ben robison

New Options for Web Analytics

Just a quick post on a topic that I found quite interesting.  Apparently Microsoft is working on software that will uniquely identify users based on their browsing habits.  It’ll watch what websites you visit, how long you stay, etc., but could also potentially start sifting through your history to see where you’ve already been.

According to the article,  right now it can guess age and gender fairly well, but there are very high hopes for it’s future potential.  Online privacy advocates get your guns ready.

Google Website Optimizer May Be A “Stormy Teacup”

Not everyone is excited about Google’s Website Optimizer. Google uses AdBot, a version of GoogleBot, to spider through the landing pages that are entered with AdWords Campaigns. AdBot judges the contents of the landing pages and assigns them a Quality Score. The higher your score, the lower your minimum bids and the better position your ads achieve. So in order for your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns to work well, you better be doing Search Engine Optimization well.

According to this analysis by Andrew Girdwood at e-Consultancy, the way that Google’s Website Optimizer changes the content on your page in order to increase conversion, conflicts at a very basic level with the things you should be doing for your long-term SEO.

On the list of concerns:

• Google dislikes pages that present one set of content to GoogleBot, but which appear to say something else to users
• Probable heavy use of javascript to run the optimizer does not play well with long-term SEO objectives
• Creating seperate PPC landing pages creates duplicate content on your site which means your own internal pages are competing with each other for rank in the Google search result

One possible solution is to protect the URLs to your PPC landing pages from GoogleBot through use of the robots.txt file while still allowing AdBot to get to them. That way you can create duplicate SEO friendly content for your PPC pages (remember, you want a good Quality Score) without conflicting with your other long-term SEO goals.

More Info
http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/363042/why-to-be-great-at-ppc-you-have-to-be-good-at-seo.html

How Can Smart People Make Such Stupid Laws?

I found this article through Slashdot today, and I’m embarrased to call myself a Utahn. Apparently our legislature has just passed a law that bans keyword advertising. Not all keyword advertising, just the ones that use something that could loosely be tied to a competitor’s trademark. If you’re in the same industry, couldn’t any keyword fit that description?

Apparently the law only applies if the ad is displayed in Utah or the advertiser/keyword vendor is located in Utah. How on Earth does one control that? In reality, every advertiser would have to check a Utah registry before buying keywords that might contain a trademark of a competitor. In fact, the language of the law is even more vague. It defines a trademark as an “electronic registration mark…[a] word, term, or name that represents a business, goods, or a service.” How does the state of Utah possibly expect to enforce this law?

If all this doesn’t spell S-T-U-P-I-D-I-T-Y, the law passed despite the fact that Utah’s general counsel informed the legislature that the law violated the dormant commerce clause.

The bills champion, Dan Eastman, is trying to protect against so-called trademark hijacking, which he refers to as a new form of identity theft. While that is a problem, this is one solution that will never work. The consitutional issues involved are only one massive obstacle in the road, not to mention the lack of support from anyone with a brain (OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh).

The likely outcome is that the law won’t stand up under scrutiny or even a slight breeze, but before we can bury it, our tax dollars will have to pay for the litigation and resulting court cases so the judges can strike it down. Couldn’t the state be doing something worthwhile with our money, like working on the new Real Salt Lake stadium? (And yes, I’m glad the stadium is being built)

More Info
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2007/04/utah_bans_keywo.htm
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005185.php
http://www.schwimmerlegal.com/2007/03/utah_electronic.html

Google Website Optimizer

Awhile ago Matt Belkin wrote about A/B Testing and mistakes you should avoid while doing it (recommend reading for the online marketer in you). He talked about the differences between A/B Testing and Multivariate testing.

Multivariate testing is changing more than one thing at a time. True A/B testing takes discipline and patience, neither are often prominent character traits of web developers. Google Website Optimizer to the rescue.

From the homepage of the latest Google service: “Website Optimizer, Google’s free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).”

Happy testing!

TapeFailure and Compete’s Attention

Two quick tidbits I picked up in the news today.

TapeFailure
Apparently, there is a new product called TapeFailure that will show you video of what customers are doing on your website. It doesn’t capture all the information that other solutions provide, but somehow converts their browsing experience into a video that you can watch. Other metrics include percentage of pages scrolled, distance the mouse moved, average clicks per page, user sight focus.

I can actually see some real value in some of the metrics (user sight focus anyone) but I’d be very interested to see how something like that is measured and reportes. I think the video thing is really cool, but it’ll be a complete flop if only for one reason. What one single user does on a site is unimportant. Marketers care about trends of what thousands and millions of users are doing, and we’ve got better things to do with our time than watch a video of one person’s experience on our website. It might find some novelty points, but it’ll never catch on. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong, but if I’m right, remember you heard it here first.

Attention
A group called Compete is now measuring a new metric that they’ve dubbed Attention. From the article…”it measures the total amount of time spent by US users on a website as a percentage of total time spent on the internet by all US users.” While Hitwise reports stats at the ISP level, Compete reports measurements by users that have their toolbar installed.

I won’t get into the problems of measuring the US population by the subset that use a particular browsing toolbar because this metric is not going to play that big of a role in the market. It will be useful for folks who want to pay for advertisements on other sites, they’ll know where to start to buy ads, but it also means that these companies now have a pretty good idea of how much they can charge for their adspace. It has little meaning for those who are trying to optimize their own sites to increase conversion.