Compete.com has released "The Compete Attention 200" which attempts to help accurately measure user engagement.  Developing an engagement metric is challenging but if done correctly can help advertisers plan and measure their ad spends more effectively.

From the post: The Attention Index is based on the amount of time U.S. internet users spend across the top one million websites. The Compete Attention 200™ represents the best of the best each month.

Who made the cut? The top ten should really be no surprise. MySpace leads the pack, followed by Yahoo, MSN, Ebay, Google, AOL, Pogo, Facebook, Amazon and Craigslist.

Some noteworthy website monetization news today with the announcement that the Fast's AdMomentum platform will be released later this quarter as a private-label contextual advertising and monetization solution for online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers.

“There’s no question that search technology and performance advertising have dramatically transformed the world of publishing, but for many publishers the transformation has not paid off as well as it should,” said John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST. “Publishers want to maintain control of their revenue, serving their advertisers and audiences more effectively, and this has been difficult to do with third-party platforms. With FAST AdMomentum, we give that control and independence back to publishers – enabling them for the first time to fully monetize their assets without having to share revenues or risk customer disintermediation.”

Tags: fast, admomentum, fastsearch, john lervik, website monetization, contextual advertising, media companies, online retailers, telecommunication service providers, online publishers, advertising revenue, website publishers, google adsense, ypn

Jon Myers, Search Director for UK-based search engine marketing specialist Latitude has released a white paper using mathematic equations and principals to explain the theories and logic behind the Long Tail of search.

Unless you are a mathemetician or just very good at examining numbers, much of the white paper can make your eyes glaze over. But, there are some good insights to consider when shopping for keywords or planning SEO campaigns.

An important aspect of the Long Tail theory that Myers explains in great detail is the power of branding. The Long Tail of search suggests that the more obscure search terms have value in that users are closer to a buying decision when searching for more specific terms. In one of Myers' examples, a user searching for the auto "Audi" is closer to purchasing a shiny new A4 than someone searching for "new car."

 

Beginning tonight (or around 3pm EST - depending on who you are talking to), sponsored advertising on Yahoo! search results will be ranked based on bid price and quality score. Website Magazine reported on this a few weeks ago (read that post here). The change that Panama brings will help Yahoo place ads in front of users that are more likely to be clicked, and that means more revenue. There is quite a bit of speculation in certain circles that Panama is intended to be flexible enough to eventually handle video and audio ads and to distribute ads to mobile devices.

Tags: yahoo, YSM, panama, advertising, advertisers, yahoo search marketing

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld discussing "25 signals of poor quality sites" that is a good read. While I don't agree with all of the points that are being made, and many are simply mistakes made by novices, it's definitely a good refresher read and something to share with those just getting started on their path to Web success.

A few of the signals that I tend to agree with most and that that I use with the greatest frequency in determing the quality of a site are the presence/absence of link request pages, presence/absence of a privacy policy, availability of contact information, amount of unrelated subject information, and the presence (or lack thereof) of on site errors - Php/MySql or just 404 pages.

Read the entire thread at WebmasterWorld.

Digital Inspiration has a good post on why it’s useful to offer blog readers an email subscription. In short, most people still don't use those little orange RSS icons and even if they do, offering a traditional email newsletter can make sense because it makes for a more convenient user experience.

14% of Website Magazine Blog RSS subscribers are Feedburner email subscriptions, but I've heard that this number can often reach to 30-40% of an audience depending on the simplicity/complexity of the topics being covered. Either way, it's a good supplemental program for a blog to offer an email version of blog posts so definitely look at services such as Feedburner, FeedBlitz or R-Mail if you haven't already.

Learn more about Website Magazine RSS feeds
Subscribe to the Website Magazine RSS Feed or sign up for the daily newsletter which contains a summary of the daily blog posts now.


Tags: email, rss, blogging, blog, blogger, email

The eBuity Group is presenting some interesting information on the state of spam in the blogsphere. The key findings:

• 53% of all pings are spam, 64% of all pings from blogs in English are spam

• 56% of all pinging blogs are spam

• MySpace is now the biggest contributor to the blogosphere.

• Blogspot continues to be heavily spammed

• Most spam blogs are still hosted in the US

Technorati Tags: spam, splogs, spam blogs, blogs, pinging, ping

eMarketer released the results of a recent survey taken in conjunction with MarketingSherpa at a recent ad:tech show. The focus on the survey is what marketers think is working in online marketing, what is not working, what strategies are being used more and what strategies are waning.

A couple of highlights:

• About online advertising tactics that worked best, search engine optimization (SEO) jumped from a 33% response in 2005 to 45% in 2006.
• Paid search ads answered as the best-performing tactic, although down from 52% in 2005 to 49% in 2006.
• Rented email lists reported as the worst-performing tactic for the second year in a row, garnering 56% of respondents.
• Tactics that online marketers plan a 5% increase in budget investment - search marketing leading with 34%, followed by email marketing to in-house lists with 27%.
• For emerging advertising tactics, ads on third-party blogs and blog networks led the way 42% of respondents, followed closely by social networking sites with 40%

This is, however, a skewed report and eMarkter does include a disclaimer stating the same. The audience is an ad:tech-attending crowd, so it's not a snippet of the marketing industry as a whole. What is disappointing, and what eMarketer does not address, is that there are no figures as to the number of respondents to the survey. It could have been 10 people or 10,000. We're left guessing on that one.

BloggerDesign has developed an excellent plugin dubbed FB StandardStats that makes installing Feedburner’s stats code simple for WordPress blogs. This plugin is an easy way for those that may be "programming challenged" and using WordPress to get the benefit of Feedburner's stats package (which includes tracking of visitors, the top pages of a site, the top incoming traffic sources and the top outgoing links) without having to modify any code at all. While we don't run WordPress on the Daily Blog at Website magazine, I tested the plugin out on some various blogs and it worked like a charm. A big thumps up from me.

Learn more and download FB StandardStats now. (Wordpress 1.5+ only)

LinkedCampus.com is a service offering text messaging campaigns targeted at the college campus crowd for local businesses to offer highly-targeted advertising and special offers to a text-savvy demographic. Users of the service can quickly and easily send out their messages to up to 1,500 contacts per month.

Plans range from 25 messages per month for free to $145 for the 1,500 per month plan. It's tough to find any college-aged individual that's not always within arms-length of their mobile devices, so it could be a very effective way to reach them. The service appears to be an extension of Texticate.com

You know, when I won the spelling bee at Wasena Elementary school in Roanoke, Virginia in the mid 1980's, I never realized how much that spelling superiority would impact my career. I've always had an ability to spell correctly, a skill which now lends itself well to my success with pay-per-click advertising. Keywords are important to PPC campaigns, but it could be argued that keyword typos are of equal importance.

How does good spelling equate to success with pay-per-click advertising?
Good question - here's the answer. If you can spell correctly, you also know how to spell incorrectly, right? You may be very surprised to learn just how awful many people spell, something that is only made worse by super fast typing. If you are not bidding on misspellings (typos) you're leaving cheaper, equally relevant traffic for others to acquire. If you're into PPC advertising, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes generating typos for all of your keywords - your ROI will thank you.

Here are Five Helpful Keyword Typo Generators:
Seoconsulting.de | SeoChat.com | SEObook.com | BuildTraffic.com | WebmasterBrain.com

Technorati Tags: keywords, marketing, advertising, PPC, ppc advertising, online marketing, seo, sem

The 2007 IAC Awards Call for Entry Deadline has been extended until February 15. Awards will be presented within each of the 96 industry categories and advertising formats such as online ad (including banner, pop-up or interstitial), rich media online ad, email message, online newsletter campaign, microsite/landing page, integrated ad campaign and ads the client did not choose.

If you have not yet entered your best online advertising, the IAC Awards Competition Web site is located at www.iacaward.org.

Tags: iac, web award, website awards, marketing awards, advertising awards

Superpages.com has taken a big social step forward. They have announced a feature called "Reviewer of the Week," that allows people to compete with others in their geographic area to win status as their local Reviewer of the Week.

“Local search is hot and so is social networking, so it makes sense that we combine the two,” said Robyn Rose, vice president of marketing for SuperPages.com. “Whether you're talking about finding the best Italian restaurant or a reliable plumber, SuperPages.com provides robust local search capabilities, along with ratings and user reviews, to connect circles of trusted individuals.”

Users that regularly submit reviews will be given priority and can be featured on their local SuperPages site, depending on how often they write. While not only supplying a social edge to SuperPages.com, users will certainly find extra value in the site, benefiting from "personal" referrals from their fellow citizens.

While review sites are nothing new, and one could argue that SuperPages is taking a page (pun intended) out of established review sites such as Yelp.com, SuperPages already has a leg up on the competition. Not only is their database of listings already gigantic, but once users discover the review feature, an entirely new demographic has a reason to frequent the site. An increase in popularity will also mean that it's important to optimize your businesses' contact and address information in order to ride the wave.

Website Magazine's February issue will feature an article about local search and offer tips to ensure your business is taking advantage of the growing services. Get your free subscription to Website Magazine now.

Technorati released a new features of its blog search platform on Thursday dubbed WTF (Where's the Fire). Technorati WTF is a mix of user created content and a voting-based reccomendation engine of sorts which "lets the 'knowers' tell the 'wonderers why certain search terms are so hot." WTF's, which are submitted by Technorati users, explain the buzz around people, things, and events. Paris Hilton, Windows Vista and Barack Obama are just some of the topics currently listed. Think of it as a real-time search term zeitgeist. If you think you know what's hot right now, then you can write a WTF yourself - no blog required.

Tags: technorati, wtf, technorati wtf, web promotions, online marketing

I'm expecting this to appeal to only a handful of our readers, primarily those that are online ad buyers. comScore Networks announced yesterday that the firm's audience data for online advertising networks can  now be segmented into broad consumer-focused categories through its meda Metrix service. This capability should provide a more thorough understanding for media buyers of advertising opportunities within specific content areas.

From the release: "This enhancement provides advertisers and agencies with the ability to make side-by-side comparisons between individual Web sites and advertising networks, in order to select the optimal mix of media vehicles with which to achieve their goals," commented Jeff Hackett, comScore Networks' director of agency relations. "It enables advertisers to gain deeper insight into the most effective vehicles for reaching consumers within a particular content area, while publishers and advertising networks can now quickly identify and evaluate competitors within their content category."

Tags: comscore, media metrix, ad segmentation, advertising, online advertising

Via Rueters: U.S. newspaper publishers Gannett Co. Inc., McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co. are planning to sell advertising jointly on their Web sites in a bid to capture more online revenue. It would probably be a safe bet to assume that it's a move to draw some of the dollars back from Google and Yahoo which recently signed some thirty local news outlets up to distrubute classified listings. These companies are formulating a plan to offer advertisers one-stop shopping for display ads on Internet sites.

"The goal is to create the largest network of newspaper- developed local sites for any advertiser to reach local consumers," Dubow said at the conference, according to a transcript on Gannett's Web site. What this all means to advertisers is that they may be able to start looking at online classified and display advertising more seriously. For many this is the first real sign ov viability as large U.S. newspaper publishers bulk up on online dollars as circulation at most papers slips and advertisers move away from print and onto the Internet.

Microsoft's ad management interface has been down for the past hour. Via the adCenter blog:

We are currently conducting maintenance on the adCenter user interface. The user interface will be unavailable for the next couple hours. Rest assured, your campaigns and keywords will run as usual. However, you will be unable to make changes using the user interface. Advertisers who access the system using the API will experience no issue managing campaigns. We are sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience while maintenance is being performed.

Maybe they are working to impliment the their new Google Analytics killer - Gatinuea

Just a quick note: The Web forums are abuzz with reports that Google is updating it's Toolbar PageRank. While the value (and importance) of PageRank is often debated, there is nothing nicer that seeing green - especially considering all those services (like Text-Link-Ads) which determine the value of advertisers space in many respects based on PageRank.  Sign up here right now and let us know the change (if any) to your PageRank!

Not one to discuss the ins and outs of mergers or acquisitions, yesterday's announcement that Yahoo! has officially acquired MyBlogLog for a reported $10-12 million caught my attention. The social network for bloggers and blog readers has seen significant growth in the past few months with lots of blogs (and bloggers) installing their tracking code and building their MyBlogLog community.

The importance of this acquisition is about the priority that many companies are placing on social media. But there are problems on the horizon that are important to consider. Chris Winfield of 10e20 discussed many users concerns regarding how long until spam becomes a huge problem for mybloglog. I really have to agree. On a service where links can be added willy-nilly on profile pages, and spam is already a pretty significant problem, changes to the service might improve it but it will also take away from the existing experience, you know, the experience that made it so attractive to Yahoo! Winfield suggests MoBlogLog impliment an Akismet (wordpress) type solution or provide an option to moderate their comments and choose to approve.

Quintura has released a visual search engine designed specifically for children.

Improving the user experience by replacing antiquated listings and Boolean strings with tag clouds, users can visually navigate and easily refine queries to find relevant information faster. There is not too much of a market for visual search or search for kids at the moment, but the interface is pleasing (I should know, I have two kids) and the results (powered by Yahoo! Kids) are very focused and relevant. Quintura itself makes browsing the Web in a logical way possible, especially if you're interested in researching one particular topic and don't know exactly where to start. Quintura could also be very helpful to anyone doing SEM (search engine marketing) or SEO (search engine optimization) as it provides its users with an ability to remove keywords from the tag cloud and narrow down their search to a very specific niche.

The word on the street is that Quintura is going to start an affiliate program for web-sites/blogs where one should be able to create an interactive tag cloud for easy navigation via the site and for web search.

Technorati Tags: quintura, visual search, visual search engine, yahoo kids, tag clouds