A recent report from the Center for Media Research that found the proportion between new and repeat visitors in cookie-based tracking tools was inaccurate.

The essential argument was that third-party cookies are consistently flushed by security programs because they are generally seen as superfluous or violations of security and/or privacy. According the research, 31% of all web browsers have their cookies cleared each month.

The consequence of this is that the visitors coming to the site are not identified based on their prior visits.

The whole study is here if you have a subscription, which is free.

Pay Per Click generates measurable sales data remarkably quickly, but sometimes we still have to wait a while for any given ad group and set of ads to generate enough traffic to create a reasonable statistical result.

How long exactly? Well, the most effective measure that we have used is based on the venerable confidence interval statistics measure, which is the same one used to identify the significance of poll surveys that are often seen on the nightly news. In those surveys a question is posed with two possible answers, such as “Do you think Three-eyed Wombats are good or bad for the Cleveland economy?” After a sufficiently large sample size, the difference between the “good” and “bad” answers can be shown to be significant with a high degree of confidence, generally around 95%. Read More

Google recently released a video about the value of Branding (you can see it Here) that was very telling. It was, essentially, an education about how different companies perceive branding and its value, followed by compliments they paid Google about branding. The education portion was about 2/3rds of the video, which is not surprising because Google is not, and will not in the foreseeable future, be a good platform for branding products.

Branding is a difficult thing to quantify and market, but the essential nature of it is something that is at once familiar yet exciting. Ze Frank has a brilliant video blog about branding that sums up the essence of this concept using Jon-Benet Ramsey as the “brand” example. Read More