Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

Hey! Tom LeBaron and I won first place in an Omniture-sponsored web analytics contest. I've always, always wanted an oversized novelty check. That's even better than a trophy! We just appeared again on the front page of the Marriot School eBusiness Center newsletter:

Web site analysis technology became the buzzword across campus this past semester through the first Web Analytics Competition. Students who participated in the competition had the opportunity to expand their knowledge of web site analysis and develop skills that put them ahead of their peers.

Seventy students composed the thirty-two teams that participated in the competition which was sponsored by the Kevin and Debra Rollins Center for eBusiness and Omniture Inc., a web analytics company.

“A lot of them did it just for the experience,” said Derrick Davis, the eBusiness Center student lead in charge of curriculum and competition. “Students wanted to learn more.”

Students used Omniture’s SiteCatalyst, a product that tracks statistics from other companies’ web sites. Omniture sent one of their own trainers to explain how to use SiteCatalyst and to introduce the company hobbytron.com, which served as the students’ client during this hands-on experience.

“‘Omniture University,’ is the training Omniture gives its professionals, which usually is a two-day class,” Davis said. “This was condensed into two hours for students.”

Students had two weeks to work on the project by themselves until they presented their finding to the judges, which consisted of Omniture CEO Josh James, NextPage Marketing Vice-President Cydni Tetro, and other Omniture executives.

Four finalist teams were called back to the final competition on 11 November. Davis said that the judges commented that half of the groups did better than their employees.

Cameron Barnes, Omniture group manager, said they were not disappointed with students’ performance and were very pleased with the quality of their work.

“Students displayed high caliber of work and professionalism,” Barnes said. “The site they were working with had some hard-to-find traps, and yet some of the students did.”

The final presentations had the flavor of real world events, with surprises such as the fire alarm going off in the middle of a presentation.

“That’s something I didn’t expect,” said Davis, who was in charge of coordinating the competition from its concept to the final day of events. “I told everybody to get out and come back as soon as possible when the alarm was cleared.”

Tom LeBaron and Tom Dalton received the first prize of $2,500. Brent Dance and Patrick Hillery’s team placed second and was awarded $1,000. The third place prize of $500 went to Jarom Adair. These team’s members received a job interview with the company. “We are grateful for the Omniture Team’s financial and logistical support of this event,” said Dr. Stephen Liddle, director of the eBusiness Center. “Omniture is a great partner and they help us deliver a high-value experience for our students.”

Davis said Omniture executives showed interest in participating again and making it an annual competition.

I'll try and hunt down our Powerpoint presentation -- it has more headlines than content, because we wanted to be able to adjust our presentation to the types of questions and feedback we got from the judges, but it's still interesting.

The tactic that won the day (in my opinion): we presented an executive-level overview. Enough specifics to show that we knew what we were talking about (and some very, very specifics to show that we knew better than anyone else) and then a strategic discussion of how to move forward in cooperation with their IT and marketing teams. Nobody wants to hire an arrogant, hard-to-work-with consultant, and nobody wants to be dependant on that consultant forever. You're going to hire the guy who will work well with your existing (and permanent) teams. We stressed that we didn't want a lifelong dependance, either -- one of our chief goals is to train your team to be able to do this on their own.

It was a great, great day.

So, Tom. What do you do?

Corporate websites are often confusing and ineffective. I help make them work better.

Really? How do you do that?

I help businesses define their goals and measure specific things on their sites, so we can make changes to improve it over time.

Huh! (Nodding.)

A website can be a business' most effective sales channel. But most companies' sites are created by graphic designers or committees of people without specific insight into how to best use the Internet for marketing. For instance, Genetree is a genetic testing company. They had a site with a shopping cart, but it was hard for people to use and the site was confusing. The site didn't sell very many products at all.

I installed SiteCatalyst, a very good site tracking system, to help me see how people were actually using the site. I identified areas where people were leaving the site, and found that the shopping cart had a few specific problems. We redesigned the cart, cleaning up the forms and asking for less information. We rewrote some of the main pages and designed some ads and buttons to make the site easier to follow. We also added new pages for search engines to find and set up an affiliate program for them.

Their website has grown steadily over the last three years, and now it is their main source of sales. It is also the most popular website in the genetic testing industry -- its market share on the search engines is almost twice that of their next competitor.

Woah! Can you do that for me?

Yes. Yes, I can. (Smile.)

What is the role of the US government in relation to US citizens performing data-gathering and other intelligence functions under "deep cover" in other countries?

If the US has helped forge documents for that person, it is certainly liable. However, how would a foreign government prove that? What if the US is receiving communication from that person? Could the US get in trouble for what one of its citizens is doing?

That sounds a lot like Palestinian terrorism, I suppose. Citizens may decide to strap bombs on themselves and head into Israel. But when it happens, the Palestinian government takes heat for it. They are then forced to make a big show of stopping it, by cracking down.

More to come.

I wrote this for work, but we're making it public, so I figured I'd share it here, too. I'm repurposing content!

Anyway, here's the quiz. Seven common SEO tactics -- do you know which are good, and which will get your site delisted, and why?

1. Buy multiple domain names with different keywords and point them all to your site
2. Add unique meta-tags to every page on your site
3. Increase the keyword density of your pages to five percent, or twenty percent, or even fifty percent
4. You can’t get away with simple white text on a white background, but use CSS to mask the color and do the same thing
5. Detect the search engine ‘crawlers’ and show them different, keyword-rich versions of your flash or other pages
6. Put ‘alt tags’ on all of your images and other content
7. Edit your robots.txt file to include a command to “index=all; revisit=daily”

Answers are after the jump...

Businessweek reports that the first wave of Google Print advertisers were disappointed -- 9 to 1. Only one of ten advertisers saw returns sufficient to justify their investment. Businessweek was quick to declare the death of this program.

I'd like to consider a few points not mentioned in their article (nor in any other coverage I've seen of the matter):

1. How many traditional advertisers can track activity back to a single print ad well enough to justify it on its face? Probably not many. Any single ad is just a blip in an ocean of marketing activity surrounding a brand or product. If (as it appears was the case in this survey) direct marketers are trying to gauge the performance of their print ads with the same level of detail that they judge their Adwords campaigns, of course they were disappointed. What metric were advertisers using to measure conversions from their print ads?

   Consider a kid who read the ad and thought, "That's just the thing for me!" What could that kid then do, that would alert the advertiser to the fact that it was that magazine ad that brought them to the site to buy? Tracking URLs get stripped. People use Google to find URLs even if they have the whole thing there in front of them. The kid could have even come through an Adword ad to get to the site, if the advertiser was bidding #1 on his own brand name or whatever the kid happened to type.

2. The companies participating in this trial probably had no experience in print advertising. Copywriters trained to compose 30-character lines of text to fit in an Adwords slot would have a hard time competing with the Madison Avenue folks also advertising in the magazine. People reading a magazine are in an entirely different mindset than those using Google to search for products. How many of the first wave of advertisers considered the implications and produced creatives as well-tuned for this target market as they are for their online market? (Do any of them remember how successful their first online campaigns were?)
3. Google needs to recognize it is 'leveraging' a different strength here. The Adwords program provides two benefits -- one is the contextual targeting model, which ads in magazines will largely lack. The other, however, is the low-friction marketplace for advertising. As a middleman, Google can provide a much less painful way for advertisers to deal with publishers. If they focus on that, this program will succeed.

The concerns of advertising tainting editorial content are mitigated by Google Print. The constant negotiating and mind-games are removed.

As a vehicle to allow tiny companies to advertise in the great publications of the world, this initiative is probably doomed. But as a step forward in the development of the advertiser/publisher relationship, this is fantastic.

In defense of Google, I once spoke up at a meeting and said that since they are a private company, they can run their business however they want. The immediate reply: "They're a public company. They went IPO months ago."

I let it go, but I have since stumbled across a concise explanation of the distinction, which I will post here for my own convenience.

No, Google is a public company. You see there's this obscure institution called the "stock market"...

No, Google offered some shares to be exchanged on a particular market, making them a publically traded company, but they are in fact, a private entity all the same. In this short review of high school level Social Studies, the public sector is the Government, and the private sector is everything else. The unrelated term "publically traded" simply means that there are no buyer restrictions on who may own or trade their stocks. There is such a thing as stocks that are not publically traded as well.

Regardless of the trading of their stock certificates in the marketplace, Google does not gain some new requirement to rank companies/sites according to anyone elses wishes on how they should be ranked.

From a discussion thread on Slashdot, A great place to quickly gather the thoughts of hundreds of people on news and technology.

Smarter spam might serve a valuable purpose: protecting privacy on the Internet. One of the smartest things the RIAA (may their souls rest in eternal torment) has ever done was flooding the P2P networks with 'fake' or corrupted versions of popular songs. Horrible, but brilliant. Once the networks were filled with their fake versions it was very difficult for people to use them.

The same principle could apply to privacy on the net in general. If the net were flooded with fake websites, complete with fake posts and threads, using real people's names, it would make tracking people much more difficult. A company that's been slandered on a couple mesage boards could create a million more message boards -- with good, bad, and indifferent messages. Then they could point to the whole set and say, "All these criticisms are ridiculous!"

If I wanted to change my online persona, I could have a hundred fake Tom Daltons go do things online, so it was impossible to tell what was really me and what was just another digital, false shadow.

Not that I'm convinced that privacy is really the direction the net needs to go. But that's another story another.

Here's a first-and-last sort of thing: a podcast! I won't be doing this on a regular basis, even though it's almost no work at all. I don't really like the sound of my voice.

But I wanted to show anyone who's interested how very easy it is to make a "professional" podcast. So here's my attempt.

Download MP3: 10x Marketing and Cheap Microphones

The PodCast:

dalton podcast

Here's some nuggets of humor from Yahoo's FAQ about their PPC program:

1. How do I know the Click Protection System is working?

First of all, to verify the effectiveness of the Click Protection System, you must have a tracking URL in place on all of your listings.

With the tracking URL, you are able to review your Web logs for the phrase "source=yahoo." You will be able to see that Yahoo is delivering you lots of targeted traffic, including lots of traffic from sites like Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista. Read more about tracking URLs.

Um... That doesn't address the question at all. It's a nice, long answer, and most people will probably never read it to realize that it has nothing to do with what was asked, but I did.

2. Does Yahoo! Search Marketing monitor the effectiveness of its Click Protection Software?

When situations arise in which our specialists discover click patterns that do not seem to be valid clicks, Yahoo! Search Marketing immediately refunds affected advertisers.

We had some fun with this one recently. We got charged $14,000 for clicks on an account where we had budgeted $30. We were told it will be four weeks for them to investigate. That's a pretty drawn-out "immediately."

3. How close to my budgeted amount will I actually spend?

...your monthly spend comes very close to 30 times your daily budget.

Great. I'll tell accounting right away. We'll be very close to our budget, folks. Yahoo assures me. How close? Which way? Will be slightly overdrawn? Do I need to deposit an extra 5% to cover the potential overage? An extra 20%? I dunno. Maybe I'll go check their FAQ.

4. Can I modify my budget amount after I've set it?

Yes, you can change your budgeted amount at any time on the Budgeting page under the Money Manager tab by logging into your account. Please note that any changes you make to your budget will take effect within a few hours, and only affect your spend going forward (your target monthly budget will be recalculated and a new 30-day period will begin).

This is fantastic. Not only will my changes be implemented within a precise "few hours" (is it 3? or 8?) but Yahoo will helpfully start managing my budget on 30-day cycles from that point. So if I see my spend is a bit too high on the 15th and I nudge it down, Yahoo will begin sending me traffic spikes on the 16th of each month. Unless one of the months is February, or one of the other non-30-day months. (Count your knuckles.)

I won't mention the references to their monthly minimum fee, which was discontinued months ago.

How can Yahoo do this? They're an Internet company. They're supposed to be good... aren't they?

I thought Google's PPC program was clunky and hard to work with, but Yahoo has changed my perspective rather dramatically.

A $36 million bond. Zoning and planning. Years of construction work. And finally, yesterday, Provo's high-speed fiber optic network reached my neighborhood.

I can't imagine a candidate more perfect for this new service than me. I mean, c'mon. If you're reading this, you know me. Fiber optic Internet and phone and TV? The future is here! Now!

But there's a catch. The flyer on my door declared, "All of these services are now available for a fraction of what you've been paying for them, through Veracity Communications powered by iProvo." A salesman's phone number was scribbled on it. I prepared to call him by grabbing my most recent telecom bills to compare.

I'm currently paying:
==============
(Comcast) Limited Basic Cable TV -- $12.62
(Comcast) Internet -- $29.95 ($52.95 minus a $23 discount introduced just before iProvo came...)
(Qwest) Phone -- $32.29 ($20.45 basic service, $11.84 fees)

Total: $76.46
==============

Veracity's "fraction of the price" package:
==============
Faster Internet, though the difference between a 1-second load time and a .045-second load time is small
VoIP which requires me to buy a new phone
Cable with more channels, but most that we don't want

Total: $94.94
==============

April said she'd consider it if the TV lineup included TLC. It doesn't, though. To get that, we'd have to do the $113.94 package. Over a year, that would be almost $500 extra.

That's a fraction, by the way, of 3/2 of what we're currently paying. Their flyer was right.

So, sarcastic humor aside... what does this mean for Provo? If they're not willing to compete with the big boys (the salesman told me they couldn't match what Comcast and Qwest are charging me -- "we don't do that") they had no business getting into the arena. And we just wasted $36 million dollars. That I suppose I'll be paying anyway, since they'll just raise my ultility prices to cover it.

And I was so excited about having fiber optic! Maybe once iProvo goes bankrupt, Comcast will buy their dead lines and upgrade. That'd be cool.

(And I'm not going to get into the predatory tactic of discounting your product when a competitor enters the market -- that's legal, smart, and not a problem because there's still competition from Qwest and MStar and Digis.)