At the Summit, I heard Avinash Kaushik speak (or as Dylan says, How can you go to the Summit and not hear Eric Peterson and Avinash and Sam Decker?) And as usual, Avinash was wonderful, soon he will have groupies following him around. But I didn’t agree with one thing he said. I wish he were right - making more money for the company and more money for your boss is the road to success. Unfortunately, I feel like all anyone cares about is ego. (To be fair, he did touch on this.)

Customers say, “I don’t care what the right thing to do is, I want to do a better job of what my competitor is doing.” Or they say, at my last company we did it this way [five years ago, a million years in Internet time.] Or they say, my wife|husband doesn’t like it. It’s true, as Avi says, that the person with the largest income gets to decide, but my real issue here is, not only do they get to decide, but they too often decide based on what makes them feel important, not on what makes them and the company more money.

As a consultant, this is a hard place to be. (It is probably even harder as an employee!) I always feel ethically obligated to point out once to the customer that if we do it our way, they will make more money. Then when they say, “I don’t care,” I can say, “OK, we will do it your way.” But sometimes I wonder what they are paying for, doing it their way or achieving success.

I guess it is all in the definition of “success.”

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps I promise that I will do Regular Expressions Part VIII soon.

I really do love FeedBurner, and it’s such an appropriate gift - I just found out that I am speaking about feeds and blogging in November.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

ps I promise that I will write Part 7 of my RegEx series, maybe even today.

Podcasters can consider this unpaid user testing: I usually write from the client’s side of the aisle, but tonight I want to be a customer. Specifically, I am a very avid listener of podcasts, yet podcasts and podcasters can drive me a little crazy sometimes — enough to make me stop downloading them (bad) or stop listening to them (arguably worse, since they don’t have my share of mind but their analytics can’t tell that. )

Mistake #1: Your website makes it really hard for me to subscribe to your podcast. If you already know what the feed address is, why can’t you tell me instead of asking me to click on a link that brings up my Quicktime and insists that I sit at my computer to listen to you?

Mistake #2: Your website doesn’t have links to sites/software that you/your guest discussed during the podcast. I know that you think I am sitting at my computer and listening to you, but in fact, I am driving, and I just can’t write down the name of a suggested destination, no matter how carefully you spell it, while switching gears and accelerating. For example, I listened to a wonderful (albeit too long) podcast today on design, with someone on Good Karma/Webmaster Radio. The speaker gave out a number of sites that might have been interesting to look at, but I was exercising and then driving.

Mistake #3: You think I am paying attention to you all the time. and Mistake #4: You think that I listen to you from beginning to end in one sitting Here’s the problem: You may ask a guest a question or start in on a news item that I already know or am not interested in. By the time I notice that you’ve moved on to a new, more interesting topic or question, you’ve already announced the topic name. This means that I get to hear the item but I never hear the subject or the subject name. If, for example, you are talking about a new pay per click feature, I can probably figure out whether the subject was Google or MSN or Yahoo. But if you are talking about some cool feature that a new, little-known website introduced, I won’t know what the site name was unless you find a way to close the news item or question with a reference to the site again. This same issue rears its head when I listen to only part of a podcast, get to my destination and turn off my iPod, only to pick up the next day without a clue as to what the specific subject was.

Mistake #5: Your equipment is lousy and that of your guests is worse. I am somewhat more sympathetic to this topic than the others because when I did my podcast with Eric Mattson, we used Skype. The sound was crystal clear yet the technology burped in the middle and we didn’t know it until listening. I was amazed that people listened to the end (and I know they did, because they sent me comments about this issue). I just find it too painful to listen to anything that is not mission critical when the equipment makes the voices hard to hear.

Mistake #6: You think I already know who you are and how your show works. For months, I listened to Danny Sullivan talk about “the chat room” on the Daily Searchcast and assumed that it was something you participated in if you were one of his subscribers. Eventually I figured out that the chat room he was referring to is a function of Webmaster Radio. I think.

Mistake #7: You spend too much time joking and wasting time and not enough giving me really hard information or important thoughts. Enough said.

Mistake #8: You work too hard to be funny even though you aren’t a funny guy because you think that’s the way it works. Well, maybe others will disagree, but I think podcasting is like blogging: your audience has to love you for who you are and not who you think you should be. (Or maybe that’s Bridget Jones.) I can’t even give you any examples for this one anymore because all those podcasters have long since been deleted from my iTunes.

Mistake #9: You allocate an hour for your podcast when 20 or 25 minutes would be just great. See Mistake #4.

Mistake #10: The name of each cast is not descriptive enough for me to know if I’m interested in the download.

Having said all that — I still love podcasts (at least, the ones that I haven’t deleted from my iTunes.) They enable me to multi-process, i.e. learn while I am doing a second activity at the same time.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Here’s the link to my interview with podcaster Eric Mattson of MarketingMonger. Eric is on a quest to reach 1000 interviews with Internet marketing executives and entrepreneurs.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I spent 25 hours in Portland, Oregon. Not only is it a jewel of a city, but everywhere you go, you meet web analysts.

I finally got to meet Brent Hieggelke, my Web Analytics Association co-chair. Brent used to be CMO at WebTrends but is now CMO at a London-based start-up, TouchClarity. TouchClarity uses neural networks (and probably genetic algorithms) to look at each visitor’s click stream and dynamically change the layout of the screen. That way, for example, the individual who is always clicking on sports stories will get served up ads for Sports Illustrated, and the person who is clicking through on beauty stories will get fashion ads. Although this might sound vaguely like split path testing, whereby different people see different options, it’s not the same at all: the goal of split path testing is to determine which one design works the best for everyone, whereas the goal of TouchClarity is to always customize the website for every individual.

I finally got to meet Loren Hadley from L.Hadley & Associates. Loren also works with Brent and me on the WAA Marketing Committee. At lunch, the talk turned to Google Analytics and I pointed out that the new invitation wait time is down now to about three weeks. Loren then told everyone that he had purchased an invitation from China for $.99 on eBay and received it instantly.

After corresponding with him for over six months, I then finally got to meet fellow analytics blogger Eric Butler. We went out for dinner with two of his colleagues from WebTrends, Kevin and Clay. Kevin gets all the credit for the title of this post (although just about everyone I met in Portland is in love with it. Brent practically dragged me over to a window to see Mt. Hood.) And then Greg Drew, CEO of WebTrends, magically appeared in the restaurant so that he and I could finish our WAA business. (I use the word “magic” because he had no idea where I had gone to dinner or that I was going out with Eric. Or that I even knew Eric. Am still not quite sure how he figured it out.)

I even got to meet with my friend Andrea Hadley (no relation to Loren, but they both like meeting other Hadleys) of NetSetGo from Vancouver, who offered up the observation that the WAA is like Canada — multicultural. (I think Switzerland and “neutral” would have been a better analogy, but hey, she’s Canadian, let’s give it to her.)

Finally, if there are any WAA types out there who would like to be on the Marketing Committee - send me email, steif at lunametrics.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Earlier this week, I wrote about subscribing to a blog or webzine via feeds (sometimes referred to as RSS, although it comes in other flavors as well.) One commentor, Steve, disagreed with my analysis that the subscriber is anonymous.

So let me pull apart the pieces of the issue.

1) Is your IP address anonymous when you subscribe to a feed? Technically, not at all. If you subscribe using a web service like Bloglines, your IP address comes through to the web analytics as a “referral” from Bloglines every time you engage with the blog. If you read feeds with software like Thunderbird, the blog or ezine owner can always put a picture in the feed which your computer has to go out and pull off his server and when he evaluates his server logs, there is your IP address. (I always think this is the reason that Avinash starts every post with a picture of a flower. It is his tracking beacon. But I am just speculating.)

2) Just because someone has your IP address, do they have your identity? Sometimes, it’s not that hard to figure out. Lots of times, it is very hard (and I would venture, sometimes impossible. But the commenter, Steve, has done forensic web analytics and I never work to figure out who someone is because I’m not part of the CSI team. Notice that even he said, “It depends.”)

3) Does it matter if someone has your IP address?Probably not in the context I was setting up. Remember, I was pointing out that you don’t have to give out your email address when you subscribe via a feed (still true and still a nice benefit.) And you can unsubscribe without hurting the author’s feeling (still true, because the author won’t notice that your IP address doesn’t show up the way he would if you send in a “Please unsubscribe me from this email list” request.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

A subscription — be it an email subscription or a feed subscription — is often how blogs, webzines and other content sites define conversion. After I wrote my post to Joel, talking about things he wasn’t doing right in his effort to to convert his readers to be RSS subscribers, a couple of people asked me, “How would you write an explanation of what RSS is?” So here goes.

What is RSS? Well, you really don’t care, do you now? All that matters is what it can do for you and how to make it work for you.

RSS Features. We’re going to refer to RSS by the more generic term, “feeds,” since RSS and its cousins will feed information to your desktop, much like a subscription to an email marketing newsletter feeds information to your inbox. Feeds bear another similarity to email: you need a place to read them, like Outlook, Eudora, your gmail account. Ditto for feeds: you can read them in software (that’s one of the reasons I like Thunderbird, I can read both my email and my feeds in one place) or you can establish a free account with the many webservices for reading feeds, such as Bloglines.

So it’s just like email, right? No, there are many differences.

• Your feeds will never be subject to your corporate spam filter.
• When you subscribe, you don’t have to give out your email address and fear that it will be abused.
• If you subscribe to an email newsletter, the publisher always knows about you, and you have to work to be anonymous. But when you subscribe to a feed, you really are anonymous.
• Being anonymous also means you can unsubscribe from feeds published by your friends without hurting their feelings.
• I haven’t been staying on top of the “charge to charge” for email by AOL and Yahoo! but I hear it is coming. Feeds won’t be part of that financial project.

So how does someone make it happen? Remember that you need a place to read your feeds, just like you need a place to read your email. (see RSS Features, above.) Once you’ve got that set up, find a feed you are interested in. You will usually see an icon (often orange) with the words, Subscribe, or XML or RSS or just Get The Feed. Click on it, copy the Internet address bar of the next screen you get, paste that into wherever your feed reader wants it, and you are in business.

Usually.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

It’s getting harder and harder to talk to Google without talking in XML. A month ago, they rolled out their Google Co-op program. One part of it is Subscribed Links, and even though the description and the how-to’s are terribly written, I slogged my way through it (without any help from any XML gurus.) I hope you will try it too.

I created Subscribed Links in static mode. So if you subscribe to me by clicking here and then click on the big SUBSCRIBE button, on the left side of the screen, you’ll be able to pull up my Links every time you type in “conversion rate.” You’ll see this in Google, right under the top sponsored link:

Alternatively, if you love reference distributions, you can subscribe to one
of my customers, an embedded Linux development tools company, by clicking here and doing the same routine.

It’s good for the ego, but will be better for subscribers once I get the dynamic version working, that pulls up multiple options for many keywords. In the meantime, here’s how you do it yourself, although this is just one way, and there are lots of options available:

Copy this into a NotePad (Mac users, help me out and tell me what works on the Mac):


<results
<authorinfo description="Description (which doesn't seem to show up anywhere)" author="Firstname Lastname">
<resultspec id="InfoMatch">
<query>your search term goes here</query>
<output name="title">This will be the title of your little green co-op search</output>
<output name="more_url">www.yoursite.com</output>

<Output name=”link1″>First Anchor link text</Output>
<Output name=”url1″>www.firstlink.com</Output>
<output name=”link2″>Second Anchor Link text</output>
<output name=”url2″>www.secondlink.com</output>
<output name=”link3″>Third Anchor Link Text</output>
<output name=”url3″>www.thirdlink.com</output>

</response>
</resultspec>
</authorinfo>
</results>

Save it to your desktop as anyname.xml. Then follow the directions at the Google Subscribed Links site.

And many thanks to Clint (again), who helps with every kind of visualization one could need.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

In March, I wrote about Google Sitemaps, and pointed out that you can learn from the analytics that they give you. (Plus, if you have client side analytics, you don’t know when the crawlers come to visit, since client-side analytics don’t talk to the automated traffic. At the very least, you can learn when the Googlebot last visited from Sitemaps.)

As part of the Sitemap thing, it is nice to include a Sitemap so Google will do a better job of crawling your site. The downside is, Google’s xml conversion tools are not very user friendly. I made the mistake of sending the techies at a customer a note yesterday, “It’s easy! Just use Google’s little tools,” to which they replied, “If it’s so easy, you do it.”

So I found this tool, xml-sitemaps.com, that makes creating a sitemap in xml actually easy. You, too, can look like you know what you are doing in front of your boss and your customers when you use this free tool (or you can pay the $14.99 and get added functionality.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Since Google makes news faster than other Internet companies, almost everyone already knows about Google Trends, announced two days ago. In case you’ve been busy doing real work over the past two days: it enables you to type in up to five keyword phrases and shows you the relative number of searches done for those phrases on Google (but there are no numbers, so it is a graph without coordinates.) They also show major news events for those terms and do bar graphs for various countries.

Here was my first graph:

I was very surprised to see these results, because on Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, which captures a full year’s worth of data but only samples about 1/11th of the Internet, I got these results, showing “embedded linux” to be the larger term:

It’s possible, I thought, that Google is picking up all searches that included the term (as if they were doing what Google AdWords calls broad match), because KeyWordDiscovery shows many more derivative terms containing cygwin. However, that guess was wrong wrt Google Trends: if you want a broad match, you have to separate your terms with a pipe like this: (embedded linux)|cygwin.

The real issue seems to be about pitfalls that a service like KeywordDiscovery faces when they sample, and the skew of various kinds of words. KD’s FAQs say that they do use Google as part of their sample, but they also use many other engines. This probably works well for them for most situations except for the one I happend to try. After all, if your company is involved with embedded linux, or you want to understand the market or the competition, you may easily be a manager who could use Google or Yahoo or MSN, typing in embedded linux. On the other hand, my limited experience with real geeks (the kinds who would type in cygwin) is that they use Google almost exclusively.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics