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….

Yahoo Analytics Campaign Report

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.

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

So it always excites me to see well-executed studies like this study presented by Cone Research of 1092 adults aged 18 or older who were asked about what they thought of companies participating in Social Media.

• 60 percent of Americans interact with companies on a social media website.
• 25% interact with companies on a social media website more than once per week.
• 93% of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media.
• 85% (!!!) believe a company should be active with customers in social media.
• 56% of Americans feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them on a social media environment.
• Men are twice as likely to interact frequently on social media frequently
• 30% of the difficult 18-34 group believe that companies should use social media to market to them.
• 30% of those with household incomes over $75,000 believe companies should market to them via social media, and two thirds of these people say they feel a stronger connection to companies they interact with in this way.

These are impressive numbers. When asked in detail about the interactions that they ‘expect’

• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
• Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
• Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
• Companies should market to consumers (25%)

Here’s the thing this study amplifies.

Social Media Engagement is not something you learn on a corporate off-site. It’s not something you leave to your I.T. guys/gals. It’s not something you can ignore.

It takes time and commitment. It takes practice and thoughtfulness before you actually need to depend on it to save your rear. To be less familiar with social media than your consumer, or to expect they won’t notice your social media incompetence is a very dangerous position to be in when the whole world is watching.

chart from Brian Solis used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

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

I am posting this so I can refer people to this post when they call me… and I get around 7-10 calls daily for sites from people who want every bell and whistle they can think of on the site. From the start. Without any budget or forethought.

So this was a refreshing read about website simplicity and landing pages. Well worth the read. In the article they call out these six methods for web design that can drive away clutter and improve user experience.

1. Only what you need.
   The biggest aspect of simple web design is only showing what’s needed to make the sale, and nothing more.
2. Reduce clicks. The less clicks it takes for a customer to buy a product, the higher returns.
3. The “Grandma” rule. If your grandma (or any elderly person) can figure out how to buy a product for your site, odds are it’s put together pretty well.
4. Reduce the number of columns. Each time you add a column to a page, the content is pushed into a smaller and smaller space.
5. Give less options. There is an added stress put on web shoppers to make decisions.
6. Keep it clean. A clean design keeps visitors happy.

Examples are given that any smart retailer or merchant could follow for success.

You get VIP listing placement, a full profile, and more.  If you have a local audience and want to rank better for your regional searches, this is a no-brainer as BOTW has always provided good quality link juice (even if the page rank bar shows nothing yet.)

SIGN UP NOW and good luck!

As PPC marketers we will want to remain aware of the phrases that are suggested for our “money terms” and bid accordingly. Phrase match and Exact Match will start to become more important in many cases as Suggest “structures” the queries.

According to onestat, the 10 most used numbers of word phrases compared to October 2007 in search engines on the web are here…

I think that Google Suggest will shift these numbers quite a bit, and with it, the need to react as search marketers.

A few other thoughts.

1. We May See More Traffic to Regional Sites. People regularly enter “cheap gas” and “best dentist” in search engines - without qualifying the searches at all. Organic results tend to send people to national portals, but suggest-driven search gets them closer to well optimized, regional sites. A search for “cheap gas” without search suggest offers gasbuddy.com at number one organic result, while a “suggested” search for “cheap gas houston” gives houstongasprices.com.
2. Google Suggest Drop Down a new micro “SERP”: Those who make their way into the suggest feature get a “better than #1″ position. For example, typing “ipod case” into Google with Suggest shows the first suggested feature as “ipod cases at Wal-Mart” - grabbing people and then offering up the organic page free from PPC ads that use “Wal-Mart” in their keywords.
3. Google Suggest Results May Change Long-Tail Search Optimization. Those of us who believe in doing long-tail marketing may find an decrease down the tail from search, and a greater need to develop segments of our site to serve those long tail queries. Searches that used to come in with two word phrases may now have 3-4 words, which helps with medium-tail optimization, but longer phrases previously further down the tail may be “clipped.” This will concentrate search terms so that Adwords bids will rise and competition increases in a sort of “cluster” effect.
4. Google Suggest SERPS offer More Impact for Trademark Blocking in PPC. If your tradename is offered in Google suggest results, and you’ve filed a trademark complaint form, the results page will be free from paid competition giving you a better shot at the traffic through organic or ppc links.
5. Google Suggest Can Improve User/Searcher Skills Forever. With Google suggest constantly popping up when you go about your daily queries, many who never really thought of keyphrases will now start to think about them. It will be a constant reinforcement of our efforts to think about how consumers search. We may have to adjust our planning to meet these enhanced skills.
6. Google Suggest Can Be an Ad-Hoc Negative Keyword Tool. There are other ways to be more comprehensive, but Google suggest can help to identify negative keywords you may want to enter in your campaigns. And I saw some negative phrases with higher index numbers that never showed up in Google keyword tools.
7. Dramatically Reduced Spelling Error Opportunity. While many of us set up adgroups to capture spelling errors, this will have a decreasing impact as people start to use the suggest feature as a live auto-correction. Typo-campaigns may get less traffic.
8. Hijacking Google Suggest May Become a SEO Technique. It may become possible to hijack Google suggest so that competitive phrases are strategically flashed to the user. For example.. if you sell “abc widget” then a suggest of “abc widget fails miserably” could be used to divert traffic.
9. Better Searches Offer Improved Analytics Information. With the user making clear choices among those available, we’ll have better information about what is enticing and engaging to the users. Vague, high volume two-word searches are always confusing when we’re looking to make decisions, and this might just help us plan better.

I think that this will have a measurable impact on how people search - possibly forever.

And now we turn around and find that they are almost to their 500th broadcast. If you want an example of TRUE social networking, authentic media, and what can happen when you remove greed, paranoia, and selfishness from art, check them out (and follow them on Twitter.)

“The [seo] challenge comes from a combination of:

• The need to create new content that travels and that others are motivated to link to
• Convincing web site owners that they need to create and promote content on an ongoing basis outside of their brochureware corporate site or online product catalog

…. “Long term, promotion of content that attracts relevant links from those empowered to publish will win. The act of linking is performed, unsolicited, by individual publishers.”

One undercurrent effect here is that there is a shift in responsibility for the success of a site from the SEO (with his bag of tricks, magic levers and dials) to the site owner (producing relevant, domain specific content worthy of links.) It also may spell a major shift in the role of SEO to content producer for some companies, and not a lot of SEOs will be able to deliver on this.

I’ve seen, time and time again, that getting a company to assign (talented) resources to the production of content is very difficult. Either because of laziness or lack of long-term mindset, there is a rift that develops between the consulting SEO’s recommendations and the company’s willingness or ability.

So, the clients nod at the ‘you’ll need to produce quality content‘ task discussion, when time comes, nothing gets done. Either they will avoid the task altogether or they’ll assign “an intern” or someone that’s already doing 3 jobs to the work… and the output hardly counts as link worthy.

That rift causes huge levels of stress and can be interpreted as a lack of ability on the SEO’s part. Saying “but you’re producing crap content” hardly mends the issue. It will be the responsibility of the skilled SEO to not only identify and recommend the content production, but also in educating clients on the value of this activity.

Image: Mikel Ortega

Running a franchise is a unique business endeavor. After all, franchisees aren’t quite entrepreneurs — they have to run their businesses according to their parent company’s rules — and aren’t employees, either, because they’ve invested their own money in the store or service they’re running.   Inc Magazine.

Even if these new rules hadn’t happened, franchises that hid lots of dirty laundry from potential franchisees were being found out anyhow.  Social media and forums was already stripping away some of the barriers to knowledge.

The franchise success depends on competence and compliance as well as the competence of the franchisee.  While the franchise offers training and often grand-opening assistance, there is no way for them to know if the business is going to succeed.  Franchises are not a magic bullet, and many customers simply aren’t doing their homework.  So what you have after a while is a bell curve of success.  On one end, savvy owners making a lot of money and living a great lifestyle - while the “fail” end of the bell curve is full of very loudly upset people - often losing a life savings as they go down.

With consumer-generated-media, the franchises are faced with a really hairy reputation monitoring problem where the brand is only as strong as the weakest location.   Unlike company-owned stores, business model franchises have pretty minimal control over their brand name once a franchise is launched.

Franchise brands are like the dancer with big feet, or the boxer with a big head - it’s just such a big target!