Annual NETexponent Pumpkin Decorating Contest
October 31st, 2008
Every year at Halloween our team flexes their creative muscles and come up with some interesting ways to decorate these mini pumpkins. It is especially challenging because the darn things are so tiny!. However, every year the team still comes up with some interesting ideas.
This year’s contest winner was Cristina and her Dirty Martini Pumpkin – Congratulations Cristina! Enjoy your prize.
Everyone at NETexponent hopes you have a very happy halloween!
Posted in Affiliate Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 2 Comments
Happy Halloween from NETexponent – What We Shouldn’t Be Afraid Of
October 31st, 2008
Search Marketing isn’t going away any time soon. Phew!
Marketing Sherpa produces a nifty search marketing report every year. In this year’s 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, they show you through an abundance of colorful charts how the flow of marketing dollars has increased year over year and will continue to increase by the billions in the coming years.
As far as the current state of the economy is concerned, market downturn will definitely affect search but not really damage it. Businesses are better informed than ever about the usefulness and efficiency of search marketing, and because of this, most search budgets are not likely to decrease during a recession.
I’d include specific numbers and stats, but I’m afraid of the those spooky copyright lawyers.
Posted in Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
Google Affiliate Dashboard Report Released
October 29th, 2008
The folks at Google Affiliate Network (formerly Performics) have just released a new report for advertisers. The Google Dashboard report gives a great executive summary of your affiliate program with top sites, graphs, and much more. This should save advertisers the trouble of logging in to the system to monitor progress and could be a valuable report for upper management. I cannot post a screenshot since the report is a PDF and contains confidential data but here is the detailed description. It’s a really nice looking report and very useful. I hope the report frequency can be updated so we can receive these daily or weekly.
Monthly Dashboard Report
The Google Affiliate Team would like to introduce your Monthly Dashboard Report. The Dashboard summarizes your affiliate program performance, providing the actionable insights you need to truly understand and impact effective. The Dashboard will be sent via email directly to you.
A variety of reports from your account have been generated and conveniently laid out in a two page format providing a snapshot view of your program. This data will provide valuable insight into program strengths and weaknesses as well as where to look for future opportunities.
Attached is the first Dashboard for your account. We have provided a brief description of each report contained in the Dashboard and highlighted areas that deserve monitoring in order to maximize the use of the data.
Twelve Month Program Performance
Posted in Affiliate Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
Get Seth Godin’s New Book Free
October 29th, 2008
Our friends at Audible.com want people to hear Seth Godin’s new audiobook for free. Download it now and enjoy.
No Strings Attached!
http://www.audible.com/tribes
Posted in NETexponent Clients by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
Twitter Me Surprised
October 29th, 2008
I should not be admitting this, but I am pretty late to the game on Twitter. I fully embraced other social networking vehicles like Facebook and LinkedIn but for some reason I could not do the same for Twitter. After a long meeting with our advisory board I was convinced that I should try it out for a bit. One of our board members is a big proponent of Twitter and our social media services team talk about it often. It’s been a few days now, and while still not 100% convinced I see the same value others see…I have to admit I do enjoy using Twitter. It just goes to show that you should usually test something before forming an opinion.
If I were forced to choose between Facebook and Twitter I would still choose Facebook in a second. Initially I could not see the point in updating my status on both Facebook and Twitter but then I discovered the Facebook app that feeds Twitter updates into my status. Now I only need to post to Twitter and it automatically updates Facebook for me. That eliminated one hurdle. Another hurdle was eliminated when I downloaded TwitterFon for my iPhone which made updates pretty simple.
I thought I would post my initial thoughts:
Twitter Pros
- big community of users
- simple to use
- focused on doing one thing and doing it well
- lots of buzz
Twitter Cons
- lots of noise (it is very hard to cut through the Twitter clutter since everyone is talking at the same time…how do you navigate this mess?)
- Facebook offers the same service plus much more (granted Facebook has its share of noise too, but new functions allow users to control what they see and how much)
So while I may not be a Twitter fanatic, I think it serves a purpose because it does one thing well and has built a strong, loyal user base.
Feel free to check out my Twitter posts (as boring as they may be):
UPDATE
I just came across Nielsen data showing Twitter as the fastest growing social network sites in terms of audience. (but Facebook is much bigger currently)
| Rank (by Sept. YOY UA growth) |
10 Fastest Growing Social Networking Sites: Sept. 2008 |
Sept. 2007: Unique Audience (in 000s) |
Sept. 2008: Unique Audience (in 000s) |
% Growth: Year Over Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Twitter.com | 533* | 2,359 | 343% |
| 2 | Tagged.com | 898 | 3,857 | 330% |
| 3 | Ning | 842* | 2,955 | 251% |
| 4 | 4,075 | 11,924 | 193% | |
| 5 | Last.fm | 850 | 1,879 | 121% |
| 6 | 18,090 | 39,003 | 116% | |
| 7 | MyYearbook | 1,422 | 3,056 | 115% |
| 8 | Bebo | 1,299 | 2,418 | 86% |
| 9 | Multiply | 592 | 941 | 59% |
| 10 | Reunion.com | 4,845 | 7,601 | 57% |
| Source: The Nielsen Company, Custom Analysis (September 2008). | ||||
| *Note: These websites do not meet minimum sample size standards. Projected and average measures for these sites may exhibit large changes month-to-month, as a result. | ||||
Posted in Social Media by Peter Figueredo | | 2 Comments
Vote For The Affiliate Marketing Pinnacle Awards
October 28th, 2008
Cast your vote before October 31st for your top choice in each of the following areas:
- Affiliate of the year
- Affiliate manager of the year
- Exceptional merchant
- Affiliate advocate
- Best blogger
- Affiliate marketing legend
Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Awards and Honors by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
MSN adCenter Gets a Makeover
October 28th, 2008
Just barely…
In an effort to compete with the bigger slices of the search marketing pie, Microsoft released adCenter 5.0 on Monday. Do I expect this to have a serious impact on incoming traffic or conversions from Live Search? Not really.
The upgrade includes a faster editorial review process on their end, accessibility options for multiple users on one account, and…wait for it…wait for it…the ability to now pause/resume ads and keywords, which MSN calls “more flexibility in managing campaigns.” Let us now bow our heads in awe of such innovation. They also claim to have added better geographical targeting options. Is it just me, or is the most significant difference the change in layout colors to dark blue and gray and an enhancement in their logo of circles symbolizing, perhaps, the direction and motion of the head any time someone tries to use this service?
Posted in Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 2 Comments
Google Analytics Gets Better and the Best Analytics Blog on the WWW
October 27th, 2008
A long time (maybe 10 years) ago, there must have been a day the higher-ups at Google decided that as part of the company’s business model, they would try to release something new almost every week of the year.
This week, Google announced that there will be new features available in their popular (and free) web analytics platform, Google Analytics. What they now offer is a world beyond visits, bounce rates, etc. There are now custom reports, advanced segmentation, API for exporting GA data, new visually-pleasing motion reports, integrated reporting for AdSense, and a slight facelift in the UI. Most of these features are in public beta, except for the API and AdSense reporting (private beta). You can get the full scoop on The Official Google Analytics Blog.
If you really want to learn more about the new beta release, you should visit Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor. I’ve yet to read a blog as enthusiastic (and funny!) about web analytics as his. Whether it’s basic stuff or advanced data analysis, he actually gets you excited about things that most people would deem objectively boring and tries to get people to become “analytics ninjas.” His practical approach to sifting through data segments in order to give actionable advice is enlightening and simplifying, hence, Occam’s razor. One of my favorite posts is about choosing awesome key performace indicators (KPI). He also likes to use terms like “HiPPO” (highest paid person’s opinion), which I love.
Posted in Search Marketing, Testing/Optimization by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
Yahoo! Search Now Has Better Geo-Targeting in North America Only
October 24th, 2008
Normally, when I login to Yahoo! Search Marketing, I leave the dashboard (no totals!) and go to the campaign summary right away. It was a pleasant surprise when I logged in today and saw the announcement, “New, More Specific Levels of Geo-Targeting Available.”
In the past, the only choices for geo-targeting in Yahoo! Search were to either choose the entire market or to block continents you didn’t want your ads to appear in. This wasn’t very efficient or usable, and even Yahoo! warned users, “Note: The accuracy of the blocked continents feature is not guaranteed and may vary depending on a number of factors.” After seeing the announcement about more specific targeting options, I tried setting an existing campaign to run ads in the United Kingdom, and guess what? I still couldn’t. Confused, (and my excitement waning) I tried setting up a brand new campaign, but the only geographical options were for the United States and Canada. It finally dawned on me that new improvements were only for North America. The functionality now works similarly to Google geo-targeting insofar that it lets you target by country (USA and Canada only), city, or zip code all at the campaign level. There’s even a nifty little map that highlights the places you target, also like Google. If you want to learn more about this new functionality, you can read about it on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. It’s unfortunate, however, that there isn’t better targeting for outside North America. Be that as it may, there is the option to setup entirely separate international accounts through international versions of the Yahoo! Search Marketing interface, but again, not that efficient if all you want to do is have your same English language ads show up in different places.
Yahoo! has been trying to catch up with Google for a while. Google, after all, has had geo-targeting options for what seems like forever now and seems to be at least a few steps ahead of Yahoo! at all times. For example, to increase quality (and cost), Yahoo! introduced the “minimum bid,” something Google already had for a while. Recently, Google did away with the “minimum bid” and changed it to “first page bid.” Now, the implications of this change is totally another story, but you get the point. Who knows, maybe next week Google will come out with a way to target people by GPS on their mobile devices and show an ad for something in close proximity to an individual?
Posted in Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
