Widely popular Internet radio service Pandora just raised another $35 million in venture funding, according to a report in peHUB .

This comes after some other good news for Oakland, Calif. startup earlier this week — a royalty deal between Internet radio companies and the record industry, which Pandora Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad described as finally putting the service “on safe ground.” (Others were less optimistic about the impact on smaller web broadcasters.) Of course, if peHUB is correct, then Pandora must have raised the money before the agreement, meaning that the backers were either confident that a deal would be reached, or that the company would figure out a business model regardless.

I’ve emailed Conrad for confirmation or comment, but I haven’t heard back. Pandora previously raised $22 million from CrossLink Capital, Labrador Venture Partners, Selby Venture Partners and WaldenVC.

Original post created by: Digital Venture Beat

During the several hours of perusing the internet each day, I come across many value propositions. Like most web surfers, I can’t help but try my luck at winning a “free Ipod Nano” by shooting down a duck or bowling a strike. And while I know that there is no reasonable chance of winning such a prize, I can’t help but engage myself in that value proposition.

Landing Pages and the Value of Propositions

When creating landing pages, a similar vein of thought should be applied to your efforts. How do you capture attention, and once you have that attention, what do you do with it?

The following subheadings are what I’ve found to be the imperatives for engineering landing pages within your site in the interest of high conversion.

First off: What is the offer?

Who are you, and what is it that you’re offering? These are the basic questions that customers need, before they can move forward in the hierarchy of a value proposition, and yet so many business owners fail to convey these two critical points on their most critical landing pages.

You don’t have to be sly or witty, just be honest. If you have a good product or service, then convey to them the benefit in a presumptive fashion.

For example: “Increase Landing Page Conversion by 77% with these 3 Simple Steps“. This proposition would best suit someone in need of information (who obviously is in need of help) which you could qualify by using an opt-in form to deliver the formula; this is just an example of engaging your target audience and facilitating a benefit.

Second: Why is this important to me?

It’s crucial that the customer internalizes your unique value proposition. Do this by offering an obvious improvement - one example that everyone in your target market can empathize with.

Third: Show and Tell

Or as I like to say, show and sell. Actively engaging a person’s interest by showing them how or why your product works is a sure fire way to make an influence. Everyone likes to learn. In terms of SEO, I generally like explain the parts that make up the whole - SEO is a combination of three ingredients: Content Creation, On-Page Optimization, and Off-Page Optimization.

If any specific topic needs more detail, I would briefly delve into the specifics, but not lose the focus of why it is I am pitching them to begin with. The intent is to aid the process of discovery and reinforce your initial claim while increasing the associated value it represents to the prospects needs.

Fourth: Lower Existing Barriers

The propensity to be hesitant moving further into the conversion funnel is human nature. Supporting evidence and testimonials work, but selecting the proper supporting materials is what separates the good for the great. Go one step further by record the effectiveness of different pictures and text on your landing pages to empirically gauge their effectiveness. The engineering of landing pages, as I had alluded to earlier, comes into play here.  Statistics also aid the process of lowering existing barriers while supplementing clear and distinct advantages to support your product or service.

Fifth: Provide Options

The easiest way to offer the most value is to offer options or augment an option with a sense of urgency. It is a well-known fact that people do not like to be sold. However, what they do like, is having a myriad of options to select from, so that at least the process of being sold is less obvious.

This allows them to feel in control, which leads to an alleviation of anxiety or resistance to facilitate their demand for the product or service offered.

Understanding that individuality is an emotional trigger provides you with the opportunity to set the stage for conversion by bundling or packaging distinct advantages into an appealing offer. This is why car manufacturers went to great lengths to create flash-based website/options for personalizing and customizing an automobile online, so you could see the end result and create an emotional attachment for the final product.

There isn’t a person out there who doesn’t enjoy some sort of bargain or enhanced perceived value. Custom paint which would have cost $2000 extra, can now be included into the base price as a bargaining chip/ emotional trigger to sweeten the deal and facilitate the purchase.

Would this have actually cost the automobile manufacturer any more money to produce?; probably not, since the car was more than likely in pre-assembly anyway.

Sixth: Create a Sense of Urgency

To take this one step further and add urgency, you could make the offer time-sensitive, set to expire in 30 days. The fact is, the “not too much pressure/pressure close” is a clear example of how utilizing options can facilitate a high dollar purchase while incorporating a time sensitive call to action. As far as the consumer is concerned, all they know is that their custom automobile is only one click away, and they were in complete control and got a great deal in the process.

Seventh: Use Persuasive Jargon

Words like “New” or “Free” are catchy and can bring you one step closer to the final conversion objective. The word FREE, in particular, has a 98% reader response; and even if something is old and slightly different, well, guess what, it’s new!

There are 3.4 billion competing pages in Google for the word free. It’s because it works. Try to tactfully weave this into your offer to enhance your overall value proposition to get consumers past their innate resistance.  Under this premise, a bit of reciprocity can go along way…

Nick graduated from Butler University with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Finance. Mr. Hoffman spearheads new business development endeavors for SEO Design Solutions. Prior to his tenure, Nick worked for Merrill Lynch and UBS Financial.

Original post here: SEO Design Solutions

People make a lot of comments, questions and complaints on microblogging service Twitter about companies — if you’re well-known, I imagine it becomes hard to manage pretty quickly. That’s where a startup called CoTweet comes in, helping companies manage their customer relations on Twitter. The San Francisco company just opened the beta test of its service publicly, and also announced $1.1 million in a first round of funding.

Of course, it’s possible for a company to do customer service on Twitter without CoTweet’s help. But if you want something a little more sophisticated than just a corporate Twitter account, CoTweet allows multiple users to manage multiple accounts, monitor keywords and trends, get email notifications timed to when you are “on duty,” create conversation threads, and more. There are already some impressive users, including WholeFoods, Starbucks, Microsoft, and the city of San Francisco.

Salesforce.com is also trying to plug companies into customer discussions on Twitter and elsewhere online through its Service Cloud. In fact, chief executive Marc Benioff has offered Twitter as an example of where the business software and infrasctructure market is going. But Salesforce isn’t focused on Twitter the way CoTweet is. This might limit the startup, but might also offer it an advantage in reaching companies that are particularly interested in Twitter.

The public beta is free for now, though CoTweet says it will start charging eventually. Investors include Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments, and Freestyle Capital.

The original post is created by: Digital Venture Beat

VentureBeat’s team of experts has selected 14 finalists for our MobileBeat2009 Top Startup Competition.

We’re revealing the full list at our conference on July 16, but here are some teasers about the seven finalists for the top “mobile services” category and seven finalists for the top “mobile applications” category.

Criteria included needing to be less than three years old. Of the more than 100 qualified applications, 53 were from new companies or products (companies that are either operating in stealth mode or wanting to make a new product launch at MobileBeat). Thanks to everyone for applying and being patient as we sorted through the list.

Among the services finalists are three that have gone public in some way with their plans: Boku, Urban Airship and ZOS Communications. Boku handles mobile payments for digital goods in a variety of apps. Urban Airship provides push notification and in-app purchasing services for iPhone apps. ZOS provides developers with a location-based services platform. But each of them will be announcing significant new products at MobileBeat.

Our apps finalists include two that have previously talked about some plans: Waze and Ringful. Waze (right) uses the members of its network of drivers to provide real-time road traffic information, and it rewards drivers who provide information on roads that have no traffic data, and it has attracted quite a following in Israel, where it is based. Ringful creates a dashboard on the iPhone for accessing personal health information. But these companies, too, will have new announcements at MobileBeat.

So all of the these competition companies — including the nine in stealth mode that will first be revealed at MobileBeat — will have significant new announcements at the conference.

VentureBeat’s staff reviewed the applications with help from both our advisory board. We decided to give more weight to companies that had not launched yet or if they had a significant unannounced product.

We learned a lot from looking at the applications. Notably, most of the activity was focused on Google’s Android platform (a sign that there is still virgin ground to conquer on this platform?). The next was the iPhone, while the balance was spread between Research in Motion, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

The focus on Android makes sense for another reason: In April, Google Ventures’ Rich Miner noted that Android was “a good place where you can quickly prototype and test out capabilities that you probably can’t on some of the other platforms.”

We were surprised there were relatively few game-related applicants among the application companies, even though games are the top app on the iPhone, with more than 10,000 titles. There also weren’t many entertainment applicants.

In interviews with 20 venture capitalists in preparation for MobileBeat, we heard that the best opportunities in apps exploited technologies such as connectivity, location, web-browsing, and presence (think Twitter updates).

Our applicants are excited about the next chapter in mobile commerce, inaugurated perhaps by the iPhone 3.0’s new in-app payment system. They are also interested in location services, enterprise apps, communications apps, and mobile content apps.

Are you an entrepreneur or executive active in mobile? Join us at MobileBeat 2009, our mobile conference for industry leaders. Sign up here.

Here is the original post: Digital Venture Beat

In our first blog post of this 3 part series named SEO for Large Websites Part I, we touched on the importance of defining ranking objectives (from the onset) to allow the theme to resonate with continuity and planting the seeds of relevance that will eventually becomes pillars of stability for eventual rankings.

SEO for Large Websites Part II

Now, in Part II,  it’s time to move on to the following metrics (that are equally as important) to round out the summary of what a optimal blueprint would look like for creating a robust SEO campaign for a large website (which ultimately has different needs than a smaller website).

• Define Ranking Objectives (covered in Part 1)
• Plant Seedling Keywords (covered in Part 1)
• Determine Preferred Landing Pages
• Reinforce Competitive Keyword Categories.
• Strengthen Internal Linking, Consistently.
• Use Succinct Titles and Meta descriptions (as they can pull their own rankings alone).
• Manage Site Wide Duplicate Content (Custom templates, Noindex, Follow, 301 Redirects, XML Sitemaps).

Determining the Preferred Landing Page - This is possibly one of the most important aspects to an organic optimization campaign. Most simply assume that their homepage is the most relevant place for conversion, yet, nothing could be farther from the truth.

You should know that instead of just entering the front door/homepage that people will enter a website from the side door, the back door, on a whim from an iframe from a social media site, a Google blog alert from Google Blog Search, an RSS feed reader or otherwise.  So, depending on your homepage is not an option as your website grows and develops more authority unless you want to leave a pile of cash on the table for your competition to devour.

Each page MUST quickly establish what its purpose is and clearly communicate a core benefit to the user in order to facilitate conversion - so this is where your preferred landing pages come in.

If you understand that each page can rank for specific keywords on its own merit and understand that it is a process well within your control, then it doesn’t have to be a guessing game when it comes to conversion. Organic optimization under this light becomes more like a preferential selection of significant landing pages that are augmented by subordinate means within a site such as (a) dynamically generated php includes with topically aligned products or pages (b) contextual linking from related pages “much like Wikipedia” (c) sitemaps (d) RSS feeds or syndication formats such as Google Base or other means to provide deep crawling and indexing.

In another post named “How to Make SEO Landing Pages That Rank Like PPC“, I cover this tactic in greater detail. However, to summarize, you simply create enough topical pages or leverage the co-occurrence of keywords (from pages or posts, tags, tag clouds, footer links, etc.) to link to the preferred landing page with the root keyword and stemmed variations you wish to rank for.

You simply need to conduct competitive analysis on the first page you see ranking on its own merit (ranking with a specific page and not the homepage) in search engines for that keyword. Then you can check the websites’ concentration ratio of frequency and co-occurrence for that keywords saturation/percentage. For example in a Google search box you can use the search operator

site:competitorsdomain.com keyword

It will state “results 1-10 of X Amount”, X-amount will vary depending on the number of supporting pages are targeting the keyword. Targeting implies that it appears in exact match, phrase match or broad match in the title, description or on the page or in links in some way, shape or form in the site.

Using that search operator, you can see how many ball park / supporting pages they used to acquire that position. Granted site age, domain authority and page strength / relevance and continuity have a great deal to do with their position; you still need comparable metrics that you can use for gap analysis. After you have a metric, you can then analyze their strongest pages as well as the other top 3 competitors to look for similarities or indications of their ranking tactics.

For example, are they employing fewer more authoritative links and dozens of supporting pages for each topic or a larger number of internal links and less external links to each page to produce their ranking factor? Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but at least you will have a benchmark such as (100 pages and 20 links per page with varied anchor text) to topple their competitive advantage.

Reinforcing Competitive Keyword Categories - This is where rankings battles are fought and won daily in reinforcing multiple granular layers to send a clear signal to search engines that you are working under the premise of optimization.

For example if I wanted to rank for the keyword “designer shoes” or “athletic shoes” which is a great example of a broad category replete with brands, makes, models and features. I could then set up the parent category so that it is only a few clicks away from the root folder and then feed the relevance model by using title tags, site architecture and content to reinforce topicality.

Designer Shoes has 2.5 million competing pages in the top 1000 search results in Google. Since that is not extremely competitive, depending on how you leveraged the off page factor, I would say a timeline of 8 months to acquire that result is fair.

Looking at the threshold, the more supportive layers I add to this topic, the easier it would be to scale relevance, which means that adding multiple sub folders and using the subordinate pages to get spiders and links to those pages internally would be the first priority.

From personal experience, I would add 100 pages of contextual content to use to support the landing pages. The contextual articles could be a blog or articles designed to instill a footprint in search engines with an array of anchor text and relative pages “designer shoes for sale”,  ”why you should avoid designer shoe knock offs”, etc., to reinforce the theme of the site.

I would then structure the site in such as way that the top level categories are broad enough (shoes) to encompass one more layer where I can instill make, model (designer pumps/designer flats) and a unique description to set myself apart from other companies that may be employing copycat content from mfg. specs.

One example would be shoedomain.com/shoes/prada-black-highheel-pumps.html that way I could consolidate or parse each aspect/designer/make within one query string after the /shoes/ sub folder or elect to specify one additional silo to support. The category would be where I focused the anchor text to from within the site, in addition to each specific make, model and designer after the site architecture was in place.

By feeding the sub folder “shoes” and funneling internal and external links to that “keyword-rich / relevant sub folder”, I am indirectly providing buoyancy to each page contained within that folder (making it less dependent on off page ranking factor). If I can internally reinforce the landing pages in this capacity, then time, absolute links (using the full URL vs. relative links /page.html) will eventually create Pagerank and flow upwards and back to the main categories and site theme if structured properly.

Then after I was done with that category, I would move on to the “athletic shoes” category and set up similar internal support mechanisms. You could then cross link the two categories with secondary navigation, footer links or the contextual content to provide a push to your deeper internal pages.

As the site grows and ages, it will be able to manifest ambient rankings from keyword stemming (queries finding near matches in the descriptions, title tags and content throughout the site) and return an array of search results from the long tail that supersede your original ranking intent.

This broadening of relevance and keyword stemming is a blessing in disguise, but it is the site architecture and the use of deep links and internal links (deep links from RSS feeds, or other sites even if it’s only a few links from other websites) will differentiate your site from a competitors who has zero inbound links to deep pages.

This concludes part II of SEO for large sites and in the last and final post SEO for Large Websites Part III (coming soon), we will cover my favorite topic, internal linking, the thread of relevance between titles, descriptions, url structure and landing pages in addition to some other unique tactics that you can use to leverage your on page SEO factors.

Stay tuned for more from SEO Design Solutions Blog, where we share free search engine optimization tips, tactics and strategies that you can actually use to conquer your competition online.

Here is the original: SEO Design Solutions

Internet radio companies have been complaining for a while about the high royalty rates they pay for music — they said the rates set in 2007 didn’t make sense given the small amount of money they’re making. Pandora, which remains one of the most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone, even said those fees might force it to “pull the plug” on the service. Now, it looks like the issue has finally been resolved, with webcasters reaching a deal with SoundExchange, the nonprofit group that collects royalties for music copyright holders.

“Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” said Pandora Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad in an email sent out earlier today. “The unresolved licencing issues have hung over us like a dark cloud for two years. It’s a great feeling to have the road cleared of that obstacle.”

The Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) has more details on the agreement, which lasts until 2015. But the crux is that SoundExchange will reduce royalty fees in exchange for a percentage of revenues. It’s an opt-in system (meaning a company could choose to pay the higher royalty rates and not share revenue), and the terms change depending on the size of the company. Since Pandora is a “large” webcaster (meaning it makes more than $1.25 million annually), it gets a 40 to 50 percent cut in royalties and in return gives SoundExchange 25 percent of US revenue.

Conrad added that the deal still sets Pandora’s royalty rates at a level “much higher than any other form of radio.” To bring in more money, the Oakland, Calif., startup is limiting its free service to 40 hours of listening a month. People who want to listen more than that (they account for 10 percent of users right now) have to pay $0.99 or upgrade to the $36-a-year Pandora One service.

The first companies to sign the agreement were AccuRadio, Digitally Imported, and RadioIO, RAIN says.

[Are you an entrepreneur or executive active in mobile? Join us at MobileBeat 2009, our mobile conference for industry leaders. Sign up soon.]

[photo:flickr/flattop341]

The original post: Digital Venture Beat

CompuServe Classic, the online service that provided the first gateway to the online world for a lot of us middle-aged folks, has been shut down.

I thought it was already dead. I was among those that used the 30-year-old service to get online, way back in the early 1990s. For a few years, it was my link to email, games, web sites and online friends. I switched to America OnLine, before it became AOL. But I share an irrational soft spot for CompuServe in my heart, like other old codgers out there. CompuServe rose to prominence in the days of dial-up, when it took such a long time to get anything done online that you really had to want to do it.

Those were the days when you had to wait such a long time for replies to email, or to send messages, that you had more time to think of what to say. I don’t miss those long waiting times, but I think we could all benefit from more reflection on what we write to others. CompuServe is more roadkill on the information highway and a warning to others who may end up like it.

AOL, which owns CompuServe, said today that it was shutting down the dial-up service in a message to subscribers over the weekend. The remaining customers have been asked to move to a newer version, CompuServe 2000. You could chalk CompuServe down as one of the companies that fumbled the future. Just like Xerox, which invented most of the things related to the personal computer and then watched as Apple and IBM made real businesses out of them.

CompuServe was one of those companies that should have been Google or Yahoo. It was introduced in 1979. When the World Wide Web came along in the 1990s, CompuServe stayed with its “walled garden” approach. CompuServe went into a long decline and was eventually purchased in 1997 by AOL, which managed to make the leap to the web, if not perfectly, then at least more nimbly than CompuServe. By 1993, I had defected to a series of web browsers and corporate emails. Years later, I’ve finally settled upon Gmail.

Original post here: Digital Venture Beat

As your website grows, your grasp and understanding of SEO should also. The tendency for search engines is, the more content you have, the more keywords and topicality can overlap which may leave search engine algorithms in a quandary attempting to parse and identify which pages have priority over others.

SEO for Large Sites Part One

Although phrase based indexing and retrieval is a prime method for extracting relevance and context, there are multiple layers involved ranging from site architecture, internal links, external deep links and accessibility that all contribute to the formula that decides (based on the least common denominator) which pages are the best match for any given query.

To Assist Search Engines We Suggest that You:

• Define Ranking Objectives.
• Plant Seedling Keywords.
• Determine Preferred Landing Pages
• Reinforce Competitive Keyword Categories.
• Strengthen Internal Linking, Consistently.
• Use Succinct Titles and Meta descriptions (as they can pull their own rankings alone).
• Manage Site Wide Duplicate Content (Custom templates, Noindex, Follow, 301 Redirects, XML Sitemaps).

Define Ranking Objectives - Depending on your keyword positioning and ranking objectives, you will need to select the best method to accomplish them. For example, if your focus is on the Long-Tail of search (meaning less competitive keyword combinations), then link prominence (links from other sites only to the homepage) and flat site architecture (all the pages in the root folder) will work just fine for accomplishing this type of result.

If the market were more specialized and you had less competition (like a high ticket item like MRI equipment), then you could elect for a smaller site with key nodes of relevance (like tips of an iceberg) to wrap up singular, plural and other popular keyword combinations over time.

By adding a series of keyword rich naming conventions and using pagination such as breadcrumb navigation you would reinforce 2 out of the 3 primary metrics search engines assess for relevance (url naming conventions and anchor text) within your own site to subsidize off page ranking factor.

The more work or more streamlined and granular your layers are optimized the less dependent the site becomes on getting a jump-start from other sites and the faster it develops its own authority (to rank on its own coherence/merit).

This strategy would differ from a large ecommerce site with thousands of SKU’s (stock kept units) which means that the model numbers would be the keywords and there would be a large degree of duplicity across the website due to generic mfg. descriptions, etc.

Each keyword has a threshold and tipping point and term frequency within a document, how clearly the hierarchy is promoted within your own website and how large of a footprint your website and link profile make (compared to your competitors) all determines how buoyant your rankings will become.

Plant Seedling Keywords - With keywords, keyword research, modifiers and action words the last thing you want to do is work backwards after the fact. Keywords are the foundation of organic optimization and are the wireframes that eventually support the schema of what a strategic page acting as a piece of the puzzle can accomplish based on its position in the pyramid of relevance.

That pyramid is (1) stable site architecture (2) relevant landing pages based on keyword continuity and (3) a strong internal and external link profile. However, before you can progress to stage 2 or 3, you need to have your hit list of keywords ready to engage the market and search engines alike.

There is no need to recreate the wheel, just look at search trends, related searches (in Google in the footer), keyword research tools and common sense to find a nice cross-section of relevance to use as your blueprint to frame out the site.

If you have a site that lacks coherence, it is not too late to add a new segment to consolidate the ranking factor, execute 301 redirects, add new naming conventions and implement a clear structure that implies a hierarchical method of consistency.

We often implement a an optimized blog on clients sites to concentrate ranking factors that allow us to bypass poorly implemented errors or dated site structures which omit crucial metrics for search engines (such as meta tags, internal links, a one size fits all template, etc).

By baking SEO into the template or new section, you know it is only a matter of time if you manage the areas which impact relevance over time. A stable search engine ranking for a competitive keyword can take anywhere from 4-12 months, but you have to remain focused on the ranking objective over time.

It is not uncommon that when you finally give up and think you have done everything possible to acquire a competitive position (and just relax) that it takes a top 5 or #1 position. The main thing is not to get frustrated or abort inadvertently since you may not see the real result without patience.

So, instead of targeting a handful of keywords, target an entire set of keywords to build the relevance for that subject/topic. By adding internal links to reinforce each other, your pages can implement the buddy system to feed off each other and steamroll the competition since you are using a tight niche of keywords.

To provide a more thorough overview, here is a post from the past on keywords and keyword modifiers that will explain the importance of alternative and supporting keywords and what role they play. This post on theme density will also aid in getting the point across that by concentrating your topics intelligently, rankings are a by-product of great content.

I can see clearly that this topic will require more elaboration, so, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed to catch a follow up video and the rest of the topics outlined in this post above. This is a great topic and should have more than just an overview with bullet points.

In the follow up video and posts, I will break out each segment below in greater detail with examples to provide clarity:

• Determining Preferred Landing Pages
• Reinforcing Competitive Keyword Categories.
• Strengthening Internal Linking, Consistently.
• Use Succinct Titles and Meta descriptions (as they can pull their own rankings alone).
• Managing Site Wide Duplicate Content (Custom templates, Noindex, Follow, 301 Redirects, XML Sitemaps).

Stay tuned for more from SEO Design Solutions Blog, where we share free search engine optimization tips, tactics and strategies that you can actually use to get ranked.

Also, if your haven’t already (shameless plug), many of features we discussed are already available in our SEO Ultimate All-In-One Plugin for WordPress (hint, hint). This SEO plugin is definately worth checking out and is modular based so, we will continue to add functionality over time to expand its capabilities each week.

Go here to see the original: SEO Design Solutions

A very wise friend, ok Craig, once said this to me: “Paid Search is like playing chess with a Supercomputer.”

At that moment I think my reaction was something like “meh!”. Of course Craig was right.

Search Engine Marketing (Organic + PPC) continues to be a huge part of any company’s acquisition strategy on the web. Like other online channels it is targeted, it is effective and it is accountable. Perhaps its most unique asset being the ability to hyper-target relevant customer intent.

It would be fair to say that Paid Search it has also gotten very complex (Search Long Tail anyone?).

Your campaigns and ads are impacted by the many shiny buttons and pretty dials provided by search engines, complex algorithms that determine if your ad shows up (or not), and a bunch of cool things that search engines are doing (like Universal Search).

Given that context measuring impressions and clicks and click thru rates (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) and conversions are now merely price of entry, in fact you focus on those in the first couple days and then very quickly have to elevate your game.

Yet with our tools like Omniture or WebTrends or Google Analytics etc that is kind of all we end up focusing on as Analytics Professionals. Partly because of the limitations of the data available in the tools, partly because most Web Analysts don’t have the required deep understanding of what Paid Search is all about.

In this post I wanted to share five cool, “non-normal”, analyses that you can do to get a much better understanding of your Paid Search performance. The reports are all inspired from analytical principles I have advocated for quite some time on this blog.

All the analyses been created using the ClickEquations PPC Platform’s ability to do impressive deep analysis with its ClickEquations Analyst tool. [Disclosure: I am on the ClickEquations board of advisers.]

Here’s how I think of CQ Analyst: Take one part data from all search engines, one part unique custom metrics, one part custom database front end integrated into excel and the resulting ménage à trois combines to produce incredibly powerful insights.

Here are five that we’ll cover here:

Let’s go rock it!

#1: Identify Keyword “Arbitrage” Opportunities.

Most web analytics tools dutifully report on search engine data, which ones sending how many visits and what not. They also have a report for keywords. And surely by now you know that you can drill down from the search engine report to look at keywords for that search engine.

Now here is the reality : The ranking of search engines by traffic to your site is fairly well settled. Has been for a long time. It does not change month over month, or changes very little.

What does exist in your data is a different how one keyword performs across search engines! Thanks to the difference in algorithms for both organic and paid search in each engine.

Lookie here, my ClickTracks report….

See what I mean? The heatmap shows you how even my humble blog is optimized for different keywords in different engines. This allows me to look for “arbitrage” opportunities (focus on selective keywords for each search engine).

You can do this exactly same thing for your paid search keywords with ClickEquations Analyst, i.e. look at side-by-side performance rankings by clicks or conversions.

In this example, we see that the keyword dog boots is generating huge traffic on Google (1,309 clicks) but almost nothing on MSN or Yahoo. Why? Are we not buying this delightful keyword on those engines? Is our bid too low or our ad copy ineffective?

Questions you want to answer quickly before your once a year annual huge sale is over and you are left with tons of extra dog boots (heaven forbid!).

Sorting by clicks-per-keyword in another engine, Yahoo in this case, we see that our top traffic terms there are ones where Google is under-performing.

More opportunity!

Let’s bring this puppy home, switch to conversions for the same keywords across different search engines. . . .

It is pretty clear now where immediate opportunities exist (in case you did not notice, the frowny faces : ) and where you are doing ok.

In our case the keyword that is our second highest performer in terms of bringing home the bacon (conversions!) is doing great on Google but is we are getting eggs on AdCenter (or is it Bing now?) and YSM.

It highlights a possible Sales / Revenue opportunity and gives you marching orders to investigate. Remember you already know that this is working on Google, why not on the other engines?

#2: Rock Your World, Focus on “What’s Changed”.

While we obsess about our brand terms and our top ten key phrases the reality is that the long tail of search means that our organic and search campaigns focus on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of keywords.

One effective strategy to deal with this purely data problem is to focus on what’s changed.

No more data pukes. Just looking at things that need attention.

[imagine whip being cracked, politely]

You must do this to stand a decent chance of making ROI on your Search Campaigns.

[/imagine whip being cracked, politely]

The focus of your What’s Changed reports is to show campaigns, ad groups, keywords that are gaining more impressions, getting more clicks, producing more revenue (or not!) compared to a prior relevant time period.

Here’s the report:

[Click on the image for a higher resolution version.]

Here’s your schedule: Wake up. Take shower. Review major “rises” and “drops” in Gross Profit. Press buttons. Take action. Get coffee. Drive to work to receive praise for a job well done!

Notice the focus is not on Clicks or Visits (not that there’s anything wrong with that), its on money baby!

Here’s one more very useful example, focusing on Avg CPC’s, as you figure out what dials to move. . .

Every line in these reports begs a simple question: Why?

What is causing that ad-group’s revenue to soar 498% above what it did last month?

How come that keyword is down 74% in the number of impressions yesterday vs the day before?

Why did the cost per click for doghouse pets boulder suddenly shift that much?

The biggest problem with paid search, or web, analytics is that you don’t have starting points. These reports, and metrics, give you that. You can then go investigate the hot leads. Perhaps your competitors have sprung into action. Maybe your quality score has taken a dive. Who knows, the boys in the warehouse may have run out of stock.

The nice thing about the ClickEquations Analyst is that you can easily use the delta feature to set the am out of change between two time periods for any paid search metric.

You can create customized Top X modules of what’s changed and literally you have a living breathing dashboard that highlights the most important, and it never gets auto deleted by the HiPPO’s!

#3: Analyze Visual Impression Share, Compute Lost Revenue.

Did you read my post about Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool ?

One of the really cool things that SbKT offers is Ad/Search Share (8th picture in that post). It tells you how often your ad shows up when someone searches using a specific search query (for both paid and organic).

It is very useful in understanding what share of shelf you have (think shampoos in walmart). It is surprising that only the most hard core PPC folks seem to focus on this metric.

You can also get Impression share for your own keywords portfolio from the Adwords Campaign reports. You want to know how many people who are searching for a keyword that you are bidding on are not seeing your text ads (no see = no click = no honey!).

The CQ Analyst helps you visualize the impression share metric very efficiently, even your HiPPO will understand the story!

The impression share, Exact, report showing “share of voice” for queries matching your keywords. . . .

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Orange = Yea! Green = Ouch!

Need more motivation to work harder to improve your impression share? Here you go, missed clicks and revenue. . .

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Orange: Cause (ouch!). Green: Effect (ouch! ouch!).

The ClickEquations Analyst report is showing above the lost revenue in green, and the orange line shows why that is lost revenue (lost impressions).

It takes the average revenue per click from the impressions you are getting from your campaigns (so the real conversion data from your site) and extrapolating it out to show how much revenue the lost impressions represent.

In the above real customer example the lost impressions alone (without doing anything else) represents revenue growth opportunity of 30%.

Remember this is using your actual current clicks from ads when you do show up (impressions) and your actual current conversions.

Winning those missing impressions would require either a budget increase, or more likely some significant improvement in bids or quality score – but knowing that potential exists offers a clearer view of specific expansion opportunity than paid searcher usually see.

This is a superior understanding of the opportunity then what you’ll get out of standard web analytics reports. Superior because you are truly bringing deep AdWords data together with your site’s outcomes data.

#4: Embrace the ROI Distribution Report [Identify: Lovers, Friends, Losers].

If you are a Analysis Ninja prepare yourself for a minor orgasm. This is so cool.

Remember the 80/20 rule?

80% of ROI comes from 20% of your Campaigns. Replace ROI with revenue, profit, your favorite metric.

Step One: Specify your ROI goal and your minimum acceptable ROI.

Step Two: Run Report.

The report tells you how many of your campaigns, adgroups and keywords fall into three performance bands: Great (exceeds expectations), Good (meets expectations), Poor (sucks!). Or: Lovers, Friends, Losers.

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You’ll see the raw numbers, the cost vs revenue breakdowns, and the comparative percentage contributions.

So what’s happening here?

8% of the AdGroups are responsible for 54% of the revenue (!). Checkout the Avg ROI contrast.

Or more visual. . .

Its not even 80/20, more like 90/10!

It’s a ruthless way to determine which elements are hurting you, and which are actually helping.

This type of analysis allows you to take a very close / critical look at exactly how many of your keywords are really profitable, and which ones are sucking wind.

It should lead to a complete reevaluation of your keyword selections, match type settings, bid choices, ad copy, and campaign organization. Or in other words, the baby and the bath water.

This analysis is super cool because you end up with a prioritized to-do list of campaigns or keywords that require your full attention.

#5: Zero in on the Actual User Search Query (and Match Type).

While the entire business of Paid Search revolves around keywords, often there is not enough attention being paid to the role Match Types play in determining which search queries (the words the search engine user actually types) trigger your paid search ad.

We sadly make far too many decisions based on keywords we bid on.

In our campaigns we use Broad, Phrase and Exact match types to ensure we are showing up for relevant user searches. Hence most of our campaigns include key words which use all or some of these Match Types.

One of the simplest report you can create using the ClickEquations analytics platform helps you analyze the impact of these different match types on performance. . . search query by key word by match type. . . .

Column 1 is what was typed into the search engine. Column 2 is the keyword that was in your paid search campaign. Column 3 was the Match Type used.

And here is a report that will really solidify the Match Type concept in your mind: The match type report is for the keyword wellness cat food and the actual user search query. . . .

Impressed at the creativity of users who search?

The analysis you should do right away is to understand the performance of individual match types with the user search query for a clump of specific keywords you have bid on.

This analysis will instantly spark ideas for:

If you pause and think about it for a moment this search query report is perhaps the ultimate keyword research tool you could get your hands on. And it is free! Use it!!

The Analysis Ninjas amongst you won’t stop there.

No sirree, bob!

You will want to understand performance of various Match Types across your entire account! You’ll take three steps up and try to understand the forest view first.

A typical expectation would be that Exact Match keywords, which are very precise targets carefully chosen, will perform better than Precise and certainly Broad Match.

So is it?

The first report in ClickEquations Reporting gives you the top level analysis of your Match Type distributions.

It answers fundamental questions such as: What is the result of all your hard work in finding and promoting keywords to Exact Match? What about your plan to conquer the earth and moon and pluto to increase the % of revenue you get through Broad Match?

Here you go. . . . Happy Fathers Day. . . .

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In one nice view (come on you can’t argue with a pie and a bar chart on the same page!) the information you need at a glance to understand performance, all the way down to Revenue / KW.

Let’s drill down on that to look at it more clearly. . . .

Revenue Per Keyword from Exact Match is much higher than Broad and much much higher than Phrase. That validates our hypothesis and it provides nice support for all the effort we have put into creating highly targeted Exact Match keywords

Do even more of that, while you shift to leveraging Phrase and Broad more strategically.

My favorite view is perhaps to look at the bang for the buck of keywords based on match type. Outcomes sweetie, outcomes!!

The complete picture, Cost -> Revenue -> Gross Profit -> Net Profit by each match type. . . .

Niiiice?

For this specific client it turns out that every dollar spent on Broad Match is yielding a much lower return when compared to Phrase or Exact Match types.

Immediate work needs to be done on negative keyword expansions to further optimize spend.

Each company is unique, your picture might look like this. . . .

By focusing on Cost in addition to the four layers of Outcomes (revenue, gross profit, net profit) you are able to see a multi dimensional picture.

Digging deeper, as in the first part of recommendation #5, will help you then make changes to your match types and campaigns to optimally utilize the opportunity in front of you.

Happy?

Five sweet recommendations you can follow tomorrow, or today!

Paid Search has changed dramatically over the last few years. Yet we tend to report and analyze like we did during the days when hotmail was cool (!).

The stories we have shared today show that taking a different approach to the data already available gives you super awesome insights that lead to immediate cost savings / revenue improvements.

And it is not that hard is it? You need a bid management software like ClickEquations with built in advanced analytical capabilities, you need some awareness of AdWords / YSM / AdCenter and you are on your way.

Ok now your turn.

What do you think overall of this approach? Have you done any of the above five types of analyses? Got any other favorites that you would care to share? What do you use to do your Paid Search Campaigns analysis? Any tips or horror stories you want to share?

I would love to hear from you. Thanks.

The original post is created by: Avinash Kaushik

The teen hacker who unlocked the original iPhone is at it again. George Hotz, 19, claims to have created an app that can “jailbreak” the iPhone 3G S.

That means the program, dubbed purplera1n, can install third-party software on an iPhone 3G S, even if that software is not approved by Apple. It didn’t take him that long to hack the iPhone 3G S, which has only been available since June 19.

Jailbreaking is a big deal because it shows that it isn’t impossible to overcome Apple’s built-in security features for the iPhone. To some users, jailbreaking adds value to the phone because they are able to run a variety of unauthorized apps. Apple tries to close off vulnerabilities that make jailbreaking possible, but hackers such as Hotz look for new ones in a cat-and-mouse game.

Note that while Hotz originally was able to “unlock” the iPhone so that it could make phone calls on non-AT&T networks, “jailbreaking” is different in that it merely allows unapproved apps to run on the iPhone.

Hotz released software on Friday that works with Windows-based computers and the latest version of iTunes, as well as an iPhone 3G S running the latest iPhone 3.0 software. He talked about it in a blog post. Today, he released a Mac version. He warns that people who try the software should do a backup before they start.

In the initial post, Hotz wrote,  “We release, Apple fixes, we find new holes.” Various blogs have confirmed that the software works. Hotz gained fame in August, 2007 when, at the age of 17, he became the first hacker to crack the iPhone’s security so it could run unauthorized apps.

Original post here: Digital Venture Beat