2. Search drives more sales, but shoppers are thinking longer before buying.

3. Does Google Analytics overstate the value of search? Econsultancy research shows that it might.  Make sure to at least set your cookies for 30 days.

4. our friend, Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic blog asks “Is Free Shipping More Attractive Than A Dollar Discount?”

5. A great example of why Amazon is one of the smartest online retailers. They get Social Media, Too.

6.Catch my interview with my buddy Tim Ash Interview on his Landing Page Optimization show on WebmasterRadio.fm. We discuss Brain types and personas and how they influence landing pages.

2. Dr. Ralph Wilson interviews my good friend Avinash at the eMetrics summit about Useful Key Performance indicators for small business. Ralph also did a few interviews with me. Here is the first one on “The Winning Edge“:

3. Mars Chocolates is being punished for a bad ‘Fling’ – first when people search for the website they end up sending people to a porn site. If that wasn’t bad enough, Marketing to Women guru Michele Miller explains how they missed the mark entirely on this product launch. Make sure to let Michele know what you think of her recently relaunched website Wonder Branding.

4. I am looking forward to presenting at SES Toronto June 8-10th. I’ll also be meeting several OnTarget clients as well as non-clients. Be sure to come say hello to me if you are a GrokDotCom reader and are attending the conference. Ruud Hein from Search Engine People and Sarah Benmaza of NVI interviewed me prior to attending the conference. One of the sessions I’ll be doing is “Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag.” I’ll be sharing some of my favorite tools from 33 free tools to improve your website and few others not on that list. Do you have any Free-to-cheap tools you use that I should add?

5. Larry Chase who has been publishing his newsletter, Web Digest for Marketers, just slightly longer than Dr. Ralph Wilson’s, Web Marketing Today (I’ve been a faithful subscriber to both of their newsletters for over a decade) interviewed me about the 3 common mistakes in web analytics.

6. My friend Stéphane Hamel shares some web analytics market research and his take on it from his collaboration with Forrester’s John Lovett.

* Photo: Courtesy of Shutterstock Images LLC. Shutterstock and their PR agency Morton PR are doing a wonderful job at pitching bloggers like me to use their images.

Absolutely not, right?  Or at least not yet.

You came to buy a specific book.  You’ve already got a task in mind and browsing random books aint it.  You’ll likely blow past any and all call-outs, recommendations, and other assorted distractions until you’ve found the book you came to buy.

And if Amazon ends up not having the book in stock, you’ll go elsewhere.

But AFTER you’ve found the book you wanted, recommendations are welcomed. At that point you’ll actually pay attention to other books Amazon recommends and bundles with your searched-for book.   You’ll even look at what other Amazon shoppers eventually bought after viewing your friend’s book.

Task Orientation Defines Scent

This Amazon thought experiment exemplifies the task-orientation common to most online visitors.

Visitors arrive at your site with a goal in mind.  They already have a task, and your website either helps them accomplish that task or it gets dumped.  And that goes for every page on your site – either it contains the content the visitor wants, or it provides a link to it, or the visitor leaves.

But what about people just wanting to browse?

This is a question posed to me in a recent comment.  As the commenter put it:

“… when I’m browsing through Amazon – with no other goal than to pass the time – I get converted to buy stuff all the time.

‘People who bought x also bought Y’ And if the book or cd Y is something I’ve been interested in – it triggers a purchase.”

His point was that browsing is a task-less online activity that eliminates the importance of scent.

And it’s an interesting question/thought.  To answer it, I’ll first have to distinguish between early stage shopping and true browsing.

Early Stage Buying vs. True Browsing

In the early stage of the buying process, the visitor is aware of an itch he’d like to scratch, but isn’t quite sure exactly what purchase will best scratch that itch.  Let’s say our shopper is vaguely aware of wanting to get in shape, and is kind of wanting to do Yoga.  But he’s not sure if he wants to do Yoga in a dedicated studio, or take classes in a more general, multi-purpose gym, or just buy some tapes for home workouts.

This Yoga shopper is still task oriented – it’s just that the task is researching rather than buying.  And a home-workout themed website or Yoga Studio website that helped her do the research stands a far better chance of getting her business than a Website exclusively focused on late stage buyers.

This is one reason we highly recommend catering to early stage buyers and developing a content strategy for them.  And for more info on how to do that effectively, check out David Young’s excellent video series: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion

Browsing is different.  Browsing means the shopper isn’t even clearly aware of a product desire yet. They’re not even focused on research.  If asked, the shopper couldn’t even describe the itch they’re looking to scratch.   And yet, they could buy if presented with the right product.

Browsers are still task-oriented

Despite appearances, browsing isn’t task-free.  Even though a specific object hasn’t (yet) catalyzed their free-floating desire, browsing visitors are still driven by desire.

Browsers are seeking novelty and possibility: the possibility of finding something different and better than they’d have imagined.   Browsers are as goal-oriented as any other shopper – just with different goals.

And as is true with every goal-oriented shopper, any website that fails to deliver on those goals gets dumped.  In fact, most shoppers only browse on sites that have already proved themselves capable of delivering novel products.

People browse Amazon.com not because it presents them with recommendations on the home page, but because Amazon masterfully presents them with interesting possibilities of new books that are similar to and possibly even remarkably better than books we’re already impressed with.  This is why the commenter I quoted from recalled the ‘People who bought x also bought Y’ quote rather than a “view Amazon recommendations” quote.

So how does a site plan to deliver on this search for novelty and cooler-than-expected items?

What it takes to be a browsing-friendly Website

Apart from bargain-priced rotating-inventory sites like bluefly, overstock.com or woot.com, the top three e-tailers most noted for browsing-friendly design are:

• Amazon
• Zappos
• iTunes

Here’s what they have in common:

They sell “impulse-buy-friendly” and “most-people-own-a-bunch” items.  Think about it: books, music, and shoes are all things we buy a lot of AND things we buy on impulse.  So each of these sites have a lot of repeat visits/visitors AND a fair chance at luring visitors into impulse buys.

They make it easy to sample the items in stock. iTunes lets you actually listen to the song.  Amazon lets you read the dust cover, table of contents, and a few passages from the book.  Most reviews also give you a flavor of the book.  Zappos gives you the best product photography to be found and provides expedited shipping both ways, which is a way to eliminate the pain and friction of customers trying on and “sampling” the shoes.

They routinely get new items in stock and make it a point to stock huge inventories. If browsers want novelty, it helps to be able to provide it, both with new stuff and with stuff I’ve never heard of before.  Amazon.com has all sorts of weird titles I’d never find at my local Barnes & Noble or even imagine existed.  Same thing with iTunes and Zappos.  Browsing shoppers know that novelty is only a click away.

They have solid user reviews set-up. Amazon and Zappos make up for limited sampling through user reviews, making it no coincidence that they have the best and most solidly established review communities on the Web. iTunes lags behind the others when it comes to reviews, but makes up for by better sampling, lower average price point, and better than average recommendations.

They make it easy to sort by regular categories AND by loose associations. Amazon let’s me see cool webs of connections between books, and look at user generated lists.  Zappos provides great filtered navigation options, so that I can not only sort by black men’s dress shoes, but also by black cap-toe lace up oxfords that cost between $100 and $150.  And many of the revues compare shoes, even to the point of recommending alternatives.  iTunes allows users to sort music by genre, decade, and browse with the aid of since-you-bought-that-you’ll-like-this recommendations.  For even better filtered, or faceted, sorting, check out this Get Elastic article as well as their thoughts on using user filtering and sorting preferences to personalize visitors shopping experience.

They’ve eliminated or greatly reduced buying friction. I can buy shoes on Zappos and get them next day or by 2nd day for free shipping.  With Amazon prime, I get 1-Click buying, and free 2nd-day shipping.  iTunes allows me to enjoy my music within seconds of buying.  And I know I’ll never have a problem with billing or customer service with these e-tailers.  There’s simply no friction to buying and a good bit of near-instant gratification – important factors for inspiring impulse buys.

So it’s only fair to ask: can you get sophisticated and wary audiences to buy pseudo-snake oil simply by switching from extolling the virtues of a single miracle product to praising the miraculous combination of two semi-wondrous products?  As in this teeth whitening example:

Well, yes, actually.  The tactic works because having to use two products is a type of downside.

By implying that the promised miracles are too big for just one product and that you’ll need to combine a couple of wonder-products to get the results, the copywriter is tacitly admitting a downside to the strategy: you’ll have to buy two products instead of just one.  And admitting the downside boosts credibility.

Moreover, the “housewife just like you who stumbled into a miracle cure of the decade” bit (the part that’s “enhanced” by the false home town claim) comes off as a lot more credible because more people can see themselves discovering a combination of existing products than discovery a single miracle cure.

But, wait: I can get you a trial sample of both for free!

Ah the copy writer givest a downside, and then the she taketh it away – almost.  If I can get both products for free, it’s not much of a downside that I need to combine the two of them, is it.  Plus, I can see if the combination really works before having to buy.

And then the auto-renewal on your credit card snags ya.

P.S. As a follow up to the Jenny Perfect Skin article, Grok reader Steve Chase snagged this screen shot from Calcutta and it seems that Jenny has a twin sister living there!  And she ALSO figured out this amazing skin combo.  Incredible, huh?

Take a look at the screen shot I took of the landing page.  What do you think most caught my eye?  Here’s a hint: think layout and bolding.

Straight out of The Ogilvy Playbook

Here are two relevant quotes taken from pages 73 and 90 of Ogilvy on Advertising:

“When you advertise in local newspapers, you get better results if you include the name of each city in your headline.  People are mostly interested in what is happening where they live.”

“There is no law which says that advertisements have to look like advertisements.  If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract more readers.”

Notice how much the landing page has been formatted to look like a blog (the editorial pages of the Web), complete with the “About Me” section at the top of the right-hand column.  And have you noticed that Pensacola, FL has been bolded twice, both in the “About Me” section AND the first sentence of body copy?

Other blog-like touches include a “temporarily closed” comments section and a very chatty / best-friend-name-dropping authorial voice.  But it was the bolded hometown that stood out most.

Now, as a copywriter, I only bold key persuasive points, so that visitors’ eyes will still pick out the important parts of my messaging during a quick scan of the page. Obviously, someone really wanted me to know that this girl was from Pensacola.

And oddly enough, I’m from Pensacola.  What a weird crazy happenstance, huh?

Jenny Has A Lot of Hometowns

So I asked Bryan Eisenberg to go to the same site.  Here’s what he saw:

So, yes, some, uh, creature decided that a hometown girl would be more persuasive than a stranger, and then had absolutely no problem blatantly lying about it.  Makes you proud to be associated with Internet Marketing, doesn’t it?

Still, it’d be a cunning technique, if only it could be de-sleazed first.

Any thoughts on how you might (more ethically) apply this same technique?  If you’re a semi-local supplier, could you get a bunch of enthusiastic customers to “represent” for their hometowns on a templated landing page and then present the testimonial-esque copy based on visitor IP addresses?

What do you think?  And (Michele and Holly, this one’s to you) do you think women are more likely than men to be swayed by a hometown spokesperson?

The spending level for Valentine’s Day gifts this year will be slightly lower than last year – $140 to be spent by men (versus $166 in 2008), and $75 (versus $90) to be spent by women, according to the BrandKeys Valentine’s Day Index, writes RetailerDaily.

Mature consumers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, and also gravitate to images that show products and lifestyles,  according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results according to their “Photo Finish” study of more than 400 Americans age 40+, reports MarketingCharts. This is something to consider as you work on “hero” shots for your website as well.

Paul from WiseGrass attended our Wizard of Web class a while ago. I just came across this great Google Maps Mashup on his website. He showcases his wonderful lawn care work by letting people know where his showcase lawns are.

There are plent of businesses that could leverage something like this. Could yours?

The Google Website Optimizer team launches an official GWO YouTube channel. You’ll find several videos there including several from our Always Be Testing webinar series.

If you missed last week’s webinar I did for the Web Analytics Association with Akin Arikan and Josh Manion you can see the recorded version now. It’s titled Testing, Testing, Testing. Anybody Can Test. So Why Don’t You? Registration is required.

Thanks for all your support. This is the second year in a row that we have won a SEMMY award. Our article Three Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads took the award in the Design & Usability category. Congratulations to all the other winners and runners-up. There are some great articles there.

Don’t miss my interview with David Szetela on PPC Rockstars today. You’ll hear us discuss the top page and ad elements that every PPC advertiser should test.

What do you think – Is Twitter the Next Second Life? http://tinyurl.com/8nof7j. You may also want to read The State Of The Twittersphere? http://tinyurl.com/6upklq. GigaOm claims Followers Aren’t Really Friends on Twitter. This leads to some of the challenge of measuring influence on Twitter. http://snipurl.com/90lob.

If you are looking for more smart people to follow, here are the Twitter IDs for The Top 100 Most Influential Online Marketers http://tinyurl.com/4owzd4. Thanks for voting me #21.

Sex Sells, but a Commitment Can Help.

Multichannel Analytics: Tracking Online Impact Of Offline Campaigns.

Has anyone played with http://www.wordvision.com/. It uses an algorithm to recommend the hot topics and keywords for SEO writers. Thoughts?

40 Inspirational speeches in 2 minutes:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Once you’ve gained the reader’s interest through relevance, buyer confidence is everything – without it the sale is lost.  That’s why methods of substantiating claims and establishing credibility are frequent topics of mine.

And it’s also why Tom Wanek’s blog is a must read.

No where else will you find such a powerful, systematic framework and methodology for creating credibility within your marketing and copywriting.  Tom’s application of Signaling Theory to marketing is brilliant, easy to apply, and utterly unique.

If you haven’t heard of Wanek’s Six Currencies of Credibility, Roy Williams provides a great intro here.  But you’ll have to go to Tom’s blog to really dig into Signaling Theory.

Highly recommended.

2. Customer Focus Calculator – will analyze the words on your page and determine if your copy is more about yourself or your customer. This tool will measure if you are we-we-ing all over yourself.

3. BT Buckets – Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

4. 4Q from IPerceptions – developed with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

5. What’s the Buzz? – a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

6. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker – scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

7. Backlink Social Celebrity SEO Tool – discover who bookmarked a webpage and who linked to that webpage. The bookmarks are searched for in the various social bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, Raw Sugar, and others. The backlinks are found using Google and Yahoo!.

8. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0 – can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

9. Website Grader – provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

10. Spider Simulator – help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

11. Spider Test – Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases.

12. Google Analytics – web analytics with new “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

13. Google Website Optimizer – Free A/B and Multivariate Testing

14. Yahoo! Analytics – still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

15. Microsoft adCenter Analytics – by invitation only, but you can apply at the link provided.

16. Piwik – This is an open source web analytics solution.

17. Linkscape – allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

18. BacklinkAnalysis – Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

19. Trifecta – Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

20. Firebug – this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

21. YSlow for Firebug – YSlow will analyze your page to make suggestions for how you can speed up the page. YSlow is integrated with Firebug.

22. Google Webmaster Tools – see which phrases your ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

23. Morgue File – offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

24. OpenAds – for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

25. Sitescore – analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

26. mon.itor.us – use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

27. Orangoo Spell Check – spell check your website.

28. The Scrutinizer – offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

29. Product Indexation Check – use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

30. Kamplye – allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage.

31. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine – create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

32. Feng-GUI – generates heatmaps for your website (upload a screenshot) by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of viewing your website.

33. Scrutinizer browser – a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

What are some of your favorite free tools to make websites better?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

They advise people to come back every Tuesday to see what is new. I am not sure why they didn’t include a way to subscribe here.

When you go there, make sure you have your speakers on.

I am curious what our readers think of the experience. Please comment below.

(*post updated 6/18/09)

1. Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics – it pulls the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content Detail reports automatically, with links to the social media sites for your pages. It pulls in data from Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, with more to come.

2. The Google Analytics Report Enhancer – Get enhanced segmentation, you will also be able to segment by transaction, adgroup, and referral path anytime a segmenting opportunity comes up. Now you can see exactly which transactions are attributed to each source, medium, source/medium, keyword, campaign, new or returning visitors, and more. You also get the ability to see the raw number of conversions for each goal you have as well as goal revenue.

3. Google Analytics hacks to obtaining full referring URLs – Provides two ways to get full referring urls into Google Analytics.

4. Multiple Profile Greasemonkey Script – If you have multiple profiles setup for your google analytics account, you will be able to select a new profile to view you will see the same report you were just on, but it will be for the new profile which you selected. Also, if you wish to compare reports from two profiles, there is an option to view the new profile in a separate tab.

5. Unusual Keyword Trends in Google Analytics With Greasemonkey – provides a “What’s Changed” report which tells a) which referrers have sent most traffic in last few days and b) which have sent most traffic where they never did before.

6. Google Website Optimizer multivariate experiment data to show up in Google Analytics – While Google Website Optimizer by itself can give you a quick look at which combination is best at improving conversion, it tells you nothing about transactions, revenue, micro-conversions, navigation, segmentation by source, and bounce rate. If you integrate Google Analytics into your Google Website Optimizer experiments, you will get much richer data, and be able to get a true idea of how your test is doing.

7. Google Analytics for Wordpress – This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog. This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. This WordPress plugin also gives you the possibility to track downloads with Google Analytics based on a set of extensions you specify and adds the possibility to track all image searches as organic and collect their keywords.

8. SiteScan – A Google Analytics Diagnostic tool designed to provide you with a complete audit of your Google Analytics setup. SiteScan is a free way to ensure that your Google Analytics is configured properly on your website. The most comprehensive web analytics debugger is the WASP Firefox extension.

9. Goal Copy Extension – The Goal Copy extension records all of the values in a Google Analytics Goal Settings form. You can then navigate to another profile where you want to put that copied goal and paste all of those values into the new form. That way, you can get your goals from one profile to another without all the tedium.

10. The Unofficial Google Analytics API – Uses Google’s email as XML function to send your data to Google Groups so you can use the data. There is also the Google Analytics Python API.

11. Google Analytics to Google Docs Greasemonkey Script – do a one-click export to create a Google spreadsheet for analyzing Google Analytics data.

12. Get Detailed PPC Keyword Data from Google Analytics – This filter shows exactly the Search Term (i.e. keywords that are searched on) rather than just the Bid Term (i.e. the keywords that triggered a PPC advert). For example, if a visitor searches for “sony digital camera” and you have an ad configured for the keywords “digital camera” as a Broad Match in Google AdWords. With this filter the same search will show “digital camera, (sony+digital+camera)” in any Google Analytics report that shows keywords (e.g. Marketing Optimization -> Search Engine Marketing -> Overall Keyword Conversion) or any time you cross-segment against keywords.

13. Analytics KPI gadget for iGoogle – This widget allows you to see important KPI information from Google Analytics directly in iGoogle.

14. Google Analytics Reporting Suite – Using Adobe Air the Google Analytics Reporting Suite brings Google Analytics to the desktop.

15. Customize the list of recognized search engines – Adds 60+ additional search engines for detection (rather than listed as a referrer) and differentiates regional variations e.g. google.co.uk, google.com, msn.se etc.

16. Script to capture first and last referrer in Google Analytics – From my friend, Brian Clifton’s book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

17. Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way – Make sure your data isn’t polluted with your own or your company’s clicks.

18. Tracking Your Twitter Tweets with Google Analytics – This method will track anyone visiting the site as a result of your tweet, regardless of where they clicked on the URL. It doesn’t matter if it’s in an email client, hosted email app. etc.

19. The Official Google Analytics blog – Get the latest from the Google Analytics team. They also publish the excellent Conversion University.

20. Google Analytics Help Center – The official forum to get your questions answered about Google Analytics.

21. Google Analytics for iPhone – Access your Google analytics on your iPhone.

22. Google Analytics Notes – Keep track of events by adding notes directly into Google Analytics.

23. Better Google Analytics Firefox extension – This wraps up several scripts into one. This super-script will allow you to:

• Auto press the “Access Analytics” button, if it is displayed
• Remembers settings you set when you switch between profiles, and allows you to open another profile in a new tab quickly.
• Allows you to export any report available as CSV to Google Spreadsheets.
• Converts percent values to absolute values in tables.
• Provides one-click access to year-over-year reports in Google Analytics.
• Sorts the visible table rows.
• and Adds Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo InLink Metrics to your content detail reports.

24. The Enhanced Google Analytics Firefox Plugin – is designed to allow analysts to get more action out of what changed in the Referring Sites and Keyword Reports.

25. Kampyle/Google Analytics Mashup – this plugin allows you to incorporate the feedback you get from using Kampyle on your website (you need account for both) and integrate it with your Google Analytics.

26. Excellent Analytics is a simple Excel plug in that lets you import web analytics data from Google Analytics in to an Excel spreadsheet.

Please help me maintain this list as the one place to find all the Google Analytics plugins, hacks and tricks. Do you know of any others that should be on the list?

1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

2. AideRSS – Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

3. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

4. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

5. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

6. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

7. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

8. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

9. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

10. Web Page Speed Analyzer – Compare the download speed of your pages with those of your competitors to see which are loading quicker. Quicker loading pages tend to have an advantage at converting visitors. This analyzer provides a detail analysis of the page elements. For a rough comparison of two pages side by side try WebSlug. And, WebWait is great when you want to get accurate speed results from the visitors perspective because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

11. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

12. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

13. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

14. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Try some (or all) of the above techniques and report back on your intriguing espionage! This tape will self-destruct in 10 clicks.

Shhhhh… care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

Your customers’ eyes and your wallet thank you for taking the 3 minutes to read that page.

My favorite feature of this tool is how it breaks down by percentage how much of each genders’ browsing habits you exhibit, and correlates them to the results you receive. I cleared my browsing history and visited, what I though to be, a range of sites. Here are my results:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 54%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 46%

Click here to find your own. How accurate is it with you?

“Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

And second-best part? Just get a load of his Bio and cited influences:

“The winner of 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Garrison Spik (pronounced “speak”), a 41-year-old communications director and writer from Washington, D.C. Hailing from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, he has worked in Tokyo, Bucharest, and Nitro, West Virginia, and cites DEVO, Nathaniel Hawthorne, B horror films, and historiography as major life influences”

Who knew DEVO could be such a potent muse… And the best part? They actually have winners in separate categories for Adventure, Fantasy, Children’s Literature, and such, with my favorite being this winner in the “Purple Prose” category:

“The mongrel dog began to lick her cheek voraciously with his sopping wet tongue, so wide and flat and soft, a miniature pink fleshy cape soaked through and oozing with liquid salivary gratitude; after all, she had rescued him from the clutches of Bernard, the curmudgeonly one-eyed dogcatcher, whose own tongue — she remembered vividly the tongues of all her lovers — was coarse and lethargic, like a slug in a sandpaper trenchcoat.”

So go find your own favorite and treat yourself to some fine Friday reading..

Go ahead, treat yourself to a well-deserved belly laugh:

http://www.thecopygod.com/

[Hat tip to Bob Bly]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Many of you are aware of Google Trends, the handy tool that enables you to track and compare what Google users are searching for. Now imagine a similar tool that can give you some insight into what people are buying and selling online. That’s exactly what we’ve built: Google Checkout Trends aggregates the sales data of Google Checkout merchants and charts it in a matter of seconds. (Of course, all the data is anonymized first.) So if you’re interested in how sales of Batman or Spider Man paraphernalia compare, or are wondering just how popular Ugg boots are these days, visit Checkout Trends for a glimpse into online shopping. Go ahead and try it out — and get creative with the searches. You may be surprised at what you find.

I was having problems this morning getting any results from my searches, even from their six suggested searches. Every time I searched, I received a message that said:

Your terms – ipod, zune do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

If you want to see what the graph of results looks like you can find people discussing it here, here, and here.

Regardless, I think once these issues are resolved, like Google Trends this will provide some interesting data. One thing to keep in mind though is that in our analysis for our 2007 Customer Experience Retail study we found only 10% of the 300+ top retailers offered Google Checkout as an option.

How meaningful will the results really be?

Have you had better luck with Google Checkout Trends? Your impressions?

Oh, how quickly things change. Blogs have taken over, creating a feedback loop between journalists and readers, businesses and customers, you name it — conversation has officially changed the game.

While this may not represent all of the year’s best marketing bloggery, it’s a start. Are there posts by other bloggers you’d like to see on here? Let us know with a brief comment and (so long as it fits) we’ll add your suggestion to the list. Enjoy!

December

“Best of 2007: Top 7 Tech News Stories” — Mashable (The top tech posts from the Mashable.com team.)

“2007 Brand Autopsy Marketing Book Awards” by John Moore, Brand Autopsy (Find out which books John thought were made to stick, so to say, in ‘07.)

“The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration” by Brian Clark, Copyblogger (Shows how to spin brilliantly trashy headlines into useful attention-grabbers, e.g., “Headline Help: Crucial Tips That Brian Clark Forgot to Mention” [Hint: It's not just for bloggers.])

November

“The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” by Aaron & Giovanna Wall, SEO Book (It’s quickly becoming the go-to resource for blog SEO.)

“Close Encounter with Facebook Beacon“ by Charlene Li, Groundswell (See what happens when you back peddle into a revenue stream by snooping on your users.)

“Who Owns Your Data on Google, Facebook, Netflix?” by Don Dodge, The Next Big Thing (One of the year’s top debates, nicely distilled in a simple response to Jason Calacanis, Doc Searls, and Dave Winer.)

“Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle” by Richard MacManus, Read/Write Web (Review of a clunky internet-connected e-book reader. Will it catch fire or burn up?)

“Google’s Android Arrives . . . An Open Source Mobile Phone Platform” by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s not a Google Phone, but a mobile operating system.)

October

“Sorry PR people: you’re blocked” by Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (If you’re in PR or have ever considered emailing Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, or any other blogger/author/journalist, don’t do a thing until you read this appropriately scathing post.)

“Online Copywriting 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet” — GrokDotCom (Resources for anyone who wants to communicate on the Web.)

“Radiohead’s In Rainbows: A Look at Anti-Marketing in the Music Industry” by Maki, DoshDosh (One band schools an entire industry on “the ROI of free,” but stumbles a bit in the process. Read our follow-up case study for more.)

September

“Dear Steve Jobs” by Robert Scoble, Scobleizer (Apple announces iPhone. Zealots and Geeks wait in lines for days. Sales are a bit slow for Jobs, so he drops the price. The blogosphere speaks up. Jobs listens.)

“Forget About Page Rank and Build a Better Blog” by Darren Rowse, ProBlogger (A terrific video post on why it’s important to put content first, then let search engines do their job. Optimization matters, but what you’re optimizing matters more.)

August

“Damn, I am so busted, yo” by Fake Steve, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (One of our favorite satirist bloggers, Daniel “if-that-is-his-name” Lyons, gets outed by a New York Times writer whose name happens to be BRAD STONE.)

“Moving Day” by Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics (In a freak move, NYTimes.com picks up Dubner & Levitt’s popular blog, breathing new life into old media.)

“See Who’s Editing Wikipedia” by John Borland, Wired (A Cal Tech graduate student makes a program that allows us to see who’s editing wiki entries. You might be surprised. Read our follow-up post for more.)

“Answer These 10 Questions Before You Charge for SEO Services” by Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz (A must-read for all SEO firms and the people who hire them.)

July

“Will The Last Corporation Leaving Second Life Please Turn Off The Light” by Duncan Riley, TechCrunch (The L.A. Times talks about the pink elephant: Are businesses making money or even wooing fans in Second Life?)

“Sphinn: Our Social Site For Search & Internet Marketing Professionals” by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Danny and crew launch a cool, 2.0-ish social news service for SEO’s.)

“FreeBurner for Everyone” by Traci, Burning Questions (Google acquires yet another important company. David Dalka gives six reasons why the deal was a mistake.)

June

“Why I disagree with Privacy International” by Matt Cutts, Gadgets, Google, and SEO (Google gets poor grades on their privacy practices. Matt speaks out.)

“Ask Launches Ask3D” by Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch (The “first” major launch of universal search.)

“Building 43” by Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog (You can’t out-SEO the team behind Google’s algorithm.)

“If Clicks Were Votes” by Andrew Meagher, Compete blog (A fun double-header analysis that tries to infer what could happen to Democrats and Republicans in the ‘08 U.S. presidential election if Web traffic on its own actually mattered.)

May

“Google Maps is spying on my cat…” by Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing (Google Street Views takes some very revealing photos, backlash ensues.)

“New Version of Google Analytics!” by Jeff Gills, The Official Google Analytics Blog (Sparks go off as Google unveils its updated analytics solution. Impressive, but is it an enterprise solution?)

“Thank You for Helping Me Write The New Rules of Marketing & PR!” by David Meerman Scott, Web Ink Now (With one of the year’s best executed and most earnest linkbait posts, David proves why everyone should read his book. Thank YOU, sir!)

“The Movie is Finally Here,” by Geert, Bring Back the Love (Have advertisers lost that lovin’ feelin’? This short film shows why it’s time to bring it on back, now.)

April

“Google beats Microsoft in DoubleClick bidding battle” by David Hunter, Microsoft News Tracker, (GoogleClick? They win another acquisition battle.)

“Google Website Optimizer Launches” by Robert Gorell, GrokDotCom (Now everyone can do A/B and Multivariate testing at zero cost. Want some free resources with that?)

“Video: RSS in Plain English” by Lee Lefever, Common Craft (Finally, someone shows how RSS really is simple.)

March

“Viacom Sues YouTube for $1 Billion…The End of the Tube?” by Pete Cashmore, Mashable (If you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em? The great debate rages on.)

“Why Online Advertising Economics Are So Messed Up” by Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0 (Now that “page views” are dead, it’s time to take a look at the real problem. Just beware of those zombie metrics.)

“Taking the Week Off” by Robert Scoble, Scobleizer (After receiving horrible anonymous threats, Kathy Sierra, one of the world’s top bloggers, quits blogging. A regrettable chapter, indeed — but there was a silver lining. Ultimately, greater minds prevailed and the incident fueled a much-needed conversation about balancing professionalism with free speech in blogland.)

“10 Reasons Commenting is Good for Bloggers” by Chris Garrett, ChrisG.com (’Tis better to give than to receive. Here’s why.)

February

“Why People Hate SEO…” by Jason Calicanis, Calicanis.com (SEO is Bull? Although there are likely reasons why Jason would say such a thing, at least he got savvy search marketers to link to him and even challenge him back. Mahalo!)

“National Pork Board Goes After Breastfeeding Search Marketer” by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (The Pork Board shouldn’t whine about spilt milk, especially when it’s not their own.)

“7 Big Questions for Online Marketers” by Jeffrey Eisenberg, GrokDotCom (Everyone loves answers, but are you asking the right questions?)

January

“Steve’s Devices” by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type (The post that put the year of the iPhone in perspective, explaining its limitations and predicting, without saying as much, that 2008 will be the year of the open mobile platform. Oh, and Nick does this six months before the iPhone even launched.)

Did we miss something?

Probably. There were so many eye-opening blog posts this year that we need your help updating this list so that it is definitive — or close to it.

What were your favorite posts this year? Leave a comment and/or link to let us know.

How do you think Uncle Jakob would vote?

Where does this obsession come from?

The other day, one of our newer staff members asked me why I’m such a screenshot addict. What’s the benefit to collecting all these images, many of which I may never use?

It was only when I opened my Yahoo! page yesterday that it hit me. The banner was right there, where it’s been for awhile. Even though I never clicked, there is a value in those impressions. What triggered my memory was that little stick drawing guy in the SnagIt banner.

I can remember, as early as 1996, taking screenshots for marketing purposes. Back then, I was working with a telecom company that was selling voice-over-Internet products, and I was helping to manage the banners we bought on Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista, landing pages, and so on. The top-performing banner — no matter what we offered or how creative we were — was this little stick figure smiley-face guy with a simple offer. (By the way, I’m still shocked today at how good this company was at measuring stuff back then. It probably helped fuel my passion for web analytics. I could tell you by the keyword on any of the engines, for any date range, for a particular version of a banner we ran, how many minutes people used our product to call Argentina.)

But I digress. What did I do with the screenshots?

I used to take screenshots of every page where I could find our banners. Then I would save them to compare with the following week’s/month’s metrics. I’d analyze them to see if any other elements on the page were enhancing or detracting from the ability of the banner to get the click-though. Sometimes it was a search result that influenced the conversion. I’ve been collecting screenshots ever since.

For as long as I can recall, I’ve been a fan of TechSmith’s SnagIt (and later, Camtasia for video) for Windows. Now that we’ve switched the company to Mac, we’re using SnapZ Pro X, as well as TechSmith’s newly released Jing Project. (Thanks, guys. Please keep those Mac products coming!)

What can you do with screenshots?

1. Chronicle all of your online advertising efforts and use the screenshots to analyze any interactions with your success metrics.
2. Keep a running history of changes to your content, or a competitor’s (i.e., see what changes/tests have been performed).
3. Use them in presentations when reporting on web analytics for a particular ad creative or page.
4. Use them to figure out what to test next in your landing page optimization efforts
5. Impress your friends with your collection that contains an original Amazon screenshot.

Are you a fellow screenshot addict? Want to be? If so, come join my FaceBook group.

My idea of a good time is curling up with a soy protein shake and reading about neurology, quantum physics, or Harry Potter. I think I’m funny. Really. I’ll write something and just crack myself up. Still, I look a little silly, sitting alone at my computer writing and laughing. Some people find that strange.

I’m in shape. Well, I was in shape. Ok, maybe “in-shape” is too strong a phrase, but I was once called “athletic” (not that long ago) . I’m a non-smoker and healthy except for slight Swedish Fish problem. A big Sweedish Fish problem. Fine, it’s an addiction, but I’m seeking help.

Question: Would you date me? Heck, I wouldn’t date me. That’s where the Profile Doctor comes in.

Having trouble creating your online dating profile?

Creating the dreaded profile could very well be the number one problem online daters must face. But now Lavalife has created the Profile Doctor to come in and do a profile analysis on member profiles.

I’m really curious about this. I love the idea of getting outside feedback on your profile. But I wonder: would I rather have a man or a woman do the analysis? Maybe a man since he’d know what guys like. But a woman might be better at helping me polish the finer points to help me shine.

I’d like to know what criteria the Profile Doctor uses to analyze these profiles? I mean, yeah, some stuff is just creepy, but can he really help you get more dates? I’d love to know.

I still think the best way to do a profile is to get your best friend to write up a profile for you. Best friends can talk about your good points so you don’t have to feel like you’re bragging. I’d really like to see this feature on the dating websites.

Don’t Date Him Girl is a laugh-out-loud funny site designed for women to be able to share their past dating experiences. Wouldn’t it be fun to have something like this on the dating sites? I think it would be fun.

Hmm. . . the guys reading this over my shoulder aren’t laughing. One would have to be careful about psychotic ex’s posting less than flattering comments. Hey, one or two angry ex-girlfriends isn’t a big deal, but if there are, like, 17 . . . that could be a sign of a guy to avoid.

No matter what, it’s just plain hard to write about yourself. I’d give the Profile Doctor a try. Or I’d get my best friend to write something for me. Either way, I think getting feedback on your profile could help improve them. Better profiles would lead to more dates. Isn’t that what online dating is all about?

P.S. — You know. . . I’m a writer, and I consider myself a pretty good judge of character. Maybe I could be a profile doctor? How cool would that be? In the meantime, I’ll create a profile and follow-up to let you know the prognosis. Hey, if an athletic math nerd seeking someone who to hum the Seinfeld theme with can do it, so can I.

Dylan Lewis launched the Web Analytics Wiki. His goal with your help is to have 300 articles in 3 months. Will you help?

Jason Ciment, Future Now’s first client, has launched a new site based on his success with search engines. Check out SEO Timetable, a 120-day plan to get great rankings.

Mike Moran, co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc., just launched a new site and contest site called Do it Wrong Quickly. Mike’s looking for you to tell us stories of your boss or colleagues.

Mike Drew, a book marketing and publishing expert who helped us become best selling authors, launched two new blogs: Beneath the Covers and Push the Key.

Holly Buchanan & Jeff Sexton will be in New York, September 17, to teach Persuasive Online Copywriting. Will you be there? By the way, it amazes me that people get $150 for our first book, Persuasive Online Copywriting on Amaxon. I’ve seen it sell for over $1000, just because it is out of print. Please be aware that we sell an updated version as a PDF.)

My buddies Joseph Jaffe, CC Chapman and crew are hosting a panel discussion on Virtual Worlds in the Amphitheater on Crayonville Island.

Last but not least, this is not a friend’s business, but a friend told me about it. If you travel a lot and like to make sure you get the best deal, even when the price of your fare drops. Check out Yapta.

Friends, please let me know if I missed something new that you’re up to.