PalatnikFactor.com

The SEO Factors That Really Matter

Pablo Palatnik — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:19:38 +0000

If you’re an SEO or talk to SEOs , you may just always hear different theories on the factors that really matter, and when we talk about SEO, I think 95% of the time, we’re all talking about optimizing to rank in Google, the others will follow.

Here is a video from WebProNews with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz that is a great look into the SEO factors that really matter.

More WebProNews Videos

Have You Tried Website Optimizer?

Pablo Palatnik — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:49:46 +0000

One thing as advertisers we want to make sure is that our landing page is as optimized as possible to turn visitors into customers or turn landing pages into solid leads. We may stick to one design but you just never know if its optimized to its full potential. There is always the possibility that a certain headline in the landing page or an image can convert that much better.

You always see the option in the Adwords interface but MOST people don’t take advantage of it.

Why should I start using Google Website Optimizer?

1. Increase conversions: It’s not uncommon when optimizing key web pages for a few small changes to double, or even triple, conversion rates. You put a lot of time and effort into driving traffic to your site. Why risking losing visitors you’ve worked so hard to bring on board? Tweaking and testing web content could increase your site’s conversion rate so that you’re getting a higher return on investment from the same volume of visitors.

2. Eliminate guesswork from site design: Why base design decisions on assumptions? Instead of trying to guess what button converts best, or which headline is the most compelling, let Website Optimiser take the guesswork out of site design, by leveraging empirical data from real visitors.

3. Improve landing pages: Reduce the number of would-be customers you lose through ineffective landing pages. Website Optimiser’s automated testing makes it easy to fix and deploy compelling web pages.

4. It’s really easy to use: You don’t have to be a statistical genius to use the tool. Providing you have the new page variations ready, you can set up tests in under 10 minutes.

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Top Tactics for Tough Times in Paid Search Marketing

Pablo Palatnik — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:35:59 +0000

Google has a great piece that can really help out advertisers use some tactics that can enhance the performance of your paid search campaign. With tough times comes different methods of wording ads, etc.

Here are some tips from Google that you can of course use across the board in all engines.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.

Consumers care about prices more than ever, especially on day-to-day purchases. When someone searches on a particular product, you know they’re interested; by using your ad to tell them that you’ve got the highest quality and the best price, you’re more likely to earn their click. Update your ad text to focus on low prices, good values, and timely promotions.

2. Use value-related keywords.

It’s open season for bargain hunters. To reach these deal-conscious consumers, add appropriate price- and discount-related keywords. Try the AdWords Search-based Keyword Tool and Search Query Performance report to find and higher-performing keywords that people are actually searching on.

3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.

Ads perform best when their ad text reflects the ad group’s keywords; this makes ads more relevant to their intended audience. Make sure that both the text and the keywords in each ad group focus on a specific topic or product. For instance, an ad group about “tennis sneakers” will generally perform better than a broader ad group about “sneakers.”

4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.

The wrong keywords can attract people who are looking for products you don’t offer. Use negative keywords to filter out traffic that’s not related to your offering. The Search Query Performance report can help you identify potential negative keywords by showing which queries have triggered your ads.

5. Make it easy for customers to buy.

Since people are spending more time comparing products and services online, make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for and buy from your site. Use the best Destination URL to send visitors directly to the page about the product or service promoted in your ad.

6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

To get the most out of your campaigns, focus your time and resources on the keywords, ads, and ad groups that are driving the most value for your spend. To determine what’s performing best for you, consider Google’s free Conversion Tracking tool.

Basically, these are the key essentials to any search campaign whether its a bad recession or in a good economy, these are the key elements of a search campaign.

The source of this article was taken from the post from Google: Top Tactics for Tough Times

How Google Detects and Protects Advertisers from Invalid Clicks

Pablo Palatnik — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:04:12 +0000

We all know that click fraud can be very costly for advertisers. It can make all the difference in the world for a campaign if in a month you get a good amount of click fraud so we’re all very weary. I think we have all been the victims of click fraud at one point of another if you’ve been in the PPC game for a while.

The New York Times had an article I also wrote about last week regarding click fraud.

So, since most of us use Google as the main or one of the main search engines for Pay-Per-Click advertising, here is a video to show how they go about detecting and protecting advertisers from click fraud.

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Paid Search Taking Recession Hit Down 26%

Pablo Palatnik — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:17:14 +0000

In a recent NY Times article, paid search traffic is taking a hit from the past year. While on a daily basis, you have advertisers coming in and out of the paid search game, it seems the traffic to paid search is decreasing.

“According to the latest data from Hitwise, paid search traffic has taken a major hit in the last year. While, according to Hitwise, about 9.84% of the search engine traffic it registered in April 2008 came from paid clicks, in the four weeks preceding May 9, 2009, this number declined by 26% to 7.25%. Hitwise registered this trend across all of the categories it tracks, with the sole exception of paid traffic to site in its education category, where paid search results increased slights from 1.39% to 1.45%.”

“Paid clicks to major retail sites and travel agencies were down 20% and 25% respectively. Especially searches for brand names like “orbitz” (which went from 46.35% to 35.75%) or “walmart” saw strong declines in their share of paid clicks.

Searches for “home depot” registered one of the most stunning declines in paid clicks, as only 0.83% of searches went to a paid listing in the last four weeks, compared to just over 39% a year ago,” cites the NY Times.

Heather Hopkins, senior analytist at Hitwise states, “I looked at the top search terms sending visits to the three categories to compare rates of paid clicks year over year. Consistently, brand name terms (such as “travelocity”, “orbitz” and “walmart” saw a sharp decrease year over year in the share of paid clicks. For example, 35.75% of clicks on searches for “orbitz” were on paid listings in the four weeks to May 9, 2009. This compares to 46.56% in the same four week period in 2008. This represents a 23% decrease year over year.

Even more extreme, 0.83% of searches for “home depot” went to a paid listing in the four weeks to May 9, 2009 compared to 39.06% in 2008. Similarly, “usaa” saw 0% of clicks on paid listings in the last four weeks compared to 28.88% in the same period in 2008.”

The Launch of Googles Rich Snipets for Organic Results

Pablo Palatnik — Thu, 14 May 2009 03:53:26 +0000

Organic search keeps expanding its formats and looks. Who would’ve figured 2-3 years ago Universal search. I’d say within the past 2 years, we have seen a lot of activity in the engines in terms of souping up organic search to look a little more standard then the usual SERPs. We have even seen some design in the paid search ads.

Google has now launched, in its gradual process, ‘rich snipets’. What is rich snipets?

“Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they’ll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Now we’re beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate. As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format.”

In the webmaster blog, they explain rich snipets:

Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it’s as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. For example, here are a few relevant lines of the HTML from Yelp’s review page for “Drooling Dog BarBQ” before adding markup data:

larger image

and now with microformats markup:

larger image

or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:

larger image

By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google’s search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we’re excited about the possibilities.

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Combating Pay-Per-Click Fraud, Really Hurting Marketers

Pablo Palatnik — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:43:00 +0000

One thing we really watch daily, if you do pay-per-click, is how fast, slow, or whatever the case may be your budget is spending per day.

In this economy, I think its safe to say there are no marketers just “spending away” on pay-per-click since cost have gone up (some may say down to less competition) and many companies seeing a decrease in sales.

In the New York Times today, there is an article titled, “Pay-Per-Click Web Advertisers Combat Costly Fraud” which discusses the issues that we face as marketers with click fraud in the search engines. Click fraud doesn’t necessarily comes from search engines, although I’ve always been skeptical of 2nd or 3rd tier engines, not all, but some, but comes in the form of other competitors trying to gain that edge to destroy your ROI or pick-up the pace of your budget so it depletes quicker.

“…Search engines like Google say that they have the problem under control. Google says that advertisers contend that fraudulent clicks account for just 0.02 percent of all online activity. If Google and an advertiser agree that a click is fraudulent, it offers the advertiser a credit.

(In 2006, Google settled a $90 million lawsuit after advertisers argued that it had not given them adequate compensation for fraudulent online ad clicks.)

“We are working hard as ever” to protect customers from fraud “and to innovate to detect click fraud,” said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager of trust and safety. “And we’re getting fewer questions from advertisers about click fraud.”

Companies like Click Forensics are helping some large companies such as NewCars.com combat this issue which can be a good percentage of your ad spend, as described in this article, click fraud represented 20% of their ppc ad spend.

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Nofollow’s Role in SEO

Pablo Palatnik — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:28:27 +0000

There is a very interesting thread on SEO FORUM titled, “Nofollow’s role in SEO” When starting a link building campaign for a client or your own website, I think its fair to say not only are we looking to building links to get higher rankings in the SERPs, but always looking for quality links that can drive targeted traffic, EVEN if the link is NOFOLLOW.

The thread is interesting in its question about having a balanced link profile to the website. Does it matter if a website has all nofollow links? Is it shady if a website has ALL dofollow links? These are questions some….question.

One member raised a good point from an article on SEOmoz: Seomoz have their own crawlers for the linkscape tool (now I’m not being paid by Seomoz, though this is the second time I’ve mentioned them today on here)… they’ve just released some stats from it.

They claim to have crawled 475 billion links on the web, and of those they found:

“# 2.7% of all links on the web are nofollowed
# 73% of those are internal (so nofollow is actually far more popular as a link sculpting tool than a spam prevention device) ”

So only 0.729% of links to external sites on the web are nofollowed by their calculations.

So having no nofollow links in your backlink profile is unlikely to raise any flags.

Here are some responses from the thread:
—————————————————————————————–
“Diversity of your link profile is IMO an important part of ranking for competitive keywords.

Links acquired naturally will have a broad range of characteristics such as PR, age, duration of link, nofollow/bareback, tld, and anchor text.

SEO’s tend to concentrate on getting a natural backlink profile with varied anchor text from different sources.

One thing that may not be included in this is the variation of nofollow and bareback (those w/o nofollow) links.

If you were to go through a naturally popular site’s backlinks you would likely see a mix of the two. Go through a site that is trying to manipulate the SERPS and you won’t normally see any nofollows (unless they choose to comment spam but thats not so popular anymore).

That for me is information that could be used by G to raise any flags. A site having 10000 bareback links without even one nofollow would certainly raise some questions.

Does anybody think this information is used in some shape or form?”

———————————————————————————–

“I think this is taking the diversity thing to far. There must be a ‘logic’ as to why Google would do something before putting forward a hypothesis that they are doing something. Google wants better search results. Google definition of better results is largely searchers find the data they want. This is the basis of why Google is winning the SE war.

To imply that lack of nofollow links means a site is manipulative and should have their rankings reduced IMO lacks any basis in logic. Google has told us nofollow simply is removed from the link equation in relation to juice transfer.

A powerful link profile does not necessarily imply a balanced linked profile. A profile that has a range of diversity does not imply what that diversity should be. A few very powerful links can give a powerful link profile. The idea that there is a range of ‘best case’ combinations of links does not appear to me to be a very good argument. There are way too many variables. The nature of the site/industry/market/competators etc all would change the range. On top of this the effort needed to calculate the range would be very big the benefit very small for Google. I think this type of idea only confuses and leads people to lose focus on their link building efforts. NoFollow links are useless for ranking purposes (with the exception they may have indirectly). Nofollow links can be useful for direct traffic.

I am a strong supporter of link diversity. But helpful diversity. ie diversity to increase ranges of relevances. Not diversity for the sake of it. Focus your efforts on those things that do make a difference and avoid getting distracted by those that do not….”
——————————————————————————————

Google’s role is to deliver the best results as you say. This includes removing spam from its index.

I think this point has been taken from a pure white hat’s perspective; suggesting that somebody who garners links in a natural way should be worried about nofollow diversity. This is obviously incorrect and not what I was getting at. I am also not implying that there is a best combination in terms of ranking.

But taking the case I mentioned, where a site is trying to manipulate the search, you can conjure up in your head exactly the link profile most would have because most ask the same questions of their linkbuilders.

Links in the thousands:

All without nofollow tag.
All on pages with PR.
All without true anchor text diversity (home equity loan, home equity uk loans, equity home loans, best equity home loans)

Taken along in conjunction with the other variations, I believe this is valuable information that could be used to fight spam. If not on an automated basis then perhaps using a flag.

Even if only 0.729%% of links are nofollow, if a site has 10000 links then you would expect some.

In my eyes, Google has become the best search engine, and the best advertising revolution since the TV because it uses every last nugget of information available; cookies, search history, targeted ads, bookmarks etc etc. It’s overarching objective for everything is to get information from you to.

For me, to say that they are not using this information because they tell us ‘nofollow simply is removed from the link equation in relation to juice transfer’ is without logic.’

The nofollow attribute is known mostly only by SEO’s correct, SEOs (WH,GH or BH) are the only people attempting to manipulate SERPs. Ergo nofollow is information that could be used to counter this.

I was trying to bring up discussion and am not saying this is true but there is IMO a logical basis for this to be used in conjunction with other signals.
—————————————————————————————–

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Local Search Grows by 58%, Got Local Search Marketing?

Pablo Palatnik — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:24:34 +0000

As the searcher grows more in tune to the web to be more efficient in their search, the local sector keeps growing. On a press release from the Yellow Pages Association, we see that local search outgrows the overall search sector.

” A tremendous surge in the annual growth of local search far outpaced growth of overall Web search, according to a study conducted by comScore, Inc., a leading Web behavior research firm, and released today by the Yellow Pages Association.

The study found that local search — the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services — grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall U.S. Web core searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21 percent year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008. Local searches stand at 12 percent of core searches on the top 5 portals.

Buoyed by the growth in local search, Internet Yellow Pages and locally-focused online business directories also saw double-digit growth of 23 percent in the same period, totaling 4.6 billion searches in 2008.”

Need Online Marketing Services? Contact The Palatnik Factor Now!

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Yahoo Web Analytics Now Available for Search and Display Advertisers

Pablo Palatnik — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:27:59 +0000

As search marketers, we cannot get enough analytics data. You want to be successful in this game? Get as MUCH INFORMATION as possible, its that simple. Knowledge is power and with the right info, you can get the right results.

Yahoo is now offering web analytics on its own platform and looks cool just from a single screen shot (I’ve yet to try it myself)

From the YSM Blog:

“Here are some of the questions that Yahoo! Web Analytics can help advertisers and agencies answer:

How am I performing?
Yahoo! Web Analytics gives you customizable reports, dashboards, alerts and segmentation tools that let you slice up data to figure out what’s working, and what isn’t. You can identify opportunities to improve ads, campaigns, keyword bids and website design.

Who are my audiences?
This new version helps you take advantage of our recent demographic targeting options by helping you identify the age, gender, city, and online interests—and finding out who your most valuable audience is so that you can reach more of it.

How can I improve engagement and conversions?
It’s one thing to get people to your site—but what you really want is to keep them there and buying your products or services. This new version of Yahoo! Web Analytics can track up to 15 steps of your conversion process to see where you’re most liable to lose someone.

The new version is available for any of our advertisers who work with an account manager, but it’s most suited for large advertisers with complex analytical needs and the resources to set up and manage analytics.

If you think it is the right tool for you, contact your account manager to get started. Visit our website for more information. If you’re not quite ready or aren’t eligible for Yahoo! Web Analytics, look into our Full Analytics or Conversion Only Analytics in our Sponsored Search user interface.”

Try Yahoo Analytics now!

Need Online Marketing Services? Contact The Palatnik Factor Now!

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

The Future of Debt Settlement Leads by Nick Passalacqua

Pablo Palatnik — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:05:27 +0000

Nick Passalacqua of Predictivedollars.com is a cutting edge entrepreneur with over 8 years of expertise in the lead generation field and plans to expand the growth of the company through its recent purchase of Savebig.com. Savebig.com will be a resource to empower consumers to spend less and save money in order to free up cash for the things they really want out of life. This will allow Predictivedollars.com to enter into multiple financial verticals among other products and help consumers save big on everything across the internet from credit card debt to electronics.

Mr. Passalacqua previously owned another lead generation company which he grew to well over 1000 clients and was later sold to one of his competitors. He was recently quoted, saying “I am excited to be in the lead generation industry where I can excel due to my innovative nature and have mutually benefiting relationships to all parties involved not to mention our ninety percent client retention rate to back it up.”

The company is currently expanding its workforce by 8 times its current capacity at their new corporate headquarters located in Boynton Beach Florida formerly the headquarters for Motorola.

Nick, tell us a little about Predictive Dollars?

A: Predictivedollars.com is a quality lead generation firm specializing in debt settlement leads among other lead gen verticals. We own and operate a significant amount of web properties in which we generate high quality and a high quantity of leads on a daily basis. Our web properties are dedicated to consumers who are financially distressed and in need of a solution to eliminate existing debt. To date we have generated over 47 billion dollars in consumer debt inquiries and all leads are delivered to our clientele in “real-time” after they pass a 16 point electronic validation system for accuracy.

Why is it a good time to be in the Debt Settlement Industry?

A:I am glad you asked all though that is a tough one. There is no doubt the debt settlement industry is growing at record paces and their is plenty of opportunities for consumers to potentially alleviate their existing debt and also for debt settlement companies to prosper like never before. The challenge the industry currently faces is as the economies financial distress grows daily it is unfortunate that some families must choose between feeding their families or paying off their debts and the choice is obvious. This creates which is known in the debt settlement industry as fallout ratios and they are at record highs though many DS companies remain cash flow positive.

What would you tell any affiliate trying to generate B2C Leads?

A: I would tell them to take the high road of standards and ethical practices at all costs. Many leads companies get into the business with the intention of short term gains and wind up with an unprecedented amount of irrevocable long term failure just like some debt settlement companies. I am ecstatic to say I wear the name of my company Predictivedollars.com proudly.

How do you see the standing of the Lead Industry as you see it today?

A: When it comes to the lead industry the battle over quantity vs. quality and lead vendor vs their customers is never ending. April, 2009 statistics show no signs of letting up, especially as dollars remain tighter and sales cycles longer. You know this battle and the side you’re on usually boils down to your role on either the marketing or sales team.

Marketing wants a flood of leads and to keep the pipeline full. The sales team wants a flood of leads, too — but they don’t want to waste their time with unqualified leads or dead-ends. Oversimplified? Sure. But in general, this is still how the quantity vs. quality tug-of-war plays out in many organizations.

The most devastating problem overall is debt settlement companies which keep non performing employees and deflate the overall results of perfectly legitimate lead companies. Many debt settlement companies believe more employees is a good thing when in fact 80% of their business comes from 20% of their employees, this is obvious sales 101. Do the math? This causes an extreme deterioration to a companies over all R.O.I. and the lack of results are blamed on the lead providers. Also technology and relevant communications play a crucial role in a companies overall chance of survival in this day and age and PredictiveDollars.com by far is steps ahead of our competition on every level of technology and communications we just wish more debt settlement companies would invest richly in technology as well.

What do you think about incentivized leads?

A: 3 words. Set for failure.

Is the current economy hurting the lead industry?

A: Absolutely not. As the economy toughens the amount of lead inquiries for those in need of a debt solution rises. The only challenge we face as a company is state to state legislation in which hurts our overall margins because most debt settlement companies can only do business in a handful of states and we take in lead inventory on a nationwide basis.

What should new affiliates or lead generators be watching out for?

A: They should watch and learn how to adapt to market conditions like a chameleon and I will leave it at that.

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Live Search Partnering to Help Solve Duplicate Content Issues

Pablo Palatnik — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:16:27 +0000

As we all do some link building, or a lot of link building, we’ve been dealing with the issue of multiple duplication of the same URL in its different forms which plays a part with indexing in the search engines. Live search blog had a great post on how they are joining with Google and Yahoo to combat this problem.

http://mysite.com
A webmaster may consider this their authoritative or canonical URL for their homepage.

http://www.mysite.com
However, you can add ‘www’ to most websites and still get the same home page.

http://mysite.com/default.aspx
You can also often add the specific filename of the homepage and get the same page

http://mysite.com/default.aspx?promo=ABC
Many times websites use parameters to track things like where customers are coming from (in this case an offline promotion), or parameters that determine how the content on the page is formatted.

“To help solve this issue, Live Search has partnered with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag attribute that will help webmasters identify the single authoritative (or canonical) URL for a given page. The link tag defines a relationship between a document and an external resource. In this case, that resource is the canonical URL. The following is an example of the new link tag attribute for canonicalization:

A few notes about the implementation of the new attribute:

* This tag will be interpreted as a hint by Live Search, not as a command. We’ll evaluate this in the context of all the other information we know about the website and try and make the best determination of the canonical URL. This will help us handle any potential implementation errors or abuse of this tag.
* You can use relative or absolute URLs in the “href” attribute of the link tag.
* The page and the URL in the “href” attribute must be on the same domain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx”, and the ”href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://mysite2.com”, the tag will be invalid and ignored.
o However, the “href” attribute can point to a different subdomain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx” and the “href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://www.mysite.com”, the tag will be considered valid.
* Live Search expects to implement support for this feature sometime in the near future.”

Need SEO Services? Contact The Palatnik Factor Now!

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Everyone Really is on Twitter! It’s Everywhere.

Pablo Palatnik — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:59:21 +0000

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Online Retail Sales Up in First 3 Quaters of 2009

Pablo Palatnik — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:06:34 +0000

No matter what the news says, how hard times are, the online retail sector is prevailing in this down turning economy. In Q1, most sectors were down but e-Commerce has actually rose an impressive 11% in the first 3 months which is very positive for times like these.

“Looking further into the findings, 44% of the e-tailers reported increases of over 10%, 14% showed increases up to 10% and 13% reported flat sales.

In the survey, about 70% of both consumer brand manufacturers and multichannel retailers reported online sales increases. However, Web-only merchants had a different situation. About six in 10 reported Web sales declines.

“It seems that consumer confidence is getting better,” Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst, told Bloomberg News. “Hopefully the worst is behind us.”

As I said before, while many companies believe cutting advertising budgets is the way to cut expenses, I believe now is the time to try and step up your budgets and establish a great online presence.

Need Online Marketing Services? Contact The Palatnik Factor Now!

Subscribe to PalatnikFactor.com Today!

Are People Really Using Twitter?

Pablo Palatnik — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:30:14 +0000

It’s no secret that Twitter is probably the fastest growing social website right now, maybe right along side with Facebook. Despite this growth in users and sign-ups, don’t be fooled. While its getting A LOT of publicity from basically ALL OVER THE PLACE, many are singing up but NOT RETURNING. Unlike Facebook, if you dont have much friends on Twitter, you’re not really engaging too much unless you want to send yourself some Tweets, in that case, you should go out and find friends immediately.

AdWeek Reports, “Over 60 percent of people who sign up to use the popular (and tremendously discussed) micro-blogging platform do not return to using it the following month, according to new data released by Nielsen Online. In other words, Twitter currently has just a 40 percent retention rate, up from 30 percent in previous months — indicating an “I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.”

“…Martin sees this low retention rate a long-term problem for Twitter, citing growth patterns for previous Web sensations. According to Martin, a low retention rate limits how much a site can consistently grow its audience; by his calculation, a 40 percent retention rate results in just a 10 percent reach level. That limits how big a property can get over time, since there are a finite number of potential new users.”

Now, I believe Twitter is a great platform but wont hold-up as a stand-alone platform. If someone can buy it an incorporate it into something else where users would be more engaged, it’d have more success long-term such as Facebook did with status updates within a users profile. That’s my own personal opinion.