'marketing' Category

• Blogs, Spam And Rank

  This blogs visitor volume slid for a few weeks, a couple of months ago. So did the spam comment volume. It was actually easier to see the slide in the Akismet 15-day spam queue, than anything else. Spam went down 10% over a period of less than two weeks, and was strongly correlated with visitor [...]

  October 20th, 2008

• Spectacle Recycling, Content Match And MFA

  Part of what we do is SEO and conversion improvement, so I tend to take a close look at other sites that rank well in organic search, to see how they are constructed and whether they work only for the site owner, or work for the visitor too. That was thrown into highlight this week [...]

  September 28th, 2008

• Is AdWords Search History Permutation Fraudulent?

  Update
  2009/02 I can no longer detect Search History Permutation using the diagnostic tests that I previously used – I believe that this is no longer operating, or it has become more subtle in its effects.
  Original article
  My first article on Search History usage was experiential; you can do the searches yourself and see the strange [...]

  March 17th, 2008

• SEO vs PPC

  Andrew Goodman has an interesting start on a discussion of the relative merits of PPC and SEO. I think he’s found an worthwhile thread, but I believe that there’s a different type of analysis to be usefully applied. It is that clicks have different meanings; here is one model for looking at what clicks mean.
  I [...]

  March 16th, 2008

• Web Marketing In Context, 2003 Survey

  Most businesses follow the Kevin Costner “Field Of Dreams” visionary model for their website:
  “If You Build It, They Will Come”.
  Annoyingly, this model usually fails. Let’s have a look at how people think about their web marketing and why they end up either ravingly happy or cynical depressives about their efforts. Web Marketing, or Internet [...]

  March 10th, 2008

• Apples, not Turtles

  This article was triggered by unreliable internet connections, especially after upgrading to Apple’s latest Mac OS X release, Leopard. It’s a reflection on Brand, the Pareto Principle, and Perception, which is why it ties, strangely, to Internet Marketing.
  There’s an almost certainly apocryphal story that someone was presenting cosmology to a non-scientific audience. At the [...]

  January 30th, 2008

• Pride goeth before a fall

  Whooee, I’m going to have to watch my step. I monitor my presence on the web, mostly using Google Alerts and similar facilities. This is mainly because of my interest in online identity and especially because of the interaction of search and identity – a fairly common theme in these articles. I know who I [...]

  January 11th, 2008

• Definitions: CPA

  Various of our clients have different performance targets for paid search, evolved because of the different ways in which they can or want to measure performance. For paid search, the most common performance measurements that we see are CPA, ROAS and ROI. This article addresses CPA, the Cost Per Action.
  CPA – Cost Per Action
  CPA, [...]

  September 3rd, 2007

• Google Top Position Pricing Motivational Analysis

  Google announced yesterday (2007/08/08) that the pricing system for placing adverts above organic search results is to change. What effect will this have on advertisers and other Google stakeholders, and what reasons might Google have for doing so?
  As you might expect, a first pass analysis suggests that Google is using this to increase revenue streams. [...]

  August 9th, 2007

• Google is destroying the web!

  Adam Lasnik, Google’s missionary to the heathens, fired up to convince webmasters to use links only if they fit the citation model, wrote a few months ago that he and Matt joked that people are often bragging they have an undetectable technique to raise rank. The interview (second link in this paragraph, to Stone Temple) [...]

  July 30th, 2007