Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Analytics

  • Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Segmentation in the Age of Data Objects

     Almost everyday of the past 12 years I’ve looked at web analytic data. It’s never been a completely satisfying experience. Log files don’t paint a vivid picture and javascript’s palette of data points is often a mess. At the end of the day, it is all “just numbers.” It doesn’t tell me what to do.…

  • Display Advertising’s New Wave

    This week I was supposed to be in Amsterdam giving a presentation at Sanoma Uitegevers MediaParade event. As luck would have it a volcano erupted and forced me to cancel the trip. Below is the presentation I was really excited to give. It’s 45 minute talk, history lesson, state of the union and crystal ball…

  • The Market Value of Supply Side Data

    AdExchanger had a nice post from TRAFFIQ’s Scott Portugal about publishers using a Value-per-Customer metric for site visitors. As longtime readers know, I’ve been advocating publishers take this approach and measure site performance on revenue per visitor for years – most recently here. I especially liked this part of Scott’s post: “users interaction with a site…

  • Dynamic Segmentation (La Nouvelle Vague)

    I’ve always loved segmentation. One of the keys to the success of my first web business and the number one reason we survived the dotcom bubble was that we segmented our email list like crazy. Every supplement purchased qualified you for a segment. We knew the categories you were interested in and what products within…

  • Launch Interviews on Yieldbot

      I realize that not everyone follows me or yieldbot on twitter so I wanted to post links here to recent interviews I've done surrounding the launch of yieldbot. AdExchanger ExchangeWire  Hope you enjoy. I tried to go into great detail on our vision and execution. Publishers interested in getting into the yieldbot beta please contact…

  • Yieldbot is Born to Run

     Two years ago after Omniture purchased Offermatica and I started Relevance AMPlified (RAMP)  I stated three core principles of what I was doing next: 1.    Intent & affinity are the root segmentation strategies 2.    Achieve success w/ the most advanced technology 3.    Testing, targeting & optimization is our DNA These ideals are also evident in…

  • Links vs. Cookies: A Tale of Two Web Economies

      I credit Jonathan Strauss of link analytics company awe.sm with coining the phrase “the link as the cookie.” I’ve been borrowing that expression for the past year because it not only describes his service and the meta concept of linked data, but it also encapsulated what intelligent landing page optimizers had been doing for some time…

  • Analytics APIs Will Be Our Bridge to Intelligence

    Eric Peterson has a kick ass post titled “The Coming Bifurcation in Web Analytics Tools.”  In it he defines the bifurcation issue:  “I believe that we are about to see an increasing number of companies in the coming year drop their paid vendor’s “basic solution” in favor of Google Analytics and, at the same time,…

  • What Social Check-Ins Forgot: The Value of Landing Pages

    I have yet to become a fan or user of social/location based check-in services though I am a fan of the beaconing strategy they employ. As I’ve written before, value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and…

  • The Value of Search Ads for Brand Keywords

    On Search Engine Land today I saw a nice post on understanding the dynamics of Paid vs. Organic (or Natural) search. As David Roth explains it: What keywords are we really talking about? Those that match exactly with your brand name or branded product name, where there is generally no competition. So if you are Acme Widget…

  • Digital Spaces That Excite Me for 2010

    Last year I was very fortunate to meet some incredible people involved in shaping the future of digital media. I enjoyed learning about what interests them, hearing their points of view and discovering what problems they were working on solving. Needless to say, digital media evolves at an astounding velocity so I thought this was…

  • 2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

    "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." – Emerson 2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can…

  • Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

    For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary. Attribution quickly formed the business models…

  • Audience: Display Advertising’s Cat in the Hat?

    Display advertising, which at one time looked like the web’s glorious channel is now a glory hole for direct marketing. In many respects brand advertisers have themselves to blame, not believing that a click is branding and fumbling around with poor microsite driven strategies that have zero ROI. The fact of the matter is an…

  • Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

    This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years. As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been…

  • Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked

    Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed…

  • Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics

    Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many…

  • SES Presentation: Search Becomes the Display OS

    75% of the audience was agencies and amazingly 80% of those people were running both Search and Display campaigns. As my fellow presenter Scott Rafer has noted on more than one occasion the falling cost of Display can bring back better returns than search. Believe it! I saw it myself three times this week for…

  • Speaking and Clinic at SES New York

    Next week Search Engine Strategies rolls into my home turf and I’ll be involved in a couple of ways. On Tuesday March 24th in the Expo Hall I will running an audience based clinic. 3:00pm Expo Hall: CPA Optimization StationWith advertising dollars more accountable than ever optimizing your Cost Per Acquisition or Cost per Action…

  • Why Is Recovery.gov Making Online Access to ARRA Difficult?

    Note: This post has bias to no political party — other than the optimizers of freedom. There has to be a reason that the good folks at recovery.gov want to make it difficult to view the full ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) bill. First, I had to fish around before finding the actual law that…