Blackbeaks Blog….All things Analytics

Recently in my sales work with clients and prospects I have heard some very disturbing trends which has prompted this blog post. The most recent shocking meeting I had was this Monday but prior to that I also heard of some disturbing tactics being touted by some of Finlands’ “best of breed” digital agencies. Rather [...]

The recession is a phenomena that all the corporations have jumped on particularly in the online marketing space to serve their own agendas. Controversial? Well, all I am saying is be careful when the big ad agency tells you that the only solution to falling sales is to double your marketing efforts with them. I [...]

I was asked the following question recently and I thought it was worth sharing my answer in case anyone found it useful. The question is in italics and my answer follows.
Hello Steve,
Last year i saw your talk on designforconversion on that lovely boat in A’dam.
I’ve been thinking about the defintion of conversion rates and i [...]

I have finally finished my book! This is just a quick note to let the readers whom have been asking me for ages when it would be done that it is finally done. Sorry it’s taken so long. The publish date is scheduled roughly for April 09 as there is still an edit, forewords and [...]

This could be Microsofts smartest move of the year and it’s only 8 days old. FAST is one of the companies which develops enterprise search engine software. The benefit is that publishing sites for instance can monetize their sites without having to use adsense, they could simply use the FAST search engine and have advertisers [...]

Chris Sherman is a bit of a name in the US search industry as you all probably know. I got invited to The Spock Network by him which seems interesting. It looks like a search engine specifically designed for looking for people. May be a mover and shaker because it¢‚¬„¢s backed by over $1Bn in [...]

Aloha,
Calling all online marketers on deck! There are new spiders crawling all over your adwords. Interesting article on Goolge’s new bots and how they affect Quality Scores on Adwords.
Content from Axandra.com-
“Facts of the week: Google uses a new spider to index web pages
Google is using a new crawler software program for their AdWords advertising system [...]

Well not really but you’d better pay attention if you have ID in your URL strings.
Two of our clients have noticed problems with Google SERPs this week.
The first problem we were told by Google was because of ID following directly after a “?” in a URL. We were told that if the following condition [...]

(Source:Marketingsherpa, Omniture)
If anyone wants to get some free information on search trends provided by Sherpa go to Omniture’s site download your copy of a summary of Sherpa’s study.
This study will show you few pretty interesting things about search spenditure, keyword usage, overall costs per clicking, and in my opinion the most imprtant thing, that [...]

There are a lot of so called search engine optimization “experts” out there. Nothing more than pirates most of ‘em! an’ I should know!
Well, Mike Grehan, he ain’t a pirate, I’ve met him a couple of times at the Search Engine Strategies in Stockholm and he knows what he’s on about. This article is [...]