Seth Godin reports:
There’s one big insight that ought to change everything for anyone who buys clicks online. Here goes:
If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.
Banner ads as a way to boost your contextual ads - first time someone’s measure that (I think).
As a quick follow up on my post yesterday, see this article on Yahoo news: U.S. Congress campaign cost expected to set record.
U.S. candidates and their political allies will spend a record $2.6 billion on campaigns for November elections […] comes to an average of $59 per vote in Senate races and $35 per vote in the House of Representatives…
I just cannot believe these numbers. Incredible.
A few days ago I heard a story on NPR about Democrats trying to catch up to Republicans’ data mining techniques. Apparently political parties nowadays are heavily focused on getting their followers to go vote. Geo-location used to work, but Republicans are now moving to more sophisticated data mining techniques which identify you as a Republican or Democrat based on “behavior” (schools attended, type of car you own, what you have on your personal blog, what your MySpace page contains, etc - by the way, these examples may not be the ones they use but you get the idea).
I find this interesting from both the technological and ethical point of views. For example, it’d be interesting to see if a business could/would leverage a customer’s MySpace profile for marketing purposes. After all, virtually every retailer craves for user information to feed their marketing database - and the MySpace profile page, when available, is data goldmine.
On the ethical side, this is just plain dangerous. If it ever becomes technically possible to exploit MySpace profiles for commercial or political reasons, it seems to me that we are setting ourselves up for sneakier and scarier forms of spam in the future.
Website conversion rate specialist Robbin Steiff nicely summarizes a nano-confrontation between Eric Peterson (WebSideStory) and Matt Belkin (Omniture) at eMetrics. For Peterson “Lack of methodology is responsible for the failure of web analytics”. Peterson has written a number of reference books in the area and has been on both sides of the fence - vendor and customer.
Belkin too has been on both sides of the fence. He responds to Peterson “that analysts should find quick wins (”I saved us $30K on Google Adwords with the use of our web analytics last quarter,”)” and that with those quick wins, the rest of the organization would quickly get on board the web analytics train.”
Belkin’s an outstanding marketer, his answer is tactical, exactly what a prospective customer would want to hear. But his “instant gratification” strategy assumes quick wins come by easy - they don’t. Peterson fails the marketing test - but he’s more thoughtful, and does provide the correct answer for sustained analytics success. There ain’t no magic bullet!
Chris Baggot relays a question on the value of an email address. What’s it worth? (his answer is basically “it depends”). Another interesting question would also be - is it trending up, or down. I think it’s trending down and will continue to do so as long as email is spammed.
$1.65B from Google. I’m not going to enter any form of silly debate on what’s it really worth etc - I’m just taking note as someone who’s lived the 2000 .com bubble burst and recession as a startup founder: it’s good to be a hi-tech company again.
It looks like VCs these days are having a hard time adjusting to Web 2.0 (smaller exits, fewer exits, no IPOs), as reported by Peter Rip from Leapfrog. Business model questions are generally tough for the early stage Web 2.0 entrepreneur, and VCs aren’t always tactful when asking these questions. I must say that Rip’s post is brilliant, but a tad complex. I think I’ll pass on this one, Peter. (j/k)
I’m sure some entrepreneurs are silently laughing at this. But I think it’s ultimately in the best interest of the entrepreneur to partner with a VC firm that has a well defined and sustainable business model.
I’m giving a talk about Web analytics today in San Fran, at the Web Publishing Conference (4PM - Web Analytics: What to measure and why).
For those of you interested in the future of online marketing, buzz marketing and blogging, listen to this podcast from TalkCrunch: Episode 13: PayPerPost raises $3 million. I have a very strong opinion on this, but the Overture/sponsored search comment at the end of the podcast was kind of interesting.
By the way, I am impressed by how everyone kept their cool and managed to laugh a bit. Pretty jabby.
The upgrade was easy. I see a lot of new features in the dashboard area, but most important for me is comment moderation. We’ll how it goes, maybe I can safely turn comments back on without been innundated with spam.
