I’m referring to Google, who announced last November that speed will be added to the algorithm determining a site’s quality score. In simple words, the slower your site loads, the more your ads will cost you. If you are way too optimistic, you’re thinking that there are hundreds of other factors in that algorithm and so the weight placed on speed can’t be tremendously significant, right?

Well, yes and no.

Even if you don’t end up paying through the nose for ads, you are still leaving a ton of money on the table. Last week, results of a study conducted in the UK revealed that almost 50% of all people surveyed cited slow loading time as the main reason that turned them away from a site. Simple but scary math translates this to 5.5 abandoned transactions per consumer over the last 12 months. Could this have been happening on one of your clients’ sites?

If that’s not sending chills down your spine, consider this- not only will traffic continue to increase, but more and more people are browsing on their cell phones. You cannot afford to be slow… literally!

Our good friend Bryan Eisenberg suggests 2 very simple but valuable ways to speed up landing pages.

1.       Running a Speed test using tools like Web Page Analyzer, Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug, or Google’s Page Speed. This will help determine how slow the site or pages are.

2.       Slimming down “fat” images with tools like Smush.it, Dynamic Drive, or Web-Resizer. To state the obvious, this will speed up the loading time.

In my Conversion Optimization Certification course, I learned that telling someone their website sucks is like telling them their baby is ugly. So as an agency, how do you break the news to your clients? what initiatives can you take to educate and help them? Should this even be your responsibility?

Whether or not you think its your responsibility, the lurking guilt of knowing should drive you to take at least a small step towards helping your clients. For starters, you can run those testing tools on their sites and send out some suggestions and recommendations with next month’s report. Shed some light on the issue and work hand in hand with them to keep that quality score solid, so that their users can have a better online experience and you can manage their campaigns more smoothly.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Before the Internet, if I were a responsible shopper, I imagine I might have gone to a mall – but you know, a couple of weeks early. These days, as a responsible shopper, I have to order off the Internet even more than a couple of weeks early, which trust me, isn’t any more likely to happen. Besides, some things you can’t buy off of the Internet, like a musical instrument. All I knew was I wanted a musical instrument my two year old niece could smack gleefully without bothering the parents too much.

First, I searched my brain – good old trusty brain. It told me that quite obviously what I was looking for was a glockenspiel, stupid. Good old smart-ass brain. So I’m off, romping around aimlessly in a confused state looking for any kind of store that seems like it might sell a glockenspiel. I can’t even spell glockenspiel. I’m screwed. But it’s my fault I’m screwed, really, because my chosen phone isn’t smart enough. Phone IQ medians change, apparently.

I’ve used a basic blackberry for a few years now, no-frills web and essential e-mail. I’ve been able to broadcast location info, manually, and receive basic information and messages when out and about, a revolution in and of itself – I’m no location information virgin – but I can’t kid myself, for the most part it’s just text messaging on steroids. I’ve never had that gratifying lazy sit-back-and-be-pampered with location-savvy data stuff being fed to me effortlessly, by virtue of my latitude and longitude. What’s the opposite of broadcasting? Broadceiving? Yeah, never had it.

But next year. Lookout Daisy. I expect the world. I’m gonna buy me a fancy-assed phone, click the ‘report my whereabouts to government agencies and Google’ button, and let the shopping stress just melt away. Right?

The potential for GPS enabled, location aware cell phones to change the way we search for merchandise, services, and, well, anything at all that you have to be near to want, is mind-bogglingly massive. Our friendly neighbourhood data comptrollers Google and pals have not failed to notice this fact, of course, and are quietly planning world domination via what might seem to be an innocently coincidental, convenient, or just geekily clever, convergence of acquired technologies.

Today Google went ahead and admitted/announced/gleefully-spewed it has built (no no it was HTC, really) a consumer cell phone, the Nexus One, and will be selling them itself. From Google freaking dot com slash freaking phone. For the first time Google is selling something directly to the consumer, and it’s giving me the willies.

The plan, quite openly, is to make a bunch of money per handset, presumably by partnering with merchants and providing advertising that has the mobility value-add of knowing exactly where the potential customer is in space-time (our personal-life-data-trail (ahem, profile) now includes how long you spend at the grocery store, in the chips aisle – lookout! Run to tinfoil aisle!).

In simple terms I expect merchants to hop on the standardize-our-inventory-and-submit-to-Google train, then have the opportunity to help make real the lazy-man’s last minute Christmas shopping experience that I so meta-selfishly desire (I guess that wasn’t simple terms, my bad).

Google, incidentally, recently became an affiliate – offering ads for a percentage of sales. Woopdee do, who cares, you think, if you don’t know what it means to be an affiliate. Oh crap, you think, if you do. And so the future’s plot thickens (rarely does it thin – Obama maybe). The same week they announce the phone Google enters talks to buy Yelp (*gulp*) .

I’m no conspiracy nut, but c’mon, Google would be stupid to not offer me 10% off jeans if I buy two pairs at Old Navy in the next hour because I happen to be ten feet from Old Navy and my Nexis One’s accelerometer just felt itself drop through the hole in my tattered pockets so obviously I need some pants and oh, wouldn’t you like 15% off of the Thai place around the corner, it’s only three hundred yards to your right. I know you like Pad-Thai, Naoise. You’ve tried a few home recipes. You usually eat lunch around 12:30, don’t you Naoise? AHH my phone’s talking to me! And not in the normal, phone call way. In a bad, Hal way.

Google won’t be stupid and own everything, or even make things exclusive, risking anti-trusting finger pointing (could Google make ‘open source’ the biggest scapegoat concept ever?), but on the Google phone Google apps will run so crisply, and be so … what’s the word? Ohyeah, free, that everyone will use them. Competitors will innovate, and build up a following, to inevitably be out-innovated (ooh cool word), or bought, by Google. It’s a pretty sweet self-satisfying cycle, and it only makes sense to own the handset – I think Google sees all the potential Apple is squandering in its handset ownership duties.

Of course Google says this is all about choice in the marketplace for evolving superphone devices blah blah, thin veil blah. The most obvious tell that this is about owning the users more than the sale, is that you have to have a Google checkout account to buy a phone. Kapow, Google has a direct path to sell anything to you in the future. Anything. From anybody. Anywhere. Incognito (it’s not itunes, it’s just a checkout at the end!).

So what has to happen for my imagined lazy shopping experience to truly materialize? Well there is a tug-o-war of reasoning that has to be worked through – local merchants won’t adopt until there is an active pool of people to advertise to. But Google knows that when an ad network starts it needs to attract merchants with wee samples of high converting audiences, letting merchants imagine there is an infinite pool of potential golden traffic to be tapped – get the merchants in early and it’s easy to keep them.

Google’s handset sells for $529, cheaper if you buy it with a plan from a provider. A lot of people expected Google to do something radical and make the phone really cheap – the public understands enough to know Google sells ads and will make money off of each handset sold. Instead of going cheap Google made their phone the same price as other exclusive phones – whether intentional or not, this ensures Google’s audience for the emerging mobile consumer market in the US doesn’t thin in buying-power too soon, which will have the effect of impressing early advertisers.

Earlier in ’09 I wrote a post about ways the Internet might change that could alter how we think about and interact with the concept of search. The first item on the list was a look at personalized information agents – information fetching algorithms that learn about your habits and present information proactively you might want to see. Google, with its recent adaptation of personalized search as the default for Google search, is lumbering slowly down an inevitable road towards being my personal information agent.

Google knows that the story my cell phone has to tell, the one item which I never move more than a few hundred feet without taking with me, is so information rich, so personal, that they could convert it into staggeringly useful stuff-of-search.

They’ve already proven that if you simply blend staggeringly useful stuff with a mix of innocuous, somewhat relevant advertising, people go ‘meh, could be worse’, and you get away with all the advertising.

Next year, with my fancy-assed new phone, which by then will have a ‘find-my-presents’ app that knows I’m shopping for my three year old niece, I’ll be saved the trouble of actually searching right? As I happen to be walking down a random street in December, my phone will suggest that I turn left here, go to the music shop across the street, and try out the four star recommended glockenspiel, because obviously that’s what I’m looking for, stupid. Local merchant makes a sale, Google gets a cut, and I experience a world where the searching part of finding things becomes obsolete.

So in the end it’s inevitable that I’ll get my lazy-man’s shopping experience – just what I oh-so-uncarefully wished for – and yet, I can’t shake the willies. What is the smart-ass part of my brain hinting at?

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Click here to Play Super Santa Rider 2

And don’t forget to let us know how you did and what you think!

From all of us at Acquisio, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Richard Couture is sporting our Winter 2009 model t-shirt at the "clinic", getting his H1N1 shot. He looks so happy.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

As ugly as it may be to some traditionalists, the three column layout is a more intuitive ‘web site’ shape, and is going to be intuitive to use for a wide variety of users. This push comes from Marissa Mayer at Google, the VP of Search Product and User Experience, as it is outlined by Danny over at Search Engine Land.

The party line is that Google wants to test and see if this user experience is well received by the populace at large. If it speeds up the way people complete their search, for instance, it should be weighed as a positive. This potential UI shift is a major departure for Google, and intuitively search marketers and all of their mothers quickly identify this three column Google with the recently revamped competitor, Bing.

It’s natural for Google to take the competition seriously, and the fact that Microsoft deployed with a left-side navigation means it was tested, and worked. It also was giving MS fodder to differentiate themselves from Google – it helped back up their ‘decision engine’ branding (which I still don’t agree with so much, but if Google makes this change, I may have to eat my words).

This left-side navigation, three column layout is also a lot more like a traditional website, and so it is intuitive for everyone – it settles the brain a little, that navigational anchor. Google has thrown so much odd looking junk into their results recently that I think it must be alienating some of the searching population.

Those less savvy or comfortable online are going to see universal results and may not know how to react – thinking, ummmm, is this weird stuff more important? Should I be clicking on this? Which could, if not turn them off completely, slow them down by milliseconds – how to speed that back up? Bring the comfort back. Put a left hand column, make it feel like a traditional website so that weird stuff on that part of the screen no longer appears weird, and people get click-happy again.

But Google is just testing, albeit with more public relations than they have tested with in the past. Usually the Google search engine results page (SERP) evolves in silence, with little fanfare, after some sample testing has gone on in the background.

Google is constantly tinkering, but it seems like sweeping changes have begun to stick a lot more frequently in the past 18 months. Aaron Wall recently wrote to the fact that Google’s brand ownership of the above the fold real estate of their own SERPs can, with certain queries, be ridiculously favoured to something Google owned or related:

Source: SEO Book

When I was a PubCon Vegas the other week I had a chat with the search consultant working with Sony BMG on fixing up half-disastrous major artist sites like MichaelJackson.com – and the conversation settled down to the above the fold issue. For a query like ‘Michael Jackson Movie’ he is used to explaining how organic has to compete with a whole heck of a lot of Adwords, but now he has to explain dealing with a gaggle of Google goodies: Google Movies, Google Music, Google News, Mostly Google owned Video results and potentially now, Google Shopping/Product results.

It’s clear Google has acquired an appetite for traffic cannibalization of some design. Is it simply an act of brand-building, keeping surfers within their network, or is it a reactionary measure to counter the paranoia induced by virtual-private-internetz like the nemesistic foe Facebook, and those pushing a competing ‘search product’ that is more fully featured? Or is it something broader reaching, something Google feels it needs to do while it has the market share it has now?

I’m not being conspiratorial here, just contemplative. Google is in a unique position to do user testing on a mass scale rarely seen before, and in an intelligent enough way to draw meaningful results. If Google decides that it should look and act like our opening screenshot implies, you can bet it’s not a whim – but the question is, are they judging their results by positive user impact, or by some internal metric that incorporates things like profitability, or, now that they seem to be running a network of sites, network retention of the surfer?

If this is the case positive user impact might be replaced with minimizing negative user impact while increasing profit or retention. This would be much more likely, in Google’s long term planning, to be evaluated as something resembling ‘user acceptance and adaptation potential’. Google is big. Really, really big. They’re also close to a monopoly in North American search. Although big, North America is a relatively isolated culture – it creates its own trends. Google then, has the opportunity to not only serve a culture’s need for search, but also, at least in part, to define the expectations people have of what they think search results are, or should be.

This is a position of unimaginable power, though most people wouldn’t have cause to notice, or in most cases, so long as things don’t change too much, care. People outside of the industries of search marketing, librarianship, ontology and psychology, rarely compartmentalize the concept of ‘search’ as being something people do with intent, develop as a skill, or have defined expectations about while performing.

People do, of course, search with intent, some more skillfully than others, and absolutely everyone who has ever used Yahoo! or the like, has expectations as to what will be returned from that tabula rasa come search box. In the search industry there is an old turn of phrase that has evolved its meaning in context as the search results pages have changed: Ten Blue Links. The classic, plain-Jane search results page of ten blue links on a white page form the basic schema upon which western culture has built their expectations of internet based ‘search results’. I’m not defending it as ideal, just pointing out that it is in fact a schema.

It has only been a couple of short years since the most basic experimentation with the classic motif started taking place. Google eventually lost its timidity and started pushing search results changes without any explicit user input (you could always command Google to do things like serve you scraped dictionary results with a ‘define:’ query).

Universal search was the public face put to the conceptual change Google had begun instigating. By using it as a publicity vehicle, Google made it more than acceptable for people to expect images and videos in their search results – with a little testing the big G scaled back the concept of actually playing back videos from their search results pages, choosing instead to push people to the video site such as Youtube. The Youtube acquisition also gave Google a chance to peer into their audience a little more, interact with them, learn about them, and it also gave them another taste of the pure fabled Facebook honey.

Remember, this is a Facebook who openly states that they intend to change the way people think of search, by being the first to tie everything to a personal social graph, and bring information and recommendation origins back around, once again closer to home. They also state openly that they plan to beat Google at their own game.

Google on the other hand has been busily blossoming our concepts of what search should be by injecting more and different types of content into its search results, and slowly inching closer to people’s personal and social lives. But Google has to decide if they even want to accommodate the mental shift in ‘what search means’ that Facebook wishes to see take place. If anything they aught to be pushing the concept of openness in search, the extended value of crowd-sourced recommendations. There is more information in the wild, and a lot of people don’t have a social graph capable of recommending a new television, or the perfect learning toy for their one year old – but Google does.

The simple truth is, however Google decides to alter its results page will *define* how American culture, and perhaps beyond, perceive what a search result should *be*. Recently, Google has been pushing the envelope of what a search result means. In fact, sitting right inside the results pages these day’s are Google’s own personal affiliate links. Google ‘Product Listing Ads’ is Google.com acting like an affiliate site, where they allow you to list your product inventory links much like traditional Adwords ads, but you pay per acquisition instead of per click.

The ‘Product Results’ which appear to sit in the right sidebar look a whole heck of a lot like the ‘Shopping results’, in the new way they are constructed and displayed. The interesting bit is that the shopping results appear to be integrated right into the middle of search results pages, an area we have traditionally been conditioned to think of as holding purely organic content. And from where I’m sitting, they’re not clearly labeled as ads if they’re labeled as ‘Shopping results’ and ‘Product listings’.

As Google integrated Universal Search with pictures, videos and news, we thought of it as benignly ‘organic’, but now it seems it may simply have been softening us up mentally for the introduction of commercial elements into the middle of our classic Ten Blue Links schema – and with Shopping results, Google has taken direct advantage of the natural trust we have in that portion of their SERPs, by integrating images with a simple heading that almost, but not quite, differentiates them as advertising – many of us will take on trust that these are a natural addition to what we, as a culture, have naively been thinking of as purely organic real-estate.

Is it an inevitability that we will have to update our old concepts of search to include a continuous commercial slant? Probably. This is all somewhat expected, but one Google test pointed out by Aaron Wall sent more of a chill through my spine than the idea of Surgey Brin, Superaffiliate, and it was this little obfuscation of the URL, replaced with breadcrumbs:

Source: Seo Book

If Google is going to take the URL reference away from the SERPs, then they are thinking in broader terms. A lot of content publishers, old school and new, feel threatened by Google co-opting their content, and if Google decides to minimize the importance of the domain name as a reference point for content origin in the SERPs (the domain name is still the main way to brand a business online), then it places further space between what Google wants you to think of as ‘search results’, and the space in our minds they still own completely, our traditional Ten Blue Links.

It’s obvious Google is planning on evolving their results pages, and as they do they will have to match the SERPs to their strategy of how they want users to think of ‘search results’ over the next five years. They have real competition with innovation and deep pockets working at changing the public’s idea of what search means to match their own products, which they’re intentionally differentiating from Google Search. What Google decides to do with their results pages in 2010 may define their short-term future, and may change the way people think about search, fundamentally, over the next few years – but only if Microsoft or Facebook don’t see too much success themselves in the same effort.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Depending on your advertising goals, some of these second tier networks may be worth considering. So any serious online marketer should know (1) what are some of the better alternatives out there, (2) what the advantages are to considering any of them, and (3) what to consider/look for once they decide to expand their online marketing reach.

Alternative Ad Networks

First, we’re going to take a look at a handful of second-tier networks that you might consider as alternatives or supplements to, AdWords or Yahoo!. This is far from an exhaustive list, but it includes some of the more reputable tier-two networks. Also, all of them are auction-based, self-serve networks, and are primarily targeted at English language markets.

Ask Sponsored Listings
Ask’s Sponsored Listings’ contextual ad network uses a CPC bidding model. It focuses on certain key verticals, and publishers include plenty of different search sites like Excite, Mamma, and Dogpile, as well as other lifestyle and technology sites (such as CNET.com). Ask also boasts a reach of over 70 million unique users.

AOL Advertising (fka Quigo AdSonar / Platform-A)
Acquired two years ago by AOL, Quigo AdSonar offers contextual advertising via its AdSonar and FeedPoint products. Advertisers pay per click and bids are selected for each sponsored placement. Sponsored listings are available on such sites as ABC.com, The Washington Post, AOL Money and Finance, CNN Money, and FOX News. Rich media ad units are also available.

Facebook Ads
With Facebook Advertising you can target audiences with a variety of demographic and psychographic filters. Reach people by location, age, sex, education, and other targeted keywords. Ads are primarily text-based (max. 135 characters in length) and may include a small image. CPM and CPC bidding options are both available.

LinkedIn Direct Ads
Through LinkedIn’s DirectAds, advertisers can target business professionals worldwide with text advertising. LinkedIn’s worldwide user base of professionals is more than 50 million, and lets you target your message according to industry, job title, company size, location. Pay by clicks or by impressions. This can be a very valuable audience for certain businesses, but it’s not always the cheapest to reach. For instance, some ad categories sell at CPMs of $50 or higher. While its text ads are available for small to medium advertisers, rich media advertising is also available, but restricted to advertisers with budgets in excess of $25,000.

Marchex Adhere (fka IndustryBrains)
Marchex Adhere offers call- and click-based performance advertising products. Bids can be placed on vertical categories (business, finance, real estate, IT, and HR), as well as site-specific pages. Site-specific placements are available with publishers like BusinessWeek, The Globe and Mail, Kiplinger.com, and PC World. While keyword-targeted placements are available, Marchex’s strength appears to rest with their site-specific targeting.

MIVA (fka Findwhat)
Formerly e-Spotting and FindWhat, MIVA was acquired by performance-based advertising network Adknowledge in March 2009. MIVA’s Precision Network is offered for targeting different verticals. MIVA also has a network of thousands of sites available for sponsored placements. There is otherwise scant information available on the specific sites and publishers in their network.

MySpace MyAds
MySpace MyAds uses its social network data to offer various targeting options. Banners are served based on user hobbies, interests, gender, education level, parental status, age, and location. CPC and CPM bidding options are available. MySpace MyAds is also part of the FOX Audience Network advertising platform.

Pontiflex (this profile has been updated as per the comment below)
This is one of the few CPL marketplaces of note. They don’t have a roster family of publishers, per se, but offer a technology that lets advertisers access the entire CPL market, and even manage non-Pontiflex campaigns. Their CPL network is available through the AdLeads and AdUnitX platforms, and publishers using the technology include Pandora, Monster, and Admob.

Why Choose a Second-Tier Ad Network

Knowing what higher-profile alternatives are available, online marketers should also understand what the benefits are to expanding their campaigns into the second-tier. Essentially, there are three main incentives to try your campaigns in second-tier networks: (1) new audiences, (2) lower costs-per-conversion, and (3) better campaign management.

The first reason to consider tier-two networks is that they can help you reach new and unique audiences with your messages. Alternative networks often strike deals with content publishers such as popular newspapers, magazines, and blogs, that the Tier One networks have limited or no access to. So through the right ad network you can advertise with publishers that have the attention of the audience you’re targeting. After all, only around 5% of pages views on the web come from search pages. The remaining 95% of page views are content-, non-search –based [source].

Another reason to consider second-tier ad networks is that you might find CPCs and CPMs more cost-effective. With a properly optimized campaign, you can often pay much less for conversion than what is available through the first-tier.

Finally, second-tier networks can help you get a better return on individual campaigns. By spreading your message out across several networks, you will be able to determine which messages perform best with what audience, and optimize your campaign on a network-by-network basis. For instance, if one network performs particularly well on a particular campaign, you’ll be able to shift more of your budget to that network.

Choosing a Second-Tier Network

Once you’ve decided to extend your online marketing reach beyond the first-tier networks, there are several things you should consider when evaluating which networks to invest in. The main points of consideration range from pricing model to partner sites and where their traffic comes from. Knowing all of this in advance will help you (1) calculate whether a network is worth partnering with, and (2) how much of your online budget to invest in any of them.

First, understand what pricing models they offer and whether they suit your business goals. Ad models can range for from CPC to CPM to CPA, and while some offer only one of these, others offer a blend of the three. As a refresher, CPC means you only pay for each visit, CPM means you pay per thousand banner impressions, and CPA is strictly performance-based, where you pay only for conversions.

Second, think about how users find your site. This will allow you to choose networks that have deals with content sites that your target market is likely to visit. Niche business can easily find an AdWords alternative this way.

Once you’ve identified a network that interests you, speak with a company rep and ask how much traffic (and potential leads) they can deliver to you from a particular niche. This will help you determine whether the network is appropriate for any of your campaigns.

Also, if the second-tier ad network is a niche search engine (such as a shopping search engine), find out how they generate traffic. The quality of traffic you get will differ according to whether they are their own, well-known brand name, or are just buying traffic from other, smaller PPC search engines and reselling it to you.

You will then want to inquire about whether they is any sort of contract to sign and, if so, what the terms are. If campaigns do not meet your expectations, you’ll want to be able to pull them and receive a refund on the balance of your funds at any time.

Finally, no matter what network you decide to try, you should first test their traffic with a small budget. This will help you both evaluate their traffic, and then optimize your campaigns around that traffic and how you’re paying for it – whether it CPC, CPM, or CPA.

Conclusion

Even though Google dominate the first-tier, and the first-tier dominates online advertising, there are still clear advantages to straying into the second-tier. While you’ll often find CPCs, CPAs, and CPMs much lower (often due to less competition), you will also be able to better target your ads through targeted niche sites. Just remember to screen them appropriately, and then test them out with a smaller budget/campaign.

And, of course, if there any ad networks that you feel have been left out, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

So cute.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

I have a friend who runs a website for a product that hasn’t been invented yet. Seriously. He’s a smart guy who’s half domainer and half lazy SEO (god blesss ‘im), and a while back he decided that digital wall calendars are a product that must, one day, be invented.

Being an SEO he also realized that even now people are searching for them, expecting them to exist – So he went out and bought digitalwallcalendars.com and electronicwallcalendars.com, and made them into really basic info sites, acknowledging that there is demand for this product, so someone please make it (Tungle you hear that? Call me, I’m in Montreal, this should be your business plan).

He runs Adsense. The ads, quite obviously, cannot have much of anything to do with digital wall calendars, because … THEY DON’T FREAKING EXIST, but he admits to me that he’s reluctant to add much of any more content to the site, because for whatever reason, incomprehensible to him, people are actually clicking the ads. Why change that?

The sad fact of the matter is that a lot of the ad networks and websites that display them pander to, and are utilized, by web morons – people who barely understand that they’re clicking on an advertisement when they do. These ad networks are embracing the lowest common denominator, and even taking advantage of them. Website owners profit, and have no incentive to change the woeful status quo.

A lot of the time these are older people who aren’t able to get their heads around the subtleties of Internet life and how people interact online, but sometimes they’re just culturally isolated from an understanding of those subtleties (redneck tech anyone?). Of course there are other web morons (every time I read Youtube comments, I die a little inside), from the next generation, not the last, and the only reason they might bite the dust is a heaven sent epidemic of the Darwin effect (an atheist makes a silent prayer, and he means it dammit).

The older generation’s Internet experience is ruined by their lack of understanding that they’re being taken advantage of or underserviced, while the younger generation’s Internet experience appears to exist solely to ruin MY Internet experience.

The fact that young web morons are empowered to spout their valueless verbal diarrhea on the largest websites in the world is a by-product of the technology of web 2.0, and the mindset of freedom of speech being a free-for-all. With little to no editorial intervention, the free-for-all becomes a useless cesspool of non-information. The public internet degrades in value, passing reason and purpose to the privatization of the world’s evolving information technology, limiting access to high quality content, and so essentially, making knowledge an exclusive privilege.

Who’s at fault for all of this mediocrity? You, me and the powers that be. Ad networks are not the only online entities embracing the mundane, most of the world’s biggest websites do it too, and we the people feed the cycle by contributing to the melee with nothing noteworthy at all. Well, it’s almost 2010, and I don’t really care about flying cars, but seriously, people who make the world go round, people who surf the web, all of you listen to me, I’m sick of seeing the Internet pander to the (s)lowest common denominator, so fix it. One website at a time, here’s some advice:

Myspace Anthropomorphically

I hate you. If I’m ever lonely at night, having trouble falling asleep, all I have to do is think about the millions and millions and millions of other souls just like myself that also hate your guts, and I feel a little bit better about the world around me, and can slip into a peaceful slumber. You’re like the strip mall in the poor part of town that sells nothing but cheap plastic souvenirs begging to be taken home like so many flea ridden stray dogs.

Myspace Users:

Musicians - You needed a myspace page in 2005, and yes, even in 2010 you should have a presence there that lets people find your real website, but stop thinking of it as your home, or even a hub – your myspace address is not what you should be advertising, there are plenty of free ways to easily stream your music from your own domain and properly interact with your fans on your own site. A domain and hosting cost NEXT TO NOTHING, and there are specialists out there who will help you do what you need to do – if you’re concentrating on pimping your myspace page, stop, go write a chord progression, and move on. While it’s good for networking, and it may be for another couple of years yet, use it, but start thinking of it as a conduit to interaction, not an end. It’s not good enough.

Comedians: (a lot of people don’t know but comedians embraced myspace early on for the same reasons musicians did) – same deal boys and girls, you want to promote yourself online, use myspace for networking and exposure while it lasts, but hurry the hell up and get a slick website up, running, and established, like this Montreal based stand up – THAT’S how you sell yourself, use myspace as a business card to point people to a place where you can really get your message across. It’s 2010, there are no technical barriers anymore.

12 year old girls: grow up.

Anybody else feel they need to use myspace?

Myspace owners:

Rupert, your personal advice, same as for the 12 year olds.

Good news, it’s dying:

Craigslist, anthropomorphically

I love you, but you’re like the girl I dated in University ten years later. You never really grew up, never developed, you never did anything to improve yourself, and the years have not treated your looks so well. Simply put, you’re ugly, you’re useless outside the one thing I use you for (you know what that is, and if you think that’s enough for me to stick around should something better come along, think again), and I simply do not expect to be friends with you in the long run. Shave your legs.

Craigslist users:

There is nothing you can do. You don’t even know that you’re being fed ten year old usability and that the Internet has the potential to be sooooooooooo much better. You’re like a boy who has been raised in a cellar, never having seen natural sunlight, never having read anything but communist era propaganda schoolbooks. How could you know any better? Of course you couldn’t. It’s not your fault. Please don’t be angry with the world, though understand it is your right.

Craigslist owners:

Read that wired magazine article all the way through, steal the tens of thousands of dollars worth of free design advice and invest the one week it would take to make your website not suck so much. I know you don’t care that it sucks butts, perhaps you’re above suckery, I don’t quite know, but really, it’s no skin off your back, and if it would make the masses happy, can you explain to me why it is that you don’t care? You realize even your grandmother would despise your site. Why do you hate your own grandmother?

Let me guess. You don’t care to tell me.

Bad news, people don’t know what they want:

Google Adsense anthropomorphically:

You are the worst thing that has ever happened to the Internet in the history of the Internet. Why do you think its okay to make your advertisements look like content, blurring the line for all but a slim portion of web users who can differentiate? Does it make you feel superior to take advantage of all of the small IQs out there who are never quite sure if they’re clicking on a text ad, or a real piece of content? How do you sleep at night? Oh that’s right, comfortably on a billion dollar pillow.

Google Adsense users:

Hmm, this is pointless, the people who don’t know that they’re clicking an ad are not going to read this. Everybody else, just move on. Webmasters who use it, I can’t blame you, it’s the easiest buck, but trust an old-school affiliate, there is better money to be made with real programs, they’re just a lot more work to scale intelligently to your content. Elbow grease builds engines.

Google Adsense owners:

Okay, I’ve been an affiliate for about 12 years now, and I’ve never EVER come across an affiliate style program that treats their affiliates as HORRIFICALLY as you, dear Adsense owners, treat yours. You guys are more crooked than the casino and porn industries put together, in an awkward position. Why, when the account I’ve used for six years and absolutely pummeled with spam, from shallowmaker and beyond, have you never even missed a payment by a day, but plenty of others who have disgustingly clean accounts are canceled, funds seized, emails ignored, and kicked to the curb.

If you were trying to compete with other affiliate programs you would have failed a long time ago because of your absolutely pathetic lack of customer service, you’re inane ‘I make the rules, screw anyone who gets in my way’ philosophy, and your tendency to steal from honest people, without even the courtesy of a personal ‘screw you’. Instead, you act like any other rich prick, and just do what you want at poor people’s expense.

Google Search anthropomorphically:

I guess I can’t blame you for pandering to the masses, except, that’s kind of the point of this post, so here, let me blame you. You’re killing the world. Please stop trying to convince people that all of their answers can be found behind your little white search box. The entire concept of universal search is going to dumb down the portion of the population of the planet that haven’t learned how to learn yet. People need to develop the skill of critical thinking, and develop the ability to qualify knowledge, but the masses are letting your ranking algorithm do that for them. I’m not sure how to fix that… but you know, at least be friendly with black Google. Racism isn’t cool.

Google Search users:

Stop it. Stop taking your life, your library, your homework, your whole freaking developing mind, and outsourcing it to Google. It’s not worth it. Your brain will atrophy. You’ll grow up without any skills and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. You will simply become another Paris Hilton, and our culture will die.

Google Search owners:

Hey, geniuses, ‘universally accessible’ means EVERYBODY regardless of creed, colour, religion, socioeconomic status, or LOCATION. Stop pandering to oppressive governments who trample human rights just so you can profit – all you’re doing is propagating abuse and human suffering. Pandering to the highest common denominator is no better than the lowest, if the high end is all about keeping the proletariat down.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

My preferred tool, and what essentially enables this, is Google Analytics. I value ease of access to interesting and useful data, and how quickly novices can become familiar and productive with the tool.

Google Analytics can be the lazy webmaster’s best friend (and I like to be lazy in bulk, it keeps me busy) without any tinkering, but can also be an extremely of an insightful tool for people who decide to go beyond looking at numbers, towards an interpretation of them, with a wee bit of config (and there is craziness beyond the basics, but let’s not go bonkers just yet).

A lot of what is presented in Google Analytics (okay lets get lazy and call it GA) is not quite as it seems, and without some work to dig into the data and interpret it, some default views might actually end up misleading your efforts.

Getting the basics of Google Analytics down isn’t all that complex, but if you’re just starting out I do recommend getting a walk-through from someone who has used it from a marketing perspective in the past. If you’ve got e-commerce tracked there’s another aspect to consider, and even if you’re only concerned with a specific segment such as paid search, gaining some understanding of other sources of traffic is likely to help your paid efforts.

I’m going to present a handful of ways to gain a little clarity, which is by no means a comprehensive overview of how to interpret your data (whole books are written, my friends, volumes), but it might help lessen some common misinterpretations.

1 – Clean Out the Brand & Expand

You need to mine your analytics software for keywords that can expand and contract your PPC account. The best source of lateral ideas for keywords to bid on, especially if you have a lot of content on your site, is from the organic traffic you already get from the search engines.

In order to see the terms coming from search engines in GA, click Traffic Sources > Keywords. If you select ‘non-paid’ you’ll see data over time for your organic traffic, and a short-list of your top referring keywords. You can choose another metric like source to see where they’re coming from, and look at goal or monetary information for them also. In order to clear this list up you have to apply an ‘exclude’ filter on the list of keywords. This option is available at the bottom of the list of words, just pull down where it says ‘Filter Keyword’ and select Exclude.

In the exclude field type your brand words, or parts of words, separated by the pipe symbol, ‘|’. This symbol just means ‘or’. Once you apply the filter, the data over time graph at the top will reflect the filtered keywords, which incidentally is a great way to monitor your overall organic SEO efforts, as will the list of keywords presented. Simply set the number of rows in the bottom right to something large like ‘500’, and explore the list for juicy new keyword ideas.

So what happens if you don’t have organic traffic to mine keywords from? Mine your existing adwords traffic, which is tip 2.

2 – Exacting Adwords

If you’re running a PPC campaign, you need to understand your match types, and while I believe they should only be used very strategically, chances are you’re bidding on some broad-matched terms.

The second technique I want to present for gaining clearer insight into your PPC campaign via Google Analytics is something I actually consider completely mandatory for any advertiser who utilizes ‘broad match’ in their Adwords campaigns. It’s just a set of two filters that you apply in your GA account, which reveal to you the actual phrases that people searched at Google which triggered your ad. If you’re a PC computer shop and bid on broad-match for ‘laptops’, it might be nice to know if you wasted ten bucks today for people searching ‘apple laptops’.

Revealing the long-tail of the phrases you’re bidding on lets you both expand and contract your account, intelligently. If you see phrases where the searcher-intent doesn’t match your website’s offering, look for patterns, and you might find a new ‘negative keyword’ to prevent your ad from being shown where it’s not relevant. On top of contracting with negative matches, you should constantly mine this set of ‘long tail’ phrases to find more phrases to bid on specifically. If you bid specifically on a phrase instead of on a part of it via broad-match, chances are you’ll be saving money, be up against less competition, and you’ll have a chance to tailor your ad and landing page with more relevance.

That funky string in filter 1 for you to copy/paste, so long as wordpress doesn’t muck it up: (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)

3 – Compare Data in Context

Google Analytics lets you look at data over time very easily, enabling you to spot trends, but if you don’t put the time-frames you’re looking at or comparing into context, it loses meaning. Sometimes a necessary aspect to consider in order not to lose context is seasonality. I recommend, in most cases, comparing time frames to their equivalent from the previous year – it rarely makes sense to compare Q1 data to Q4 data without taking seasonal trends into account, and if you don’t have a sophistimacated formula for doing so, just compare it to the same time last year.

To do this just click the down arrow to the right of the date range box, and select ‘compare to past’. Then just change the secondary date range to read from a year earlier and click apply:

You’ll be rewarded with some contextual comparison data, and if you’ve gone to the trouble of filtering this chart down to relevant metrics ahead of time (such as non-branded organic traffic for SEO, or specific campaigns or keywords for PPC), you’ll have a nice distilled meaningful graph. Remember that seasonality is not the only way to gain context, always ask yourself if you’re comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges when you’re doing comparison work.

There you have it folks, three simple but essential ways to gain a clearer view of your traffic and trends, to make more intelligent and informed decisions for your organic and PPC search campaigns. Now, just to mess with your heads a little bit, have a look at what kind of information GA can really put at your fingertips:

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog

Naoise’s Note: This is a guest post by Cathy Camper, a librarian for the Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR. Cathy’s work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. Full bio at the end of the post, or visit www.cathycamper.com – Thanks for the amazing contribution to the Acquisio Blog Cathy! (p.s. – I take full responsibility if wordpress has prevented me from displaying your article in as nicely presented formatting as it was provided to me, my apologies, but I can’t access the css to indent your paragraphs).

Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search

By Cathy Camper

This article is written in response to Naoise Osborne’s engaging post “Nine Ways the Internet Could Change that Would Make Search as We Know it Obsolete” (August 26, 2009). As I read it, I had an eerie feeling that for me, a librarian, the future he described is my now. I posted a response, and Naoise invited me to write about search from a librarian’s viewpoint. So here I am.

Disclaimers first: like Naoise, I’m not a futurist, and unlike some of my colleagues, my job is to help people find what they want, not to work on the technical side of search, search engine optimization or search innovation.

Still, as a public librarian, search, as well as its more obsessive cousin, organization, is at the core of what I do. The future of finding information is the future of my job. When I first discovered online marketing articles addressing search, I was thrilled. But my eyes soon glazed over reading discussions of stickiness, click-through and bounce rates. My goal as a librarian is simply to ensure patrons find what they want. It doesn’t matter if they stare at one page all day or flip through hundreds if they leave satisfied. Libraries aren’t selling anything. Like the U.S. Post Office, public libraries often are left to do what no commercial enterprise would take on, for example, provide free Internet service, and instruction, to everyone.

In some ways, Google trumped librarians good when it fulfilled the publics’ need for a magic box that would find whatever the public typed in. Author, title, keyword, call numbers – the public never understood or cared what library metadata was anyways, and it turned out even accuracy mattered less than getting a slew of answers to requests in the blink of an eye.

On a larger scale, the Internet rearranged librarians’ approach to knowledge overnight. The one right answer no longer sat for years in a volume on the reference shelf; now there were many right answers, which would also always be changeable. The right answer might exist anywhere, not just on shelves or in catalog order, or provided by people of a particular profession, class, training or status. Actually this has always been true about knowledge. But now the speed and breadth of electronic information meant it could no longer be ignored, or protected by knowledge gatekeepers.

Librarians today are kind of like early mammals in dinosaur days, scurrying between the claws of commercial search giants like Google and Amazon, grabbing crumbs of information either straight from the behemoth’s clutches, or plucking information the bigger reptiles miss, to feed the needs of those that ask. We supplement search using books, databases, library resources and other means to fill in what the dinosaurs can’t provide.

One of the main contentions I have with futurist scenarios about information and search (for example, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous) is that they are often built on an unstated platform of optimistic, forward movement, assuming a democratization of information access by making it free. Google replaces the lockdown of organizational systems with the infinite flex of individual search. Tagging does away with the Dewey Decimal system and the card catalog. Social networking disperses authority and expertise to everyone; Wikipedia cumulates it. MP3’s make CDs obsolete. Internet trumps library; the e-book trumps paper. Even the name and number of Web 2.0 implies a movement beyond, away from, whatever was the web point zero.

But the reality librarians deal with is that knowledge also moves backwards, authority and expertise still exist, and matter, and “free” may have costs.

Some examples. You’re restoring a 1930’s car. You need to see color samples to do a historically accurate restoration. Repair manuals, car books and extensive online searching turns up no color pictures. A library with magazine back issues may answer your needs; by searching backwards, you find a color ad for the car that shows not only the hues but also how they were applied.

Or say your research demands primary sources. Pretty much anything before 1982 may still be on paper, unless there’s been demand, (and funds) to digitize it. OK, so maybe it’s not on paper, it’s on a floppy disc. Or microform.

Which leads to another wrinkle. We have to not only search backward, we have to retain a method of doing it, technologically, if that information is to be of use. In the next twenty years, imagine the computers we inherit of baby boomers who’ve kicked the bucket. If and when the grandkids figure out the passwords, will they have any desire to look at Grandpa’s 10,000 unlabeled digital photos? If he’s uploaded and tagged some to Flickr, they might survive, but for the family archives, it might be the shoebox of labeled paper photos that gets passed on down the line. What about those unmarked floppy discs for a Commodore 64? Even if the family has the desire, can they find the machine to read them?

As to authority and expertise, it still exists right there in the double o’ed logo of Google’s branding. The hidden change is that it’s been corporatized. These search giants are commercial; their best right answer, in essence, is a product to buy. Google is free only in that it makes enough on advertising to stay solvent. Google works well if you want to buy something. It works less well if you’re researching expertise in knowledge, say in the forefront of cancer research, where a medical database or a cancer institution’s holdings may be more to the point.

Another problem with corporatized information is that it’s not always in the users interest, though it often looks to be. An example might be when your financial institution pushes you towards electronic banking by telling you “conserving paper conserves trees.” They’re also not telling you the cost of electronic banking, or that should you need a paper statement, the bank will now charge you for that. Similarly, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook strive to maintain an image of magnanimity, offering “free “products, while at the same time extracting payment from users via privacy invasion, and maintaining an ultimate authority over what gets shown and who gets space. These social networks aren’t public square forums where anyone can say their piece. Read through their user agreements to see who has ultimate say.

Speaking of users, patrons, customers, they also can direct search skills backwards as well as forwards. Public libraries have been hugely influenced this way by the recent recession. No longer can a ditch digger find a new job through newspaper want ads. Now, he has to look online, on Craig’s list. But to do so, a 50-year-old ditch digger has to learn to type. He has to know how to write a resume, and use software to do that. Then he has to learn to use the Internet, e-mail protocol, and letter writing skills. He has to have an e-mail address. And he has to have Internet access. If he can’t afford it, his only free access is one hour a day at the public library.

Libraries go backwards to bring these users forwards. True, it’s momentary, and in some rosy future, all people will be Internet savvy or will have died off. But what may not change is that the Internet will be freer for some than for others. One hour a day, shared access, will give you different results and opportunities than owning your own computer with 24-7 availability. The Internet may be the land of milk and honey, but the bottleneck to get there, for many, is long and narrow.

So this is the state of my job now, to move backwards and forwards, to find the best answer to match the individual needs of each patron. In a way, my job is to be a Web 2.0 search engine, to search what David Weinberger calls the “mess of information” out there, to fetch and present the best answers to each individual, in a way that best meets their needs.

So what of the future of search? Personalize online searching will wreak havoc with library assistance. At best, I could look over your shoulder, throwing out suggestions, or we’d each search, then contrast and compare.

Some futurists predict that search will disappear, and that in the near future, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. While I don’t doubt this will happen, we rarely jump into the future all in one leap. Look around you at our 2009 neighborhoods – while some houses could be inhabited by the Jetsons, many more date to the 1950s or even Victorian times. A good model of the future needs to incorporate lots of old baggage.

A realistic model of information storage and retrieval needs to consider worst as well as best case scenarios. Not adding up the cost of electronic bank statements may save paper but not the environment. There are lots of dystopian futures out there that could seriously interrupt our Internet idylls. Global warming, the demise of petroleum stocks, epidemic – none of it bodes well for electronic access as we know it. All it takes is for the plug to get pulled – no more electricity – and we go from the Jetsons back to the Flintstones. Recent movements such as growing food locally, self-sustainability, and alternative energy and transportation sources are important for librarians to know about, on and off the Internet, into the future. And again, much of the information for these movements is found researching past knowledge, searching backwards, to go forwards.

Now let’s get dystopian dark, let’s look at the monopoly Google is amassing. No longer is the hoard gold or land holdings. It’s information. That includes information about you, which you might consider private. One of the reasons librarians are challenging Google is because it’s dangerous when information is privatized because its use no longer falls under public laws regarding privacy, accessibility or dispersal. But it’s also dangerous when one entity becomes king of the heap. If I were an evil hacker-terrorist-despot, why bother getting the bomb? Go for the fountain of knowledge instead; invade and conquer Google. There are lots of variants to this Google nightmare. What if Google simply disappeared, just wasn’t there tomorrow? What if Google becomes a monopoly of all recorded information? What if Google decided they were tired of being nice and free, now they were going to be tight, mean, and expensive?

Early in this article I used an analogy comparing librarians to early mammals. I did so not because I believe (though I hope) future librarians will grow big and dominate like the mammoths and smilodons of yore, but because things can change, best evidence in history all says they will, and that change can be unpredictable. We’ve been graced by a bubble of time, here in the U.S., free of war, strife and invasion. But civilization is fragile. Rosy futurist scenarios that forget to look at history are arguing the wrong points. The best chance of information survival is not publicity, authority, power, electronic storage or even paper recordings. Our oldest surviving stories were written on clay tablets and buried it in the desert, dependant as much on fluke as human planning for their survival.

I sometimes daydream a potential sci-fi novel, a futurist nightmare scenario, one based on human fallibility. Futurists describe an Internet with limitless choices, brimming with good information. But imagine as years go by, an Internet that accrues some good along with all the bad ads, the false information, the self-aggrandizing websites, the unsigned come-ons, plus information reiterated again and again with no accreditation or date stamp. For a window on what I’m talking about, try searching “acid reflux” on Google. You’ll get some good hits, and hours and hours of pseudo-science. Multiply that times twenty or fifty years.
Let’s also imagine a future where we can’t look back. Libraries are unfunded; the doors locked, the books piled in dusty heaps. Microfiche, floppy discs, CDs abound, but machines to read them no longer exist. 16mm films sit cracked in their canisters. Bureaucrats cut funding for institutional and private databases, directing all pleas for education to the Internet. Why not, it’s free?

Let’s add to that a public that even now, at the height of information availability, is no less susceptible to rumor, is no more insistent on fact than in the past, and is just as likely to believe that because something’s in print, it must be true. The recent debates about healthcare in the U.S. points this out, all ideologies aside. Much of what is being argued and debated is not based on fact.

Add to that the big free library that Google Books promises to become. Only this library is only accessible using Google’s sloppy metadata, as Geoffrey Nunberg makes clear in his article “Google’s Book Search; A Disaster for Scholars.” Misdating, cataloging errors, classification errors abound. Nunberg finds a 46-70 percent error rate on misdating alone, but as he says, “… even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.”

Voila! A dark ages in the Age of Information, where the litter of useless knowledge impedes search, where falsehoods become truths because they’ve lasted the longest, they’re the top of a hit list, or because a celebrity twittered it. More information will be collected, but equally will it be jettisoned, because of ignorance or expediency. History predicts what gets saved will be things that are most organized, most accessible, and most obviously valuable. And like medieval times, who can access, use, understand and protect information may narrow.

This is truly a worst case scenario. In reality, the future’s more hopeful. If like Nunberg suggests, Google books were to connect with the Library of Congress or OCLC’s metadata on books, we could create a library unrivaled in any other human civilization. Steps to self-monitor or organize information, for example changes in Wikipedia to promote accuracy, may tame the wild frontier we now search. These actions are the duties of future librarians. These organizers probably won’t hold library degrees, or be called librarians – they may not even be people, as artificial intelligence and Web 3.0 mature – but this wrangling of information is the forefront where innovation will occur.

Hopefully we’ll always exist in a place somewhere between information dystopia and utopia, a place that allows enough happy accidents, that there will always be a need for search. The buried doubloons. The lost and refound manuscript. The private collection. Though I’ve defined the future librarian mainly as an organizer, the passion is equally the hunt. And even more than the hunt is the importance of what we serendipitously find along the way. The Internet is great for this. But so is fossil hunting. Forward and backward. We need both.

Truly my greatest fear is a universe where everything is known, the end of search. A GPS connected to RFID tags, so there’s no possibility of hidden treasure, no wondering what happened to Atlantis, or what’s at the center of the Universe. It scares me that that may be the end goal of artificial intelligence, to cut us loose from the weight of the unknown, to free our time from pondering. But for what? So we can play electronic games, plotting, scheming, dreaming– pantomiming search?

the end

Cathy Camper is a librarian for Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR, where she works in School Corps doing outreach to schools, grades K-12. She has edited recipes for Amy Sedaris’ book I Like You, and published a children’s science book Bugs Before Time; Prehistoric Insects and Their Relatives with Simon and Schuster (2002). Her work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. She co-edits a small zine about candy called Sugar Needle. More at www.cathycamper.com

She thanks librarians Gregory Leazer at UCLA, and Wendy Hitchcock, at Lewis and Clark Law School, for their insights and suggestions on this topic.

Post from: Acquisio Search Blog