Jonathan Wall, Marketing Director at the top online electronics store in the UK dabs.com, explained at Internet World 2006 that his marketing team is now composed principally of web analytics experts who are constantly trading on the screens for the best prices and return on investment for their advertising spending.

With revenues in excess of €300m and an online marketing budget rumoured to in excess of €25m, can Jonathan's web analytics team be the future of marketing teams?

Jonathan's vision could not be more different from the traditional marketing department, with its one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit. Compared to the accountability forced onto internet marketing, the TV advertising industry is wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers.

The change has similarities with the modernisation of financial market trading. Traditional buying and selling of financial assets was based on open outcry system. The prices at which customers were able to sell their assets depended on a chain of human interaction which ended in the open outcry buying and selling trading pit.

The open outcry system was plagued by inefficiencies, trader cartels which pre-arranged price and articificially increased price spreads and margins for the traders and banks. As a result the price spread, difference between the buy and sell price for the clients and suppliers was large. Talented traders could read their fellow traders and manipulate larger spreads for themselves.

Most of these human intermediaries have been taken out of modern financial trading. Open outcry trading has become mostly extinct, replaced by electronic trading. The buy sell spreads, and the cost of trading have dropped dramatically. The inefficiencies and huge cost of face to face trading has been replaced by zero overhead direct screen trading. The client has real-time access to real prices and can trades directly with suppliers.

Google Adwords bidding is a copy of financial screen trading. Though the spread, the margin retained by Google is still a large inefficiency, that will come down as other online advertising networks, like Yahoo Search Marketing start to compete on more level basis.

The world of advertising is heading towards a big change. Gone are the days of inefficiency and un-accountable media channels. The new advertising buy is electronic, transparent, and completely accountable.

Technorati Tags: advertising , adwords , electronic+trading , google , webanalytics

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:26 AM | Permalink:Is Electronic Trading the Future of Advertising Buy ? | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Technorati Tags: chocolate , ecommerce , online+supermarkets

Posted by Paul Salber at 1:01 PM | Permalink:Chocolate & Wine Top in Online Supermarket Sales | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For decades, Lord Saatchi has been an icon of the advertising and marketing industry in the UK. The company he co-founded with his brother, Saatchi & Saatchi, is notorious for managing the conservative government comeback in the 80s and 90s. Baron Maurice weighs in on the death of the TV-industrial complex with insightful tips for brand owners:

• TV Advertisign at its worst will be killed off by the internet

With the fragmentation of media, TV adverts are no longer having any impact, only the efficient, the brutally concentrated thought will survive.

• Only the most brutally simple ideas will be survive in the complexity and confusion of the digital marketplace.
Its the modern equivalent of having the best site on the high street, except the location is in the mind.
• Precision is better than greed The strongest brands are defined by their ownership of one thought; it is best to be unique and precise in owning one word than overlapping in concept with others through greed.


• Favorite word: Simplicity


• the new generation of digital consumer multi-tasks and has a brain programmed to edit ruthlessly
Biggest marketing problem in the 21st century, people's protective filtering from media intrusion; Malcom Gladwell's "Blink", Seth Godin's "All marketers are liars".

• Media fragmentation can be navigated by Unifying your Brand Concept and Meaning. It doesnt matter what the medium is that carries the message.

Advertising agencies struggling with ever fragmenting media and demographics can use the "One Word" Simplified-Brand as a Unifying concept which clarifies, redefines and re-unites their target audience again. Demographics is about meaning, a Word, a Concept and less about channels and age-groups.

Reminds me of the Daniel Pink's "The Concept Age"

• Broadcast advertising will remain a dominant feature of the overall advertising landscape provided

Simplicity will save TV advertising. Strong simple concept will punch trough the media noise and save TV advertising.

Mmmm....not sure about this one.

Maurice's "one-word" branding and strategy has similarities with Seth Godin's uniqueness, "subsubsegmenting" and nicheing thesis. Lord Maurice is a little unclear on the mechanics and detail of how to segment the demographics. But he states that select the word and meaning right, and segmentation takes care of itself,

For an old dynasour of the TV-industrial complex, with an estimated $600m made from TV advertising and marketing, he is not resting on his laurels. Seth Godin should make him an emeritus member of his fabled Big-Moo-33 for evolving above and beyond any need to.

Technorati Tags: advertising , branding

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 11:04 AM | Permalink:Branding in the New Digital Age - Saatchi & Saatchi Style | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Matt Cutt answers some of the questions that have arisen lately:

Firstly, Google is not full. The problems of web sites dropping of the index and coming back during Google's BigDaddy upgrade were not due to lack of machines; the crawl/index team certainly has enough machines to do its job, and we definitely aren’t dropping documents because we’re “out of space.”, according to Matt.

The problem of pages dropping from the index were due to bad inbound link quality

The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling. The Bigdaddy update is independent of our supplemental results, so when Bigdaddy didn’t select pages from a site, that would expose more supplemental results for a site.

Enclick's philosophy about linkbuilding is: there is no such thing as a free lunch.. An easy link-exchange with somebody you don't know is more likely to be a bad quality link, which might even get you de-indexed.

Your inclusion ratio also depends on the strength of your inbound linking. Google has a threshold of inbound link strength below which Googlebot just shallow crawls your site.

From Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Indexing timeline

google linkbuilding

Technorati Tags: google , linkbuilding

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:41 AM | Permalink:Google answer's back: Bad Inbound Links Cause Shallow Googlebot Crawls | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Comparison Shopping Market Leaders

Rank Name Domain Market Share

1 www.shopping.com 18.38%
2 www.bizrate.com 17.35%
3 shopping.yahoo.com 14.39%
4 www.shopzilla.com 13.60%
5 www.froogle.com 8.49%
6 www.nextag.com 7.83%
7 www.pricegrabber.com 5.81%
8 www.epinions.com 5.75%
9 www.calibex.com 4.63%
10 eshop.msn.com 3.76%

From Search Engine Watch

Kelkoo dominates the U.K market, with more than double the traffic of #2 player Shopping.com UK

These are the players that most affect the shopping feed standards body. The shopping feed standards they require from merchants are quite different both in language, format and parameters.

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping , ecommerce , vertical+search

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:01 AM | Permalink:Shopping Feed Standards: Governing Body | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A rumor is running round that Google is to launch public traffic measurement figures, like Alexa rankings and Nielsen/Netratings. Nielsen Media Research, the audience measurement company that has held a virtual monopoly in the sector for decades, charges upwards of $20,000 a year for traffic statistics across the internet. And hitwise, another traffic statistics provider, is not much cheaper.

With the volume of user information collected by Google with its toolbar and the clickstream on its search results, the statistics on traffic would be the most accurate in the world. The number of Google toolbars in use far surpasses Nielsen and Alexa's sample users.

Given the high cost of hitwise and Nielsen, Google's service would be an immediate hit.

Maybe we can get confirmation from Google watchers.

Technorati Tags: alexa , google , nielsen , webanalytics

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:46 AM | Permalink:Google to Compete with Alexa and Nielsen NetRating ? | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Peter Morville is an expert in "findability", making information findable; his book ambient findability is about designing user interfaces and information architecture such that anyone can find what they want quickly. Peter states that searching is interactive and iterative. Your query changes as you advance in your search, in step wise refinements.

In particular, how do you enable people to move between searching and browsing modes. Enclick and Hispavista have been analysing search usage patterns of millions of users, and over the years have arrived at a mix of directoriy and search results. The standard user has become more sophisticated in his search usage, expecting some sort of tagged or faceted search results.

Technorati Tags: findability , search , tagged , tagging

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:57 AM | Permalink:Searching or Browsing - Ambient Findability | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As expected Google has started offering faceted or tagged search. Searching for a general term like Barcelona gives the following results

The refine results section allows you to drill down according to different tags. The result of drilling down is

Further assisting you in finding the areas you want.

Google seems to be providing the service for tourist destinations, and refining according to different activity tags. We provide the same tagged search solution for ecommerce and catalog sites, made to measure.

Technorati Tags: google , search , tagged , tagging

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:11 AM | Permalink:Google Launches Refine Results | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Online Marketing Show 2006 is held yearly the at the RSA, London. A big greenhouse that never fails to roast participants in the afternoons. The show participants change little from year to year but the trends and the hot technologies move on quite quickly.

The hot trend this year is the rise of Search Engine Marketing, mixed in with social networks. Blogs and aggregation sites like del.icio.us, digg.com, and flickr.com.

Many of the search engine optimisation agencies are moving clients onto blogs and interactive media to further engage and connect with their users.

Technorati Tags: search+engine+marketing , seo , social+networks , web2

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 8:47 AM | Permalink:Social Networks at the Online Marketing Show 2006 | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The advantages of enhanced search facility for finding information have just started to be exploited. Endeca, the leader in our sector has just been granted Guided Navigation Patent; Pioneering Innovation Has Played Key Role in Market's Evolution From Search to Information Access

Guided Navigation helps people using Web or enterprise applications to find relevant information by guiding them in an interface that always keeps information in context. The context is created by dynamically exposing the dimensions, attributes and other relationships in the underlying data set. This experience helps people navigate content, analyze information sets, refine search results lists, and combine search and browse behaviors. Guided Navigation encourages exploration and discovery because people no longer have to guess the perfect search query or anticipate the specific classification schema of the underlying data

Congratulations to Endeca, credit where it is due. Even when it competes with our offering of tagged site search. Some concern on the wording of the patent. As ever, defining an intangible intellectual idea can be frought with abuse with regards to the rest of society.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , endeca , search

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:57 PM | Permalink:Endeca Granted Patent on Guided Navigation | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Industry bodies are trying to push through a standard for shopping feed files A recent meeting of the Arts trade association feed standards committe had a low turnout from shopping engines.

One of the big problems with shopping feeds is the wide range of different taxonomies, categories that merchants and shopping engines use to categorize merchandise in their offering. The forms that merchants must fill out to send their product data to the engines also differ widely, increasing the chance of error and the work that marketers must perform to get items listed. For example, Yahoo! Shopping has two mandatory fields, 13 optional ones and 40 possible setting combinations for each SKU; Shopping.com has one mandatory field of 21 characters with three options; and Shop.com has four fields of 255 characters each. Other metadata can also be handled differently from engine to engine—things like global shipping and payment settings, feed file requirements, and submission data.

Standards would reduce the overheads in generating shopping feeds for the ecommerce merchants, improve the return on investment for marketing on shopping engines.

One issue that came up in a recent shopping portal representative was whether to require merchants to offer their data feeds in extensible markup language (XML), a text format originally developed for large-scale electronic publishing. Many merchants now send their feeds in the form of highlighted spread sheets and data streams delimited by commas—an old holdover that’s relatively easy to program, but also likely to contain undetected errors that can get their product data left out of a shopping engine index. The concensus is that XML is the future, but uptake is slow among some older shopping portals.

The advantage of better shoping feed standards is the ability to use richer data. The ecommerce retailers want to provide it and the shopping engines want to use to on their portal. Standadized XML shopping feeds will arrive in the future.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , shopping , xml

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:00 AM | Permalink:Standardisation of shopping engine feeds meets with problems | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

The Islington Business Design Center yesterday for the June 2006 Search Engine Strategies 2006 Conference

Excellent set of seminars. My favorite theme was the link building tips:

Link building is becoming a conversation. A personal relationship between your firm and its community, your entire value chain, partners, allies, press and media surrounding your market. Mike Grehan's emphasizes the need to ask for links, personally. Making contact with web sites in your local subject communities. Keeping to a theme. Clearly the cluetrain meme being picked up by the google algorithm.

Mike Grehan has been emphasizing for years the increasing skill with which search engines discount inbound links from outside YOUR SUBJECT. It is not just the anchor text of the inbound link, but also the paragraph, the web page and the subject context of where the inbound link originates.

Link Building has become about conversing with your subject environment, and writing quality content that is referenced by your peers. The academic referencing DNA of the Google algorithm showing through. Academic research scientists understand the entire link building reputation approach almost instinctively.

The upshot of a lot of the comments is that search algorithms look for natural community activity. Inbound links within subject paragraphs with all sorts of different anchor text, and web pages distributed around your subject community.

Superzu transcribed Google's tips about sitemaps which I missed

Aaron D’Souza on Google sitemaps:

• using Google sitemaps helps Google to discover more of your web pages and to prioritize for crawling.
• it drectly informs Google of the existence of all your pages
• iit enabls Google to crawl your site more effectively
• it helps you with crawler issues (you can see crawl success and error distribution).

Aaron repeated that the sitemap system is to alert you of any violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Technorati Tags: engine , google , linkbuilding , search , ses , strategies

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:32 PM | Permalink:Search Engine Strategies Conference: London 2006 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As of today, the feed submission formerly in the Google Merchant Center has been replaced with Google Base submissions. Google Base was quietly launched 3 months ago, and currently offers free online classifieds service that allows anyone to list a product for sale.

Google Base is also arming itself with a reputation system like eBays, where merchants will accumulate vetting votes from its buyers.

Google Base replaces Froogle Merchant Center by ZDNet's Froogle Merchant Center is no longer -- it has been replaced by Google Base in what seems to be an attempt to merge the two data sources.

The grand plan is for Google Base to be a central hub of information. In some distant future, you will submit information for Google Co-op, Google Sitemaps, Google Book Search and Google Scholar through Google Base. Sounds like a Google will be aiming for a standard for feeds.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , froogle , google , googlebase , shopping

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:09 AM | Permalink:Froogle to merge with Google Base | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The concesus is that the web sites with SEO and webmaster attention cruise up the alexa rankings, but don't necessarily have real traffic. As observed by Matt Cutts.

A great image of where things go wrong with alexa is shown below.

The figure shows that above the 50,000 ranking, all traffic figures are distorted. You dont get a straight correlation between ranking and traffic. Probably due to the low sampling data, with insufficient Alexa toolbars visiting sites above 50,000.

Matt's advise is "use the google toolbar". Enclick's advise for accurate relative traffic figures on your competition is: get NetNielsen or Hitwise service, or ask us.

Technorati Tags: alexa , competitoranalysis , webanalytics

Posted by Paul Salber at 11:07 AM | Permalink:Where things go wrong with Alexa rankings | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)