One of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.

This is especially true for companies who are struggling to find their sweet spot in the paid search world. During the day-to-day chaos, few are thinking about the cost of each call - they just want to answer it and do their best to change the caller into a customer. If the staff is so busy, do you really think they’ll drill down and get the “how you found us” information accurately recorded. It doesn’t happen. Pay-per-call and click-to-call offer “embedded” tracking, but are plagued with inventory and adoption challenges. My friend Christine (CC: Nice to see you at SMX!) created a great post on Offline Conversion Tracking, which covers some of the same ground, and this issue has often come up in conference sessions.

As Greg Sterling points out, the vast majority of purchases are made offline, yet the tracking solutions are only just maturing, and others have a very healthy skepticism about some of the new solutions.

The real result of this is the “leaking” of marketing budgets that happens with a lack of tracking. The dynamics of the purchase cycle are mysterious, making strategic and tactical solutions little better than guesses.

I see basically four flavors of off-line conversion tracking from pay-per-click ads, and would like to introduce a hybrid.

anecdotal
customer question at point of sale, catalog IDs, coupons, offers
poor man’s IVR (multiple phone numbers)
cookied IVR
…and a hybrid…
cookied part number modification

CLICK MORE to see the rest of this article.

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The small transit operator Fredericton Transit Division had their routes added to Google Transit tonight for the Fredericton (85k) area, adding yet another Canadian location for the terrific trip planning service. The University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University students in the area will surely benefit from this trip-planning service.

The City of Fredericton Transit Division operates 28 buses on eight routes, Monday to Saturday, 6:30 am until 11:00 pm, providing safe, affordable mobility to those in the community who do not have access to or choose not to use a private vehicle. In addition we operate chartered busing to various school, tour, and conference groups in and around Fredericton, and a parallel service , Dial-A-Bus, for persons with a disability.

In the past few months’ time I’ve spent more than my usual amount of time watching others surf the web. I am always astonished by how poor people are at knowing where to type searches, or web addresses, or login information. When I ask someone to go to a website, there is genuine confusion about where or how. It’s no surprise to me that a thriving sub-economy exists based on navigational searches - which I define loosely as “typing a web site URL into a search box because you want to visit it.”

Most of the time it’s user issues that causes navigational searches IMO:

• The toolbars have been dragged out of whack.
• I don’t even think about, I just type.
• Ambiguity between “search”, “find”, and “address bar” in browsers such as IE7.
• Alcohol or Drugs, Senility, or perhaps Loud Children.

Some people have real reasons for it. Here are a few:

• I don’t have to worry as much about typos.
• I sometimes want to look at the cache
• I get a quick glance at other sites referring to it (talk about ad-hoc reputation management!)
• I’m a rebel, damnit, and you ain’t gonna change me.

A terrific article on navigational searches prompted me to begin a list of good resources on this matter. I also found this terrific write up by Jeremy Crane over at compete’s blog. It was also eye-opening. (more…)

Looks like Google Transit has rolled out Quebec’s AMT Service

I went to visit Agence métropolitaine de transport using Google’s link http://www.amt.qb.ca, but it had been hijacked! No wait. Google put ‘qb’ instead of ‘qc.’ Need to fix that folks. Should be qc…

Postscript: Google fixed the link.

AMT’s territory spans 63 municipalities and one native reserve, 13 regional county municipalities, and 21 transit authorities. It serves a population of approximately 3.7 million people who make more than 750,000 trips daily.

We are all busy, but most of us love blogs. Finding, filtering, and selecting blogs is something that must be done by hand. because it requires that we personally evaluate an author’s efforts and give them enough time to show their stuff. It’s my blog audition, borne from necessity.

At one point I had 1400 blogs in Google Reader, haphazardly picked. Even with nicely developed folders, filters, and so on, I found myself wasting far too much time. So one day I got fed up. I did the equivalent of “touch bloglist.opml” and started over.

And, what evolved afterward was a very simple and effective method for narrowing down the thousands of blogs without impacting your daily flow.

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Google Transit expands once again as it announced inclusion of European locations from Italy to Switzerland, helping mass transit users efficiently move about! This is the latest in a series of changes recently including addition of Southeastern Virginia, Sacramento, and Vancouver BC.

Firenze (Florence) Italy and Torino (Turin) Italy (Gruppo Torinese Trasporti) - 90 million passengers every year.

Switzerland National (SBB, VBZ) - around 25,000km of mass transit.

Southeast UK including London (Traveline South East) - see this outstanding article about integration of UK’s public transit data into Google.

See also the post about this in Search Engine Land.

What would you pay to be totally unburdened from spam? I mean totally.

$10/day?

$10/week?

$10/month?

Would you be willing to tighten laws on email commerce? Do you think that Trusted Sender programs are going to help?

I wonder if the blur between “hidden” SPAM filters, such as those offered by ISPs causes people to hold off on genuinely good spam filtering (yes, that you buy) because they think they “already have a filter” and are just resigning themselves to cleaning the crap out of their in-box each day?

I honestly don’t get it. This issue is having a huge, direct impact on our economy and yet nobody is taking serious action on it. If it weren’t for spamstopshere, I would be put out of business by SPAM.

Microsoft has put together a set of keywords by Industry.

Currently listed are Retail, Technology, and Financial Services groupings.

For example, you can download pre-fab lists of financial services terms around “Banks, Loans and Refinancing”. Retail can look into Apparel, Toys, Transformers, Video Games, and Mobile Phones.

….Tis the season for advertising online—particularly if you’re in one of our featured holiday consumer industries: Retail, Technology, and Financial Services. It’s time to prime the holiday search advertising campaigns, to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable holiday sales. Below we’ve compiled lists of industry search keywords designed to give you an even better shot at ringing up more holiday sales in these hot industries….

These may be good for the newbies to learn more about what a keyword list looks like. The lists are in a near-ready-to-import Excel spreadsheet set up for Microsoft Adcenter.

If you’re thinking a blog is too much work for your marketing efforts, check this out…. More than 8 of 10 business journalists (84%) say they have used or would use blogs as primary or secondary sources for articles.

This from the 2007 Arketi Web Watch Survey: Inside B-to-B Media Usage of Web 2.0

• One-quarter (25%) said blogs make their job easier
• 18% said instant messaging makes their job easier.
• 97% said they enjoy using new technologies
• 30% said they use some type of instant messenger for professional communication.
• 60% of journalists said they spend more than 20 hours a week on the internet.

Hat tip to Lee Oden for the Twitter.

Since my blog has a mix of SEM and non SEM posts, and I still want to post the Sphinn plug in button on them, I did a quick mod that only shows the “Sphinn It” button in the case where you’ve put the tag “Sphinn” in your Wordpress 2.3+ tags list. Feedback welcome. Bold text is new code.

function io_sphinn_it_filter($content)
{
global $wpdb;

$sphinnfound=false;

$targettag = “Sphinn”;
$posttags = get_the_tags();
if ($posttags) {
foreach($posttags as $tag) {
if ($sphinnfound=stristr($tag->name,$targettag)){
break;
}
}
}

if ($sphinnfound){

// generate $sphinn_it_html based on …
echo ‘<script type=”text/javascript”>submit_url = \”.get_permalink().’\';</script>’;
echo ‘<div align=”right”>’;
echo ‘<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php”></script>’;
echo ‘</div>’;
// new content will be added after each post
$content = $content . $io_sphinn_it_html ;
return $content;
}
return($content);
}

If you have an improvement, feel free to shoot ‘em over.

Remember, you have to put “Sphinn” in your post Tags before the button will display.