DISQUS

"Nope, according to our calculations we just need to give you a better parking space and more M&Ms."
Hilarious!

Ahh, I like the channel conflict point by Kirk.

Another possibility is Google is putting the pressure on. Like Serps full of subdomains to the same site, a page full of Amazon links isn't what the searcher wants, most likely. And other advertisers can get annoyed.

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Price Guarantees: No Substitute for A Unique Value Proposition

That is silly, wouldn't Amazon rather have 10 links in PPC advertising that ultimately go to Amazon than just its own? Affiliates are a great way to get around Google's double serving policies, and commissions are only 4-6% for most affiliates unless they're sending killer amounts of buyers, in which case, why cut them off? Plus, the affiliates absorb all the costs for non-converting clicks. I wouldn't go this route, Amazon, if that's why you changed your policy.



Linda Bustos's last blog post..Price Guarantees: No Substitute for A Unique Value Proposition

Cool! That's the interface I'm seeing now. I have 4 different twitter accounts and it seems they all have different interfaces - this is getting confusing. Some had the search box at the top with no footer search link, others had no search box, just footer link. Now I know why!

PS, that search box at the top didn't ever return results for me...did it ever work for anyone?

Linda Bustos's last blog post..5 Ways to Handle Returned-to-Stock Items

I think Youtube commenters should give this a read...if they CAN read. I can make this libelous statement implying a substantial number of Youtube users can't read because I'm fairly sure it's a large enough group ;0) If I implied johnnycomelately702 can't read, that could be libel. Cool, I learned something today and applied it to my life :-D

PS I love the Twacker landing page. Hi-larious!

Linda Bustos's last blog post..How to Grow Your Email List from Your Shopping Cart

@Ben I hope not, though I'm biased because I'm on the ecommerce side :) But really, not every retailer uses Google Adwords (or advertises for all its products/keywords) and Google Base to appear in Google Product Search. So search users who also depend on Google for commercial searches may get frustrated with too many Wikipedia results.

I do think Google's getting better and better at detecting intent whether a search is transactional or informational, and maybe searchwiki (if anyone bothers to use it) could also help.

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Too Many URLs Spoil the SEO: Fixing a Common Ecommerce Duplicate Content Problem

Uh oh...organic search further cannibalizing paid clicks? How did this make it out of beta?! :-P

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Too Many URLs Spoil the SEO: Fixing a Common Ecommerce Duplicate Content Problem

Love the headline! That definitely got my attention and it was a clever connection. Nice promo for Rackspace too :)

Linda Bustos's last blog post..6 Creative Ideas for Filtered Navigation

I think Yahoo should keep search. I use Google all the time but would feel less happy about that if I had to use it because there were no other options (Live Search is not considered an option). Using Google makes me feel better about my results because I can choose to use it over engines I feel to be less relevant. Take away that perception, and I no longer can do a little superiority dance every time I hit the big G.

Viva Yahoo Search!

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Bloggers Digest 1/16/09

For conversion optimization, Segmentation for sure. For PPC optimization/budget/spend/keyword intelligence - Motion Graphics :)

Linda Bustos's last blog post..New Google Analytics Segmentation Feature Rocks for Ecommerce

It's nice they give a transition period before the full roll-out. I flipflopped back and forth but now am getting used to the new design although I don't think it's more usable (I hardly notice the Inbox # whereas the old design was nice and conspicuous), and it does show 2x the ads...

It is growing on me, though. I felt in control that I could switch back and forth but I feel it will be an unwelcomed shock to those who haven't switched yet and who don't follow all the juicy social media news.

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Webinar Recap: I Know I Should Be Testing, But…

Yay, I'm excited about staying logged in :)

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Webinar Recap: I Know I Should Be Testing, But…

Matt Cutts dreams, oh man I KID YOU NOT I really had this dream.

The night before the Marketing Pilgrim Scholarship Contest winner was to be announced, I had a dream that I was on my way to a movie theater in Deep Cove, North Vancouver (5 minutes from my house. There is not really a theater there - aren't dreams random? And of course, to announce the winner -- of all the places in the world, you'd come to a dinky cinema North Van, right?)

Okay, so I'm at the theater for the announcement but, you know, nature calls - so, when I get back the announcement has already been made. I missed the whole thing. Then Matt Cutts turns around and says, don't worry - it was you.

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Book Review: Always Be Testing

I like what SEOMoz does with its community profile pages. You can drop a link in your profile page, but it's nofollowed until you get 100 Moz-Points - you've paid your dues as an active member of the community.

Wouldn't it be easy enough for Twitter to implement a similar thing? After X followers?

Also, Twitter is a blog - a micro-blog. It's easy enough to start up a bunch of Wordpress blogs or any other type of blog and throw up links all over them - but without incoming links these blogs have no authority. Authority bloggers and businesses, (for example) start up micro-blogs because they fulfill a place that traditional blogs can't - but certainly they are sources of valuable content and should pass Page Rank if they get enough links from other authority sites - just like traditional web pages do! Pfffh!

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Bloggers Digest 9/4/08

Done.

Wow, there are a LOT of submissions!

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Bloggers Digest 8/8/08

Oops my bad, I got the Flickr groups post mixed up. Soooorry Julie *blush*

Proves I shouldn't be reading blogs at 12:30 Saturday morning!

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Win 1 of 5 Signed Copies of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day!

Thanks everyone and no worries, Allison. It was just a misunderstanding. It wasn't a reciprocal linking gimmick. I did encourage our readers to link to the post when I first announced it on Get Elastic (and also to read, sphinn, stumble, del.icio.us etc). I started seeing a few trackbacks in the comments on Marketing Pilgrim and decided to throw link love back in a roundup post on Get Elastic. It was cool, I ended up "meeting" new blogger friends by following the trackbacks - "reputation management" meets "blogger outreach."

I did throw out another call for our readers who blog to link my entry from the roundup. To offer a link back would be the least I could do since I returned the favor for the first batch. I think of our blog community as an invisible network of like-minded people. Finding their trackbacks at least lets me put names and blogs to otherwise mysterious Feedburner stats.

Hey if you can't leverage your Facebook and Twitter friends and blog readers, who can you? :)

I really liked your post too, Allison and I actually recommended it to one of our readers in the comments of Get Elastic who was asking a question about Flickr marketing. I was glad to have a good reference to point her to!

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Win 1 of 5 Signed Copies of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day!

This is fantastic news. Do you think this will hurt paid tools like Keyword Discovery?

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Product Photography: How To Achieve The Ghost Mannequin Effect

This post is very entertaining. I wonder if they've run their homepage through Google Website Optimizer yet to verify without a doubt that this 28 words is the magic formula. I'd like to see a screenshot :P

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Does Your Ecommerce Website Speak to Howsers?

Great article, I totally hear you on the importance of long tail keywords for paid search - if only they were not so difficult to predict and manage ;)

In terms of physical product inventory, the long tail, on demand model doesn't fly for everyone. Amazon carries nearly every book, cd and movie title known to man and mp3 sites can carry every song ever written, but many businesses must focus on the hits. If they have competitors that can efficiently offer everything under the sun in that industry, then they're at a HUGE disadvantage.

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Why eCommerce is a Lot Like ICanHasCheezburger

Go ahead and sue the 14 year olds watching clips of South Park, mmmkay?

No, really. How can you sue someone for watching content that they may not be aware violates copyright? If you search for "penguin falls through ice" and find a March of the Penguins clip illegally uploaded and *gasp* watch it - that's not the crime. The crime is uploading it, if that's what the law is.

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Why eCommerce is a Lot Like ICanHasCheezburger

Thanks, Asif! That's what I love about blogs, the conversation continues after the article is posted.

Offline page load is interesting, do you have an estimate of how common this is?

A commenter on Get Elastic also offered up a number of advanced additions to the article:

* Forgetting to tag links in email campaigns
* Forgetting to separate navigational searches from search engine keyword, by using a custom filter for Direct Search or on page addIgnoredOrganic
* Not changing keywords and url`s to lowercase (GA groups “KEYWORD” and “keyword” differently)
* Allowing log spam by not adding an including only hostname: (www\.|)mydomain\.com
* When using ppc - not recording actual search keyword by using a custom filter e.g $A3 in (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*) and
* Forgetting to manually tag paid search landing pages in yahoo and msn.
* Not segmenting visitors by type (e.g return visitors behave differently to new visitors, or Hunters behave differently to Browsers http://tinyurl.com/4×2k73 )

When installing:
* mixing urchin & ga.js
* Forgetting to tracking mailto: clicks
* Forgetting to tag links between 2 domains or links to/from an externally hosted shopping cart.

Most interesting to me is:

* When using ppc - not recording actual search keyword by using a custom filter e.g $A3 in (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)

What this does is show you exact long tail keyword the searcher used, rather than the keyword in your AdGroup that the impression was attributed to. We hope to get a screencast tutorial on this at Get Elastic in the near future.

The commenter is only identified as "Phil," as he cannot openly identify himself for professional reasons. But he had some more really fantastic tips in the comments here: http://www.getelastic.com/8-google-analytics-si...

Linda Bustos's last blog post..How Do Ratings and Reviews Help Online Retailers?

Maybe G wants to throw AdSense up on it?

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Internet Retailer 2008 Live Blogging + Commentary Digest

Hi Lamees,

Actually, setting up filters in Analytics doesn't affect a visitor's ability to access your site or to convert.

You can set up a separate profile if you want to keep tracking countries you've excluded from your main market. You could exclude your other markets from these additional profiles, so in essence you can get very targeted geographic analytics reports for each major region. This could be valuable if you're testing campaigns for markets you're thinking of expanding to, or only serve in a limited fashion (certain products you are willing to ship, etc).

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Using Buzzillions to Brainstorm Personas

I now have a follow up comment to my post:

2 Stupid Typos I Missed When Proofreading This Blog Post

1. "...commas, no spaces" instead of "commas, not spaces" (thank you Jesse for the heads up)

2. "...make sure it's a backslash or it won't work" should be "forward slash" - I've been known to mix up "turn left" and "turn right" as anyone who's had me as a passenger-seat GPS system will affirm.

My apologies, thanks for all the comments, sphinns and del.icio.us love despite the foibles :)

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Improving Product Descriptions Using Competitor Customer Reviews