OBSESSED WITH RESULTS

Yes, the big blue guy and I have shared the same problem throughout the years – stuffing ourselves with too many cookies. Apparently though, my stomach isn’t the only recipient of cookie stuffing these days. As reported in ReveNews, eBay initiated a suit back in 2008 against an affiliate and alleging “numerous actions including fraud, racketeering activity under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), wire fraud and unauthorized access of eBay’s servers.” In June of this year, the FBI  Cyber Crimes Department brought indictments against this same affiliate for wire fraud and criminal forfeiture. Their crime? Cookie stuffing.

If you are not familiar with cookies, they are small files placed on your computer by the websites you visit. Cookies are actually useful and usually quite harmless. For example, Session Cookies are kept in your computer’s temporary memory when you visit a site and are used by that site to store session identification. They don’t collect personal information and they don’t identify you in anyway. When you leave the site, they leave your computer.

A Persistent or Stored cookie stays on your hard drive for a select period of time or until you delete it. These cookies collect data about you in terms of your web surfing behavior or your user preferences at a specific web site.

A Malicious or Tracking cookie is one that stores your online activity, following you about trying to build a profile about your web surfing habits and interests. Though they are not holding personally identifiable information about your identity (we hope) they are trying to learn enough about the kind of person you are so that they can direct the right advertising message to you at the right time. Why is this site showing me so many sports ads. . .hmm. . . ?

By now you are thinking, I am going to block or delete my cookies every day. Think twice though, you may find that on your favorite sites that allow you to personalize content your preferences will be gone. Many online shopping carts that use cookies won’t work either. In fact, with some sites you’ll often get a warning to turn on your “cookie allower” or you won’t see much of the site. If you are worried about your information, check the site’s Privacy policy to see how they treat cookies. If you can put up with the possible inconveniences, it’s best to clear cookies when you are done with your surfing and start from scratch each time you go online.

However, many sites now use Flash cookies which aren’t controlled by the standard cookie and privacy controls located in the Tools section of your browser. In a study by UC Berkeley of the Internet’s top web sites, only four of these sites mentioned these cookies in their Privacy policies. These cookies are created using the Adobe Flash plug-in (the one that allows you to see a lot of cool videos and effects) and because they are relatively unknown, can be used to store information and track users around the web. Use the Adobe Flash interface to get rid of these (see the Wired article referenced below).

But, what about this cookie stuffing business? Cookie stuffing is a practice where the website you visit decides to place a lot of cookies on your computer. In affiliate marketing, where an independent website owner sells other people’s stuff, making sure they get credit for selling you the item is important. After all, if you are shopping around you may end up making a purchase somewhere else. Some unscrupulous affiliates will resort to stuffing your computer with cookies to ensure that if you go to other sites run by other affiliates their cookies will override the new sites cookies.

More typical though is the nefarious activity alleged in these indictments, where cookies placed on a user’s computer cause clicks to secretly be made on an affiliate link allowing the affiliate marketer to defraud a merchant with phony activity. As described in the ReveNews article: “Hidden forced clicks are when an affiliate link is invoked without a physical click by the end user. Various forms of technology and/or coding are used so that the merchant’s site is not actually seen by the end user.” One reason for doing this may be to build traffic to a site and boost rankings. In this case it was to increase the number of computers storing their eBay affiliate tracking cookie. Interestingly, the “wire fraud” aspect of this case doesn’t involve money transfers, but “transmission of the tracking cookie between states and internationally.”

Though the majority of Affiliate marketers are by far honest business people, in an unregulated world many will push the limits of technology to gain an advantage. Prior to this case, cookie stuffing was not technically considered illegal. But as the average users and authorities become more technically savvy the criminality and creation of unfair advantage behind such actions can be discerned more easily. In this case, both judge and grand jury members were able to understand the fraud being perpetrated and act upon it. Though I am not an advocate of increased Internet regulation, as I would rather see the industry police itself, there is a lesson here for all black hat wearers. The honest will eventually catch up with you and take your cookies away. They might also stuff you into a small room with bars on the windows and doors.

http://www.revenews.com/kelliestevens/affiliates-indicted-for-cookie-stuffing/

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/#ixzz0xZi8iVns

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/

http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2007/all_about_cookies.asp

With Consumer confidence dropping in the USA and said consumer busily trying to get out and stay out of debt, people who sell things are having their challenges. When current customers have closed their wallets, “new business” becomes the mantra of the day. In fact, EMarketer, quoting a new study from CSO Insights states that “more than 91% of companies worldwide reported increasing new customer acquisition was one of their top strategic marketing objectives for 2010.”

New business acquisition requires a lead generation strategy. The latest tactics have included traditional and online media, with the most successful being email, followed by live events and then webinars. With two out of the three being online campaigns, it is surprising the report found that 51% of the respondents said that their efforts online this year were below expectations. Truth is that this number is better than the 68% in 2009 who felt their efforts were lacking, but disappointing still the same. Many feel that their online programs are in need of improvement.

The number one cause for disappointment and the biggest lesson learned was that those who had good tracking in place did much better than those without. “As more lead generation efforts shift to the Internet, tools to help develop, execute, and track campaign effectiveness will become a ‘must have’ rather than a ‘nice to have,’” said the report.

Tracking issues aside, with email being the number one method to garner leads, moving forward, how do we factor in the steady decline of “open rates” around the world? MailerMailer’s “Email Marketing Metrics Report” shows email open rates steadily declining from 14% in 2007 to just 11.2 % at the end of 2009. Looking at the industries whose open rates suffered the most we see entertainment, banking, medicine and general marketing messages. The winners were classified as agriculture, religion, transportation and those from large businesses.

The report concluded that cluttered in boxes and the growing use of mobile devices might be to blame. If true, then the ability to track results in order to make on the fly changes in messaging to get those emails opened becomes crucial.

But, getting your emails opened is just the first step. Enticing people to read and then click thru to your web site is quite another. The MailerMailer report showed click thru rates on opened emails have also been on the decline with a drop from 2.6% to 1.6% in 2009 alone.

It is not surprising then that in this mediocre economy religious and retail emails have some of the highest click thru rates. In fact, Experian Cheetah Mail reports that though nonprofit emails get opened more, catalogers get clicked on the most. One of the conclusions we can maybe draw then, is that today’s consumer is looking for ways to help others and perhaps find some bargains for themselves.

It is not surprising then that Coupons.com reports that this year they and their affiliates have already distributed more than $1 Billion dollars worth of coupons! They attribute much of the growth to more brands offering digital coupons along with consumers’ broader use of printable coupons. But let’s face it – people are printing coupons because they have to! Searches on Google for “printable coupons” are up 67% from last year and according to Harris Interactive 8 out of 10 current US coupon clippers say they will continue even when good times return.

Putting it all together, if you want new business – try emailing some coupons, tie them in perhaps with some charity or good cause and then track, track and track those redeemers and their conversions.

Source: Marketers Put More Lead Gen Budgets Online JULY 27, 2010 http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007833, CSO Insight’s “2010 Lead Generation Optimization Key Trends Analysis”

Why Email Metrics are in Decline, July 26, 2010 http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007831

Digital coupon clipping surged in the first half of the year July 27, 2010http://www.internetretailer.com/2010/07/27/digital-coupon-clipping-surged-first-half-year

Well its been 18 months since Google started its Caffeine project and about 2 months since its been widely talked about.  I bet you are wondering “What now?”.   There are so many changes in the digital media and advertising industry that its hard to keep up with.  So, our team at Ionic Media would like to give you a quick update on what it all means in 5 quick points:

1. From months to seconds

September 11, 2001 marked a crucial turning point in Google history.  Because many news sites had a problem keeping up with demand and their sites were going down, Google’s team found that when they could cache the site, they could actually take some of the demand off of those sites and meet the needs of the spikes on the internet for real-time information.  This led to the creation of “Google News”.  This is where Google’s path began to change and they became aware that 30 days was not enough for larger sites and its standard of 4 months prior to that was even worse.   With the advent of social media (Twitter updates every half a second and Facebook about every minute), then Google really had no choice but to update its systems to accommodate these new “influential” sources of media.

2. Analysis in small pieces 24/7

Caffeine lets Google analyze the web in small portions and then updates their search index on a continuous basis (i.e. 24/7).  The goal is so that you (and your customers) “can find fresher information than ever before – matter where it was published”.  Google says that if “Caffeine” was a pile of paper, “it would grow three miles taller every second”!

3. Google Caffeine’s Effects on SEO

Page Load Time – Make sure your page loads fast.  If its too heavy, Caffeine will more likely index it faster if your pages are simple, fast and constantly updated (think Twitter)

Keywords and Phrases – The relevancy and quality of keywords is more important than its has been in the past.  Google is connecting the relevancy of pages based on the content more than it has in the past.  This update is about one thing – INFORMATION QUALITY AND RELEVANCY.  This means stop relying on any spammy links.

Ads – Caffeine puts more emphasis on organic search results rather than paid advertisements.  This means that your PPC Quality Scores are being affected for AdWords.

4. The response to Bing

Google Caffeine is also partially a response to Bing which is focusing on 4 areas: 1) Speed, 2) Relevancy, 3) Accuracy and 4) Index Volume.  To see more about some early testing of these 4 items regarding Google Caffeine, see http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine.

5. What Bruce Clay and Matt Cuts Say

We all internally talk here at Ionic about “blogger experts”.  But these thoughts from Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts do summarize my experience of Caffeine and Mayday (Google’s previous release) since January 2009.  Here are the highlights:

1) Caffeine Infrastructure:

• Get fresh
• Be engaging
• Lower your bounce rates
• Be relevant
• Spread your content around (think YouTube, Google Buzz, Feedburner, Google News, Google Blogger)
• Update your site maps
• Make sure your site’s speed is up to par

2) Mayday and the Long Tail Keyword

From Matt Cutts of Google, “We’re trying to find the best sites that match up to long-tailed queries.  It’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long-tail queries”.  Here are the suggestions that Bruce Clay makes which I agree with:

• Pick one: Select one page to act as a landing page for terms and long-tail qualifiers.
• Get focused: Concentrate link popularity on category landing pages. This will help maximize category relevance from the top down.
• Be first to publish: The first to publish will garner the maximum inbound links.
• Don’t forget the old school: Archive old content within the silo as category support.
• Share it up: Make content easily shareable among major link equity sites (links will point to the top silo page.) First to publish is moot if no one knows about it.
• Be social: There are strong indications that Google is reviewing a wide host of sites to observe users’ behavior and interaction with the brand. Domain reputation relies on more than site age and whois information.

Hope this helps!  As you know, we are always here for you if you get lost!

Marie Smith
Manager, SEO and Social Media

There are many ways to market your website online through various forms of search engine optimisation. Now days with the innovation to social media networks, blogs, forums and social bookmarking, sites it is very easy to do a successful campaign and get down loads of prize backlinks to your website, thus increasing your page rank.

So what were going to do is set up an Internet presence for your new site / company. Here is a list of SN (social networking) sites that we could use to advance our site / business enterprise, consider social networking is not the same as social bookmarking, which we will cover a little later in the article – but each point raised here are simply different forms of search engine optimisation.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Squidoo
• Creamaid
• Yedda
• Tweako
• Xanga

So now to make this process a little easier for you to follow, this is a basic run through of what I would do with the above list.

• Submit my site / business to Facebook. Create page, ask for friends, start posting.
• Create a twitter account (if you don’t already have one) and start a little tweeting – 4 or 5 tweets should do it.
• Create a page on Squidoo – general write up on your new site.
• Digg and StumbleUpon your Squidoo write up and twitter tweets.
• Submit to more SN’s

See more at: http://googlekeywordsoftware.com/using-seo-to-generate-traffic-through-social-media-networks-and-blogs

Google’s AdWords network has become one of the biggest online PPC ad networks. Millions of users everyday around the world are exposed to ads from Google.  How many of those are your ads, and how many out of those millions are seeing them?

If you use Adwords then you’re probably already running a search campaign, but are you on the content network? If you aren’t, well, why not? You’re missing out on the opportunity to exponentially expand your reach to customers around the world that you aren’t getting to by using search.  Using Google Analytics to help you refine your Google site placement within the content network can maximize your results from a content campaign.

There are thousands and thousands of sites to choose from on the content network, but you can choose the sites where you want your ads to appear.  It can be overwhelming when you’re first trying to figure out what your campaign will be. There are several ways you can run your content campaign in order to optimize the result you get.

But how do you choose which sites to advertise on? Google Analytics has a great tool to help you figure out just that.  It’s the Google Placement Tool, and it’s a great way to get an ultra-targeted campaign.

Using the referring sites report in Google Analytics, you can see all of the sites that sent visitors to your site. These are usually people who are writing about your site, such as press, articles, blogs, forums, or other online publications. A lot of these referring sites are part of the Google content network, and you’re able to run advertisements on them.

See more at: http://www.marketerscollege.com/training/2359/how-to-use-google-analytics-to-help-with-google-site-placement/

There’s so many reasons why PageRank shouldn’t be a primary metric for SEO:

• Infrequently updated – Google updates the PR scores in the toolbar 2-4X each year on an unpredictable and unpublished schedule. The PageRank score you see today could be dramatically different than the PageRank Google’s using in ranking/crawling calculations.
• 1 of 200+ ranking signals – Google’s representatives have continually repeated that PageRank is just one of “more than two hundred” signals the engine applies to the rankings equation.
• Applies to pages, not sites – The PR score is based on individual URLs, not domains. Technically, there’s no such thing as a “PR 5″ website, just a website with a homepage URL that has displays “5″ in the toolbar.
• Imprecise – PageRank is a logarithmic score when fitted to a 0-10 value in the toolbar. We’ve estimated the log base around 8-10, meaning that a PR5 URL has 8-10X more PageRank than a PR4. Yet, there’s no granularity between values. One PR4 page might have 5 times more PageRank than another PR4 page, but the Google score won’t tell you until the log base threshold has crossed the next value marker.
• Intentionally Inaccurate - Google has been using toolbar PageRank to visually penalize pages and sites for buying/selling links for many years, but they readily admit they use this filter intermitently so as not to tip off spammers. Thus, we’re never sure when looking at PageRank whether a page/site has or hasn’t had its PageRank reduced and whether that does or doesn’t impact rankings (or the value passed by the non-manipulative links)

See more at: http://stracciafabrizio.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/pagerank-la-scienza-del-ranking-correlations/

According to the recent Nielsen Three Screen report, not only are Americans increasing their overall media consumption, they are also increasing their media multitasking.   The Q4 2009 report found almost 60% of Americans spending up to 3.5 hours every month surfing the web and watching TV in tandem.  What’s more impressive is this time spent together online and watching TV has increased 35% in only one year.

Nielsen Three Screen Ionic Media Blog

One of our clients recently ran a National TV campaign directing consumers to visit their site to download a free trial product coupon. Site traffic immediately spiked, so we dug into Google Analytics and pulled daily and hourly site traffic data.  We found a distinct correlation between the time a specific commercial aired and the number of free trial coupons downloaded.  In one week with TV running, there was a daily average of 2,396 downloads, versus a daily average of only 245 for the previous week with no TV  – an 878% increase!

Upward and Onward:   “The rise in simultaneous use of the web and TV gives the viewer a unique on-screen and off-screen relationship with TV programming”, said Nielsen Company media product leader Matt O’Grady. “The initial fear was that Internet and mobile video and entertainment would slowly cannibalize traditional TV viewing, but the steady trend of increased TV viewership alongside expanded simultaneous usage argues something quite different. It seems that, for the foreseeable future at least, America’s love affair with the TV will continue unabashed,” said O’Grady.

Leslie Hererra
Media Planner
Ionic Media

For years I’ve read articles about the lift Display provides to Paid Search. However, it’s always been difficult to nail down actual proof due to the inadequacies of tracking or the inability to measure actual impact. So the question remains: Does Display really provide Paid Search with added lift?

The answer: Yes – but it’s extremely dependent upon a wide variety of factors

Over the past six months we have been tracking lift trends for two separate clients with similar products, searching for some indication of lift, optimal frequency and seasonal trending. When results varied between the two clients we had to dig a bit deeper to determine why there was such a difference. In the end, I was able to boil lift down to the following factors:

• Marketing mix: what is the weighting between Display and Paid Search? Are there any other channels in the mix that could have impacted one or the other?
• Awareness: is the product well known, or brand new to the market?
• Constraints: low budgets? Frequency capping? Geo-targeting?
• Message: are the messages synonymous? Do they have the same tone and Call To Action? Is the creative engaging? Does it make an impact and stand out from the clutter?
• Product Type: is this a retail product that needs a credit card? Or a 5 question form that requires limited personal information?
• Buying Cycle: Is it a product that needs extensive research? Or socks?

The list goes on and on and on (envision running up and down Eschers stairs). The most definitive conclusion is that yes, there is some amount of lift and it appears to be relatively one-sided: that is to say, Display usually gave Paid Search lift, not the other way around. However, there are many other elements, such as aided and unaided awareness, that also come into play and require more extensive testing than the click of your mouse. So in the end, it’s best to have a well-rounded media campaign.

And if you’re going to set aside the extra cash to test (http://www.ionicmedia.com/contact.html), 6 months is all you really need.

Dee Dee Paeseler
Account Director
Ionic Media

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced a change in the way search results are delivered. Regardless of whether or not users are logged in or out of their accounts, Google is now delivering personalized results based on search history. This may not sound like anything new or unusual, but it has some pretty important implications for SEO. In the past, if 2 people did a search on the same keyword, one would expect that both would get the same results. Now however, Google monitors what you click from the SERPs and tailors your results based on the type of sites you seem to favor when you’re surfing the web. For instance, if I read the Washington Post every day, Google is more likely to rank this site on the first page of the SERPs when I’m looking for news related content.

Why this is a big deal: This is a feature that requires you to change your Google settings by opting-out if you want to see search results that have not been influenced by your own personal preferences. But let’s face it, most people will have no idea that their search results are being manipulated especially since it happens even when you’re not logged in! The way it works is that Google stores your search history indefinitely when you’re logged-in or for 180 days when you’re logged-out. It then displays search results based on the type of sites you visit the most. But again, only savvy users would be aware of this change at this point or even bother to go through the trouble of opting out.

What this means for us: For some SEO clients, you might rely heavily on ranking reports as proof of the fact that we’re adding value. This Google development presents a challenge and begs a couple of questions: 1) how do we continue to effectively influence organic rankings with this added personalization of search results? 2) do “accurate” search results still exist (or is this terminology even valid anymore)? and 3) how do we advise our clients to deal with this?

Presumably, “accurate” results still exist, provided you’ve opted-out or click the link asking Google to show you results without the personalized settings. All the old SEO marks of merit still apply: good content, authority, age, etc. If these things are still in place (useful content in particular), users are more likely to favor our sites and come back.

Keep in mind: Google has been manipulating search results for ages and indifferent ways: based on user login, geographic location, data centers, etc. This change however, is much more invasive in my opinion and can easily trick users into believing that the results they’re seeing are based entirely on Google’s democratic judgment rather than their own influence. This may turn out to be a good thing for users since Google will actually be catering to their tastes. My only beef with it is that it’s an opt-out as opposed to an opt-in deal that most people won’t notice is happening.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195

http://searchengineland.com/googles-personalized-results-the-new-normal-31290

Seth Godin’s blog has a nice little tip.  While we often use Compete.com and Quantcast to triangulate on traffic to specific sites (comparing a client to their main competitors, for instance), the bitly tip is impressively geeky.

You can see the referrals and traffic to an individual bitly twitter URL by copying the URL and adding + sign to it. For example, if you see something like this in a tweet: http://bit.ly/870Ry9 just copy it and paste it with the plus and you’ll see http://bit.ly/870Ry9+. I think that’s pretty neat. You can also track top retweets on an hourly or daily basis.