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Clever marketers have long sought to track the successes of the marketing campaigns that they run.   Well before search marketing and long before online marketing — in all of it’s forms that we are familiar with now — traditional direct marketing was king! DM executives would use a number of different devices, from PO BOX numbers, Offer codes and Pricing to Regional testing and Panel groups in an effort to record success and to reduce the cost of acquisition.

With online marketing almost everything is tracked and as a client if it is not then you need to be asking some serious questions of your planning and buying agency.   The upside to all of this tracking is that in isolation you know exactly which sources drive traffic and conversions to your website, or so you may think.

How often have you looked at your PPC or natural traffic data for brand terms and thought to yourself how well they seem to work in comparison to more generic and higher CPC cost keyword traffic referrals?   Many marketing managers have taken spending decisions on this data alone only to find that they loose out on brand name conversions.   Further analysis applied to your visit and unique visitor data can reveal further those traffic drivers and keywords that introduce, influence and convince users to undertake different actions on your website.

Once you have captured this data which can and will span non keyword sources of traffic.   For example clicks on online banner adverts or referral visits from your affiliate partners the task is then to assign a weighting to each of these channels.   Current methodology bases this approximately on the order of the touchpoint, the introducer and converter receive a higher weighting whereas the influencers typically receive lesser value.   Once the data has been assigned the analysis task requires a depth of data so that there is enough information on which to draw patterns and actionable decisions.

Dependencies against these results abound and every business and business units within them (responsible for separate marketing goals and budgets).

Analytics

Enterprise grade website analytics platforms such as Omniture, Coremetrics and Nedstat will have you believe that each of their tools respectively have the answers to solve all of your online marketing queries easily and out of the box.    It has been my experience that these platforms all suffer one critical point of failure, their complexity and inflexibility.

Unless you are fortunate enough to have an implementation team within your business who know the right types of questions to be asking any of these platforms you face the real possibility of suffering resource intensive corrective measures at a later date.   Key questions that should be asked of these vendors include:

1. Platform versions and flexibility – what are the different platform versions that they have available and how do they compare to each other? Is there flexibility to up or down grade during the contract period without penalty?
2. Data collection options – detail the data that is captured within the platform and how that data is made available in reporting.
3. Total cost of ownership – considering current traffic volumes and projected growth and additional support within your business and as professional services from both the analytics vendor and other partners that the platform impacts on (see point 7 below) create your total cost of ownership breakdown.   Be sure to consider set up fees, cost per 1,000 page views (CPM – as most vendors charge this), incremental costs, support costs, professional services, additional hardware costs associated with drawing analysis or delivering actionable data or additional head-count or administration costs.
4. Support – what are the routes to receive support? How much support and by what methods are included with the contract pricing? What if any would be separate chargeable support services?
5. Segmentation capabilities – what are the key value added benefits of your platforms segmentation abilities over competitors?   Can you provide testimonials of customers that have been dissatisfied and are now happy with their purchase?   A fundamental question to be asked is: Do you have to pre-code everything in custom javascript tags on each page on your site to be able to segment the data post capture?
6. Importing & exporting data – what capabilities are available (any additional price?) to import historical analytics, commerce and user data?  If we decide in the future to change to another vendor what can you tell us about the data ownership?
7. Integration with other data sources – with many competing interests in web analytics such as email, on-site search, multi-variate testing and optimisation you need to have a thorough understanding of how your platform vendor proposes to handle the nuances from each.
8. What’s next, the future roadmap – keep pace with practitioners in web analytics like Avinash Kaushik who have a breadth of experience that is second to none.  If the sales person of your proposed Analytics platform is unaware of these highly visible commentators then I would advise caution.

Affordable website Analytics solutions such as Google Analytics have held promise for a number of years and are now starting to deliver true enterprise scale in Analytics.  The recent expansion of Google Analytics to capture multiple custom variable data across many different dimensions of data, granular access controls and native support for MVT optimisation make it a worthy contender for you consideration.   Many businesses sighted their concern for data privacy and security – Google Analytics has one of the most robust privacy and terms of use/data use policies around – see it at http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html

Professional Services for Google Analytics are now also available by a wide range of IT solutions providers with multiple sector experiences.

As a marketer who needs to answer evermore diverse questions to target and respond to customer needs; the choice of Analytics platform is central to your continued success – make informed decisions.  Some vendors and products to investigate include:

Google Analytics – http://analytics.google.com
Site Catalyst – http://www.omniture.com
Coremetrics – http://www.coremetrics.com
Nedstat – http://www.nedstat.co.uk
Mint – http://www.haveamint.com
Web Trends – http://www.webtrends.com
Click Tracks – http://www.clicktracks.com
SiteBrand – http://www.sitebrand.com

Google have been testing for many months a feed of data from Twitter combined with increased crawl rate for trusted news and blog posting sources (such as the Huffington Post) and have announced today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA that they have now struck deals with both Facebook and MySpace to leverage their data feeds too.

This of course follows their announcement today that Google are now supporting real time search in earnest worldwide – here is a video about it and here is a link to real-time ‘Obama’ information:

Also announced today is that Google Trends is now out of Beta and is prime time, try it out today along with the improved Hot Searches feature.

Las Vegas is such a city of contrasts, the wealthy and those that are struggling to make ends meat somehow exist in this desert city of excess.

I feel very fortunate to be here attending the annual SEO pilgrimage that is Pubcon. I am reminded however that for my fortunes there are people that live in this place who can’t afford even the simplest of meals.  Who’s children do not have the opportunities that I would presume in America would be available easily.

If you are able to, If you are fortunate like me then maybe spare a minute of your time or a few of your hard earned dollars to help someone one day soon that is down on their luck!

One such place to send your support could be The Shade Tree.  This non profit organisation has been helping those that are homeless, abused women and children, victims of domestic violence, victims of elder abuse, victims of street violence, female veterans, homeless youth and the physically disabled since 1990.

www.theshadetree.org

Back in May this year the Google Webmaster Central blog announced that Google had rolled out support for what they termed ‘rich snippets‘ and further define as samples of content. This support for showing additional data in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) is based on using Microformats and RDFa structured data.

Today, a Googler has linked in the Microformats Discussion group a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools that allows webmasters to “check that their markup is being correctly parsed by Google for use
in Rich Snippets”. Try the tool out today by visiting it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

A couple points to note up front (from Kavi’s post at http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss):
- Currently Rich Snippets supports hCard, hReview, hReview-aggregate, and hProduct. Other microformats may not be recognized by the tool.
- Google don’t currently support the include pattern.

This new tool does not appear to be available in the main Webmaster Tools navigation just yet.

Just when is it right to accept a free gift or money in exchange for an article or review on a website or a blog? Always, in my opinion, so long as you are open about that transaction and don’t dress your article as anything else than a paid piece of prose.

Michael Gray makes a challenge to the ethics of TechCrunch writer, Sarah Lacy, today in his post about the difference of ethics between types of writers; be they bloggers or journalists. Fair enough.

With spin being the staple of successive Governments and also of traditional offline PR, Media and Business it can hardly be that surprising that these same tactics are employed in the online environment. The sad reality is that payola in all of it’s guises is a publishing fixture and is likely to remain such so long as there are hearts, minds and importantly consumer spending habits at stake.

Aside from the potential infringement of numerous country specific regulatory controls regards honesty and integrity in communications it may not be immediately appreciated that a lot of good writing talent is forced to tow the line in creating biased copy.

The humble writer can be drawn into a murky world of paid constructions through their need to satisfy the ’style’ guidelines of their employer and even perhaps the ‘brand guidelines’ of a brand that may be sponsoring the writing.

Complicating the matter more in the online world is a lack of consensus from the traffic driving search engines in defining where the lines of bias lay, as they themselves are not always completely transparent about their commercial benefits that they relinquish for bias (of positioning, thinking paid inclusion (Microhoo)).

I have worked with a number of demanding clients over the years and it is often taken for granted that clients understand the implications of actions that they demand in an online world; but they seldom do and nor are they keen on listening. Clients are pressured by what their competitors are doing and a need to be seen by their own executives to be responding.

Considerations such as a penalty being applied by a search engine for flouting a search engines definition of acceptable are measured against the risk of being caught out. This is not anything new, search for “Max Clifford” in your favorite engine to see shocking examples of media and populous manipulation.

I also agree that we are well enough into the era of online to understand that there are certain rules that should be adhered to. I do not think that the determining point on this whole issue are for the search engines alone to release their next iteration of how they each respectively determine if a link is valid or not, paid for or not. The argument is far wider than that and consistency is needed:

• across international law dealing with advertising standards,
• search engine policy applicable to not just links but persuasive text,
• search marketing professional adopting a code of practice, and;
• client organizing groups that are willing to drive change

I beleive that these combined have the power to endeer change to us all. Of course there are more important issues facing us such as plastics in our oceans.