Joey Muller dot com

Photo

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:22:31 -0700

A visualization of the time people spent (in minutes) on social...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:07:00 -0800

A visualization of the time people spent (in minutes) on social networking sites during the month of January 2012.

Time spent (in minutes)
Facebook: 405
Pinterest/Tumblr: 89
Twitter: 21
LinkedIn: 17
MySpace: 8
Google+: 3

Google+ comes in at 3 minutes, nearly a third of MySpace’s command. Will Google+ ever catch up to Facebook? Or perhaps we should ask, will Google+ ever catch up to MySpace??

Data source: comScore.

Advanced AdWords Tools (@Trada)

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:03:49 -0800

Advanced AdWords Tools (@Trada):

In case you missed it, we wrote a guest blog post on Trada’s blog: http://www.trada.com/blog/advanced-adwords-tools/.

We all love feeling as though we’ve dodged a bullet, right? In this post we provide some practical tips and real-life examples for using AdWords tools without them using you.

The AdWords Search Funnel

Top Paths report: we especially enjoy the Transitions reports.
Assisted Conversions report: understanding assist roles may change your bidding approach.
Path Length report: this will tell you how many folks are NOT converting on the first click alone.

Head over to Trada and read the post! http://www.trada.com/blog/advanced-adwords-tools/

Search marketing ad spend expected to grow 50% by 2016

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:45:24 -0800

Search marketing ad spend expected to grow 50% by 2016 :

via @emarketer @sengineland

PPC - The Stereo System Analogy

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:20:00 -0800

PPC is like a stereo system. Why splurge for fancy cables when your speakers stink?

Occupy Consciousness

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:30:00 -0800

A thoughtful, original piece by Barry Rosen (Berkeley, CA):

Now we, and millions of other Americans, wonder aloud and to our selves — what’s next for the Occupy Movement. The occupation of public spaces as a tactic for gaining sympathetic attention has, it seems, run its course. Public opinion is often moved by media outlets fronting for corporate public relations teams, grand-standing political demagogues, and the herd of paid prime-time television operatives.

Risks to popular support (over 50% of Americans now support the “it’s not fair” message of Occupy, twice the number who support the Tea Party), including self-inflicted ones, have been widely discussed and debated — e.g., diversity of tactics vs. non-violence principles is the louder voice in Occupy General Assemblies, mounting public costs for police, fire and sanitation, adverse affects on local business, and public health concerns.

The news updates about Occupy in the popular press over the last few days haven’t been flattering. The negative slant influences café and lunchroom conversations: “why do they have to be so violent?” even though 99% of our Occupiers are not. By way of contrast, thousands of Americans are cast into the emotional violence of homelessness and despair each week. Tenting out somewhere is a practical consideration for many of them. (Why not in the plaza of an international investment bank, or the lawns and courtyards of public institutions that provide passive or active support to the policies that immiserate the many?)

I have confidence that the Occupy communities will transform, from earth-grounded caterpillars to colorful butterflies. Many, many people are going through some form of transformational process now. Whether it’s the elders who are either remembering their 60s fire or wondering about Medicare, the family bread-winners who feel the intense pressure of maintaining a safe and secure household, or young people concerned about their futures — we are all questioning the “status quo,” “the way things work around here,” “who stole my cheese.” We are engaged in a collective conversation, call it the “Occupy Consciousness” conversation, that asks us to consider what it means to be a responsible American, an awakened human being, and to consider Rabbi Hillel’s words: “If I am not for myself, then who am I for? If I am not for others, then who am I? If not now, when?”

An Occupy Consciousness conversation starts with a fact and a question, no one best question, but a question worthy of our capable minds and courageous hearts. Here’s an example:

Fact: Almost 20% of working age, and working-able people (people who want to work) in our country are either unemployed or under-employed. What responsibility do we want our elected representatives to take (at each level) in helping solve this problem? What responsibility are we each willing to take?

Fact: CEOs of the largest companies received, on average, $11.4 million in total compensation last year. Overall, CEOs of the 299 companies in the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch database received a combined total of $3.4 billion in pay in 2010, enough to support 102,325 jobs paying the median wages for all workers. Average CEO compensation is 343 times worker’s median pay, the widest gap in the world. Why has that happened? What should/can be done about it? What can I/we do to turn the tide of greed?

Asking these questions (and so many others that address the disparities of wealth and opportunity in our society, and the rigged construction of the economic system) at family dinner tables, campus dining rooms, retirement community social halls, church gatherings, in protest gatherings — is a conversation that will fuel the transformation of Occupy into many educational, mobilizing, and action groups — and gird the will of core activists to continue their efforts through the winter chill into an American Spring.

Barry Rosen

Berkeley, CA

brosen54@gmail.com

A cool primer on QR codes from AT&T

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:47:33 -0700

A cool primer on QR codes from AT&T

Microsoft’s vision for the future. Pretty sweet.

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:01:57 -0700

Microsoft’s vision for the future. Pretty sweet.

This is such a powerful image I had to take a screenshot so it...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:21:13 -0700

This is such a powerful image I had to take a screenshot so it lives forever. If you love Apple and Pixar, reblog this.

""

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:02:00 -0700

“”

- ‎”Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Steve Jobs
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Patenting an SEO process? Wow!

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:43:00 -0700

Patenting an SEO process? Wow! :

It goes to show SEO done right requires resources, time and hard work.

A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving a document containing content for distribution via one or more online media distribution channels; analyzing a structure of the document; determining optimal modifications to the structure of the document; analyzing keyword frequency and keyword positions in the content of the document, the keyword frequency and keyword positions being analyzed relative to historical data obtained from one or more of the online media distribution channels; determining optimum modifications to the keywords in the content of the document based on the structured document; displaying recommended structural changes to the document based on the structured document modification and recommended keyword modifications to the content in the document to a user in a graphical user interface; receiving input from the user adopting one or more of the structural changes or the keyword modifications to the content; and initiating distribution of the document via one or more of the online media distribution channels.

5 psychology techniques to get more commerce from your commerce

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:56:33 -0700

5 psychology techniques to get more commerce from your commerce:

There’s a great article posted September 21 on Social Commerce Today that reverse-engineers another article’s tips for making smarter, less impulsive buying decisions. The reverse of this is 5 techniques to get your buyers to buy quicker and more often. Pretty handy!

Facebook pages: You no longer need 25 fans to get a custom URL

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:52:53 -0700

Facebook pages: You no longer need 25 fans to get a custom URL

Cool things you can do on Google Analytics

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 09:11:00 -0700

Cool things you can do on Google Analytics:

This is a good primer for Google Analytics newbies (courtesy KissMetrics). But there is plenty more cool stuff if you dive a little deeper. For example, custom reports are way underutilized but can save you tons of time if you set up one or two for your business. Intrigued? Check out this introduction to custom reports from Google evangelist Avinash Kaushik: Analysis Ninjas: Leverage Custom Reports For Better Insights.

1. See your most important analytics data first.

If there is one (or more) pieces of data you want to see at a glance every time you login to your analytics, be sure to set it up in the Dashboards area.

You can create multiple dashboards, each of which can contain multiple widgets. To create a new dashboard, simply go under Dashboards in the menu bar of your analytics and then select New Dashboard. Then add your widgets. You can choose from widgets that show you one particular metric, a pie chart comparing metrics, a timeline of one to two metrics, or a table showing a dimension with two specific metrics. Each type of widget can also be filtered.

The best part of the dashboards is you can change the date range and see all of your widgets update with that date range’s data. This is great if you want to see an overview of your stats for traffic, goal completions, and other metrics of your choosing all in one place.

2. Find out which online campaigns bring the most traffic and conversions.

Have you been curious which of your online marketing campaigns (anything from local search to social media marketing) are the most successful in terms of bringing traffic and conversions to your website? Then it’s time to look at your advanced segments.

To create an advanced segment, click on the Advanced Segments dropdown and then the New Custom Segment. If you wanted to track traffic from local search directories, then call your custom segment Local Search Profiles and start entering the sites you have profiles on such as maps.google.com/maps/ for Google Places and yelp.com for your Yelp listing.

Once you have entered all of the domains you want to track, you can preview the segment to ensure it is pulling the right data and then save the segment. To view it, click on the Advanced Segments, check the custom segment you want to view and click apply. Now you can see all of your traffic and goal conversion data that arrives from those sources which will give you a good idea of what is working the best for your website. With the right custom segments, you can find out the ROI of your social media campaign as well as your other online marketing strategies.

3. Determine where your best visitors are located.

Have you considered using advertising via Google, Facebook, StumbleUpon, or other services? If not, it might be a daunting task to determine who you should target during your ad setups. Many of them will ask if you want to focus on a specific country or target your ad worldwide.

Thanks to Google Analytics, you don’t have fret any longer. Simply look under yourVisitors menu to see the Location demographics of your visitors.

Here, you can see your worldwide stats, including the average time on site and bounce rate of visitors from particular countries. You can also drill down to particular countries and see these stats as well as your goal conversion rates in particular regions.

Now you will know the specific locations whose visitors bring you the most conversions. Targeting visitors in these locations with your ads will result in even more goal completions for your site.

4. Learn what people are searching for on your site.

Most people know how to find the keywords that bring visitors to their sites from search engines. But how would you like to go beyond that to find out what visitors are searching once they are on your site?

If your website has a search box, go ahead and perform a search to see the URL of the search results. As an example, my blog’s search results URL is http://kikolani.com/?s=blogging. Once you have this for your site, click on the settings wheel icon in the top right corner of your Analytics menu bar and find your Profile Settings. Under Site Search Settings, select the option to Do track Site Search and enter s as the query parameter (or the one that fits your site’s URL structure).

To see the results of this setup, go to the Content menu and the Site Search area. Under Usage, you can see what terms are being searched for, if visitors refined their search, continued browsing your site, or exited which will let you know if they are finding what they want. Under Pages, you can see which pages people are upon when they decide to use the search feature. When you click on each page, you can see what terms they searched for.

Site Search can help you determine if people are finding what they are looking for on your site. It can also give you ideas of which pages of your content need more specific information as well as the new content you can create on your site to further engage your visitors.

5. Visualize what people click on the most.

Curious where people are making the most clicks on your site? In-Page Analytics under the Content menu will pull up your website in the Analytics browser with information on the percentage of clicks that have happened on each internal link on your site.

You can hover over each link to see additional details and click through to more pages on your site to see more details. This can help you visually see what areas of your site are the most popular, and help you identify where people are clicking on your site. So if you have a particular link you want visitors to see, you should be sure to place it in the areas of your website that receive the most clicks.

6. Uncover your top content.

Want to know which pages keep your visitors on your website the longest, or have the lowest bounce rate? You can see this quickly by going under the Content menu and selecting Pages under Site Content.

This section can help you identify which pieces of content keep visitors on your site the longest and lead to them wanting to continue onto more pages on your site. This can help you produce more content that people will like in the future.

7. Identify your worst performing pages.

A few items down in the content menu from your top pages are your top exit pages. This will tell you how many people are arriving and exiting on a particular page.

This is somewhat common for blogs as people are coming to find a particular piece of information and then leave (hopefully) satisfied. But for other websites, it may signify that people are not finding what they are looking for on that page and then leaving. This may mean that you need to evaluate your site’s content to ensure that visitors are finding what they want and getting a call to action so they get where you want them to be before they leave, such as subscribing to a mailing list or purchasing a product.

You may want to consider using KISSinsights on these top exit pages to find out why people are leaving these pages.

8. Determine where people abandon the shopping cart.

Does your website have a multiple step checkout process? If so, you should setup a goal for your website using a Goal Funnel. To do so, click on the settings wheel icon and click on Goals. Create a new goal with the Goal Type of URL Destination. After you enter the basic goal details, including the final URL of the checkout process (usually a thank you for your order page), then check the Use funnel box to enter each of the URLs that correspond to the steps a visitor must take when purchasing an item.

By using this setup, you will then be able to view reports showing you when people abandon their shopping cart during their purchasing process.

If you note a particularly high amount of people who exit on the payment page, you’ll know that you need to do some work in order to make that page more shopping friendly. Or if people exit before confirming their order, you’ll know that there is something missing that is making people not want to click that final button. Fixing these issues can lead to more sales in the long run!

9. Discover if you need a mobile site.

Have you been wondering if you need a mobile version of your website? Find out by looking under the Visitors menu. There you will find a Mobile option where you can see all the way down to a specific device and the percentage of your total visits that are from a mobile device.

The key on this screen is looking at the average time on site and the bounce rate. If your average time on site is lower and the bounce rate is higher than your overall numbers, then you’ll know that you’re losing that much of your mobile traffic.

The above post can be found in its entirety on KissMetric’s blog.

Google AdWords putting attention back on positions

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:35:00 -0700

This week there were two new announcements from Google AdWords’ product team:

Click level data on an ad’s position is now freely available. For insights on this, you’ll want to follow George Michie’s posts, specifically New Insights into the Google Auction. The gist of it is you can now tag your urls with additional parameters which Google parses (understands) inside Analytics to reveal data about where on the page (in which positions) your ads were clicked.
Top of page bid estimates are now available to view at the keyword level within AdWords. Inside AdWords lays out the details nicely.

Interesting that both announcements occurred just days apart. How you will utilize this is up to you and your analytics team, but at least we know how to aim for the coveted top spot and how to track click from there.

Google Analytics now offers multi-touch attribution, signaling...

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:03:00 -0700

Google Analytics now offers multi-touch attribution, signaling the end of an era limited to last-click attribution. Finally, an affordable (free) multi-channel, multi-touch attribution platform is available to marketers, analysts, webmasters, CEOs and CMOs. Kudos, Google!

10 ways to wrestle Google Panda

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:28:00 -0700

Google’s recent update to its search algorithm, called Panda, has left many sites scrambling to pick up lost traffic. Unfortunately it’s an uphill battle for most of these sites. As WordTracker’s Mark Nunney wrote earlier this week:

The problem with Panda is that it’s a hack to fix a broken algorithm.

Large content farm sites containing crap were appearing at the top of Google’s SERPs. The sites were not breaking any rules.

Google’s algorithm couldn’t stop them.

Specialist quality sites like those talked about in this article were getting top for populist searches they weren’t built for.

Google’s algo was not working well enough.

Searchers were finding inappropriate and poor sites and this is a threat to Google’s success.

Aaron Wall goes further than this and says that the content farm industry publicly made Google look stupid

Google had to act.

But it couldn’t fix the algo. So it bolted on Panda.

Panda is not part of the main algo. Panda is run every 4-7 weeks. Panda does not change the algo so that better results appear for every keyword search.

Instead any site that falls foul of Panda gets crudely wiped out by a site-wide, all-keyword handicap. That handicap can’t be lifted until the next time Panda has been run.

And it probably won’t be lifted then because very few sites have had a Panda slap lifted.

Yikes! All those years of hard work spent building back links, optimizing pages for the long tail, designing content silos and creating better internal site links, wiped away in an instant! It seems hardly fair and if you ask me, it’s not! But I’ve been around long enough to know Panda is just another thing Google does… because it can. Learn from it, do the best you can, and change your strategies if necessary.

Ok, how do you combat the negative effects of Panda? Here’s a condensed summary of Mark’s suggestions:

Look at your pages with the thinnest content and use robot tags to noindex them.
Don’t plaster your pages with ads.
Are you pulling in content from feeds? Pare down on these. They’re merely duplicate content.
Use your analytics know-how to find pages with high bounce rates. What keywords are driving traffic there? Maybe those keywords simply don’t match the content. De-prioritize them.
The reverse of number 4: further optimize pages for keywords that ARE working on your site, as demonstrated by low bounce rates and high “average time on site.”
Use images and videos to support your content, and place them above the fold.
Use share buttons.
Use comments to foster discussions.
Build your brand—whatever that means to you.
Refer to Mark Nunney’s Google Panda update survival guide. It’s a must have for SEOs and web product / site managers.

Got a Panda success story? Panda fail? Let me know!

Infographic! Another great one from GetSatisfaction.

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:35:30 -0700

Infographic! Another great one from GetSatisfaction.

Search advertising can only carry you so far

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:52:00 -0700

If you rely on search advertising to bring home the bacon, be careful you don’t fall into a common trap for search marketers: putting everything into search and not enough into the outer reaches of the web, where people spend most of their online time anyway.

Building out your search campaigns fully is absolutely necessary. But you may reach a point where you’ve over-engineered them yet you’re scratching your head wondering why all the hard work optimizing and building isn’t paying off like it used to.

If this happens to you, let me ask you: what are you doing besides search?

I believe in a holistic approach to online marketing. It’s unfortunate Google Analytics is a last-touch attribution model because search appears to be your big winner when you’re winning. It’s true, search does deliver you people who are already interested in your brand or products. But that’s just the thing: they’re already interested. How did they get interested in the first place? This is where you should be looking when you’re in stuck in a rut wondering why search just isn’t performing like it used to.

In a recent article on Clickz entitled “How to distinguish between good and average talent,” writer Joni Ngai sums it up well:

One of the biggest myths that I have heard is search advertising, email, or what-so-ever channel is the most effective marketing channel. If you are looking into the customer journey, there are many customer touch points, including both offline and online communications. Search is normally the last mile used to drive the customer to take the desired end action, such as to register for the special deal or purchase the product. Without understanding that there are other activities and customer touch points that would ‘attribute’ to the final outcome, wrong decisions are often made. I have seen brands that have stopped all other advertising and allocate their entire budget to search. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the desired results. Why?

Those who understand the attribution model would not make such a decision because they always think through and focus on the customer journey in a more holistic way and they use technology to help them when it is necessary. It is this ‘integrated’ strategy that takes the customers through the journey to the end goal.

Bloomspot raises $40 million, guarantees merchant profitability

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:22:00 -0700

Bloomspot raises $40 million, guarantees merchant profitability:

Excellent work from Bloomspot. As a merchant, I am more comfortable doing a deal with them. As a customer, I like knowing they care about the merchants they enroll. I’ve said it before, ensuring profitability is win-win-win.