Breaking News
Can “w00t” Provide Wikipedia with Directions?
Merriam Webster just announced “w00t” as the online word of the year 2007.
According to The New York Times,
”W00t,” a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher’s online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.
Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, said ”w00t” was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.
”It shows a really interesting thing that’s going on in language. It’s a term that’s arrived only because we’re now communicating electronically with each other,” Morse said.
Gamers commonly substitute numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, Morse says, creating what they call ”l33t speak” — that’s ”leet” when spoken, short for ”elite” to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, Amit points out that Wikipedia members proposed deleting the W00t page from the Wikipedia database on December 12, claiming the term hasn’t yet reached general usage.
Hmm… I bet it won’t be deleted now. Then again, the whims of Wikipedia’s editors aren’t subject to anything beyond their whims. I also wonder what impact this might have on people searching for “woot” and “Woot.com,” since it’s now the #1 search result.
Each day, Woot.com has a new featured item for sale. One new thing per day. If you don’t buy it now, better luck next time.
I visit Woot.com each morning just because of their excellent copywriting — you can get great words and great deals. Today, they’re selling a touchscreen GPS. Maybe the folks from Wikipedia should get one; it could help steer them on a better path.
W00t!
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Amazon’s Patented Lousy Service
Techdirt reports that Amazon has been awarded a patent for Generating Current Order Fulfillment Plans Based on Expected Future Orders. Essentially, if Amazon deems that you won’t be a long-time customer or ordering again soon, your order will take longer to be expedited.”
This comes after Amazon snuck One-Click past the patent system by changing the word “a” to “the,” and adding the phrase “purchasable through a shopping cart model.” According to Slashdot, lawyers for Amazon “apparently managed to reinstate two of CEO Jeff Bezos’ 1-Click Patent claims that were rejected a month earlier.”
Once again, Jeff Bezos is making his mark on commerce.
Amazonian Customer Disservice
If you don’t get your order on time, just chalk it up to Amazon thinking you aren’t worth it as a customer. Do you think they’re doing this to prevent other companies from providing lousy service?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Omniture Acquires Visual Sciences
Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), a leading provider of online business optimization software, announced today a definitive agreement to acquire Visual Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: VSCN) in a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $394 million.
This is a great move for the web analytics industries and their customers. Consolidation helps to create standards. My personal congratulations to Jim MacIntyre and all our friends at Visual Sciences, and to Josh James and crew at Omniture. Best of luck to all involved.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Showdown at Emetrics Summit: Google Analytics Retools, Microsoft to Compete
Competition among web analytics providers is heating up. Today, at the Emetics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC, Google (GOOG) announced several new features for its popular Google Analytics tool, including a customizable Google-branded in-site search box, in-site search reporting, event tracking and updates to its Urchin software — all of which should be a big help to small and medium-sized e-commerce shops. Previously at the Summit, Microsoft (MSFT) announced its own analytics platform, Gatineau.
How will these two giants compete? Here’s what we know so far…
Future Now’s Chief Scientist John Quarto-vonTivadar — who’s speaking at the Emetics Summit and spent a good chunk of last week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters — emailed me to share his opinion of the Google Analytics updates. John tells us that the in-site search is “cool,” and that it’s not dependent on Google search at all. According to John, it’s simply “a way of recording what searches are being done in-site, then relating metrics to it.” But it’s not that deep, he says. In other words, the big news isn’t how well the in-site search feature works, but that in-site search can be tracked at all. As for the rest of Google’s announcement, John says:
Event tracking is very cool and the most important feature. However, [Google’s announcement] underplayed the switch from using urchin.js to ga.js. It’s a big deal. The script is more complex (e.g., more features for the developers), and my understanding is that once you make the switch, you can’t switch back. I’m not sure whether the data will migrate forward, that would have to be checked. Also, you can’t use both urchin.js and ga.js at the same time, so it seems to be very much of a jump-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool thing.
Outbound links are an additional new feature. I think they’ve made a mistake, however, in counting anything that happens up until an outbound link as ‘zero time on site,’ and I predict they will end up being forced to reconsider that. They also never made clear — although I’m sure they are clear themselves — as to whether the new Urchin reflects all the functionality of the new ga.js, or whether one or the other is more advanced. The next questions would be, If that’s the case, when will the other ‘catch up’? So, if you do the free software, you get X features, but if you do the paid software, you get Y features — but why is Y less than X ??
[UPDATE: Marketing Pilgrim has a great screenshot of the event tracking integration, and Avinash Kaushik gives a full tutorial of how to use in-site search data.]
The Emetrics Summit crowd also got to see a demonstration of Microsoft’s beta platform, thanks to Product Manager Ian Thomas. On his Web Analytics World blog, Manoj Jasra shares his first impressions of Gatineua :
One of the coolest features which I noticed was the ability to measure the performance of individual webpage sections giving a whole new level of granularity. Microsoft hopes to takeaway some of Google Analytics’ market share, however I don’t think this is the easiest of tasks. Looking at the initial screenshots of Gatineau you can see that they are also implementing an ajax based user interface, however it currently doesn’t have polish of Google Analytics’ interface.
Once again, it looks like Microsoft has some catching up to do — but at least they’re getting used to it.
What do you think? Can Microsoft hurry up, launch, and out-pace Google Analytics, or will the “search giant” continue beating the “software giant” on its own bean stalk?
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Bryan Eisenberg Appointed to “Marketing Dream Team”
A new collective of forward-thinking marketers has emerged, and you’re all invited to join in and tap their knowledge directly. Founded by John Marshall, Michael Stebbins, and Avinash Kaushik, Market Motive — a premium service for marketing professionals — offers a concrete advantage to its members: direct access to some of the brightest minds in online conversion, email, search, web analytics, and ROI marketing. That’s why we’re especially proud to announce that Market Motive has named our own Bryan Eisenberg to its marketing “Dream Team.” Bryan will serve as the group’s resident conversion expert, a respectful nod to Future Now’s trailblazing work in the field of Conversion Rate Marketing since 1998 (when conversion and ROI took a back seat to “hits” and “eyeballs” — ouch!).
In the press release, which also announces the addition of Alan Rimm-Kauffman to its faculty, Market Motive CTO — and former CEO and founder of ClickTracks — John Marshall had these kind words:
Bryan’s knowledge of psychology and how that influences the way people buy is legendary. He brings expertise and insight that has been honed through spending hour upon hour optimizing the sites of some of the largest companies on the web. Once you have seen Bryan dissect a website and explain how each component can be improved, you will be amazed at how sites can be improved to produce more revenue. Market Motive subscribers have already benefited from the insights he provides through a special interactive site clinic. We are delighted to have his involvement.
By connecting with members in small groups, via webinar-style online conference calls and training sessions, Market Motive’s faculty has the opportunity to answer specific questions in real time. It’s like having your own personal study group to help you tackle the tough issues. Here’s what one member, Immeria’s Stephane Hamel, had to say about the experience:
I spent about an hour with Bryan. We talked about my goals as a freelance, discussed persuasion architecture, and I had the honor to take a glimpse at the internals of their process and tools. Persuasion architecture is all about process, but it’s also supported by a tool (or a set of tools) that could elevate any analyst job to levels of insights that were unimaginable without actually tying up Bryan to a chair beside you.
Very cool! Being recognized by Market Motive as a leader in online and multi-channel strategy is a wonderful thing, but if we know Bryan at all, hearing feedback like this from the rest of his peers after working with them directly is what makes him wake up each morning before the rest of us, surprising the lucky folks here at Future Now with new ideas. Our staff and clients may be spoiled by him, but thanks to Market Motive, now’s your chance to share Bryan’s insights first-hand.
Congratulations, Bryan. You grok!
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Written by:The Grok
Amazon is Ready to Take a Bite Out of Apple
Amazon (AMZN) pulled the cover off its long-awaited music store, Amazon MP3. Amazon is targeting the long tail that Apple (AAPL) hasn’t captured. Their selection is DRM-free MP3s with over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Most songs are priced between 89 cents and 99 cents.
Will they outsell Apple’s iTunes?
Check it out and compare it to iTunes. Do you think one is better than the other? Will you shop at both or keep your loyalty to one?
(UPDATE: It seems that Virgin Digital, the online Virgin Megastore has closed.)
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
PriceGrabber to Show “Hacker Safe” Trustmark in Results
PriceGrabber.com has just announced a partnership with ScanAlert to feature its “HACKER SAFE” logo next to results from participating e-commerce shops. This move makes PriceGrabber one of the first pricing engine to show trustmark verification next to specific vendors. (Last week, Yahoo! Shopping announced it would do the same.)
According to the news release:
HACKER SAFE integration will offer its certification throughout a network of more than 11,000 sellers and over 300 co-brand partner Web sites that incorporate PriceGrabber.com’s CPC (cost per click) product listings. According to a November 2006 Gartner report, nearly half of online U.S. adults, or 46% of more than 155 million people, say that concerns about theft of information and data breaches have affected their online transactions.
“Security concerns strongly influence many online decisions – especially when using comparison shopping engines,” noted ScanAlert CEO Ken Leonard. “Trust is a significant factor in comparison shopping. Confidence in a retailer’s trustworthiness can make the difference between shoppers clicking the buy button, or continuing their search.”
Pricing engines are a great tool for customers looking to get the best deal on a given product. But getting the “best deal” means precious little if the customer doesn’t feel confident giving you her money.
Is this a step toward creating a “value engine”? That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? 
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Would You Play with Helium?
My friend Anne Kennedy sat with me yesterday in the speakers’ room at Search Engine Strategies and told me about a company she’s involved with called Helium; a directory of about a half-million user-generated articles (so far).
But it’s much more than a directory. Helium allows articles its community considers more valuable to get better visibility — and a bigger chunk of its ad revenue. They also have an area for debate and have included a marketplace for publishers and authors to connect. Today, they have publishers willing to pay from $16 to $100 per article to some 69,000 writers, who’ve already generated 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics.
As a Publisher, you can list a bounty for any articles you want written. Authors then submit stories following your guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any article as the winner, while Helium’s peer review ratings help rank submissions.
Would you use articles written by anonymous freelancers? Have you already? Could you see yourself using Helium to bolster your content offerings and, possibly, your search engine rankings?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
“Yours for Just 3 Easy Payments of… “
eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal said today it would begin offering credit financing with General Electric Co.’s GE Money Bank. The new PayPal service, called PayPal Pay Later, allows online merchants to offer a credit account with flexible financing options such as no payments for 90 days. Merchants will not pay any additional fees, but will pay the regular PayPal processing fees.
Research commissioned by eBay showed that 56 percent of PayPal customers are more likely to buy from a retail site if a deferred payment option is available, eBay said.
This is an interesting development in the online payment services battle. Amazon (AMZN) just announced they’re entering the space with their own payment system. So, this news ups the ante between PayPal, Google Checkout and Amazon Payment.
Retailers who don’t take advantage of this may be missing out. We’ve seen the success that offering a deferred payment options has brought to several retailers we’ve worked with. To see a great example of how this deferred payment is being used by a retailer, check out Ice.com.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Google AdWords Optimizer: Consulting In a Box
Google announced a new ad performance tool called Campaign Optimizer that you can find once you log into your Google AdWords account. Google’s Campaign Optimizer tool analyzes your campaign budget, keywords, and landing page to see what settings have or haven’t worked well for you recently. It then generates a customized proposal of ideas for your campaign aimed at improving your advertising return on investment. You can then select which of the ideas you want to implement by clicking on a check box. It’s most effective on campaigns with at least two weeks of history.
The Campaign Optimizer may propose any combination of the following changes:
- Change daily budget.
- Add new keywords.
- Delete keywords.
- Change keyword matching options.
- Adjust keyword cost-per-click (CPC) bids.
This is certainly going to help many of the people who set their AdWords account and have left them on autopilot, hoping to get a great return. Google acknowledges that they want to continue to increase the capabilities of the Campaign Optimizer. Of course, GrokDotCom readers know optimizing your ad spend is only half the battle. Once you get them to click on your Google AdWord, you need to provide them with the proper scent and persuasive experience in order to get them to take the action you want them to take. Very few businesses — other than Google — make money by getting people to just click on the ads.
This is another step in the right direction for Google.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
