Archive for February, 2008

I have always loved the Nick Park / Oscar-Winning Aardman Animation short called “Creature Comforts,” - I remember seeing it an animation festival years ago - you’ll love this behind-the-scenes insight into the interviews - raw unedited tape with Dan Sinclair. These are the uncut interviews that were made to create the scenes. It’s fun to hear the pure sweetness of the people involved. I found myself laughing outloud. It was a brilliant idea to go out and get these interviews.

It took insight into an idea to form a framework, but it sounds like the whole thing was allowed to develop organically at times.

Hint… go watch the video first if you’ve not seen it.

Food Fuse Interesting up to the 2/3 point.

Rhino and Bird longer interview

When the going gets tough, do the tough go online?

Last year, according to the Interactive Avertising Bureau, Online advertising in the US grew 25% (17% not including search) during Q1-Q3 of last year over 2006. Currently the web accounts for less than 10% of all advertising spend but nearly a quarter of the time Americans spend consuming media (higher in some surveys.) Those numbers are full of potential growth for online, possibly accelerated by a softening economy. 26% of households are using DVRs, like TiVo, to skip television advertising, up from just 19% only a year ago. At the same time, 35% of households actively use portable media players, avoiding radio advertising, while 52% of households are using broadband internet at home during typical television viewing hours, according to Forrester.

If we enter an economic downturn, advertisers will want to look at measurable returns and strong ROI - and web marketing, seo (such as link building) and paid search advertising with testing can be tracked far better than most other types if done well. Even if the number of advertisers goes down or advertisers spend less, they are not going to reduce their online spends much… or possibly increase them as they shift money from TV and newspaper ads.

“In rich countries the internet is claiming a growing share of advertising—at the expense of traditional media, such as TV and print. There is still a gap between the time people spend online as a fraction of their media consumption (about a fifth) and the fraction of marketing budgets spent on the internet (about 7.5%). Many companies are trying to narrow the gap, which will sustain internet advertising during a downturn. Search advertising, the most effective kind of all, should be safest.” The chart to the right shows a terrific correlation between GDP and advertising.

Recently I did a survey of a client’s paid search campaigns and found that on a monthly basis, every 1% in improvement in conversion equaled $5000 in leads. The smart money for them would be on paying for continued development of high quality content, testing, and smart tactical adjustments and build those numbers as high as possible. But it’s scary - not knowing. I try to get analytics in place and teach the basics, but it’s hard to punk down $20 large on a campaign when you’re not sure what’s going to happen. Then again, you could guess. Or you could watch competitors take a bite. It may be smart to pull back but I find that unlikely.

You mean it?  A free cookie?

Many times when working on articles, or doing research I’ll come upon posts, pages, or articles that look interesting, but after I click to them, I realize they are from 1999 or 2001. While well written, anything that happened that long ago is usually irrelevant to the search marketing and site design business. The Google Info View lets me limit the dates much like Google Blog Search. Nice.

Here today I checked out Google Alternative Views, which includes the ability to choose between several types of views - and significantly alters the search engine results pages based on your “mode.”

It looks as if there may be the need for a new meta-tag (e.g. like the currently valid ‘address’ tag) which helps pages identify dates, locations, etc, because most of the page results came back “No locations for this page” or “No dates for this page”.

The date sorting feature was slick in concept but I’ve not made it work very well. I wonder if new meta tags or sitemap tags will help to categorize pages into these buckets. The locations page was wonderful when you’re trying to get information relevant to the locale, but you’re not really searching for a local business. I searched for “Search Marketing Seminars” and chose Chicago as the “location” — the results were limited in a very clean way. It works like a filter - but I couldn’t quite pick out what it was trying to do. I had to do a lot of different searches before I found a good results page showing the feature well.

One usability issue… it’s easy to forget you’ve not entered a date yet. I think Google should either allow a default, or show “no” results until you’ve chosen a date, if you’re in that mode. The results that return when you’ve not entered a date are nonsensical. I’d like to see them pop a timeline on the left side like Google Blog search has - with a default.

It’s too early to say how this would affect SEO or how businesses might be able to make sure they rank for each of the data types - but it certainly adds some dimensions to the organic search space to consider down the road.

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