Computer Tan Hoax Draws in Crowds
Tan at your computer screen!
The invention of the vain century: Computer Tan is a campaign launched to raise awareness of skin cancer-related deaths in Britain.
It has drawn in the crowds, reporting tens of thousands of visitors in its first 24 hours.
The site was launched for the Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity by advertising agency McCann Erickson.
It gives the user a "free screen tan session", then highlighting how tanning can cause skin cancer.
Hair removal cream Veet bids: “Goodbye Bush”
Some campaigns are brilliant and of their time. So much so that people mention them to their friends and write about them on the blogosphere - a clear sign of a winning idea.
The ad campaign for hair removal cream Veet in the Australian Daily Telegraph was launched by Creative agency Euro RSCG, to note the departure of President George 'Dubya' Bush and in of course to promote Veet's hair removal cream.
And even better in context:
Sharks? Dead in the water? Guys, these are lists of dead people! HELLO!
Is everything in Marketing fair game, Daahr-ling?
Marketing agencies use something called Deceased Suppression Files to save money and embarrassment. They contain the details of people who have recently died, and are used by the agencies to ensure they do not market to these people or contact them with sales calls (e.g. to stop a marketing agency from contacting a deceased about a trip to Disneyland).
One of these products, Mortascreen in the UK, has excelled itself in its marketing campaign. Or rather, it seems to have overegged the death metaphor a little.
Sharks? Dead in the water? Guys, these are lists of dead people! HELLO!
Marketing Week, 16 October 08:
detail:
Doh!
Understanding Website Statistics – Five Pitfalls to Avoid
Website statistics: what's wrong with the following statements?
1. My website gets 20,000 hits a month!
2. My website gets three million unique visitors a year!
3. Our statistics show that users spend an average of 30 minutes per visit to our website!
When you boast to your friends that your blog gets 10,000 hits, or tell your boss that your company's website has one million annual unique users, you may be setting yourself up for a fall.
Like most statistics, website stats can be misleading, and this article shows you some common pitfalls when quoting site numbers.
Website statistics – common mistakes:
1. Using ‘hits’ as an indicator – ‘hits’ are an old-speak term that expresses, well, absolutely nothing about the popularity of a website. A ‘hit’ refers to any file or part of a webpage that is downloaded by a user. For example, if your web page has seven images on it, then it will be counted as eight hits (the page itself is one hit, and then each image counts as an additional hit). It is no indication of traffic or popularity or anything meaningful about your users. quoting it shows you haven’t got a clue.
2. Annual unique users – website unique users (or ‘uniques’ as old hands like to call them) are a well accepted measure of a website’s popularity, but only when used daily or monthly. Not yearly. It is ignorant to say that your site gets ‘x unique users a year’. Here’s why: your website tracking code can only count ‘uniques’ by leaving a ‘cookie’ on the user’s computer when he or she visits your site. A cookie is a small file that the website checks for whenever the user views the site. The cookies tells the site that it 'knows' the user, and that it should not count him or her again after her first visit. Once you understand this mechanism, some of its flaws become evident: if a user accesses the site through two different browser types (for example Chrome and Internet Explorer), then they are counted as two separate visits. Visits from two different computers (e.g. at home and at work) are counted separately too. Overall, the industry has come to accept these compromises, and treats ‘uniques’ as a good indicator, for lack of a better statistic. However, this works well for a period of up to a month. Longer than that, and your statistics become too distorted. For example, over the course of a year a single user is likely to get rid of the cookies on their computer at least a couple of times, or even replace their computer entirely. If each one of your unique annual users looses the cookie that counts them as unique twice or more over a year, then your annual count of unique visitors could be half, a third, a quarter or even less than what your stats package is showing you. There’s no way around it: annual uniques are a fallacy.
3. Average minutes per visit – I often hear statements like ‘my users are spending 45 minutes on average on my site'. No they’re not. Your workmate Kirsty looked at your site just before she went home last night and forgot to close her browser, so it remained trained on your website all night. In the morning, she came back, browsed it for a couple of minutes and then closed her browser. By doing this, she has skewed your stats big time – and the fewer users you have ,the more distorting the ‘Kirsty effect’ is. Some web statistics packages now use more sophisticated methods to track viewing time, for example by showing you the median time spent on your site, but if that’s not available, don’t quote this number. It’s not really that helpful.
4. Page impressions – a trusty statistic, page impressions (PIs) or page views (PVs) are still an old favourite, but they too are not without their problems, and it all depends on how your tracking code is set up, so be well informed about your settings before you start brandishing PIs. Here’s why:
-
a. There are a lot of files that aren’t actually viewed and are sometimes counted as PIs, for example stylesheets (ending with .css) are also counted, and many sites have more than one, which are loaded every time someone visits your site, thus inflating your PI count. You have to check what's counted and what isn't before you use PIs.
- b. Every time a search engine indexes your site, it imitates a user, often by loading all your site's pages which may well be counted as page impressions. If you have many pages and your site is indexed regularly (for example by Google), you’ll get lots of irrelevant PI counts. Some stats packages exclude them and some don’t – you need to know which is yours.
5. Content groups and folder structures – and finally, you may want to beware how you present popularity of areas on your site. Most commercial website statistics packages allow you to define categories for different areas of the site, and then report on the popularity of those areas. The problem is that the categories in the tracking code often become obsolete in the time between when they were initially put in place and the many site changes and iterations since. You have to ask yourself how different areas are defined: is it by site taxonomy and structure, or simply by a category given to the page by the tracking code. Site taxonomies in themselves aren't a guarantee of accuracy either, because over time they erode, and an urgent patch here, a temporary page there - make them less reliable as an indicator of structure. I'm not saying that either of these can't be powerful analysis tools - they most certainly can be. It's just that you need to make sure you know what you're counting.
And that's really the endgame here –you need to make sure you know what you're counting. If you do, you can make more informed statements about your site's visitors. If not, well... Do not pass GO, do not collect 200 page impressions.
Design Agency Wisdom – How to Fail a Client Pitch in Three Minutes!
I got a call from a web design agency yesterday. The lady on the other end was cold calling the company I am consulting to, and somehow got through to me.
Here is a summary of the interaction:
'I'm calling from agency X', she said, 'and I was wondering if you were planning any web design projects in the near future?'
Now you see, I am this cold caller's dream target: I am actually looking into a design project for my client, and I was willing to hear her out.
'Yes,' I said, 'you actually called at an opportune moment. I'm looking for agencies to pre-qualify for a tender, do you guys design as well as code?'
'Erm, yes, we do both,' she said. She mutters some client names that I don't recognise and can't remember.
'Great! How big is your agency, how many people work for it?'
'I don't know exactly, in the 20's,' she said.
'OK, and what's the split between technical and non-technical at your agency?'
'erm, I don't know, I only started two weeks ago. I'm just... I can arrange a call for you with someone to discuss the detail...'
At this point I stop asking questions, she's obviously wasting my time. Why would I want to arrange another call with someone from a company I know nothing about, who has just cold called me with no further information?
'I can send you some info,' she offers, 'what's your email address?'
So I give her my email address, but on reflection she didn't verify it with me, and she obviously didn't catch it. I never got that email.
And here's the thing: I understand that the agency put an intern or rookie on cold-calling duty and that's entirely not her fault, but if you are out to catch a client - make sure the person on first-contact duty is prepared for the call that will actually get you what you want. If she could have answered my questions knowledgably, and talked me through some good portfolio examples, I would at least have considered her agency.
Now, but for this entry, I would have forgotten their name.
Update: Five days later I did get an email with more details. Five days?
The VPAMAZON Voucher – A Story of Missed Opportunities (or: “how not to market on Google”)
Enter "VPAMAZON" or “VPAMAZON2” into Google to get these great offers, said the promo slip, that arrived with my Amazon book in the post today. It was advertising premium business cards.
I was intrigued by this marketing tactic. Was the advertiser sure that no one else would muscle in on his preferred search terms? So I went and searched for vpamazon, and what I found was even worse than someone muscling in on your turf: it was the advertiser themselves not using their own term in an effective way:
If you look carefully, you will notice that there is a paid ad at the top promoting 90% off business cards, which is where the promoter wanted you to look. The problem with this approach is that most people's eyes are trained to skip ads, and would look at the organic search results first. There they will see a link to an empty website (a Wordpress tag that is empty), and probably now this blog entry.
Even as a savvy web user I went to the Wordpress entry first. Only when I was confused by not finding anything, did I look at the advertising at the top, though some people would miss that altogether. Organic results tend to get most of the eyeballs.
And how to remedy this problem? Easy - just create a page on your site using the terms vpamazon and vpamazon2 like I did here. Duh! Why the advertiser didn't think to do this before launching an expensive Amazon campaign is quite strange indeed... Perhaps now they will...
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Affiliate Marketing for Locals and Affiliate Marketing for Globals – Isn’t it About Time the Two Became One?
Affiliate marketing for smaller players is still too focused on local markets. If, for example, you are the owner of a website in the UK, and you want to sell advertising or even books on your site, the majority of affiliate programmes on offer will ask you to decide: are you selling to a UK audience, to a US audience or to different European countries?
You can't do them all through one affiliate site. This is a distinctly web 1.0 approach to what is potentially a huge revenue stream.
You see, when it comes to affiliate marketing, there's real money and real opportunity here at the Long Tail, where small sites and bloggers earn their crust.
Take thatdanny.com as an example. It is a relatively young blog (launched in May), but it is picking up traffic quickly. As is the pattern with most varied websites, my traffic is quite international. My Entela Hysko story is still getting significant traffic from the Balkans and South West Europe, some of my stories get distinctly American traffic, while others are more UK or more international (for example the Photobucket story).
So I I get a good mix, but then what happens when I start looking at affiliate marketing? If I sign up with TradeDoubler (UK), I can sell Dell computers, or British Airways flights or iTunes downloads, but only to UK users. If I sign up with Amazon.com, I have to sign up separately to Amazon in each country, and if I show products from the US site, it is unlikely that a European will buy them. You get the gist.
In each of these programmes you have to dig deep to find the companies that trade internationally, and then you find yourself with an extremely narrow product list to promote to all your visitors. For example, on ShareResults you can promote Ipsos polls, or Mate1 dating. On TradeDoubler you can promote Paddy Power Bingo, who are happy to take users from any country and pay the affiliate for any user. But with such a short list of possibilities I can't really offer much to my users - and here I am, ready to put those banners on my site...
Why British Airways, an airline with an international site, will only allow you to sell to UK customers is the kind of backward thinking that ignores the huge potential of Long Tail affiliate marketing. And why would iTunes, part of a global company, only allow UK affiliates to sell to the UK, unless they sign up separately to each of the other programmes? This boggles the mind; It just doesn't make sense.
Affiliate marketing naysayers will immediately counter that there are lots of reasons why this is, for example:
- American affiliate marketing sites are often focussed solely on the American market and are therefore less interested in international markets, or
- Of course, you could geo-target your visitors with your two dozen affiliate programme based on where they come from (if you expect a blogger to do this, you're kidding yourself), or
- Perhaps I am forgetting that in many cases the local market company is not a subsidiary, but a completely separate legal entity (aren't there technical solutions that distribute customers to the correct site, so that you can get the sale? Of course there are), and finally,
- Cross border technicalities, tax and currency issues make this sort of affiliate management very difficult, or not profitable enough.
And to that I say: yes, but. Yes, there are all sorts of reasons why affiliate marketing is currently focussed on local markets, but those who will manage to become truly international - will reap the jackpot, not just from the big guys, but from me and all the billions of little worker bees, here on the long tail. Ignore us at your peril!
How to Write for Google – SEO Article #2
This is a continuation from: How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
SEO Article #2: “How to Write for Google“ (and some stuff about toads).
I'll start with my usual caveat: you should write content that people would like to read, or as Google puts it: 'Always focus on the users and not on search engines'. Even if you are one of the scum-of-the-earth spammers who create pages just to trap innocent people (who searched for Niagara, and you gave them Viagra instead) - you should entertain the notion that they're not going to buy your overpriced-counterfeit-drugs -that'll-probably-kill-them, unless you actually give them some information that they would like to read, or that is useful to them -- and neither will Google (include your site, that is). Remember also that content is king and the better your content - the better you will rank.
But there are other things you could do to improve your positioning: You will be better noticed on Google if you have two things:
1. Get links from other websites to yours - Google treats every link to your site like a 'vote' of confidence. Not only that, but if the websites that link to you have many other sites voting for them, then they have a higher ranking, and therefore you have a higher ranking. This ranking is referred to by Google as PageRank. And you can see a site's PageRank in the Google Toolbar, if you have one installed (Read more about PageRank here and here).
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT PAGERANK: when you first start publicising your website, don't worry too much about PageRank. It can take months until Google calculates your PageRanks, and by then, hopefully, you would have worked on getting lots of links from people who love your excellent site. This site, for example, was launched in May 08, and (at the time of writing) has still not been pageranked. It doesn't stop it from appearing at the top of Google search results many times over, and that all has to do with its content, and how it is presented (See below).
2. Write well for Google. No one outside of Google HQ knows exactly what formulae Google uses to assess whether your content is good. It is safe to assume that it tries to weed out spam, and that it looks for signs that your page grammar indicates a proper language article, as opposed to just a succession of words. But there are things that will help your writing appear higher in Google rankings. I say this from my own experience in getting to the very top of search results, even if your site is new and your PageRank is zero:
- Go niche - if no other site on the web uses the word combination "What are hulk frogs?" and your site does, then when there is a sudden interest in hulk frogs, your site will appear at the top of search results. It's as simple as that. If, on the other hand, you try to write about "The Movie Hulk", you will be competing with millions of other hulk sites, and are much less likely to reach top position. Once you've digested the consequences of this effect, you will realise that if you cover a niche area, use niche expressions, or tackle niche questions and topics, you are much more likely to get noticed. Of course, if your website is all about Britney Spears (you
- Consider word density - word density refers to the number of times a word or expression appears in an article. If you write about cane toad feeding habits and you repeat the term "cane toad feeding habits" and the expression "cane toad" many times, Google will conclude that your article is about cane toads and their feeding. If your article has more of these words than another article written by someone else, Google may well conclude that yours is more relevant to the search term "cane toad feeding", and place your site above the other. (See what I did there?).
Of course things aren't as straightforward as a count of the number of words, and your search-results position depends on other factors as well, but this is a very useful method, and works well for me. I should probably also warn you (again) not to try and trick Google here. Use a word or expression too much, and you might be under suspicion -- and Google will penalise your site or ban it as spam. My advice thus is: bear in mind the words that people will search for to reach your kind of content. Then use them often, and use them in expressions that are likely to appear in searches.
- Consider word weight and importance - Google gives more weight to elements on your page that are enclosed in title tags like h1, h2 etc. By using these tags you are saying: this text carries more weight. In the same way, Bold and Italics can signal that a word, expression or sentence is important.
- Consider word positioning - The closer to the top the more important. If you start a paragraph, the closer a word is to the start of the paragraph the more weight it has, etc. It is better to say “The feeding habits of the cane toad – is today’s topic” rather than “today’s topic is the feeding habits of the cane toad.”
I know it is very difficult to bear all these things in mind when writing, but after a while they become second nature. In some articles you pay them more attention, because you want to hit your niche harder, and in some you don't, because you are writing for volume, or for fun.
It’s worth noting that this article may prove its own point in rather an unfortunate way, by attracting a lot of zoologist in search of the feeding habits of the cane toad. To them, I apologise. It’s just the way search engines work.
There are further writing tips for Google, and I might get back to them in a later article. For now though, thanks for reading.
UPDATE: To prove that I wasn't just talking nonsense, search Google for the keywords 'feeding habits kane toad' by clicking here. Now re-read the article and you will see why this is.
Do come back to ThatDanny.com for the next article in the series (or subscribe to this blog to get notified when it is published).
SEO articles in this series:
How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
How to Write for Google - SEO Article #2
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? - SEO Article #3
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?