Zach's blog

To find my new blog please visit: http://www.vonfelten.com/blog/

Zach

The value of web analytics

“You cannot improve what you cannot measure” is an age-old truth, which for some reason seemed to be oblivious to marketers who tended to operate in a vacuum. However, web marketing has altered all that, with the availability of sophisticated tracking tools and making marketers more accountable to questions on ROI. As web marketing technology has advanced, so has the domain of web analytics, which is now a sizeable industry in itself.

For anybody serious about using online marketing, web analytics is indispensable. It helps one truly understand their website users: who their users are, what they are looking for, how long, where do they come from and where do they exit the site. This kind of in-depth knowledge about site visitors is critical in making objective and informed decisions about a site, rather than basing critical decisions on somebody’s whims and fancies, an all-pervasive problem that continues to exist even today in many organizations...

The full post has been moved here: http://www.vonfelten.com/blog/category/web-analytics/

MSN Labs and Beta Tools

Ok.... I got a little heat from buddies for not posting where you can find MSN's research tools. MSN's tools can be found here:
http://adlab.msn.com/home.aspx

Paid search Tools
Paid Search lets you bid on specific keywords and then displays relevant ads when adCenter customers search for information.

• Context-Based Acronym Resolution
• Keyword Group Detection
• Keyword Mutation Detection
• Search Funnels
• Search Result Clustering
• Forecasting Search Volume Seasonality

Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising is a way to display advertising that is relevant for an individual customer.

• Content Categorization
• Keyword Categorization

Behavioral Targeting
You can target customer segments by using adCenter to model their online behaviors.
(They just launched this
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=47728&Nid=23067&p=339176)

• Demographics Prediction
• Detecting Online Commercial Intention

Emerging Markets
Many new online advertising channels are coming soon from MSN.

• Local Ads on PC

Google SEO Tools and Beta Projects

Google has a number of useful SEO tools and beta projects they are working on. You can find them here:

• AdWords Keyword Tool - Excellent tool that shows keywords related to an entered keyword, web page, or web site.
• AdWords Traffic Estimator - Used to estimate the how much traffic an AdWords ad would drive and what the bid price needs to be to rank #1 in the sponsored ad section on Google searches. The esitmate is based on holding the #1 spot 85% of the time.
• Google Suggest - Cute little tool found in Google Labs that auto completes search queries based on the most common searches starting with the characters or words you have entered.
• Google Trends - This tool is still in beta and needs some work but it shows multi-year search trends.
• Google Sets - Quickly becoming a useful tool that creates semantically related keyword sets based on keyword(s) you enter.
• Google Zeitgeist - If your looking to find out what fades are being searched for try this tool.

Yahoo! SEO Tools and Beta Projects

Yahoo! has a number of useful SEO tools and beta projects they are working on. You can find them here:

• Overture Keyword Selector Tool - shows prior month search volumes across Yahoo! and their search network.
• Overture View Bids Tool - displays the top ads and bid prices by keyword in the Yahoo! Search Marketing ad network.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - shows which pages Yahoo! has indexed from a site and which pages they know of that link at pages on your site.
• Yahoo! Mindset - shows you how Yahoo! can bias search results more toward informational or commercial search results.
• Yahoo! Advanced Search Page - makes it easy to look for backlinks.
  Try link:http://www.site.com/page.html searches (links to an individual page)
  Try linkdomain:www.site.com/ searches (links to any page on a particular domain)
• Yahoo! Buzz - shows current popular searches

About Zach von Felten

Zach von Felten is a leader in the search engine optimization field. He started designing web sites while attending college at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since then, he has built web sites for educational institutions, medical professionals, engineering companies, law firms, real estate developers, the entertainment industry, and many small businesses. Zach von Felten is a principle partner of Zafel, LLC. Services include web development, Internet marketing, and building custom web applications. He previously worked in the private sector as a software engineer working with machine guidance and global positioning systems. Responsibilities included project management, software development, quality control, and working with government entities. In 2004, von Felten was featured on KMPH 107.5 FM’s “Entrepreneurs Spotlight” in Fresno, California. He has since provided Internet marketing consultation to the marketing manager of KSEE-TV/Channel 24 NBC Fresno, WBBM-TV/ CBS 2 Chicago, and many small to mid-size businesses. To find more information about Zach von Felten visit:https://www.vonfelten.com