16T09:36:00.000-08:00

From a Google blog, I read Craigslist has RSS feeds for their pages. Another site Oodle.com is a collection of classified ads from the entire USA. This means you can use an RSS reader to notify you of new jobs. You select the type of job and it gives you a fresh list of new jobs. Learn How to Use an RSS Reader.

2008-01-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

Google ABM: finally released an ABM tool. This has been one of the most requested tools for several years. This tool is as significant as the release of Google Analytics. ABM (Automated Bid Management) tools automatically adjust your bids for optimal results. Instead of manually adjusting bids (time-consuming and mostly on a rough guess), ABM tools can adjust bids literally every few minutes in increments of one cent. And it can adjust bids based on location, so there can be different bids for ads in NYC and Palo Alto. You get the best possible bid at that minute, for that day, for that city. Best of all, Google's ABM tool is free. Other ABM tools can cost several thousand dollars per month.

To qualify for this tool, you must have campaigns with 200 or more conversions within the last 30 days. If so, go to the campaign's settings and look under budget options.

2008-01-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

"What Goes Up...": The House Bubble has finally burst. In the chart, we see the historic trend for house prices. It has shot up out of proportion. As we know from all bubbles, the price always returns to the base. House prices are projected to fall 40% (Paul Krugman) or 38% (Eric Janzsen). See Krugman's article (with more graphs, etc.). There is also a very good article about bubbles in Harpers Magazine (Feb. issue, not available online).

All of this is bad news: expect a severe recession that will last several years. Large corps have already begun to prepare for recession: they are cutting costs by laying off workers, reducing inventory, etc.

2008-01-10T09:41:00.000-08:00

HDR Photography: There is a new way of taking photos to create some very nice images. "HDR photography" produces photos with a wide range of tones. The eye can see far more tones than a camera (a camera captures 300 tones, but the eye can see 30,000). By adjusting your digital camera, it can take a set of photos, which you then open with a software tool that combines the photos. The result is one photo with a broader range of tones. It looks remarkable. You can take photos in fairly dim light and get great results. This is actually pretty easy to do. In fact, there's a great tool for this, and it works better than Photoshop. Here's another example. The HDR tool is Photomatix at HDRSoft.com (free, unlimited trial version).

2008-01-09T20:55:00.000-08:00

Looking for Breakfast in Silicon Valley? Here's a list of Silicon Valley Breakfast Places.

2008-01-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the little taxi in your Treo PDA? Every once in a while, a little taxi cab races across your screen. "Easter Eggs" are jokes inserted by the engineers when they wrote the code. I called Verizon about this; they had never heard of it. Here's a pix.

2008-01-02T15:06:00.000-08:00

Looking to sell your Palo Alto house? Or buy a house in Silicon Valley? Two of the top SV realtors have been sending out a research newsletter for years, and they've finally gotten onto a blog. If you're in the house market in Palo Alto or Los Altos, keep up with real estate at JeffandSteve.com's Blog.

2007-12-24T11:16:00.000-08:00

Use SMS Google: When you're in a store, use Google on your cell phone to compare prices. SMS the product name (e.g., "price mp3 player"), ISBN, or UPC number ("price 1591841410") to GOOGLE (466453). Google will give you comparison prices. You can also enter a type of restaurant and a city (e.g., "pizza, dallas") and get a listing. Try it at SMS.Google.com.

2007-12-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

Facebook caught up to MySpace and is passing them. The chart shows their percentage of daily web share. Each of them gets about 6% of the daily traffic on the web. In late 2006, Facebook opened up their site to everyone. That resulted in steep growth. The graph comes from Alexa.com (click for a larger image.)

2007-12-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's the video of the song of the bubble of the boom. You gotta watch this. Very funny song about the Web. 2.0 Bubble

2007-12-06T12:07:00.001-08:00

Here's how to block Facebook's Beacon by adjusting your privacy settings.

2007-11-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

I saw this and just had to take a photo.

2007-11-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

Firefox Shortcuts: Many people still type out the whole URL in a browser ("w, w, w, andreas, ., com"). There's a faster way: type just the domain name (e.g., andreas), hold down the Control key, and press Enter. The browser automatically adds the www. and the .com part (this also works in Microsoft IE).

If you hold down Shift, you get .net and if you hold down Ctrl+Shift, it adds .org in Firefox.

2007-11-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

Analytics: Two years ago, people asked us "why should we use analytics?" This year, analytics has become the main tool in SEO/PPC. It answers two questions: "What are visitors doing?" and "What can I do about it?", namely, how you make changes to get more conversions, leads, and sales. An improved Google Analytics came out in the spring; if you have a website, add Google Analytics. It's free and it's good. In the new book, we'll show you how to configure and use it.
Analytics tools don't just track PPC conversions; they can track all conversions: SEO, links, banners, email, etc., including offline conversions (newspaper coupons, radio ads, TV, etc). You see what works; you improve it. What doesn't work, you shut off.
Stephanie has agency-certification with Clicktracks Analytics, plus she can install and configure WebTrends and Omniture. We are in the process of getting agency certification with Omniture.
There is also the Web Analytics Association. Stephanie is on the Exams and Certification Committee. She is writing the exam questions.