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If you’re a web merchant using the Yahoo Merchant Solutions e-commerce engine, your secret weapon for succeeding online has just been revealed.

The much anticipated roll-out of Yahoo! Web Analytics (formerly IndexTools) has started and I am thrilled. As I have been involved in Yahoo! Store development for a long time, specifically search marketing, the tool hits the sweet spot in my business.

I will be taking some time to become familiar so that I can bring Yahoo merchant solutions and Yahoo Store marketing solutions to the table bolstered by a robust analytics tool with built in tagging and an excellent dashboard.

The tool has a really nice path analysis tool that blows “click trails” out of the water and will help Yahoo Store merchants better organize their stores to meet the needs of real customers. No more guessing what order your menu should be in!

Yahoo! Web Analytics includes a complete dashboard for managing your business. What I most like is the idea of watching for and working on cart abandonment, something that has been hard to measure on Yahoo stores in the past.

…Yahoo! Web Analytics is designed to make it easy for you to answer your specific business questions. With features like drag & drop data filters, custom report wizards, and our segmentation selector, you can easily apply or remove filters to view the performance or characteristics of specific types of products, visitors and web pages….

Some of the reports

* Sales, revenue, average order value
* Conversion rate trends
* Visits, sales, revenue and conversion rates for specific keywords
* Sources of site visits, including organic search, referrals, paid search and direct access
* Product performance metrics, including the number of times each product has been viewed, added to the cart, and purchased
* Top internal site searches to inform merchants of consumer’s mindset during shopping.
* Checkout page analysis to show where customers abandon their shopping carts

I will keep you informed on this important advance.

Just in case you thought that citizen-created journalism was going to remain on the edges, Google now has connected its powerful blog search to a sort of meme-counter to help gauge the importance of a given story.  It’ll be interesting to see how this changes the traffic picture for bloggers.

I predict that there will also be a reverse… that is, a link from Google News back to the meme count too.

Google Moderator was launched yesterday as a free service created internally by Taliver Heath that gives users ability to solicit lists of questions and let people vote on their relevance to what the crowd wants to know. The voting system is pretty simple… it uses voting buttons, Digg-style, and the organizer can decide if the questions and voting can be done anonymously.

This crowdsourcing approach has promise and it will become clear where as the weeks and months pass.  But with such a simplified and accessible tool like this available for free, we may see organizations begin to use it for casual meeting organization, conferences, and who-knows-what.

So keep all of that in mind as you read my ideas for how to use Google Moderator in your business:

1. Organizing meeting agendas or committee meetings
   Why ramble about things nobody cares about? Let meeting attendees post their questions before the meeting and then rate their importance so the meeting agenda can be adjusted and made more efficient. But will those who are worse about babbling on take the time to use the tool or is it more about alpha personalities?  I love the idea of walking into a meeting and knowing that the questions that were most important to the participants will be up first.  There is no hiding from the reality of a vote like this.
2. Organizing conference sessions (duh!) or saving your ass in a presentation.
   Very similar to meetings, but for groups of people who may want to decide IF they want to attend a given session. By reviewing the session voting before choosing to attend, they can get a sense of the crowd and how the session might go. Conferences such as SXSW have been doing panel voting for a while, so this idea is well proven. If you find your presentation/agenda is going downhill, crowdsourcing “day 2″ etc. might save the day.
3. Organizing FAQs for a company, product, or service.
   Frequently asked questions about your company should truly answer questions people care about. Most FAQs are too well crafted and sound inauthentic, so Google Moderator may be a way to obtain a well sorted list to then transfer to your website later.  I think the organization may want to post the ’seed’ questions first, and let consumers add new ones in their own voice. The same can be said for creating relevant FAQs over time for products or services. The question remains if Google will put together an API that lets us embed such features into websites directly and avoiding opening a new tab, etc.
4. Deciding on product features/offerings, fleshing out concepts
   If you are considering starting up a business or creating a product, you can create a list of suggested questions and put them to the vote. “What’s more important to you…” or “When do you find yourself considering…” might be some great starter questions. While I believe one can do this with pay-per-click or other methods, this adds a new dimension to the equation. While this method has its problems, there may be something to the methodology.
5. Designing interviews or research projects
   If you have a plan to interview someone, you can pose a few suggested questions to your readership before the scheduled interview. You can then be relatively sure that you’ll hit the points that people care about while structuring the interview well. This has been done in other places before, but Google Moderator makes it pretty damn easy. If you have limited time or funds, you can use this tool to determine the questions you should answer in your outcomes (especially when you’re publicly funded or your audience reaction has a big influence on your work.)
6. Creation of how-to articles, email newsletters or videos.
   If you’ve put out a new product or service, you may not be sure which technical support or customer support questions are most important. We, as technologists often overlook the questions most important to the average user. We might think that getting the USB 2.0 interface at maximum speed matters, while the consumers just want to know where the switch is to turn off the damn sound.
7. Live Q&A for webcasts or other “distance learning” scenarios
   Google Moderator seems pretty fast, so if you’re interested in doing live Q&A for a webcast or possibly an online presentation, you can use it to gather and field questions DURING the session. The pace means very few votes will be cast for each question. I guess it remains to be seen if this will work well versus something simple like Twitter for voting. One must be careful that voting does not distract too much from the presentation as well.
8. Bonus Idea 1: Deciding on Email Newsletter Topics
   If you’re thinking of sending out a newsletter or other marketing communications to thousands of people, it might pay to let people show you what they care about before sending it, thus reducing opt-out rates and improving retention. Just make sure the target audience matches the ones who are voting.

Concerns and Other Thoughts

But how many participants and votes must you have before it is useful? Is it risky to use the tool with a

group of, say 50 people? 20? I have often wondered why systems such as LinkedIN and Yahoo Answers never allowed people to vote on questions (it would be a great idea to get rid of the riff-raff) but they must have their reasons. Tools like Amazon’s askville have voting on questions now.

Other posts on Google Moderator

Andy Beal - Google Moderator Launches, Raising the Question: “Are Google Engineers Bored With Search?”

Mashable (Stan Schroeder)

Crowd photo by James Cridland

My new friend and fellow Yahoo! Store Developer Rob Snell was invited by a director at Yahoo! Small Business to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business about Online Advertising. His preperation and written testimony was easy-to-read and Rob published it here at Search Engine Land. You should definitely read that first.

Now that’ he’s back and rested, with a fresh .gov link in his pocket, I thought I’d ask him a few short questions about how it went, what it was like as an experience, and what he thought it meant for search marketing’s future. (more…)

Twellow.com is a new Twitter directory that gives everyone a single place to explore hundreds of thousands of Twitter members in dozens of communities easily and efficiently. The site was launched in Alpha this week and I took some time to chat with lead developer Matthew Daines about Twellow’s challenges, ideas, and future plans. It’s always fun to give some Lexington props! (more…)

Straight from the “why didn’t Twitter build that” category comes Twellow.com, a directory (from fellow Lexingtonians iEntry.com) of over 300,000 Twitter users. Currently you can sort by follower count and search through categories, brands, etc.

Twellow.com has been designed from the ground up to help you “cut through the clutter”. From our home at Twellow headquarters, we’re actively searching and categorizing millions of inter-personal exchanges available on the internet every day. Twellow.com is thereby able to assist you in finding real people who really matter. We’re doing the hard work of sifting out people who can help bring your vision to reality, whatever that vision might be.

The directory is in Alpha, so expect some slowness and such as people start to hammer this site. Using public data Twellow could easily slice things in even more interesting ways as they develop. Some of the ideas being tossed around in the twittersphere include slicing by follower/followed ratio, frequency of update, frequency of click-through, etc. I look forward to seeing it develop.

Like Twitter, I think that the usefulness of this directory will emerge somewhat organically as people figure out how best to use it for finding, monitoring, and connecting to others.