Blog at andreas.com

Tom Foremski at SVWatch writes how digitization destroys value. Everyone talks about "disruptive technologies" and "creative destruction" as good things, but after 17 years of the web, what we're getting is mostly disruptive destruction. Industries and jobs are being wiped out. That's great for a few VCs and a few mega-websites, but it doesn't create anything to replace what was destroyed for others.

Tom writes that these new technologies are 10X better and 10X cheaper. Actually, it's generally 1,000X better and 1,000X cheaper. My new car radio can play MP3s; just push a memory stick into the USB slot. Better than CDs; no skipping, it can't get scratched, and it's instantly changeable: just copy new albums and songs onto the memory stick. And forget FM radio; in comparison, it sounds muddy. USB memory sticks are free at trade shows. Tom points out that an album used to cost $15-20. But now, digital music is basically free. Anyway, read his article. 0 comments

So, how does Google rank pages? Google finally talks. A blog at The Wall Street Journal has a 3-part series of interviews on Google Quality Raters system. John Paczkowski (WSJ's blogger at All Things Digital) interviews Scott Huffman (Director of Engineering), Matt Cutts (Senior Engineer, Spam Team), and Amit Singhal (Google Fellow, works with the Search Quality team) (links below to the interviews).

The first interview includes a link to the Google Quality Rater manual (the 2007 edition). You can download this and see for yourself how Google's team of 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) contractors review and evaluate websites according to a long list of criteria.

In short: It's the QUALITY of the page, not SEO, that counts. A website can be SEOed to the gills, but the Google Quality Raters evaluate it and if they don't like it, Google engineers write new filters to block it.

Google uses humans, not software, to evaluate sites. The software does the heavy work (the indexing of billions of pages). But "bad" pages creep into the top results: either the filter was poor, the page is spam, or the page uses SEO tricks. So humans look at the top results, evaluate these, and the filters are adjusted. When they find bad pages, these are pushed down (Matt Cutts states that in the second interview.)

This means that much of what passes for SEO (keyword density, page rank, back links, etc.) has a limited value: it can get a page INTO the index and it can bring a page up in ranking, but the Google Quality Raters will look at the web page and evaluate not on its technical issues but on the quality, which means navigational, informational, or transactional criteria.

To read the WSJ blog items: 1) Interview with Scott Huffman. 2) Interview with Matt Cutts.

The implications of the Quality Rater manual and how to improve pages according to the manual is clearly described in our book Search Engine Marketing (see Insider-SEM.com). Our book is the first to describe this and we are so far the only book that describes this. 1 comments

End of Home Telephones?: When I bought a new home phone a few years ago, I realized it might be the last telephone I'll ever buy. This week, I unplugged it. No more regular phone. Cell only.

35% of US homes can be reached only by cell phones. Oddly, the less income, the more likely they use cell, but that makes sense: why pay for two services? As usual, US Asians and Latinos are far ahead in cell use. Cell phones go anywhere, they include text messaging and digital cameras, plus they can be personalized with ring tones, music, and games. Verizon lost 4 million landline subscribers (from 39m to 35m) last year. 1 comments

Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of search engine. But it's not really a search engine. Google (and Yahoo Search and many others) are search tools: they index billions of web pages. When you use these to search, they find pages that match your search.

Wolfram|Alpha is different. When you search in Wolfram|Alpha, it uses formulas from mathematics, physics, astronomy, geophysics, and so on, plus known data (the elements, scientific data, etc.) to calculate your answer (here's a list of topics) It creates the information for you.

Google, in contrast, can only show you what someone else has already written on a webpage.

For example, let's search for the distance from Earth to Neptune on May 14, 2022. Here is Google's result. None of the first page results are correct. Here is the same query in Wolfram|Alpha

Google can't give an answer unless someone has already written that answer. Google simply reports what it has indexed. Wolfram|Alpha calculates the answer. If we ask for the distance at 8:02 am, 9:12 am, and 3:23 pm on that date, it can calculate all of those. It lets you view data that nobody else has considered. Is there a correlation between earthquakes and diabetes?

Does Wolfram|Alpha matter? Most people use search engines to find people, products, companies, and locations. 85% of searches at Google are either navigational (find something) or informational (learn about something.)

People use search engines to find already-known things because they've learned the limitations of search engines: that's what it can do. Wolfram|Alpha is a knowledge tool: we can use it to create new information. But I wonder if this is "a solution in search of an audience." 0 comments

Google quietly announced a major change in how they index websites. Google has started to use markup code to allow data tagging so Google knows what kind of information it is. Google has begun the process of stating how the web will be structured.

Examples of items that can be tagged:
People: Name, title, role, URL, affiliations, address, photo, etc.
Reviews: Item, reviewer, date, rating, etc.
Companies: Name, URL, address, telephone, etc.
Products: Brand, category, description, name, price, photo, URL, etc.
That's just the beginning. There will be more tags.

What does this mean? You will be able to search like this: "Show me airline tickets from Dallas to Paris between June 20 and June 24 between $200 and $300 with more than 20 ratings at 4 or higher." Currently, that's not possible. With Google's new markup code, it will be very easy.

When companies mark up their data, it will be simple to build software to shop by location, date, price, ratings, and so on. We will see a new generation of comparison shopping tools.

Users will get exactly what they want without having to look at multiple websites. This puts pressure on websites.

This means a rewrite of websites. This also impacts SEO, web design, and overall business strategy.

For details, see the Google blog announcement (and example). See also examples of code and definitions.

Labels: google rich snippets

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I've been watching Rome, the HBO/BBC series, on DVD. It's quite good: lots of detail, introspective, and character development. 0 comments

eMetrics Marketing Optimization: Produced by the American Marketing Association's Silicon Valley Chapter in conjunction with eMetrics Summit.

Speaker: Andreas Ramos, Director at The CCG Group. Author of Search Engine Marketing (McGraw-Hill, 2009).

Panelists: David Rogers, Senior Web Analytics Researcher at Paypal. Roslyn Layton, Director of Client Services at Coremetrics. Akin Arikan, Director of Product Strategy at Unica Corporation. Author of Multichannel Marketing. Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith. Author of Digital Engagement.

Hands-on experts in Coremetrics, Unica, Omniture, and Google Analytics discussed how analytics can manage multichannel marketing, including SEO, paid search, email, social networks, radio, TV, newspapers and mobile by using KPIs, UVP, and tracking URLs. Tuesday, May 5, 2009. Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA. 0 comments

Google launched yet another tool. This one appears to be a Facebook killer. Google may try to kill the social network sites (i.e., Facebook...) by offering a better solution (in other words, a more-available solution).

If you search for someone, you now see "Google Profiles" at the bottom of the results page. If she set up her Google Profile, you can click on her pix and see info about her. If you're in her Friends list, you can see her contact info. It would be very easy for Google to add chat messaging, email, gadgets, and more to this: yes, it can replace Facebook. Facebook is currently losing money, so Google could destroy them.

Try this: search for my full name (andreas ramos) and scroll to the bottom. There is info about me. It even includes pixs.

To set up your Profile, log into your Google acct (such as Gmail) and then go to Google.com/Profiles

Labels: google profiles

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How to Create Your Own Background in Twitter

- According to my analytics data, 32% of my users have monitors at 1024x768 pixel resolution, so I designed the sidebar to fit for those monitors. If you design for 1200-pixel monitors, your sidebar will be overlapped and look broken on smaller monitors (i.e., for 30% of your audience)
- Create a blank sheet that is 1600 pixels wide and 1200 pixels tall.
- In the left upper corner, create a box that is 120 pixels wide and 580 pixels tall.
- Or use this sample background image (I've drawn the box in it for you). Click the link, save the image to your computer, and open it in your graphics program. Delete my photos and text. Insert your photos and text.
- Save your new image in PNG format and upload your background. Use PNG format (not GIF or JPG) for the image (PNG is much sharper and clearer).
- In Twitter, go to Settings, select the Design tab, and click on "Change Background Image". Select your background and click Save Changes.

Read my previous Twitter posting for more info about Twitter and analytics. You can also follow me at Twitter.com/Andreas_Ramos. 0 comments

Silicon Valley American Marketing Association Panel Discussion: Use Analytics to Manage Integrated Marketing

Keynote Speaker: Andreas Ramos, Author of "Search Engine Marketing" (McGraw-Hill, 2009)

Panelists:
Roslyn Layton, Director of Agency Services at Coremetrics
David Rogers, Senior Web Analytics Researcher at Paypal
Akin Arikan, Director of Product Strategy at Unica
Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith

In today's economy, ROI is more critical than ever. SVAMA's panel will discuss how analytics gives you measurable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing programs. You'll learn how to manage multi-channel marketing including SEO, paid search, email, social networks, radio, TV, newspapers and mobile by using KPIs, UVP, and tracking URLs. We'll look at examples from Intuit, Cisco, Aveda, Northface, MIT, Google, and other companies.

Experts in analytics, including Coremetrics, Omniture, and Google Analytics discuss hands-on use of analytics for managing multichannel integrated marketing. What works, what doesn't work, and how to manage and improve your marketing and sales. You will come away with a solid understanding of analytics.

Date: 5:30-9:00 pm, Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 5:30 Registration and Networking. 6:45 Keynote. 7:30 Panel discussion. 8:30 Your opportunity to meet with panelists 1-on-1.
Location: Network Meeting Center, 5201 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA
Sponsored by Coremetrics
Produced by American Marketing Assn. - Silicon Valley Chapter
Registration SVAMA.org
Price (includes great food!): $40 non-members, $30 Partner members, $25 SVAMA members, $20 Students.
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Coremetrics added Twitter reports into their analytics package. It tracks a keyword by the number of mentions in a time span, along with the Twitter user name (and the number of uses of that keyword by each user). Another screen shows the complete Tweet text. It sends notifications by email/SMS if there are mentions or traffic spikes. All in all, both Coremetrics and Omniture now have the ability to track Twitter activity.

I don't see yet that either tool can do conversion tracking (i.e., Macys tweets about a diamond chihuahua collar to their 10,000 followers; 500 come to the page; 100 buy the collar; and Macys can track the sales and revenue value). Google Analytics has nothing yet for Twitter; you set up your own tracking URLs (but the vast majority of Google Analytics users have no idea how to do that). There are indeed a number of 3rd-party tools that track mentions, etc., but that's a patchwork of other tools by companies without revenue models, which means they're not enterprise-ready. I'll look into the conversion tracking and write about that.

On April 23rd (Thursday), I'm hosting a panel discussion on analytics for multichannel marketing. Panelists include (so far) Roslyn Layton (Director of Agency Services at Coremetrics), David Rogers (Senior Web Analytics Researcher at PayPal), and Bill Mirbach (Director of Marketing and Agency Services at Intuit.) This will be hands-on inside-story discussion on using enterprise analytics (Coremetric, Omniture, Google Analytics) to manage multichannel marketing and drive revenue. Sponsored by the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association (SV-AMA), the event will be held at Google. 0 comments

Google's visual designer quit and blogged about it. Here's the really funny part: "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that."

I agree entirely with Google. Digital technology allows us to use testing to find the optimal solution. No more "experts agree..." No more "because mommy says so". Find out what works.

Far too much marketing is done by tradition, by over-paid people with 20-years experience, or just "that's the way it's always been done." The plain fact: with testing, anyone can learn how to produce consistently better results and they will outperform the guys with 20-years experience. 1 comments

From an Efficient Frontier report: Based on 60 billion impressions and 428 million clicks over the past year, Google's Cost-per-Click (CPC) in the Search Network increased 4.7% (from $0.58 to $0.61) ($0.03 increase). Content Network CPCs increased 20.4% (from $0.24 to $0.28). In contrast, Yahoo decreased by 4.7% and Microsoft increased by 6%. 0 comments

Did you know that a company can KNOW the name of people who come to them via Twitter? Yep. Quite a privacy issue.

Using Google Analytics, I can see the traffic from Twitter. Analytics also reports to me the Twitter IDs of the people who came to my website via Twitter. Just click on those to go to their Twitter profiles.

How to Do This: In Google Analytics, select Traffic Sources | Referring Sites. Find Twitter in the list of referrers. Click on Twitter. You now see the names of Twitters. A Twitter name is actually a URL, so a Twitter visit will show the path. You can then click those names to visit the Twitter profile.

That's the whole idea of the web: you can surf anonymously... no more! Let's see how Twitter, the blogosphere, and the Twitterati react to this. 0 comments

Twitter is the new land rush. Everyone is snapping up names as fast as possible. But what does that mean, "Land Rush"? In 1889, the US government allowed settlers to enter Oklahoma. Tens of thousands on horseback, in wagons, and on bicycles lined up at the border; the cannon fired off at noon; and they raced off to grab their land. But why read about it? Watch the video!

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I'm writing a Powerpoint about Twitter and will make this public in a week or two. Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/andreas_ramos. 0 comments

My Trip to China: I was in Shanghai and Beijing: here are my notes about food, shopping, and so on. Did you know there's a great toboggan ride at the Great Wall? What does dog taste like, anyway? andreas.com/faq-china.html

Why was I in China? Our book will be published by Tsing Hua University Press. They are the MIT of China. It's their most prestigious engineering school. Half of the committee of ministers who run China are graduates of Tsing Hua. We're working to make our book the standard textbook for marketing for China's millions of companies.

Why China? For example, we work with Minfon. They helped a US real estate developer come up with a global strategy to promote their products both online and offline in Shanghai with a real-time backend tracking system. Small-to-medium (SMB) companies can use the web to go global.

Using Adobe Acrobat reader? It has a bug that lets hackers get your data. Adobe won't have a fix until mid-March. So... you must get rid of Adobe Acrobat. Luckily, other free PDF readers are faster, better, and free, such as FoxItSoftware.com. Go to your Control Panel, uninstall Adobe Acrobat Reader, and install FoxIt.

Twitter: I'm still playing around with this. Follow me at twitter.com/andreas_ramos (and I promise: no tweets about "hey, I'm playing with my cat"). In the next newsletter, I also plan to write on how to use Twitter for your company.

Talking about cats, go to YouTube and search for "Simon's Cat" and watch his videos.

March 5th: This Thursday night we speak at Books Inc in Mountain View (on Castro, 7:30p). Talking about our book and Google and so on. We'll record this and make it available.

April 23: Speaking at the Silicon Valley AMA (American Marketing Association). I'm arranging a panel discussion with Coremetrics, Intuit, and (hopefully) Google. We'll talk about using analytics for mid-size and large companies: how to manage multichannel marketing, how to get your Google costs under control and make it profitable. We'll also video this.

Last week was busy: Monday, I spoke at SDForum on how the web in China is different from the web in the USA. Friday, I met with Francisco Santos, the vice-president of Colombia, who also happens to be my cousin. I asked him to help me to get my book published in Colombia. Saturday was a HYSTA conference at Stanford with Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba. It's a mega-Chinese company. You could say they're the eBay or Amazon of China, but they're bigger than eBay and Amazon combined. We met with Alibaba in China and we're interviewing them for our China book. China now has 300 million users on the web and they're growing 40% per year. China is definitely in your future. Read my article on China :-) 0 comments

A client got a burst of traffic from Italian and Polish adult sites. In ten days, they got 70% of their normal annual traffic. By using analytics, we saw it wasn't from Google or any search engines; it was all from referring links. It turns out the client had hired a company to build links. The company placed links on worthless sites and then used software to click those links. All that traffic and not a single sale. Be careful if you pay for link building. Monitor the results and evaluate it by conversions and sales. 0 comments

John McCain's daughter Meghan McCain blasts the GOP for being clueless on the web. She writes: "We live in an era where most individuals my age get their political news from The Daily Show and SNL's Weekend Update. I know this aggravates the old school political operatives to no end, but it's true. The Obama administration understands that my generation spends most of its day on a laptop or a BlackBerry, and that using the web is easy way to communicate their ideas to their constituents. (...) President Obama currently has around 5.5 million supporters on Facebook; my father has around 500,000." See her complete post. 0 comments

Where do people look when they search? Here is a Google eye-tracking study (click for a larger image). It shows where people look on the page. They concentrate on the title and then the description.

This means: Write very good TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags for your pages.

You can also see that people look mostly at the first two results. Only a few look at the third and forth result.

This also means: You must be at the top of the page. If you're not showing up at the top in unpaid (natural) search, then you must use paid search (i.e., use Google Adwords to advertise).

For more, see Insider-SEM.com

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FYI. Free health care clinics. Pass this along to your friends.

Free Clinic San Francisco (415) 750-9894
Free Clinic Berkeley (510) 548-2570
Free Clinic San Jose (408) 705-0119
Low-Cost Clinic: $59 per visit: www.quickhealthweb.com (in SF, San Jose, Oakland, Fremont, San Mateo, Sacramento, Rohnert Park. To find free clinics in your city, search for "free clinic" and your city name. 0 comments

With Google Gadgets and Google News, you can create a customized news feed on any topic. 0 comments

Using Google Analytics? Here's a great blog entry on add-on tools that improve Google Analytics (these work ONLY in Firefox). ROIRevolution.com/blog/2009/01/6_google_analytics_tools.html 0 comments

I was talking with a company this morning. Their web person had been trying for two months to make changes to the analytics tool's configuration. I made the changes in five minutes. That's the difference between experts and non-experts.

Whatever. Still looking for Karen Brodnick. 2 comments

The End of TV: Let's go to the numbers. Obama's inauguration was watched on TV by 30 million people and on the web by 70 million. Not just more. Twice as many. 1 comments

Google Shuts Down Newspaper Ads: Last week, Google turned off its print ads service. This allowed you to place ads in newspapers, just as you can use Google to place ads in search engines, radio, and TV. Why did Google shut it down?

Other bloggers talk about this, but we actually use the print ads tool. I see two reasons.

A) It didn't work as easy as the other tools. The web, radio, or TV ads are digital and are automatically inserted into the media. Just create your ad, set your bid, and the ad shows up. But newspaper ads were different. The bids weren't based on competition. You made an offer, and the newspapers would manually review the offer. If it was sufficient, then they selected the ad. The ad showed up several weeks later.

B) Newspapers are dying. Their revenues are dramatically falling every year. Everyone agreed that most newspapers would die, but the New York Times would survive. Well... it's the NYT that will die first. They operate at a huge monthly loss (millions of dollars per month) and was expected to shut down this May. Last week, Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire (he owns Mexico's cell phone network) put $60m into the NYT (at 14% interest!). So there's no future in newspaper ads. 0 comments

Obama's family is black, white, and Asian.

They are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish.

They speak English, Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, African languages (incl. Swahili, Luo and Igbo), and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Low Country.

A few are wealthy, and some, like Sarah Obama, his step-grandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack, are quite poor.

Click the photo for a larger image. 1 comments

Here is a good article on Google China (strategies, goals, problems, etc.). The article is mostly about Google China, and if you don't know about Baidu, Alibaba, TaoBao, TenCent, etc., you may miss some of the context. Maggie Guan and I are preparing a book about the web in China, to be published in early summer 2009. 0 comments

Fry's Electronics has always had someone at the door to check your shopping bag to make sure you're not shoplifting a 140" plasma screen. Well, maybe they should be checking someone else. It turns out their VP of Operations may have set up his own kickback empire, where he gambled as much as $160 million in Las Vegas casinos and may have cheated Fry's out of some $65 million. Whoa. No Christmas Cheer at Fry's this year. 0 comments

Have you been watching the stock prices for Ford and General Motors? Both literally collapsed. These were solid for decades. Both are now a few dollars per share. GM's market cap (the value of all their stock) is $1.9 billion today. Tiny Silicon Valley startups are worth more than that. Why did these collapse? They continue to churn out heavy gas-guzzling cars. Their costs are out of control. So... they're "solving" this by asking for a government handout. Yep, save them from their own stupidity. And that includes a bonus for the executives. Guess who pays the bill? Yep. You and me. 0 comments

The Google/Yahoo merger/collaboration/joint venture or whatever it was, anyway, it's over. Google just announced the breakup. Well... there's always Microsoft! :-) 0 comments

I'm settling down with using the gPhone. It works, mostly. The lack of raised buttons, the too-small keyboard, the poor camera, and the somewhat-poor casing design are minor annoyances. Overall, there are benefits: one device for Gmail, Gnews, Gcontacts, Gmaps, Gnote, and Gwhiz. 0 comments

This weekend, I bought the new "Google phone" to see how it works. The gPhone is Google's big move into mobile advertising. Because we specialize in online marketing, we have to keep up with Google. In the next few months, I'll experiment with the gPhone to see how this works for marketing. I wrote a review of the gPhone at my website. Here's one item:

Google Phone's Totally Cool Feature
You have to try this on a Google Phone. Go to Google Maps. Switch to Street View and select a location, such as the middle of Manhattan or Chicago. Click Menu and select Compass mode.
It now shows you what you see as you move the phone around. Yes, just move the phone to right or left to look around you. Move up to see the sky, look down to see the ground. Sit in your office chair and spin around and the world revolves around you.
Try this with Paris near the Eiffel Tower or on the Champs Elysee. You can look around in Manhattan or Barcelona. Press the arrows in the view to move along the street.

See the complete review of the Google Phone at my website. 0 comments

I bought a gPhone (Google's new phone) to try it out. I'll post a review in a few days. 0 comments

We're getting ready for the release of our new book. Here are upcoming events:
- In August, we spoke at a conference for MBAs at Stanford. Andreas followed up at another MBA conference in Washington DC in September.
- Nov. 18: Sacramento: Stephanie speaks at the AMA Central Valley
- Nov. 18: Chicago: Andreas speaks at Coremetrics Client Summit
- Nov. 20: San Francisco: Andreas speaks at Coremetrics
- Nov. 25: Shanghai: Andreas and Maggie at Ad:Tech
- 2009: We are preparing for presentations in Paris, Ankara, DC, and Hong Kong 0 comments

Chrome: I gave it a week. Too buggy. Chrome lacks many basic features. I gave up and went back to Firefox. Google released Chrome without basic testing. It doesn't even work with YouTube and Google Adwords, which are Google's biggest properties. Google is using user feedback to find bugs and add features. This may be a good idea for a little startup, but Google? They want to take on Microsoft and they do this as a weekend project? I'll check in again in a few months. 1 comments

So that's how they did it? Google's Chrome was built by a 20-person team. What did they leave out? Well... testing. Does the thing work? Not very well. Try YouTube. The videos freeze within a few moments. At many sites, there is no audio. There are many minor bugs with Google Adwords and Google Analytics. Google released their browser without even testing it with the top ten websites, including their own sites. If this is how Google wants to beat Microsoft, well, Microsoft doesn't have to worry. 0 comments

Google Chrome: It's a new browser, yes, but it's more than that. We don't need yet another browser: there is IE, Firefox, and Opera. Chrome is faster and has a few clever things. But it's not just a browser: it's the beginning of the next generation of software. Open Chrome and create a few tabs. Grab a tab and drag it away from Chrome. It pulls off and opens like a new window. For web browsing, this is cute but not really useful. But... if that tab had a program in it, such as a text editor or a graphics program, you've effectively turned a web page into software. Click the "page" icon (next to the wrench icon). One of the items is "Create Application Shortcut". If your new web page is a tool, this item lets you turn that page into a clickable icon on your desktop. For example, open Google Adwords or Google Analytics and use the "Create Application Shortcut". Bingo. You now have Adwords as a clickable icon on your desktop. Adwords is now a program.

Chrome is Google's platform to run software within browsers. No more standalone software in a box or on a CD. This will have huge implications for the way software is released and distributed. And of course, it's a major threat to Microsoft (and, yes, Apple); a computer doesn't need a large operating system. It can have a simple desktop, only big enough to run a browser. That's exactly what the Google phone will be: a portable device that can run Chrome and all of Google's applications within Chrome. If a gPhone can do it, then desktop computers can do it. Goodbye Windows and Apple. 0 comments

SES SJ 2008 is the main trade show for the SEO/PPC industry. It was held last week in San Jose. Save yourself $2,500 and four days: Here are summaries of all sessions: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four. The insider's view? Most of these presentations talk about trivial issues or they are based on ideas from one-to-two years ago. Only the presentation on Quality Score is up to date, but the speaker said too little to be useful. 0 comments

Okay, you know about analytics. Here's another item. Evidence-based marketing uses "best available scientific evidence" for decision-making. It's marketing based on facts, not gut feelings. It's now very easy to get data about your customers with analytics. For our new book Search Engine Marketing (McGraw-Hill, 2008), I worked with Roslyn Layton, MBA to develop the KPIs (key performance indicators) that measure the value of multichannel marketing. Roslyn continues to work in the field to refine the measures even further. Check out RoslynLayton.com. 0 comments

Coming soon! Insider-SEM.com 0 comments

Google/Yahoo/Microsoft (GYM) can now index Flash files. Adobe created a tool for the search engines that allows them to index the text content in Flash. 0 comments

Google Ad Planner is a media research tool. You enter demographics and sites that match your target audience and the tool will show more sites that your audience is likely to visit. You can also see the demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites to make your media plan. Ad Planner also lets you create and export media plans to a .csv file. Free to use at www.google.com/adplanner/ (This is currently (June 2008) in beta testing. They will open it up to the public soon.) 0 comments

Why does Wall Street make such huge mistakes? Why do PhDs in economics and mathematics (incl. some with Nobel Prizes) cause banks to collapse? It's not what they don't know; what they know is wrong. Fascinating interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (his blog is at FooledByRandomness.com). What does this mean for Google? Hmmmm... 0 comments

You can get free webpages at Google. Go to pages.google.com/ and make a page. No HTML required. Just write! Here's an example: Cuz Layton. 0 comments

The End is Near: NPR reported the other day that gasoline prices may reach $6 per gallon within six months and may rise to $10/gallon by next year. That's bad news or good news, depending on your view of SUVs: 36% of the people who tried to trade in a large SUV in May owed more on the vehicle than it was worth. The value dropped by $2,000 to $3,000 compared to May 2007. General Motors will close four of its SUV plants, expand production of fuel-efficient cars, and finally move forward with electric vehicles. They may also get rid of the Hummer (8 miles per gallon).

The Department of Energy estimates it costs 20 cents per gallon for every 5 mph over 60 mph.

Yesterday, I wrote down my car mileage for the month. I do this every few months. For 2008 so far, I've driven an average of 40 miles per day. My car (Miata sports car) gets 25 miles per gallon, so that's 1.6 gallons a day. At $4.20 per gallon (California prices), that's $6.72 per day, or $200 per month. It'll be really interesting to see how the USA deals with $10 gasoline. For the average American household, they may need to spend up to 50% of their monthly income for gasoline. 0 comments

Ever thought of living in a Victorian on a park in San Francisco? $3.45m and your dream comes true. See what such a house looks like. 2737Clay.com. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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? :-)

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I made a List of Breakfast Places in Silicon Valley. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

What happens when your doodles get out of control? 1 comments

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! 0 comments

Free Google Analytics Debugger. SiteScanGA.com will check your site to see if the Google Analytics tracking code is set up correctly. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

"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.

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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).

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Looking for Breakfast in Silicon Valley? Here's a list of Silicon Valley Breakfast Places. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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.)

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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 0 comments

Here's how to block Facebook's Beacon by adjusting your privacy settings. 0 comments

I saw this and just had to take a photo. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

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. 0 comments

SEO Book: 3rd Ed.: We're writing the next edition of our SEO/PPC book. Last week, we signed with McGraw-Hill. They are launching a new series and our book will be part of this. The new book comes out in summer 2008 in all major bookstores in Europe, North America, and Asia. Visit our current book at Insider-SEO.com 1 comments

Add Forms to Your Website: Do you have forms on your website? Do you want a form to collect registrations, contacts, etc.? Forms are much easier now. No more programming. Several companies have created tools that allow you to put forms on your web pages. Create the form with their editor and add a line of JavaScript on your page. I set up this up for a client a few weeks ago. It took five minutes. No more CGI! It can validate email address, telephone number, etc. Web-Form-Buddy.com ($40 per year). 0 comments

RSS Readers: Do you follow multiple blogs or news sites? You need an RSS Reader. It's much easier. See my FAQ about RSS readers 0 comments

Green Energy: In Palo Alto, we can switch to renewable energy sources (solar and wind). This increases my electric bill by a mere 66 cents per month. If you can, switch to renewable energy. By supporting this, it becomes more viable and we can all switch over sooner. 0 comments

How to Allow Comments at Your Website: Lev Walkin, an engineer at Cisco, wrote this for his wife. She wanted to allow visitors to add comments to her website. The result is a simple: just add a line of JavaScript to your website and your visitors can write comments. You can also assign star-ratings (visitors can vote on products, pages, pixs, items, etc), vote in polls, or write reviews. All of this increases visitor participation. There's also a dashboard, where you can view all the comments at your site (and moderate/delete) and see usage statistics. The tools are free and if you can copy and paste, you can add this to your website so you'll have the tools that the big Web 2.0 social networking sites are using. I've added a number of these at andreas.com. Visit JS-Kit.com 0 comments

There's a comet in the skies. It's very easy to see. I went out and found it right away. You can see it without a telescope. With binoculars, you see a big fuzzball about the size of the moon. Here's a map: How to find Comet Holmes 0 comments

andreas.com = $12 million? An analyst writes that each unique user on Facebook is worth $300, thus Facebook has a $15 billion dollar valuation. If that's true, then andreas.com is worth $12m. And my cat's page is worth $105,000. But c'mon, we know that isn't real. The analysts are exaggerating Facebook's numbers to drive up the value to make money on the IPO. 0 comments

Google Analytics finally turned on Site Search. This lets you track what your visitors are searching in your website's internal search (you do have an internal search box, no?). Various studies show that visitors who use internal search will convert 3X more than other visitors. So... add internal search and turn on Site Search (Here's how...) 0 comments

"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." 0 comments

Over the weekend, we made a video ad. One of our clients sells pre-lit Christmas trees (just take it out of the box, fluff it up, and you have instant tree). So we set up the tree in my living room and wrapped up a bunch of empty boxes as presents. I also had two large halogen lights from a previous photography project. Stephanie bought a Sony tripod that includes controls for the video camera on the tripod's grip. I shot the video, she edited it, and we added it to Google ads on Sunday night. We will make another video this afternoon to post to YouTube and various other places, along with the client's website. 0 comments

Does your cat wake you up in the morning? Here's a very funny animated cartoon.

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Silo, internal architecture, theme structures: it's the same idea. Restructure your website so the pages are clustered in relevant groups. If you're rebuilding Ford.com, all the pages about Ford Mustangs go in one group, pages about F-150 pickup trucks in another group, and so on. This lets Google's spider identify the theme of the clusters so it can index and rank the pages better. I did this for andreas.com (avg. 30,000 unique visitors per month) a few months ago: traffic has increased to 39,000 unique visitors (the last 30 days). 0 comments

Thinking of building websites for PDAs? Want to see something new on your Treo or iPhone? Use your PDA to visit my website design tips for PDAs.

I was looking at my analytics this morning and noticed that my PDA site was very popular. I found that it's one of the very few pages at Google on how to do PDA web design, so I updated the site this afternoon and tested it on my Treo. Now I'll add Google Adwords for mobile devices to see how that works. For our clients, we'll do advertising on PDAs. 0 comments

Two Screens: I added a second monitor to my computer. It's now a 27" wide monitor :-) I can move windows from one screen to another. To do this, you put in a graphics card ($80-$150, depending on quality) that has ports for two monitors. Just add a second monitor. Very useful for work. 0 comments

Can you fool Google just a little bit? A client called us; one of his websites disappeared from Google. It didn't show up anymore for his top keywords. I searched at Google with site:www.NameOfClientSite.com; that showed that his site had been removed entirely from Google. The webmaster and the webdev team assured me they had not added spammer code to the site. So I opened the site's code and began to look for the problem. First, I checked the CSS. It was a simple CSS. No problem there. I looked at the index page. I began going through the site, page by page. In the sixth page, in the middle of the code, I found it. Someone in the webdev team used the ol' absolute:position trick to hide text in the website. By positioning the text ten inches to the left of the monitor and five inches up, the text was "displayed" outside the monitor. Visitors couldn't see it, but Google could. Thus Google blacklisted the entire site. The webmaster now knew what to search for, so with a global search, he found all instances of this code and removed them. The next step is to ask Google to review the site and add it again. Google however takes their time to do this (it's part of the penalty), so it may take 2-3 months, if he's lucky, to be in Google again. That's three months of lost sales. By the way, Yahoo also bans this trick, so he could have been booted out of Yahoo too. Don't fool Google, not even a little bit. 0 comments

On Sunday, a group of us went to Point Reyes. We had a picnic on the beach (very sunny, great weather). We left our stuff on the beach and walked down to the surf. A seagull took the opportunity to raid our picnic and flew off with a Ziplock bag of peanuts (click on pix for a larger image; note the bag in her mouth). We chased her for a bit, but she calmly glided down another 100 yards. She knew we couldn't catch her. 0 comments

Are you running out of space on your digital camera? Memory full? Maybe you have the image size set too high. Consider how you will use the photos. If they will be displayed on your computer or on the web, then 1280 is sufficient; there's no need to take images at 2048 or 2560. By using too-high resolutions, your memory fills up. With lower resolutions, you'll get more pixs on a memory card. 1280, by the way, is still quite large. Here's a photo in 1280 pixel width (Warning: cat pix). 0 comments

Search Engine Market Share for USA, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, UK, and Italy:

USA: Google 89%, Yahoo 6%, Microsoft 3%, Other 2%. US population is 303m with 211m users.

Germany: Google 95%, Yahoo 3%, MSN 1.5%. Germany population is 100m with 50m users.

Russia: Yandex 49%, Google 23%, Rambler 17%, Search.Mail.RU 5%, Microsoft 1%, Yahoo 0.4%, Other 3%. Population is 145m with 28m users.

China: Baidu 62%. Google 20%, Yahoo, 13%. Other 5% (Sina.com and Sohu.com). Population is 1.3 billion with 162m users (10% of the population) (USA 211m users). China is growing fast and will soon be the largest number of users.

Japan: Yahoo is the market leader (but I don't have market share numbers). 86m users.

UK: Google 79%, Yahoo 8%, Microsoft 5%, Ask 5%, Other 3%. UK population is 61m with 38m users.

Italy: Google 54%, Alice Search 13%, Microsoft 11%, Yahoo 10%, Libero Ricera 9%, Other 3%. Italy population is 56m with 31m users.

Numbers for USA is based on stats from our clients. Look at your stats: Google is 90%. Numbers for other countries are from "Search Marketing Standard" (Fall 2007). 0 comments

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