Thanks to Jon Battelle for getting me thinking about this again. Jon argues that Google has “no reason” to buy a Yellow Pages company. Actually there is a very good reason for Google to purchase a Yellow Page company: visitors coming through Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) sources have different behavioral characteristics and expectations than visitors [...]
Author Archives: doneil
Internet Yellow Pages vs. Google AdWords: Getting the most from whole Sales Cycle
January 14, 2008 – 4:39 pm
Creating Usable, SEO-friendly websites
January 7, 2008 – 4:13 pm
Shari Thurow’s recent article on Usability is a pretty good overview of usability concepts, but at the end she makes an either/or distinction between sites that are usable and sites that are findable. She states:
Nevertheless, usability and HCI professionals need to face reality: people search. People use the commercial web search engines for research, [...]
How to explain Search Engine Marketing to anyone in three minutes
December 17, 2007 – 3:11 pm
Recently Catherine Juon, the co-founder of Pure Visibility, asked me to create the “Venture Capitalist” description of search engine marketing that she could describe in three minutes. She thought that this would be a challenge, but honestly I think it’s a snap, because at the end of the day, Search Engine Marketing has much more [...]
How Online Marketing Teaches Companies to Compete on Analytics
December 1, 2007 – 4:02 pm
Sometimes the limits on a process or a trend is not technological, but the ability of organizations to change their fundamental thinking about how they make decisions. Companies that start this kind of thinking can succeed in ways that before were possible only when growing rapidly in a new market.
This is the essential message of [...]
Metrics, Meet Online Marketing
December 1, 2007 – 3:18 pm
I was recently in a meeting with the franchise advisory committee of a major child care company that was discussing how to reallocate funds for the second half of 2007. In an unsolicited straw poll nine of the ten participants, whose entire marketing experience up to that point had been with print media, suggested [...]
Security Programs Making Cookie-Based Analytics Tools Inaccurate
April 25, 2007 – 7:54 am
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 [...]
PPC A/B testing: How long do you wait?
April 15, 2007 – 12:32 pm
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 [...]
Can you use AdWords to Brand Your Product?
April 3, 2007 – 5:35 pm
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 [...]
Day Parting and PPC Part II: Its Use and Value
March 28, 2007 – 5:24 pm
Day Parting is a growing part of the PPC field, with many systems and tools trying to take advantage of different traffic cycles for particular products and services. There are a lot of misconceptions about what day parting is and how it can be used, but we do believe that it is useful if [...]
Dayparting and PPC: Are you using it right?
March 1, 2007 – 8:57 pm
When Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click services started to offer time-dependent ad distribution, they called it “Dayparting” as a way to quickly conceptualize the feature. Since then, Day Parting has become a marketing buzzword for many search engine marketing companies.
The problem is that, like many marketing buzz words, it is widely used and [...]
