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.

But that’s not all. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA teenagers have astronomical amounts of buying power. Not only do they hold their own part time jobs, but they also have tremendous influence over their parent’s purchases. According to the US National Center for Education (2008), there are approximately 15 million high school students and 8% of them (or 1.2 million) own an iPhone. In spring of 2008 about 9% of teens who did not already own an iPhone wanted to buy one. In six months that number jumped to 22%. Out of all the students who planned on purchasing a new phone in the next six months, 33% of them specifically said they wanted an iPhone.

Anyone in the marketing field knows that technology such as smart phones and the internet have become important parts of teenage life. They are incredibly dependent on these as an intricate part of their lives in school as a learning tool, socially outside of school and for recreational browsing. Granted they aren’t the only customers that businesses should cater to, but they are the immediate future of internet browsing and purchasing. Their habits are the future habits of America.

So the question remains: Do you have an iPhone friendly website?

With phones being so much more than just phones, it’s important that websites and bloggers ensure they are iPhone compatible. By either making your current website iPhone compatible or setting up an additional iPhone compatible website, you are making yourself more accessible to customers. Not only that, but your original site will collect more quality links for it.

There are two problems that iPhone users face when using their mobile browser. The first is a download speed that is slightly slower than their desktop counterparts. The second is the small screen resolution of only 320×480. Website managers need to develop a site that loads quickly and doesn’t force users to scroll through the page as much. They can do this by reducing (or eliminating) any unnecessarily large pictures, Flash or “heavy” content from the new/updated website. Also, many websites are optimizing, coding and configuring themselves to work with iPhones accelerometer so that different content can be displayed by holding the iPhone different ways.

It’s also a good idea to start developing some relevant iPhone apps. Applications for the iPod are relatively inexpensive and they are a huge market right now. In economically hard times, the iPhone apps can be considered a small, affordable luxury and provide the user with news, games, weather, music or whatever. Creating your own application not only helps to drive traffic to your website, but can make you a little extra on the side as well.

There are websites that can help you build apps and configure your website for use on the iPhone as well as other smart phone brands. However, you may at some point reach a point of difficulty that a professional becomes necessary. Whatever you decide keep in mind that the iPhones have been and will most likely to remain the most popular mobile browser in the world. But after the iPod phenomenon, did we really expect anything less from them?

“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.

Basically, it appears as though Google has finally taken its learnings from being an open source powerhouse (Android is another good example) and it using its high level of insight into the way in which people interact with webpages and online and rolled it all up into a neat little project.

They seem to have taken the best of all the different browsers and rolled them all up into the one neat little package. Can’t wait to get my hands on a working beta of this one, it should be interesting to see how much more they can integrate their search knowledge into a desktop app.

Below are some key points from the blogscoped article:

Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.

The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”

Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (“omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.

As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.

Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”

Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).

To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.

You can also check out the official Google announcement on their blog here.

Google Chrome image is by Google

Here is how Google explained the way in which the new formula will work in their latest inside adwords post

Here’s an example to illustrate how per-query Quality Score works:

Nancy’s Dairy advertises on the keyword ‘milk.’ Nancy’s ads perform better on the keyword ‘milk’ in the U.S. than in Canada. Her ads also perform better on the query ‘milk delivery’ than on ‘milk,’ and better on certain search network sites than on others. Instead of one static Quality Score and minimum bid that determines whether the keyword ‘milk’ is eligible to trigger an ad for all search queries, we will now determine eligibility dynamically, based on factors such as location, the specific query, and other relevance factors. For that reason, Nancy’s keyword ‘milk’ will be able to trigger an ad for search queries where it’s likely to perform better, i.e., in the U.S., on ‘milk delivery’ and on certain search network sites.

Now, the biggest problem i see with this is that Google STILL DOESN’T give advertisers the ability to run bulk, campaign wide quality score reports. That however is a whole different issue that i will address shortly.

Google also states that quality scores will now update in real time which is a massive improvement because until now, quality score sweeps could happen several days or even weeks after making a change to an ad. Which is of course a bad thing when it comes to paying too much for clicks.

One of the other big changes is that keywords will no longer be deactivated. I’m sure we have all come across dozens of keywords in large accounts which will quite often become deactivated due to low quality scores. In fact, i’ve always found it quite useful to look at accounts in adwords editor and sort by keyword status, the inactive keywords are always the first ones to be optimized!

Google the ever evolving beast is doing a fantastic job across almost all areas of adwords and is still lightyears ahead of Yahoo, Keep up the good work guys!

Local search is changing and Google and Yahoo have started to deliver a new suite of products, specifically designed to give people results, richly populated with local data, photos, reviews and anything else which has a geographical tag associated with it.

Explore this area - Google maps starts to deliver user generated content

Let’s look at the first major change, the left hand navigation column, now has a little snippet of text which says “Explore this area” Below that text is now a selection of images from that location. Big deal you may think, but look a little closer and click on the explore this area link.

Let’s do some sample searches and see what comes up. Go to Maps.Google.com and try searching for “Yellowstone” (Or simply click on the Yellowstone link to go right there)

Ok, so we have the map open and we can see Yellowstone, old faithful and everything else within the area. Now, let’s click on “Explore this area” and really see what this feature does. You should see some images appear, on the main map interface that look something like this picture below.

The beautiful thing about this, is that this content is from the general public, peoples personal experiences with the area you are looking at. Not just some salesperson, trying to convince you about how great the holiday will be. You can now explore photos, videos, reviews and get a much more immersed within the area, all through the use of Google Maps.

Let’s do a little exploring on this Yellowstone map we have open, i clicked on one of the images of the world famous geyser known as “old faithful” and bang what’s this, its a youtube video somebody took of old faithful playing within Google maps.

I’m not going to go through the interface image by image for you, i suggest just opening up Google Maps, searching for something that you know well, clicking explore and then seeing the quality of content you can find.

I Expect that the amount of content and the quality of it is only going to increase exponentially as people start to tag their holiday snaps with geographical data, so lookout for new refinements to this feature.

Maps gets real - Google maps now featuring real estate listings.

Ok, so we have just seen the new explore this area feature and all that comes along with it but did you think they would stop there?

Every real estate site that i use to look for houses (I am currently looking to buy so i visit them frequently) seems to use Google Maps to show me, exactly where the house is. So, it seems only logical for Google to do the opposite and start to integrate real estate listings directly into Maps.

The biggest problem i have when searching through real estate sites, is the fact that their search is, well, extremely bad and outdated. I dont want to search by price range or number of bedrooms, i would prefer to search by location and then choose from the houses i like, all the while keeping in mind which streets the house is on and how far it is from work.

Let’s do an example real estate search, to do this you will need to click on “show search options” on the right hand side of your maps search box, then from the dropdown choose real estate. Now do a search for your favourite location and you are browsing real estate listings with photos and descriptions.

The implications of this little addition are huge for the real estate industry. Google could effectively, allow people to sell their house, directly through Adwords and cut out the middleman real estate site. I’m not going to go into detail about my thoughts on that in this article as i am preparing a seperate, more in-depth commentary about that topic. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, i suggest keeping an eye out for these new little icons that popup from time to time on Google Maps and play with them as much as possible.

I know I’ve already witnessed some very heated debates between Google and website owners, worried about losing valuable traffic and page views to their sites. Rightly so, Google’s experiments quite often cause website owners sleepless nights, their “tweaking” can mean a 50% drop in traffic overnight. Bigger brands, this could mean an even larger drop in traffic when the majority of their current traffic, comes from simple, brand based searches, simply because, they have spent years building that brand.

What if your homepage, is the page you WAN’T surfers to land on, regardless of their query?

If the content on a specific page is already highly relevant to the users query, shouldn’t that page be served up instead of the search within a site box?

Google’s position with this experiment is an interesting one, they claim they are trying to deliver users, directly to the most relevant page within any given website by allowing users to further refine their search, while still on Google and then clicking through, only when they find the organic listing they desire.

I give Google credit, for transactional based searches, where a user is searching for a specific product, I can really see the advantage to a system like this, delivering users directly to the most relevant page possible, but for broad, brand based searches, I think this is getting a little cheeky.

For those of you who don’t know what “search within a site” is, click on the thumbnail to see a preview image or preview HSBC results in Google here

Ok, now for the most contentious part of Google’s search within a site. Normally, advertisers can choose to block their competitors from buying their brand terms, if they have a registered trademark, so with my example above, say you are HSBC and you have blocked competitors from triggering ads on your famous trademark. Great, so you now own the space, paid and organic, when a user searches for your brand.

What happens next is the topic of most of the debate around search within a site, when you do choose to refine your search, using the search within a site box, Google all of a sudden decides that triggering ads, while searching within your site is fine and will display competitor’s ads prominently both above and beside your organic results. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture)

Is Google going too far with this? Or is this just simply allowing users to compare your search results with those of your competitors? - Studies have shown, that people have a built in need to compare between at least 3 major brands that they expect to see when they search. (Gord Hotchkiss has done some interesting research on this)

An example would be searching for rack servers, consumers would expect to find Dell, HP and Sun for instance, if the users only found the one brand, dominating all the top organic and paid positions, they aren’t as likely to purchase the product or to feel secure in their decision. I won’t go into depth about this in this article, but it is one thing to keep in mind.

In my opinion, search within a site is just another way that Google is trying to improve their users experience, helping them to reach the most relevant content, with the least hassle, however, Google are stepping on some toes with this one and if it rolls out and becomes more than an experiment, you can be sure that there will be plenty more people complaining about the feature.

For those of you who are worried about what search within a site is doing to your traffic, there is some hope, Google will listen to your requests to have this feature removed (at least they do if you are a big PPC advertiser), so contact your local Google rep and ask whether they can remove it, before you go and get too excited!

In the meantime, Loveclients will as always keep our clients (and everybody else via the blog) if our research gives any definitive answers.

Mozilla Corp. announced the release of a beta version of Firefox 3.0 on Tuesday, bringing new features and enhanced performance to what already was a successful browser, with an increasing popularity and often preferred to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s internet designer, posted a series of features on the site’s official website of what he called a milestone release.

The new changes include a better presentation of website identity and security, including antivirus integration in the download manager, it is now easier to use through its improved download manager search and resumable downloading, it has a richer personalization through one-click bookmarking system, a better customization of download actions, improved graphics, JavaScript 1.8 and improved performance.

At the same time, Beltzner warned: “We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.” In the release notes, Mozilla developers highlighted the fact that “Firefox 3 Beta 3 is a developer preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser.”