Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’
Best of 2008: Cool Web Tools
Saturday, December 12th, 2009Originally published on WebMarketCentral between August 2008 and September 2009.
Somewhat similar to tools like Basecamp and Projjex, DeskAway is an online collaboration tool that supports ad hoc work teams by enabling them to manage and track projects, share large files, send secure messages and report on activities. Pricing ranges from free (up to five users and three active projects at a time) to $99 per month for unlimited projects and users.
Gickr is a slick free tool for creating animated GIFs from any collection of photos. It can be used to create banner ads, slide shows or Flash-like animations.
This is a “connected thesaurus” that belongs in every writer’s toolbox. For any word or pair of words, it shows related words, connections between the words, rhyming words and more. For famous names, it can help find information such as occupation, birth and death years, nationality, and “trigger links” (e.g. “Clinton” and “Whitewater”).
OnlyWire lets you automatically submit content to all of your favorite social networking sites with a single button, and makes it easy for your blog readers to bookmark and share your content. If you don’t want to see their ads, a fee-based version is available for a reasonable $25 per year.
16 Essential PC Applications for Bloggers by Problogger
Frequent Best-of contributor Darren Rowse reviews essential blogging tools including SnagIt
64 B2B Marketing Tools and Resources by Modern B2B Marketing
In one of the most underrated posts of last year, Jon Miller provides links to more than 60 tools and information resources including blog posts, white papers, analyst reports, webcasts, podcasts, ebooks and articles on topics ranging from lead scoring and nurturing to marketing ROI and social media tools. Examples include David Raab’s Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Marketo’s Landing Page Test Calculator and this podcast from Laura Ramos on using Web 2.0 tactics to boost b2b marketing results.
9 Google Bookmarklets for SEOs by Search Engine Journal
The indispensable Ann Smarty reviews nine helpful bookmarlets (small tools activated from a button in your browser), such as Search selected text on Google and tools for Google Trends, Google Insights, and Google Blog Search.
While there are lots of website analytics programs out there, Clicky combines powerful functionality with affordable pricing in a way few others can match. Unlike Google Analytics (the application it’s most likely to be compared to), Clicky provides real-time stats, Twitter analytics, separate mobile visitor tracking, visitor details, WordPress integration and more. While their free and blogger plans offer limited funcitonality, their Pro ($60 per year as of this writing), Super Pro ($120/year) and Enterprise ($300/year) plans offer impressive capabilities at very reasonable cost. It’s hard to compete with free, but with all of these features and great value, Clicky has found a way to do it.
Facesaerch (yes, that’s the correct spelling) is just what its name implies: a search engine specifically for faces. Search for your favorite celebrity, a neighbor, your boss, your next prospective employee—anyone whose picture may be somewhere on the internet—to discover what photos of them have been posted and where.
Animoto lets you grab images from your hard drive or the web, choose a soundtrack from your audio collection or theirs, and then automatically creates a cool music video from your selections. While this tool would benefit from more attractive pricing (you can only make 30-second videos for free) and better controls, it’s worth checking out and playing with.
Similar to feedkiller, previously reviewed here, Feedoor.com lets you merge RSS feeds or even individual blog posts into a single feed. You can select how many stories from each source to include, and the tool provides advanced filtering options to include or exclude posts based on keywords, author and date. It also lets you create Javascript widgets for your blog or site that display headlines from your custom feed, and does it all with a simple, straightforward interface.
Crucial Firefox Plugins For SEM Professionals; Put Google To Work To Meet CPA Goals by Search Engine Land
Josh Dreller reviews seventeen helpful Firefox plugins, such as FireFTP (a fully functional and free FTP client that runs within Firefox), FireShot (a free screenshot capture tool with annotation capabilities), SearchStatus (a “Swiss army knife” for SEO pros) and Google Global (lets you search as though you were sitting anywhere in the world).
6 All-in-One Tools for Quick SEO Diagnostics by Search Engine Journal
Prolific SEO blogger Ann Smarty reviews a half-dozen SEO diagnostics tools including Quarkbase (a new addition to my arsenal), HubSpot’s Website Grader (one I use all the time), and Cubestat.
17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use! by SmashingApps
AN Jay reviews a variety of helpful and cool online tools here, from free web conferencing service Dimdim and URL shortener BudURL to Skydeck (an online tool for keeping track of your cell phone calls and text messages) and PDFescape, a free online PDF reader / editor / form filler and form designer tool.
This is an essential site for personal online reputation management. LookupPage lets you create an optimized personal profile that, in most cases, will show up very highly on the major search engines, helping you to “own” valuable first-search-page real estate for your name. The site offers free listing, as well as couple of affordable fee-based options that provide additional benefits such as an ad-free page and top listing guaranteed.
Another valuable site for reputation management, Retaggr not only enables you to create an online profile linked to your accounts on other social media sites, but also lets you easily create an online business card, social media email signature, and blog widget to help visitors easily add you to their friend lists.
An alternative search engine, Exalead may not be a “Google killer” but does provide some interesting features. The top menu and right sidebar box make it simple to narrow your search to the entire web, just your PC, or Wikipedia, as well as by related terms, site type, media type and other criteria.
Either a slick tool to help generate domain name ideas, check availability and register with just a few clicks, or at least a mildly interesting way to waste some time—you decide.
This is a slick tool that enables you to easily create a graphical HTML social media email signature for use with most common webmail services (Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL, Hotmail etc.). WiseStamp lets you control the look of the email signature as well as adding RSS feeds and social networking links like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Face to Face video chat by ePoster
Concise review of ooVoo, a free video chat tool that’s been previously written about here. ooVoo is an easy-to-use tool for conducting video chat with anyone who has a webcam.
14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition by FutureNow
The brilliant Bryan Eisenberg details more than a dozen tools to help compare or benchmark your site/blog against competitors, including Feed Compare (compare the size of your RSS subscriber base to others), Xinu Returns (shows how your site compares to others on search engines and social bookmarking sites) and Website Grader (provides an overall score for the SEO quality of your site plus competitive comparisons and recommendations for improvement).
The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites by PC Magazine
Finally, Kyle Monson reviews a slew of useful and/or entertaining online tools such as Animoto (automatically creates videos from uploaded music and photos), Jott (a cool and handy speech-to-text conversion tool) and, for researchers, NationMaster, a site which lets you compare countries on a wide variety of statistics ranging from the serious (economic measures, terrorism) to the trivial (softdrink consumption).
Surf Canyon is a broswer plugin for Firefox and IE that refines results as you search, helping to make them more relevant so you can find exactly what you’re looking for more quickly. Pandia’s review of how Surf Canyon personalizes search results states that “SurfCanyon accelerates the search process by re-ranking the search results based on your behaviour…Even though there’s no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12.”
In the same realm as Basecamp from 37signals, Projjex is an online project collaboration tool that lets you define groups, upload and share files, schedule meetings, assign tasks and send automated reminders. Projjex extends this functionality with cool, practical features like file tagging to simplify search, time tracking and iPhone integration. Serious users will eventually want to upgrade to the fee-based service, but the free offering is robust enough to be helpful tool for small businesses while providing larger organizations with a realistic trial before buying.
Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons by limeshot marketing
Lots of bloggers are adding Twitter follow-me buttons and badges to their blogs, but thanks to limeshot, you no longer have to limit yourself to standard light-blue-and-white graphic. Here are 36 variations for a follow-me badge that reflects your color scheme and personality.
feedkiller is an rss mixing tool that lets you combine a variety of content into your website or favorite rss aggregator with a single rss feed. It’s free and very simple to set up. MakeUseOf.com notes in its review of feedkiller that “other tools can be used for that purpose (such as) RSS Mixer, Feedoor and FeedBlendr. However what makes FeedKiller standout is the ability to select the number of stories to include from each feed.” What would make it stand out even more is a simple PHP script for including the resulting feed on a website.
SearchCloud is a powerful search tool to use for multi-term, detailed searches. Any search engine will let you use multiple search words of course, but SearchCloud takes that a step further by letting you select a size for each search word or phrase, indicating its relative importance. And on the off-chance that SearchCloud isn’t intuitive enough for you, they even provide a one-minute video on how to use it
ScribeFire offers a Firfox browser plugin that lets bloggers drag and drop formatted text from the web into their blogs, post entries, take notes, categorize and tag their blog posts, upload images and share posts on social bookmarking and networking websites. The company also offers tools for both displaying and buying online ads. TechJaws has called ScribeFire a blogger’s best friend, and LifeHacker has made it a download of the day, pointing out that “In addition to Blogger and WordPress, ScribeFire works with Jeeran, LiveJournal, TypePad and Windows Live Spaces.”
Inspired by TweetDeck, Monitter is a real-time Twitter monitor that lets you keep track of live posts for any three keywords you enter, plus filter the display by geographic location or language (English, Spanish, and German). Frederic Lardinois wrote in his ReadWriteWeb review of Monitter that “Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor keywords on Twitter.”
Overall, this is more for amusement than practical business use (though the inbound link checker is very thorough and accurate). dnScoop is a domain check and website valuation tool that estimates the value of an established website or a domain name using several different criteria including the number of inbound links; the popularity, age and Pagerank of the domain; website traffic; and other factors.
At first glance, Propeller look like just another Digg clone or YASN: a social bookmarking site where you can post links, vote on them, comment, and share them with friends or a group. However, the site is owned by AOL, so there’s a chance it will be able to keep spammers and objectionable material out while avoiding the problems like the Digg Mafia or the StumbleUpon witch hunt. At last check, the links here were still do-follow, so they have SEO value as well. 
Top 5 Free Web Applications by Search For Blogging
Mert Erkal, Chief Editor of Bloghology Magazine, shares his favoriate free web applications, including ADrive, an online service for storing, transferring and sharing very large files; Audacity, a powerful open-source audio-editing program; and LogMeIn, a free remote-access service similar to GoToMyPC.
Convert Archives Into Different Compression Formats (RAR to ZIP and etc) by Raymond.cc
Although ZIP is the most commonly used format for file compression on Windows PCs, several other compression formats actually do a better job of producing more compact files. If you ever receive archives in these formats (such as RAR, 7z or KGB) and can’t open them, or you’d like to be able to use alternative formats, this handy utility converts archives between numerous compression formats.
Testing the Quintura Site Search Widget by Pandia Search Engine News
Quintura is an alternative search engine developed in Russia, based on semantic technology. What sets it apart from the crowd of other alternative search engines is the way it presents search results in Web 2.0-style clouds of related search terms that help you narrow or expand your search simply by clicking your mouse. The folks at Pandia explain here how you can now use the same technology to spider and search your own site or blog—for free.
social bookmarking services and community websites submitter by Social Poster
Here’s a list of 79 social submission bookmarklets you can simply drag to your Firefox toolbar to install. The list includes direct links to register for each service, login and submit a new item, as well as each site’s Pagerank and Alexa rank. This is social posting for the lazy (or extremely busy).
Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks by Lifehacker
This isn’t actually a new tool but rather a collection of neat tricks for using Google to accomplish a range of tasks, from simple things like tracking flight status and calculating currency conversion to more advanced activities like finding free music, filtering image search results and evading your company’s site blocking software (ahem, not so sure that last one is a good idea, but it’s an interesting trick). These have been compiled by Gina Trapani, best-selling author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
A search tool that provides “unlimited space,” enabling you to search Google, YouTube, RSS, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and Images all in one 3D space. SpaceTime’s™ 3D Web Search lets you choose a search engine from the drop down menu, type in your search term and view all your search results at once in a slick 3D interface. It’s not quite something you can’t live without, but it is a fascinating and cool new way to search the web, find videos and shop online.
This is about as simple and elegant as web tools get. Hey, why waste twelve bucks on an alarm clock when you can make your $900 PC perform the same function?
Gmail Hacks, Tips & Tricks by Best of the Web
As with the Lifehacker post above, this isn’t a tool but rather an exceptionally useful collection of tips and tricks, in this case for Gmail users. Learn how to master Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, streamline the process of adding attachments, quickly switch between multiple Google accounts, read your Google Reader RSS feeds from within Gmail, use Gmail as an external hard drive, back up your email account and more.
4Q – The Best Online Survey For A Website, Yours Free! by Occam’s Razor
Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik offers a free on-exit web survey tool featuring three simple questions to help site owners determine why certain pages get visited much more frequently than others, why certain pages have higher exit or bounce rates, and other critical information, using real data rather than idle speculation.
Pageflakes Acquisition Confirmed by TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld reported a few months ago that custom web startup page provider Pageflakes had been acquired by LiveUniverse. Pageflakes is a cool tool for making the web your own, similar to Netvibes or TopNetPix, and has been covered in this blog before, most recently in January of this year when several new features were added to the tool. Under its new ownership, the tool so far keeps getting better.
A collection of a dozen cool webmaster tools including Mark Alert (provides an alert anytime a domain uses your trademark), detailed uptime reports on web hosting providers, DNS Tools (whois, traceroute, and ping), Domain Monitor (a free tool to monitor all your domains) and more.
Best of 2008: Search Engine Marketing
Saturday, December 12th, 2009Originally published on WebMarketCentral between August 2008 and January 2009.
Everything But Google: Alternative Search Marketing Options: SES San Jose by Search Engine Journal
Blogging a session on alternative search marketing outlets at the SES conference, Darrell Long provides bite-sized updates on pay-per-post (boo!), Superpages, Facebook, Quigo (interesting), ContextWeb, LookSmart, ASK (lower CPA than Google? hmm…) and MSN.
Why Google keywords cost more but deliver less by iMedia Connection
Dave McCarthy explains how Google uses its quality score to reward (or punish) advertisers, how to improve your quality score, and what types of landing page offers to avoid. All of which explains the interest in Darrell’s post above.
Killer PPC Ads: The Fundamentals by Search Engine Watch
An outstanding post from David Szetela that walks you step-by-step through the process of turning a boring, unproductive search ad into a “killer ad” that stands out and performs. Among his tips: speak directly to your audience, sell benefits not features, and use a clear call to action.
10 tips for scrutinizing paid search agencies by iMedia Connection
Noah Elkin offers thoughtful advice to organizations looking for search marketing help. Among his recommendations: think about your goals and budget first, so your needs are clear; think about the size of agency you’ll be most comfortable working with (“Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond?”); and finding an agency that has experience solving your specific type of challenge is sometimes more important than finding one with similar industry experience.
Six benchmarks for the perfect search campaign by DMNews
Howard Sewell lists his ideal criteria for measuring the success of SEM campaigns. Of course, any search marketing program should do more than just generate clicks—without some measure of ROI, it’s too easy to spend money unproductively. Still, even Sewell admits that his list is an ideal that few if any programs fully meet. For example, “generates a cost per acquisition (CPA)…competitive with other advertising vehicles” is an extremely reasonable goal for almost any advertiser, while few organizations really have backend systems in place sophisticated enough to measure ROI on an individual keyword basis.
Optimize PPC Campaigns by SEM Scoop
A short but useful (particularly for SEM newbies) post on how to maximize results from paid search campaigns. Basically, 1) use keyword tools to help develop a solid list of PPC search phrases, which will be pruned over time; 2) test keywords, ads, landing pages—everything; and 3) understand and utilize broad, exact, phrase and negative matches.
The 5 Biggest Mistakes in PPC Testing by Search Engine Journal
The biggest mistake advertisers can make in an SEM campaign is not testing. Without full conversion tracking in place, there’s no way to measure ROI—and without testing, there’s no way to maximize return. Brian Carter notes both of those points and explains three other common PPC testing mistakes.
7 Tips to Save Money on Pay-Per-Click Campaign by Saad Kamal
Great advice on how to set up an AdWords program that produces positive ROI, though written more for newbies than seasoned pros. Among the recommendations here: understand keyword match types and use wisely, bid in odd amounts, and avoid the content network—at least until you have the search side performing effectively.
5 Keyword Strategies for B2B PPC Campaigns by High Rankings Advisor
Andy Komack offers five valuable, practical tips for improving web marketing results, such as “Users Do Not Search for ‘Solutions’” (so true!) and “Apply Your PPC Intelligence to SEO.” This is a relatively quick but highly worthwhile read.
Cookies, Milk & Kramer: Converting Visitors Into Buyers @ SES by aimClear Blog
Charlene Jaszewski, self-described “Internet Consultant and Word Wrangler Extraordinaire,” provides an excellent and detailed summary of presentations by Mike Moran, author of Do It Wrong Quickly
Challenges of Paid Search Marketing in 2008 by PPC Blog
PPC guru Gordon Choi outlines the challenges that pay-per-click advertisers will face as this space becomes more competitive, and provides strategies for addressing these challenges, including how to structure and retain PPC staff, monitor click fraud and write more effective ads.
Using PPC for Conquesting Your Competitor’s Brand Keywords by Search Marketing Sage
As Tad Miller explains, “‘Conquesting,’ as used in the Advertising Industry, is a means to deploy an advertisement for one’s products or services adjacent to editorial content relating to the competitor or the competitors’ products. In the online world it usually means bidding on your competitor’s ‘brand’ keywords on a Pay Per Click Advertising platform.” As a PPC tactic, it tends to have a high cost but also a high value per conversion. His post outlines five challenges of keyword conquesting along with six solutions to those challenges.
2 Major Reasons Why You Should Run a Search Query Report Today! by PPC Hero
This post shows how to use the Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report to generate new keyword ideas as well as to identify negative keywords for exclusion from your campaigns.
Marketing lessons learned form pay-per-click analytics by John W Ellis
How PPC analytics take the guesswork out of marketing, providing precise, quantitative feedback on elements like ad messages, geo-targeting and keyword selection.
Essential metrics in paid-keyword campaigns by DMNews
Olivier Silvestre provides guidance on optimizing landing pages, ad copy and keywords through the proper use of actionable SEM metrics.
Campaign Maintenance – Removing dead keywords by CDF Networks
A very brief post that doesn’t say a whole lot but provides an important reminder: while it’s important to experiment with new keywords to try to maximize campaign results, it’s also critical to periodically prune unproductive keywords in order to maintain high quality scores.
The Great (And Completely Ridiculous) ‘In-house vs. Outsourced SEM’ Debate by MediaPost Search Insider
Dave Pasternack hammers home the value of using an outside specialist firm for search marketing by looking at the possible reasons some executives might still believe their in-house teams can do this just as well. There is no explanation, however, for the incredibly wrongheaded statement about SEO in the last paragraph; typo?
Yahoo Smart Start – A Handy Guide For Yahoo Advertisers by Google Analytics Blog
PPC specialist Katherine Anderson recommends the downloadable Yahoo Smart Start manual as both a valuable guide for beginners and reference for experienced search marketers, saying “the book reaches out well to its target audience and addresses common concerns of new and experienced advertisers in an easy and understandable way.”
Google Analytics Keyword Sleuth vs Search Query Performance Report by Google Analytics Blog
Mark Curtis offers up a detailed comparison of these two helpful PPC keyword research tools. Both are free, but one is considerably faster and more thorough.
SEO and SEM Shortcuts, Spying and Stats to Dominate Google! by SiteProNews
Writer Michael Small supplies some now-slightly-out-of-date but still useful statistics on usage of the leading search engines as well as advice on tools to help improve both SEO and search marketing results.
The AdWords Content Network – Better Than Ever by PPC Discussions
Reflecting the experience of many search marketers, blogger Jeremy Mayes gives 10 reasons why the Google content network no longer sucks for advertisers. Thanks to improved quality of sites in the network, along with other factors, the content network can now provide reasonably good lead generation performance often for considerably less than the cost of search-driven conversions.
Whats the best keyword match type? by CDF Networks
Broad match, exact match, phrase match, negative match…ever wonder when to use which? This brief yet helpful post provides some answers.
Four Tricks to Gain An Unfair Advantage on AdWords by Search Marketing Standard
“Unfair advantage” may be stretching the case a bit, but author Andrey Milyan nevertheless presents four tactics that enhance your SEM results with Google AdWords.
With A/B Testing – You Don’t Think, You Know by Find Resolution
In this articulate and well-researched post, Jeff Campbell lays out a 10-step program for scientifically performing split tests to optimize campaign copy.
Why YOU fail with Google Adwords by SiteProNews
Leighton James ticks off ten common mistakes to avoid in PPC campaigns, from including too many poorly targeted keywords and failing to optimize landing pages to improperly using phrase matching options and modifying bids for the content network.
Avoid Scope Creep Money Pit SEM Jobs by aimClear Search Marketing Blog
In kind of an inside-baseball piece for search marketing agencies, Marty Weintraub shares his firm’s goals and scope document, which is designed to set clear expectations, avoid expensive scope creep and, in the end, make projects fair for both agencies and their clients.
PPC Automation: Robots vs Humans by StraightUpSearch
This post makes the case for using a real live PPC manager instead of PPC automation software. In practice, both are probably needed. Particularly for large, complex campaigns, automation software can improve efficiency and reduce total costs. But the software itself is just a tool; for best results, it needs to used in the hands of an expert search marketing professional who can use it to streamline tedious tasks while applying human judgment in areas such as optimizing ad copy and aligning SEM programs with overall marketing goals.
Pay Per Click Advertising Tip #11 – Conversion Tracking by semvironment
Okay, it’s kind of basic, but conversion tracking is essential to determining and optimizing ROI from search marketing programs. This post walks readers through the conversion tracking process on AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.
Website Visitors Read Your Copy, Right? by Search Marketing Standard
Uh, no. Kevin Gold offers a couple of examples demonstrating that ad clickers don’t read landing page copy in detail. In other words, they respond to what they think the offer is rather than what it actually is. As with all other elements of search marketing campaigns, the key is to test, test, test landing page copy to not simply maximize leads but also disqualify resource-consuming non-prospects.
PPC ads should always lead your online sales efforts by DMNews
Writer Tim Schaden makes a compelling case that PPC efforts should precede and guide SEO efforts. Because PPC produces almost immediate results—while SEO changes need weeks to take effect—it’s the ideal testing ground for the productivity of various search phrases for a particular offering. Armed with analysis from PPC testing, SEO efforts can be focused on optimizing for the most valuable terms for a specific company, product or service.
