eMedia Daily

Is Your Traffic the Right Traffic?

In a recent post from Seth Godin, he points out 75% of traffic bounces from a site within 3 seconds. That’s most of the traffic that is generated by digg, stumble upon, and even google.

Brag all you want about high traffic numbers, but quality traffic is much more important than the 3 people who leave your site immediately. The quality traffic that you generate is more likely to be engaged with your content, and keep coming back, leading to referrals, etc. They’re going to become your customers, if you’re a retailer or ecommerce site.

Read more about Silly Traffic.

Posted in Analytics | No Comments »

Google Analytics Benchmarking

Google Analytics announced on Wednesday a new benchmarking service as part of its free web analytics program. From the announcement:

By providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency, control, and new services based on your preferences.

The service will allow you to benchmark your traffic performance among others in the industry who are using Google Analytics and decide to share their data.

For more details on sharing data with Google Analytics and how you can benchmark performance, visit FAQs for the Google Analytics Data Sharing Options.

Posted in Analytics | No Comments »

Will Yahoo “Shine”?

Associated Press
Yahoo Inc. on Monday launched a site for women between ages 25 and 54, calling it a key demographic underserved by current Yahoo properties.

The site, Shine, is aimed largely at giving the struggling Internet company additional opportunities to sell advertising targeted to the key decision-maker in many households. Yahoo said advertisers in consumer-packaged goods, retail and pharmaceuticals have requested more ways to reach those consumers.

Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles, said internal research also shows women are looking for a site to combine various content and communications tools.

“These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,” she said. “They didn’t feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.”

Yahoo is entering a market already served by Glam Media Inc. and iVillage, a unit of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal. It is Yahoo’s first site aimed at a single demographic, although other Yahoo sites like Finance and Sports already draw specific audiences.

With Shine, Yahoo plans to expand its offerings in parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology.

Will the new Shine bring the target market to Yahoo? It seems to be the answer to the ever-popular Yahoo Sports channel, that offers free fantasy sports leagues, updates and more. Shine’s home page incorporates easy access to your Yahoo Mail, bring traffic to your blog, and view the latest headlines from key topic areas (Fashion + Beauty, Healthy Living, Entertainment, Parenting, Love + Sex, Work + Money, Food, and more).

I think the key element to this is the conversational element - the “Chatter” section that highlights blogs from Shine members. To get into gender stereotypes, men like to compete - thus are drawn to the fantasy sports leagues. Women like to share information and communicate - so maybe “Chatter” is jst what they need. We’ll see.

Posted in News | No Comments »

Integrated eMail Communications

When you’re visiting the grocery store, do you see separate departments, or do you see the store as a whole? I, for one, don’t think “I need to go to the cereal aisle,” but rather “I need to get cereal.” You’ve probably also experienced the frustration when one store is divided in that way, so that you can’t purchase jeans and a purse from the same cashier. Instead, you must do 2 separate transactions with 2 different cashiers at 2 different locations in the store.

The same is true when visiting websites, and receiving emails from companies. Most people do not think of the customer service department that retrieves your password as being different from the order confirmation system, or the system that sends you promotions.

However, when email marketing communications are fragmented into silos, as described by Tricia Robinson-Pridemore in “Sending from Silos?” the user experience isn’t all that it could be. Centralizing your email messaging creates a better experience for your reader, as you can manage the number of messages that they receive, and build your brand through using the same language and style. It also allows you to build a better picture of your reader - which messages the read and respond to, and which are disregarded. With this, you can build even better marketing campaigns.

Integrating email communications certainly won’t be easy for most companies. However, the value that it brings to the table in the long term makes it well worth the effort.

Posted in Email | No Comments »

Sculpting Google PageRank

Many people use Google PageRank as a key factor for how well their site is performing in Google. While its true that PageRank is the starting measurement for placement in Google, its important to pass that PageRank throughout your site. Stephan Spencer for MarketingProfs writes that appropriate use of the “rel=nofollow” tag can strengthen the links to your internal pages, thus increasing the page ranks to the pages that really need it.

The use of the “rel=nofollow” tag seems counter-intuitive at first. The goal is to use it when linking to pages on which you don’t care about their ranking; pages like “Contact Us” and “Privacy Policy” are examples of times that you would want to use the “rel=nofollow” tag. Another great way?

Imagine an e-commerce site with category pages that contain three links to every single product page—the product name as a text link, the product image thumbnail as an image link, and the words “View Product” as a text link. You could nofollow the image and “View Product” links and funnel more PageRank through the much more contextually relevant product name-based text links. Amazing, eh?

Read more from MarketingProfs

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

eMail and Blackberries

Many marketers have been seeing a steady decline in open rates, which seem to have peaked in 2004. According to the Email Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, this can be correlated to the increase of image blocking by email programs.

In order to register an “open” of an HTML email, a 1px by 1px invisible image embedded in the HTML must be displayed. When images are blocked by default, that image is not displayed, and thus the open is not registered by the tracking server.

The number of hidden opens increases even more when you consider the growth of email on handheld devices, such as Blackberries and Treos. Some handheld devices, such as older model Blackberries do not render HTML at all, rather either displaying the raw code, or displaying the text-only version (if available). Other models, like the Treo, will block images by default to increase rendering time.

How to overcome these obstacles to open rates? First, do not use open rates as a defining benchmark of the success of a campaign. While still an important metric, click rates and conversions are much more important.

MailerMailer also recommends these steps for dealing with handheld devices:

1. Create a mobile-phone version of your newsletter optimized for a phone’s screen. Include only a small version of your logo for images. The rest of the content should be easy-to-read text that can be scanned quickly.
2. In the mobile-phone version, include a link to the full edition of your newsletter so readers can peruse it on their desktops.
3. When users sign up to your newsletter, give them the option to receive the mobile-phone edition.

Posted in Email | No Comments »

Yahoo Buzz: Yahoo Reveals Stats From The First Two Weeks

Yahoo Buzz, a Digg-like service that launched on February 25, is now nearly three weeks old. We asked Yahoo to share some of the data from those first two weeks.

The big benefit for publishers is that top Buzz stories are linked from the Yahoo home page, which turns a firehose of traffic onto a story. When those stories hit the home page there’s a good chance that the linked site will have a record day in traffic. Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million visitors to outside sites in those first two weeks, and they’ve gathered data from some of the linked partners…

Read more from Olaf Enger

Posted in News, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Segmenting Email With Web Analytics

Traditionally, Web analytics of on-site behavior and email metrics have peacefully co-existed in separate silos. Once a message gets its audience to a site, many email marketers believe their work is done. Stefan Pollard, director of email marketing best practices, and Dan Miller, manager of professional services, both of Lyris, Inc. argue for a real marriage of the two disciplines. Lyris, a combination of several recent acquisitions, tries to bring some of these metrics together in its own Lyris HQ dashboard. Pollard and Miller walked us through how email clickthroughs need to be followed and understood after users get to the site.

Read more from Behavorial Insider

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

AOL - Bebo Deal…And we care why?

AOL announced the purchase of Bebo - the third largest social networking site. Third largest is used lightly - its a distant third to the behemoths of MySpace and Facebook. So, why would AOL, which has struggled in recent years, take the plunge to purchase them?

According to eMarketer….

However, Bebo has been quietly innovative in areas of online marketing that are just now starting to get attention. It is a pioneer of widget marketing, having partnered with prominent widget developers in December 2006, five months before Facebook opened up its platform.

Bebo also hosts KateModern, an online video hit. The site is developing other short-form online video content, along with unique ways of integrating marketers into the video storyline. It also has found novel ways to allow viewers to participate in the action both online (by interacting with the video’s characters on their profile pages) and offline (producers invited fans to watch the filming live last month).

Another thing going for Bebo: its users spend more time on the site than those at Facebook or MySpace – an average of 217 minutes apiece in January, according to comScore Media Metrix. That’s 18 minutes more on average than was spent on Facebook, and over an hour more than on MySpace.

Only time will tell how Bebo will be integrated, and what benefits it may provide to AOL.

Posted in News, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Internet Usage by State

In an interesting article published by eMarketer, about 2/3 of the US population ages 3 and older now use the internet. (3 year olds on the internet… now that’s a whole new prospect and set of questions. Do websites need to be designed to appeal to a 3 year old as well as a 33 and 53 year olds?)

However, even more interesting than the age skew may be the penetration of internet usage in specific states. This is especially important in geo-targeted online campaigns. For marketers in states with higher penetration levels, their marketing mix may be much simpler, while those with lower penetration rates need to find different ways to reach their audience.

The states that have the highest penetration rate may not be what you expect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in News | No Comments »