Forget good or bad, just plain ugly

I recently got this in my mail. This should be put up there as the epitome of ugly advertizing:



This is the latest pop-up kind of advertizing. The portal promises that the advertiser gains because this latest method of pop-up advertizing "just jumps out and grabs attention" and that the brand "just cannot be ignored". I'm sorry but when did advertizing become this annoying. can you imagine how this pop up ad would massacre the surfing experience of a person? world over people are moving towards non intrusive advertzing platforms because there is a big realization that advertizing that is annoying does not transalte into ROI. It may grab attention but also creates an ill feeling about the brand in the minds of the consumer.

The reason why Google's SEO based text advertizinng was a runaway success was because it was simple, direct and clean. It didn't take away from the surfing experience but ingact complemented it. Facebook too, while contemplating and Ad platform took pains to ensure that the advertizing didn't detract from the user experience. Companies like Facebook have to be particularly careful because user experience is what makes or breaks social interactive sites. That's why this portal's latest venture is puzzling and frankly a bit annoying. This also sends a wrong message to your most valuable asset, your website's subscriber. By pissing them off, by putting annoying pop up advertizing, you are turning them away from your website!

Another side of ugly is the latest Yahoo Search Ad in India. The Ad shows a skydiver with a stutter failing to count from 1-10 in time (due to his stutter) and then eventually crashing to death, with the tagline going "Sometimes every second counts". I don't see how this Ad is even remotely funny. Its in extremely poor taste. As a marketer the rule of thumb is you do not make fun of people disabilities. Simply because, marketing is a very powerful tool. It has an incredible power to influence huge masses of people and must be used to promote positive ideas. I truly believe this. A brand that infuses or reinforces positive ideas will also be looked upon in the same light. When a brand tries to ridicule a group no matter what their ethncity will always end up leaving a bad taste and that's a risk a top notch brand like Yahoo should not take.

Long tales and other good reads

So things have been good. Been reading a lot of good reads lately. Few of the really good ones for your perusal & consumption below:

Chris Anderson's Book - The Long Tail
I know, I know i'm behind the curve on this one. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006) by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-chief of wired magazine (the favourite read of this blog) is a stellar book and must be read by everyone who is remotely interested in economics. Yes Economics and not just the internet. Anderson in this book talks about the remarkable manner in which the internet has re-written traditional retail that focussed solely on "hits" due to the constraints of supply chain and inventory costs. The main focus is on how, due to the internet, the market is moving towards the "non hits" as people are moving from mass consumer products to more customized niche products.

I knew about the Long Tail theory pretty much when the book released but this book has given me an insight on Search Engines that I never noticed before. The sieving quality of search engines to negotiate all the clutter on the net.That, methinks, is the saviour of the long tail. Yes there is significant choice out there thanks to the internet and the availability of information. But choice is useless unless you can get to it. Search Engines sift through the internet to get you what you want. That's why a Search Engine on the web portal is crucial.

Most companies do not pay attention to the search engines on their own web portal because they think their own portal is a small universe and people will get to the content any way. But regardless, navigating any portal can sometimes be overwhelming. I personally hate it when search queries within a site don't work and give out odd results. Especially when its at odds with Google. The big takeway for me personally from this book was that marketing to the long tail because of its niche drive preference is going to be difficult and sometimes not feasible but if one has an elaborate website, investing in good search engine technology and a recommendation alogorithm will ease things up significantly.

One of my favourite lines in the book tho, is when he describes Fiona Apple as "Delightfully Unhinged". I'd like to wear a T-shirt that says that! More on the book here. Also read the Long Tail blog here

There's a blogging exchange of words going on in Harvard Business Review between Chris Anderson and Anita Elberse, a harvard prof. Elberse is arguing on if one should take the long tail seriously and invest in it. Its an extremely good read and besides its greatly stimulating to see two intellectuals argue. Register on the HBR site and you'll get access to it. Can't link to it unfortunately :(

More shameless Wired Plug Alert
Yes well, what can I say I'm like a wired groupie these days. Wired is celebrating its 15th anniverssary this year and because of that one is able to access a lot of past gems. I chanced upon a wired article on the landmark US Vs Microsoft anitrust case. Th article, all of 45 pages, was published after the judgement to break up Microsoft was delivered in 1998. The article brilliantly narrates the events leading up to the case and gives inside scoop on all the players involved especially the Department of Justice (DoJ) and Microsoft.

The article reads like a salacious saga and is completely absorbing. Besides that it gives one valuable insights on US anti trust laws. By the end of this article, one gets to know the Sherman Act better than one's right hand. You also get know the ugly side of Microsoft. I'm not sure if the article was particularly biased against Microsoft but its not flaterring in anyway. I don't really get why people in tech hate microsoft so much. It may be vehemently dominating and they may not make the best of products but hey nobody out there has an OS that matches Microsoft. I use MS products evryday and I don't think I should crib particularly when I have not seen a better product to rival it. Read the article here

This made me wonder if India has Antitrust laws? Anyone know? Also I don't particularly think its a good idea, not right now any way. We've just become a free economy, what we don't need right now is a regulatory law. Besides, the ambanis and tatas of this country would never allow it

*end shameless plug*

More bounty
The Economic times recently had a great article on Leadership. In an article called "Four fundamental laws for CEOs racing against time" the author, with good examples, illustrates the 4 guiding principles that CEOs, who are pressed for immediate results, should adopt.

Another article in ET talks about the importance of customer advocacy. The author makes the case about why one should always invest in building a loyal community of users as the latter could come to the rescue during bad times. Read the Article here

Google Killer? Really??

So well, Cuil.com was launched recently amidst much hoopla and was touted by its PR as the "Google Killer" search engine. Well the verdict it out and initial reactions aren't much to go by. I'm being polite, let me say it then, it sucks. But that isn't the point, the point is that it sucks primarily when compared to Google. But, wait a sec, I didn't force the comparison, Cuil itself forced me to do it.When you call your product the killer anything, you are begging people to make comparisons by raising their expectations and if don't particularly meet those expectations and flounder badly, you are going to invite some pretty strong reactions

Well to be honest the tag line caught my fancy and I too tried out the site and the first thing I did was search my name. I was very very disappointed with cuil's results. For a site that claims to index far more sites than google, I was pretty let down with the results. My blog for instance wasn't indexed (and no I'm not berating cuil for that reason). My point is that, this is obviously a big PR snafu. Ofcourse it attracted a lot of people, ofcourse a lot of people searched on it but the upshot of it has been that it has been universally berated. Is the hype worth the negative reaction? The done thing would have been to be slightly discreet, to have gone for a soft launch with rigorous testing of the product without tall claims

The lesson for marketers here is to ensure that there is no disconnect between the marketing hype and the product. Ofcourse we all want our products to sell but nothing is worth the bad press and the public really isn't that forgiving. So next time you make tall claims make sure the product live upto it

More about cuil here

Top 8 Tips For Marketing Your Blog

Its finally happened!! Google has started indexing my blog!! yaaay! *passes out imaginary glasses of champagne* Well jokes aside, as I had chronicled before, I was finding it increasingly difficult to get my blog indexed - it was not showing up in any searches of my name and this continued for upto 5 months. I checked out Google's Site Analyzer and found that I needed to apply basic optimization tecniques like adding more links. So I made it a policy to add links in any post I write. I guess the links need to be relevant. Other than that I didn't do anything much except update the website on a regular basis. I guess both the above techniques are key to getting the blog indexed, because after I implemented these two things in a month or so my blog got indexed.

Now that my blog has been indexed, the question arises on how one should market the blog. I've tried out some of the methods and they have worked fairly decently in increasing traffic. Then there are others that I've not yet tried but are sounds techniques nonetheless that surely would garner more traffic, so here they are, in no particular order:

1. Publicize Publicize Publicize - If we are really desperate for traffic then the Blog URL must be ubiquitous and visible in all our communication - Things like email signatures, Status messages in Gtalk, MSN & Yahoo, on facebook, linked in & orkut profile or even custom T shirts! (I kid about the T shirts thing, but you can implement if one is really desperate ). Email signature at work is a bit risky but its a sure fire way to ensure that your colleagues visit your blog

2. Blog Directories - Registering with numerous Blog directories really work. Some of the blog directories are free and simply request for a link back in return for a listing

3. Search Phrase Analysis - Analyzing Search Phrases & focusing on the kind of people coming to the blog will definitely help in ensuring that they come back again. I mean if you find that one particular post is attracting a lot of traffic, it makes sense to write more on that particular topic

4. Regular Updates - Regular updating of the blog always always sees an increase in traffic. It gives people a chance to check out the blog on a regular basis. This also means that there is more of your content out there for google to index and more content means more search traffic

5. Social Bookmarking - This one especially worked for me. Social bookmarking blog posts means that traffic from social bookmarking sites such as Digg. Del.ici.ous, stumbleupon etc will come to your site. This also helps in raising the page rank due to the link back from these sites

6. Make the blog interactive: Write stuff in a way that solicits comments, views & opinions and make sure that those comments are responded to. People who write comments always come to the post to see if their comment has been answered *I wouldn't know about this particular point because nobody comments :( *

7. Visit other such blogs & comment: This is the easiest way to attract traffic to ones blog. Pick 4-5 high traffic blogs about your area of interest or on what your blog is based on. Comment, comment, comment regularly on it so that you start attracting some of that high traffic on to your own blog. Oh you can also email the blog owners discreetly and beg and plead that they include you on their Blogroll

8. Email Subscription or Plain Prostituting - Inform & email everyone you know that you updated your blog and ask everyone to go check it out. Doing it 2-3 times in the initial stages should be fine. This will atleast register in everyone's mind that you have a blog atleast. Doing it regularly makes one look need. Setting up an email subscription app on the blog once traffic has reached certain critical mass will also help in getting those regular readers back. Setting up RSS feeds is also a good idea

I'll definitely update this list as my own blog grows *hopefully* till then read this absolutely awesome article for more great tips on blog marketing. I suggest this link be added to your favourites list and also my blog hehehe

Web Analytics

(One of my published articles. Anyone interested in referring to this is most welcome although a citation or a link back would be greatly appreciated)

One of my favourite books on marketing is “End of Marketing as We Know It” by Sergio Zyman, the legendary, former Chief Marketing Officer of the Coca Cola Company. The basic tenet of this book was that Marketing was more science than art. No more was marketing all about that genius creative or ad campaign. Marketing, instead, as he viewed it was all about delivering results. How many units of coke did that Ad sell? Did the sales grow after launching that campaign? Did we profit from the direct mail campaign? Marketing was less Ad agency voodoo and more about measurable outcomes.

Yes, I’ll repeat it again “Measurable Outcomes”. As a young marketer, learning the ropes, this book opened my eyes to the raison d’etre for any marketer – Metrics. Marketing exists not to create beautiful Ad campaigns or killer direct mails. The sole duty of marketing is to generate demand. I truly believe that for any marketing activity to be truly successful, it should necessarily be metrics driven and ultimately be tied to the goal of the company. The outcome must be ..(don’t kill me for saying this) measured. So it is with great glee that I write about Web Analytics. For a data driven person like me, Web Analytics and Web analytics tools are like panacea to my soul.

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is basically the study of traffic to a particular website – where it’s coming from and its subsequent behaviour on the website. Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as “the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which Landing Pages encourage people to make a purchase”

Web Analytics provides insights on a range of traffic related questions like:

1. How many people are visiting your site?
2. Where are they coming from?
3. What is their activity on the site?
4. Which page are they viewing most often?
5. Which page are they dropping off from?
6. What keywords did they use to visit the page?

The analysis of website traffic began in the early 90’s through the scrutiny of Logfiles. Logfiles are files maintained by web servers, consisting of all transactions that take place on a website. It wasn’t long before, these file were being used to provide insight on the amount activity that was taking place on a website.

In the early years, Web Analytics primarily consisted of counting the number of “Hits” or the number of requests made to the web server. This method was fairly representational of the site’s popularity as web pages in those days were pretty basic and consisted of a single HTML file with no images, animations, videos or downloads

As the late 1990s saw the emergence of Search Engines which brought with them their spiders and their bots, it became more and more difficult to identify unique human visitors through Logfile analysis alone. The uses of Web Caches also posed a problem as subsequent visits of a person to a website could not be tracked through Logfiles

In order to address issues thrown up by Logfile analysis, a new method called page tagging evolved, which used JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. This not only solved the issue of caching and search engine bots but also enabled web analytics to be outsourced to a web analytics company as Page tagging could now be performed by companies who did not run their own web servers.

Importance of Web Analytics

Web Analytics is not about merely analyzing website data. It’s about understanding what drives people to the site and what features effect their subsequent activity on the site. Most importantly, from a business perspective, Web Analytics gives you an insight on if your site is meeting its intended objective.

As we mentioned earlier, put simply, web analytics helps us measure how many people visited a site, how they got there and what they did subsequently. Measuring and monitoring these data parameters helps us understand the individual user behaviour. The valuable insights provided by this data helps us analyze how people came to a particular site, what keyword or phrases they used to get there– whether these keywords are relevant or not, what they did subsequently on landing, what were the most frequently visited pages, what were the least frequently visited pages, which page saw a high drop off and most importantly, if the user ultimately did what the site wanted him to do. For example if it’s an E-commerce site, did all the user activity ultimately lead to a transaction? Or if it’s a social networking site did the user creat a new profile?

Web Analytics provides us the data to makes tweaks and enhance the ROI or conversions from a website. To quantify the advantages in simplistic terms, Web Analytics helps improve :


1. A site’s Search engine Rankings so that one is able to attract more & relevant traffic
2. A site’s usability and helps it become more user friendly so that people are able to navigate better
3. Conversions or sales transactions – What ever is the ultimate objective of the site

Basic Metrics

Ok, so now we know what Web Analytics is, we have gone into the history and we even know why it’s important, so great, how do we start off? Analyzing a whole bunch of website data can be clearly overwhelming, more so if one is not familiar with the basic web metrics and their definitions. Most web analytics softwares offer the following web metrics that one can track to start off with.

Hits: This metric is frequently cited to indicate site popularity but infact very misleading. In most web analytics discussions a ‘hit’ is defined as a single request for any item on your website. This can include images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the above components referenced by that page. Thus, a single page load can result in many hits.

Visits: This is most basic of all web metrics and indicates the number of visits (unique and otherwise) a site receives. It provides a quick indicator of how effectively a site is being promoted.

Pageviews: This is the total number of pages viewed on a site and is a general measure of how much a site is used. This report also provides an insight on what pages are being viewed the most and hence give an idea on what’s working on a site and what’s not.

Pages/Visit: Average Pageviews is a good way of measuring visit quality. A high Average Pageviews number suggests that visitors are interacting extensively with a site. A high Average Pageviews results from one or both of the following factors: (1) Appropriately targeted traffic (i.e. visitors who are interested in what a site offers and (2) High quality content effectively presented on the site. Conversely, a low Average Pageviews indicates that the traffic coming to the site has not been appropriately targeted to what the site offers or that the site does not deliver what was promised to the visitor.

Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left the site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to the site’s visitors.

Avg. Time on Site: Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using a site.

% New Visits: This report lets you analyze the amount of new visitors or return visitors that a site is attracting. A high number of new visitors suggests that one is successful at driving traffic to a site while a high number of return visitors suggests that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

Traffic Sources: This report gives an insight on where are all the traffic is coming from - If it is Direct traffic or from a referral site or if it’s coming from search engine. This allows one to invest marketing resources on the right channel

Search phrases & keywords: This report gives a detailed list on what keywords or phrases are driving search engine traffic to a website. It helps us understand if the traffic that the site is getting is relevant or not

There are many metrics that are offered by numerous web analytics softwares in the market. Most metrics also offer fascinating insights on the working of the website but the key to understanding metrics is to hone in only on those metrics that have a direct relevance on the objective of your website. For example, bounce rate is a misleading metric for a blog because most people exit a blog after reading the latest post. The ideal metric for a blog would be the number of visits.

Tools & Resources

There are a lot of web analytics softwares in the market and most of them differ in the way they measure metrics. But if one is just starting out with web analytics and if one has some time to play around with data, I would personally recommend, Google’s Web Analytics Software. It is free and can be easily integrated with Google Adwords Campaign and hence helps one get an insight on how ones keywords are performing. It is also easy to integrate Google Analytics with one’s website and just requires one to add a couple of lines of tracking code to the website’s HTML code

Bottom line

Ultimately, what web analytics gives you is the data. What makes web analytics effective is the inference drawn from them and that can only come from within the organization.

An organization I once worked with had an elaborate user profile page that was used internally to capture web based leads. Upon employing web analytics, it was found that this lengthy profile page had an astounding drop-off rate of 85%. This led to a drastic shortening of the page and helped the organization get more people to fill the page and ultimately more leads

Web analytics data only provides insights on what is happening on the site currently. It is up to us on how we use this data to improve the website and ultimately the ROI or the bottom line

MicroHOO! update - Microsoft Very Quiet, but Something Is Happening

A superb article on Wired.com on the Microsoft -Yahoo merger. The industry has appropriately termed it the MicroHOO! affair. Well this article looks at the future scenarios that could pan out and methinks this is an excellent insightful review on the pains of M & A between two industry giants with such an acrimonious history. Surely, this is a business school case study in the making (hehehe)

The various case scenarious have been aptly analyzed - what if a higher offer is made or a hostile takeover is done or if Microsoft walwaks away altogether and finally if Microsoft sticks to its half cash, half stock bid. the winners, losers and what would happen next have neatly analyzed.

My two cents on this whole issue:

1. Its going to be very painful. 2 big monoliths have never merged successfully and there are going to be tonnes of integration problems not to mention the basic cultural issue - silicon valley start up (Almost) meeting seatle software big daddy. ouch, it feels painful

2. The big winner in all this is going to be Google. Ironically, the big G is the reason why Microsoft made the offer

3. M & A's are successful only when there is very little overlap between the businneses of overlapping companies. MicroHOO! has way too much overlap and this could also pose a lot of painful issues on what products need to be jettisoned, thus leading to alot of internal strife. I wouldn't want to be in on a meeting between the product heads of MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Actually I would.

4. Microsoft has no choice but to go ahead with this merger if it ever hopes to steal a march from google and Yahoo has been in a limbo due to various internal issues. The basic issue - both Microsoft and Yahoo need each other but really cannot stand each other. If they merged, it would make for an entertaining Marriage.

5. And oh, lets not forget Microsoft's Anti-trust issues. With both of MicroHOO!'s instant messaging systems, email services, web portals, I bet the Justice department is rubbing its palms in glee (being egged on oh so subtly by Google) oh what fun!

6. Like I said before, The only person gaining out of this hooplah is Google. They'll get all the great, creative Yahoo folks due to mass exodus and all they had to do was stand on the sidelines!
I read somewhere, that inorder to stir things up a bit and raise Microsoft's hackles, Eric schmidt gave yahoo a call on how..er..may be they could work together on things. lol

Another good article on what makes for good M & A's here. M & A's work, as the article says, when both companies have unique but complimentary products on offer. That way the integration can be smooth and there is greater consolidation

un-creepy crawlies

I ran a search for this blog and unfortunately it seems that Google hasn't indexed my blog yet :(
So in an effort to understand why the Googlebot didn't pick me, I trawled through some posts on the Official Google Blog and found that Google has a support tool to analyze why your site is not being indexed.

The Google Webmaster Tools analyzes a site and verifies whether a site has been indexed by the googlebot and also provides tonnes of stats and diagnostic tools. There are also links for the crisis ridden folks like us who are agonizing as to why the Googlebot is so ingnoring us. I really have to research SEO its fascinating!

I found this link very useful - How do I add my site to Google's search results? . One lesson to ensure that the site has multiple outgoing links and incoming links. You can already see that I'm employing that strategy already. this post has 3 links to it :)

But it's also very annoying that Google search algorithm is so hush hush and they don't really tell you why you're not featuring in searches. I read on Wired sometime back that companies who paid google for Adwords also saw their natural search results getting featured higher hmmm

Trendspotting

One of most important aspect for the success of any Google Adwords campaign is choosing the right keywords apart from across bidding the right price. That's why my favourite google app is Google Trends

Google trends is an app that tells you what the world is searching for. Literally! You get to know how popular your search term is and which part of the world is searching for it. I'll tell you how I used this app in my Adwords campaign.

In my previous company, us marketing folks got to play around with Google Adwords as corporate dearest was funding the whole project. It was quite fun and they loved it when we wanted to experiment with some of the search words, especially to settle the debate between them "long tail" type keywords versus the popular more expensive keywords. So my company was hosting this huge seminar for customers and I wanted use the power of the net to drive traffic to the site. I was playing with Google trends and happned to type in the word "Seminar" and saw that a lot of people in India were searching for the term. I bought the keywords and created an AD for the Event. Within 15 days it was my highest performing keyword. Ofcourse we also tested to see if there were any clicks on the landing page and it was fairly decent. That's why I *heart* the net so much. It gives you so much data to make the right choice.

Google trends also in a way lets you check out the "buzz" about your product versus your competition. Take for example, the comparison between people searching for Myspace, Facebook and orkut in india

Orkut is clearly the hands down winner and if you were a marketer wouldn't this information be priceless? Trends also throw up other curve balls. It also lets you pick a region to find what the buzz is in every part of the region. For the same comparison as above, I selected India region to see which part of the country was searching the most on these keywords. The results were as follows:What's surprising is that non metro cities are searching for orkut. Not so surprising as its already popular in the metros I suppose. Still very good data to work with when say launching a product

I also recently stumbled upon the Orkut Trends Blog, where the google team shares some interesting stats on Orkut usage and user perceptions. This might come in very handy if you're considering doing some social networking marketing in your campaign