The Defrag Conference held in Denver, Colorado in the beginning of November, played host all of the top execs in the search industry including Tom Chi of Yahoo!, Bradley Allen of Siderian Software, Derek Murphy of Isys Search Software, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters and more. So naturally there was some incredibly interesting dialogue regarding the future of search going on there. During Steve Larson’s presentation on “Next-Level Discovery: Open Search, Semantic Search, etc.” the top question on everyone’s mind was this: What will the next-generation of search engines look like?

“The only problem with search is that it’s awful, but other than that it works pretty well.” Tom Chi of Yahoo! Corporation said of current search engines. He was referring to the fact that although search is a wonderful and useful tool, it could also be a little more user friendly and helpful. “People are still doing navigational searches for Ebay.com” he added. This is significant because not only are they getting relevant direct results on their results page, they are also getting lots of other stuff they don’t need – both in direct results and in the ads section. It’s become “flooded with too much noise” as Murphy puts it. People hardly know what to do with the millions of results they get.

As a basic internet instructor for adults I see it everyday. Students look up at the top right hand corner and see that there are millions of results for “Gardening” but I can’t get them past the first page for some reason. If what they are looking for isn’t right there in those first ten results, they just give up. They would actually rather try another keyword than venture deeper in to the website. Occasionally I can get them to page two or three, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

Another problem is unintelligent search results. When users search for “eby.com” they don’t get anywhere, even though what they’re looking for is obvious. Major search engines aren’t compelled to change this because those faulty search results yield the same profits that correct ones do.

Yahoo! has started to take steps to help its search platform evolve through SearchMonkey, which I’ve talked about before. It is essentially a mix between a wiki and a search engine in the sense that it allows website owners, developers and programmers to create applications that enhance the users search experience.

Other search engines like are working on vertical search systems that give more specialized results. Siderean is interested in developing a vertical search for business tools, networking and resources. Both Yahoo! and Siderean are taking a smart step forward since part of the problem, according to Tague, is that search corporations need to solve is how to integrate search with social graphs and networking.

So what’s the future of search? Will change come in an amalgam of search, wiki and social networking? Or in an evolutionary bang in proportion to algorithms? No one seems to really know what the gen-next of search will look like. But don’t worry. Users can rest assured that the experts are on it.

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Yahoo! is going to start making some their new website analytics tools available over the next few months. After it’s acquisition of IndexTools last May, Yahoo! has been working hard to develop and perfect their new service, simply named Yahoo! Web Analytics, which will provide feedback for e-biz owners, advertisement and marketing agencies, and online merchants. Complete with real time data, evaluation tools and even insights on how to adjust individual website designs to draw more traffic, this new service will help e-businesses convert more visits to sales and trim down marketing costs as well.

Yahoo! has once again proven why they are Google’s top competitor. For small businesses, Yahoo! will provide real time “enterprise level data” on their e-store including products and marketing. The Custom Microsite service provides tools to track and analyze how visitors spend their time on a merchant’s website and give owners a better idea of how to plan online branding and make their website more user friendly. The third part of Yahoo! Web Analytics, called “Yahoo! Open Strategy” (YOS) is for the developers. It was designed to provide API users with “analytics-enhanced reporting” in order to better understand user engagement and habits. These will be custom made reports and allows developers and e-biz manager follow the latest trends and visitor behaviors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics boasts ten specific services and benefits:

An Executive Dashboard which allows managers to customize the metrics, benchmarks and gauges in order to track progress, identify issues and set achievable goals. What I like about this feature is that every employee can have their own dashboard if you want them to. Personally I would stick with strictly management access, but the point is that you have a choice.

Custom Reporting Wizard allows managers to organize reports and include/exclude data according to what your business needs are.

Advanced Campaign Management measures CPC, CPM, CPA and ROI of each form of advertising. Because it’s real-time information, managers can adjust their budget, and organize reports as needed.

Real Time Segmentation analyzes each customer demographic and segment individually. This will permit managers to view how website visitors are responding to landing pages, campaigns, layouts and calls to action. It also enables managers to identify target groups of visitors so that they can better utilize their marketing budget.

The Live Cost Analysis compares search engine prices from Google, Yahoo! and MSN and integrates the data from revenue on your website, measures your paid search ROI and analyzes keyword effectiveness.

Managers can also analyze purchasing patterns, track product and product combination sales as well as preview their carts and suggest additional items they may be interested in with Yahoo!’s Merchandise Reporting feature. Reports can be created to track cancelled or changed orders and calculate your campaign’s profitability.

Scenario Analysis actually allows mangers to track visitor paths, behavior, and task completions allowing managers to redefine processes for the future as well as how those would have worked well in the past. This goes hand in had with the Advanced Path Analysis feature which allows managers to view popular user paths as a branched map.

Yahoo! Web Analytics allows managers to view and compare multiple reports side by side with their Comparative Reporting feature. Managers can bookmark reports and analyze their history to improve future processes and campaigns.

Marketing Workflow Management allows internet marketing managers to monitor the website and manage reports. This feature allows you to see how random and planned events (such as power failures, website changes or holidays) can affect website traffic. It will also send out an email alert to bring any changes to the manager’s attention. Colleagues can communicate, share notes and reports on their dashboard as well.

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Cyber criminals certainly leave no stone unturned. They have now started to use our own traffic impetus against us by monitoring Google Trend during peak sear hours. What are the looking for? Webroot issued an advisory recently stating that hackers are gathering the top news stories, videos and searches from Google Trends and posting on their own faux blogs. The Director of Threat Research at Webroot, Paul Piccard stated:

“These highly relevant news stories and videos are being posted to the hackers’ fake blogs to increase the site’s Google search rankings.”

Webroot went on to state that “These fraudulent blogs contain several video links about the news story for which the users were originally searching. Once a user clicks on one of the video links, they are prompted to download a video codec that downloads a rogue antispyware program designed to goad the user into purchasing an illegitimate program that may put their personal information and data at even greater risk.”

The motivation behind all this is not surprising. There’s a lot of money to be made and according to Dancho Danchev, an independent security consultant and cyber threat analyst, ten or more malware blogs can start to appear in the top ten result pages in less than an hour. “Upon clicking the link, the user is exposed to the typical ActiveX Object Error message that is attempting to trick them into installing TrojanDownloader:Win32/Zlob.AMV with 10 out of 36 AV scanners currently detecting it (27.78%).” stated Danchev.

Granted, black hat is nothing new. What is unique is the fact that by using this ongoing research technique cyber criminals actually have a better chance of increasing their traffic and getting users to purchase their malware-ridden products.

How can you protect yourself? Webroot gives these five tips:

1. Always have a current version of antispyware, antivirus and firewall product;

2. Never download free product or purchase them from unknown Web sites and vendors, or peer
to peer networks;

3. Download videos and other multimedia files only from known and trusted Web sites or blogs;

4. Make sure the computer is up-to-date by always installing the latest Microsoft or Apple
security updates; and,

5. Use a credit card that has sufficient fraud protection when shopping and never use a debit
card online.

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They are the two hottest trends on Google Trends in the USA at the moment!

So now i hear you asking, what’s the point in the post?.. Well, i guess i just wanted to highlight how search usage tends to differ so greatly on a weekend compared to midweek. Especially in the U.S, weekends are completely dominated by topical, sports related searches. It’s almost hard to find a non-sport related search within Google Trends on a weekend.

The top 10, hottest searches at the moment are:
1. tom brady injury
2. nfl gu
3. cbs sportsline
4. watch nfl games online
5. yahoo fantasy football
6. new england patriots
7. nfl scores
8. cbs scene
9. gu 63
10. nfl.com

Anyways, will keep this post nice and short. Just wanted to highlight the need for different thinking on weekends when compared to midweek. Keep an eye on the trends and if you have a campaign which can take advantage of one of the fast rising terms, chances are you will pay much less for clicks and will beat out the competition.

It’s safe to say, that Americans still love their football!

Stats are from Google Trends

Popularity: 15%

Ever wanted to know just how well a campaign has gone? This great service from CrazyEgg.com can show you analytics in a whole new light and it’s FREE! Well not completely free, depending on your traffic volume requirements.

This service is great for optimizing landing pages or looking at increasing your advertising revenue if you are a publisher.

So how does it work?

• Sign up and create an account
• Enter in the URL page you want to track
• Insert the tracking code on that page
• Start tracking - it’s that easy

The difference between crazyegg.com and other services is that it offers so many variations to visualise your data and it’s LIVE data too.

1. Heatmaps - this is a great way to picture where the people are clicking on your landing page. It gives you an instant visual impact or ‘hot spots’ on that particular page
2. Confetti - shows you where the clicks are coming from, the volume of clicks, search terms and much more. Confetti is a great way to visual the various colours and where they are mostly congregated on the page
3. Overlay - this element shows you the volume of clicks that were generated on the page, either it be the buttons on the page, images or forms and also gives you a breakdown in % volumes where the people were referred from
4. List - this shows you basically identified objects (meaning main pages) that have been clicked on and also unidentified (which in most cases means links or buttons). It will also give you a % volume on the popularity of that object

Other great advantages that include in the paid version of the service is that you are able to share the data with clients, bosses or friends. You can also block certain IPs if you feel suspicious of them. Also have crazyegg.com send you notifications via email or RSS, this can help you keep on track of your campaign or advertising.

I’ve been using this service for just over a month now - and I think it’s great. It’s simple and easy to use and gives me the data that I need in order to help my clients achieve their goals. So thumbs up and let’s hope they keep improving their services.

Popularity: 76%

Search Engine Marketing is so often touted as the best thing ever to happen to marketing, the be all and end all of promotion and the most trackable and closely scrutinized of all marketing avenues.
Many companies start out with the mentality “Ok we need to do SEM, get it setup and lets spend some money getting all the clicks we can get” without giving a thought to what they REALLY want to get out of their SEM campaigns. The more clicks a company generally receives and the lower their Cost Per Click the happier they are and there are always lots of handshakes at meetings and happy campers.

This mentality is WRONG!!!!! Let me explain why. Before any search marketing campaign starts you should truly consider what your business goals are, some examples would be; Customer Acquisition, Information Requests (customer submitting a request for more information from your company), Click Volume, Revenue Per Visitor. Now there are many more potential positive outcomes from your search marketing but they were just a few examples. The reason why basing your SEM success purely on click goals or cost per click is that it doesnt accurately reflect your businesses ROI and this is where conversion tracking comes in.

Conversion tracking works by inserting code onto your website which allows marketers to track actions on your website and correlate which keywords, ads or adgroups are driving the greatest amount of real value to your business. This isn’t rocket science and let me reiterate what i am saying here; Without conversion tracking or properly defined business goals which allow for some kind of real world measurement of success you are THROWING YOUR MONEY AWAY!

Ok, so now that we have my little rant out of the way you may be asking “what options are there for tracking success on my website?” Who would have guessed that there are literally hundreds of free solutions out there however the two most obvious and most powerful are Googles conversion tracking and Yahoo’s conversion tracking tools. Both of these are good, free, solutions which allow every aspect of your campaigns to be measured against your business goals, optimised to increase the performance in relation to that and also to easily be reported on.

The distinct advantage that Google’s conversion tracking has over Yahoo’s tool is that it ties directly into Google Analytics and then becomes a far more powerful tool for tracking every aspect of your sites performance.

If you have any questions regarding conversion tracking and how it can benefit you, or if you just think you need some help in defining your business goals. Come on over to LoveClients.com and we are more than happy to speak with you!

Popularity: 93%

Undoubtably the best free web analytics software is Google Analytics - When Google first released this service i was lucky enough to be on the beta test and drive it before most others did and even version one was a very powerful tool for any webmaster. Several years have now passed and the very latest iteration of Google Analytics was launched not too long ago, bringing a much improved interface and the ability to compare information in real time with the flash header is a big step forward.

Google Analytics gives users the ability to track conversions, pageviews, unique browsers, keyword referrals and so much more and i highly recommend that if you have never used an analytics based software before, practise with this first because it is an easy to use, powerful piece of software which will help improve your sites performance and your understanding of your visitors!

More to come including a how to guide for Google Analytics

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