I am not sure what is in store for Simple Pixel, but I will be sure to post it here when I figure it out. Hope you enjoyed your stay, thanks for reading.

While my wife doesn’t call them Happy Stores, she ultimately made me think of it. She has a few stores that she LOVES. Places that when she is having a bad day she is genuinely happier after visiting. Whole Foods and Nordstroms are the two that come to mind. She will drive 20 minutes out of her way (Ralph’s is across the street) to go to Whole Foods and only come back with a bottle of water and some oranges. It is something about the experience that makes her happy.

The more I thought about it, I realized that I too have my own Happy Stores. Barnes and Nobles and Best Buy are the two that come to mind. But I am sure I have a couple more.

Take a minute and think about it. What are your Happy Stores? Figure it for those off days.

This morning I was curious if Netflix was on Twitter, so I performed a simple search. What I found was someone who registered the Netflix username and is selling it. This is not the first time this has happened. Boing Boing had a similar issue. Apparently this is a violation of Twitter’s TOS and you can you get your brand back.

If you are Netflix or Boing Boing, you are golden, but what about all the small business owners? As Twitter grows and cybersquatters get smarter, this will be harder to do. Go setup your business on Twitter now and stop the madness.

Several months later, Google announces Benchmarking, which allows you to “compare report data against industry verticals and gain broader context for your site.” More importantly, it lets Google use the data from thousands of website to fine tune it’s search and advertising algorithms to maximize profit like any good company should.

But since this feature is for “my benefit”, I decided to take a look.

Since I just moved the analytics for Simple Pixel over to Google Analytics last week, we are looking at a pretty small set of data. Nonetheless, it is obvious to see the value of the report it produced.

Comparison

For comparison, each site is categorized into one of three groups based on the number of visits received: small, medium, and large (outliers are removed). Based on my stellar numbers, and those of the benchmark, I am going to guess I am in ’small.’

In addition to your size classification, you can compare to a particular category, such as ‘Marketing Services.’ Each of these groups has a minimum of 100 websites in it.

Here are my issues with this:

• I have no idea what category I am in, Google doesn’t tell you.
• I have no idea how are they determining which category I am in. Does it analyze my content, keywords, etc? Most websites don’t fit neatly into one category. Shouldn’t I be allowed to tell Google how to categorize my site?
• If I don’t know how I was grouped, then what am I comparing? I have no point of reference.
• What constitutes a ‘medium’ site? 200 visits? 200,000 visits?

Basically all this has told me is that for most sites that are ’small,’ I am getting a lot more traffic than most. Great. That and $1 will get me a soda.

I could go through each section on the benchmark report, but that would be tedious and boring.

So what’s my point? I have a two:

1. This feature, as it stands, it a joke. The only value it provides is to Google.
2. Benchmarking is a great idea and everyone should do it, but set your own benchmarks, don’t let some automated software make some assumptions.

Set benchmarks against your own traffic, using historical data. Look at your own patterns over different time periods and sources of traffic. Here are a few stats that are typically good things to benchmark:

• Visitors - total, unique, returning
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• ROI
• Total page views
• Visits by sources of traffic

Spammers are using these new email accounts to spam advertisements for “lottery tickets and watches.” Apparently the current economy’s state has not had any effect on the demand for lottery tickets and watches. Go figure.

More importantly, this questions the effectiveness of CAPTCHA to stop spammers and bots. While creating more advanced CAPTCHAs might thwart spambots in the short term, eventually they will find a way to crack them. In addition, if these CAPTCHAs get any more complicated, users will complain. Typing in a string of random letters and numbers all mixed up can be annoying as is, I can only imagine what a harder to crack version would be. So what can Hotmail and Gmail do?

Create a Better CAPTCHA
If you think about the evolution of media on the internet, video CAPTCHAs are the next logical step. I can see it now, YouTube CAPTCHA. Watch this short clip and answer a question. Using YouTube’s huge library of video with user supplied tags and descriptions, there is enough data to create thousands of computer generated clips and answer keys. Can users suffer through a 5 second video and answer a question? What about visually impaired users?

Limit the Number of Accounts per IP
If these spambots are running on unsuspecting users’ machines, limit the number of email accounts that can be created for each IP. Only a bot would create 1400 email addresses a day and log into each account and send out email. How long until they figure out a way around this one?

Make Users Confirm Their Account
Use phone call back to confirm the account. Sure its annoying, but would you trade that one simple step for a world with a lot less SPAM?

Check out our Universe on NetVibes. Read what we read. Comment on our wall. Have an overall good time.

1. Form hijacking attempts
2. Automated scripts

Strategies to tackle both types rely on tightening form validation and security. Hijacking attempts are much more of serious problem, because the attack is trying to use your form and mail server to send out SPAM to hundreds or thousands of other people. Identifying hijacking attempts can sometimes be tricky, but if you see a lot of bounced back SPAM originating FROM your servers, you should definately start investigating.

Here are some things you can to do to curb your form SPAM issues:

1. Enforce tight server side validation - Javascript validation is lazy and useless. Most of these attempts come from automated scripts that won’t ever hit your javascript.
   1. Make sure form values don’t include email header data
   2. Validate form data based on type and strip out HTML code
   3. Limit the number of characters to something reasonable
   4. Check for certain words, phrases, or code that might lead you to believe its SPAM
   5. Never pass critical mailing data as hidden fields (such as the mail to address)
2. Use CAPATCHA - makes the submitter enter in some words, letters or numbers in an image before submitting the form. This ensures that the form is being submitted by an actual person and not an automated script.
3. Validate user sessions - for each visitor, create a unique session. Store a random and unique value on the server. Include that value as a hidden fields on the form, and validate it against the value stored on the server. If it is an automated script completing the form, that value will most likely be wrong.
4. Log IP addresses - chances are that someone at an IP is not going to submit your form multiple times over a short period of time. Keep track of this and use some validation to restrict and detect.

Tightening your validation is the most critical step in stopping form SPAM. If you have a vulnerability in your form, adding CAPATCHA won’t stop someone from exploiting it. Post your form if you want us to run some checks.

1. Yes, it provides a 360 degree view of the search experience which it can then use to improve the final search experience (and make more money).
2. No, it would violate privacy and would generally be wrong and there is no need to use that data for the company’s gain.

After some research into the Google Analytics Terms of Service, we discovered that using that data would not be a violation.

6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

We cannot confirm whether or not the data is actually part of their algorithms, but it would be extremely hard to believe that Google, a company that’s primary purpose is to store, organize, and rank data, keeps each of its products in their own little bubble. So how could this data be used to enhance search results?

1. Google can better understand user behavior at an industry and keyword level (average time on site, average time for conversions, total conversions, etc) and set benchmarks
2. Understanding behavior past the search engine, they can better predict relevancy factors (Quality Score, overall positioning), click fraud and ways to maximize revenue

So assuming your site is well optimized for both search engines and conversions (because Google Analytics or not, Google knows a crappy site when it sees one) the ultimate question is could running Google Analytics give you an extra boost?

We don’t full understand how all these variables impact your SEM, but we believe they are all pieces of the puzzle.