links for 2008-01-31

January 30, 2008

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under eWhisper's Notebook | Leave a Comment 

links for 2008-01-30

January 29, 2008

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under eWhisper's Notebook | Leave a Comment 

Microsoft’s ‘Gatineau’ Analytics Shows Statistics by Age, Gender, Occupation, and Geographic location

January 23, 2008

Microsoft has been testing their new free analytics program for a while and a new round of invites has recently gone out to those wishing to try out analytics.

A few important troubleshooting tips if you have an invite:

  • You may have to visit the page a few times before the signup process runs smoothly. It looks like the initial errors where the pages were erroring out have been fixed.
  • Ensure the email address of the invite is the exact same as the email address in your adCenter account
  • Once you have the code and place it on your site, you have to wait for statistics to accrue before you can add advanced options such as:
    • Goal setting
    • Outbound link tracking
    • Event tracking
  • Be patent. While trying to write this post, the system has been unavailable about half of the time I’ve clicked on a link within the analytics interface.

The most interesting feature is the ability to segment your analytics by age, gender, occupation, and geography. This is most likely associating website visits to passport accounts and other Microsoft data which is similar to how adCenter’s targeting works.

While Microsoft doesn’t know everyone’s information, and the ‘unknown’ category is by far the largest, the additional data can be quite useful for slicing and dicing data.
adcenter-age

Screenshot of segmentation by Age. (click image for full view)

adcenter-gender

Screenshot of segmentation by Gender. (click image for full view)

adcenter-occupation

Screenshot of segmentation by Occupation. (click image for full view)

adcenter-geo

Screenshot of segmentation by Geography. (click image for full view)

While the interface is still a bit basic and erratic, the above segmentation data is not available in any other free analytics service that I’m aware of.

Using Microsoft adCenter Analytics combined with Microsoft adLabs can give you some powerful analytics to help engage your audience in new and meaningful ways.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Analytics, MSN PPC - adCenter | 2 Comments 

Quality Score is Only Affected by Exact Match Impressions

January 23, 2008

I had a long assumed thought confirmed by Google: Quality score is only based upon the exact match for a keyword.

Impressions and clicks that occur from expanded broad match do not affect your quality score.

While it is important to bid based upon conversion metrics; I often find it useful to use broad match combined with a search query report to help identify each keyword’s universe.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Google AdWords | 12 Comments 

The SEMMYS, Controversy, and Analytics Blogs You Should Read

January 22, 2008

Matt has taken the best posts from his feed reader over the past year and organized them into categories for judging the best posts of 2007. It’s usually easier to judge a blog then individual posts, so this is a pretty ambitious endeavor.

Of course, the SEMMYS are highly controversial and generating its fair share of buzz.

Personally, I’m judging the Analytics and Local Search categories.

I also have two blog posts nominated for SEMMYS:

  1. Understanding IP Targeting for PPC Campaigns
  2. How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid

which I find nice for someone who only blogs part-time (at best).

As the awards are based on Matt’s last year’s feed reader – you can see the problems:

  • Matt can’t read every blog post
  • Matt’s reader could be skewed away / towards certain types of blogs
  • How can you nominate blog posts in the future
  • How can a panel share and collaborate on next year’s posts

Regardless of the complications of the first year beta-SEMMYS; Matt has put in quite a bit of work, and he does read a significant number of blogs. Kudos for trying to pull off an ambitious project that involves the actual post over the entire blog.

I’ve already given Matt a few additional blogs (especially in analytics) to read for the upcoming year to expand the SEMMYS for 2009.

I find very few good analytics blogs. What I’ve seen is that more and more analytics blogs are focusing on Google Analytics. While there is a need for GA blogs, there is also a need for non-GA blogs as well.

If you’re looking for analytics blogs, here’s a list to start with:

I’m looking for more blogs that really talk about A/B, multivariate, focus, and other testing areas (as well as good non GA blogs) if anyone has suggestions. I’m sure there is also a good blog about Google’s website optimizer, I just haven’t found it yet.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under PPC Tracking, eWhisper's Notebook | 1 Comment 

Next Page »