june 2008

If you’ve ever wanted to test Facebook Ads and are a small business owner, Visa has a deal for you.

Visa is giving $100 in Facebook Ads to the first 20,000 small business owners that install their Visa Business Network app on Facebook.  After installing the application and answering a few questions a $100 Facebook advertising credit notification arrives in your inbox.

What’s the Visa Business Network?  Here’s what the App description provides:

A place that can help you and your business succeed.

Connect with other small business owners, learn ways to manage your business more efficiently, and grow by reaching the millions of potential customers on Facebook.

It’s free to join and easy to use. Sign up now to redeem your $100 in targeted Facebook advertising, and start connecting.

Use The Visa Business Network to:

GROW: With over 80 million users, Facebook is a great place to build your business. When you join the network, you get $100 to create targeted advertising and reach potential customers on Facebook.

CONNECT: The Visa Business Network connects you with other small businesses. Share ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge with people going through the same things you are.

MANAGE: The Resource Center features exclusive content that gives you great ways to help you manage your business. Take advantage of articles, videos, and tips from top small business sources.

Log in to Facebook, then add the Visa Business Network Application.

If you’ve ever wanted to test Facebook Ads and are a small business owner, Visa has a deal for you.

Visa is giving $100 in Facebook Ads to the first 20,000 small business owners that install their Visa Business Network app on Facebook.  After installing the application and answering a few questions a $100 Facebook advertising credit notification arrives in your inbox.

What’s the Visa Business Network?  Here’s what the App description provides:

A place that can help you and your business succeed.

Connect with other small business owners, learn ways to manage your business more efficiently, and grow by reaching the millions of potential customers on Facebook.

It’s free to join and easy to use. Sign up now to redeem your $100 in targeted Facebook advertising, and start connecting.

Use The Visa Business Network to:

GROW: With over 80 million users, Facebook is a great place to build your business. When you join the network, you get $100 to create targeted advertising and reach potential customers on Facebook.

CONNECT: The Visa Business Network connects you with other small businesses. Share ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge with people going through the same things you are.

MANAGE: The Resource Center features exclusive content that gives you great ways to help you manage your business. Take advantage of articles, videos, and tips from top small business sources.

Log in to Facebook, then add the Visa Business Network Application.

The board of ICANN unanimously approved sweeping changes to the rules governing domain extensions today. The broad based changes allow top-level domains (.com, .org, .edu, etc.) to be created without restrictions previously in place.

The new posture opens the door for almost any domain suffix imaginable, likely with .sex and .xxx leading the way. With most memorable names consumed under “.com,” that this ruling will pave the way for more descriptive suffixes, such as “.resort” or “.books”.

The AP reports that new TLDs won’t surface for several months. Regulation? Domains will need to be proposed to ICANN at which time they will go through a review phase allowing anyone to raise an objection.

Welcome to the next domain rush. Or maybe not. Citing ICANN, Ars Technica reports that “if approved, registering the TLD will cost anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000.” Maybe it’ll be the domain rush for everyone but the little guy.

If you’ve ever wondered what the popularity of a keyword or phrase is, Google’s got a tool that can help you. Google Trends, one of numerous experiments inhabiting the Google Labs site, provides the curious with search trends over time for a single or multiple term.

In addition to showing relative search volume trends, the site also maps news results onto the provided timeline. The graph Google Trends returned below is for the query “social networking” and “social media” (Social Networking is shown in blue, Social Media in red):

Below the graphed information Google also provides relative search volume by regions, cities and languages.

A recent addition is the ability to pull up the traffic on web sites. Google Trends allows entering multiple sites, just as it does for keywords. Regional information is also provided, as well as “also visited” sites and “also search for” keywords. Here’s MySpace.com in comparison to Facebook.com (MySpace.com is shown in blue, Facebook.com in red):

Just another tool you may want to employ when researching keywords or web sites. Don’t miss Google’s disclaimer at the bottom of the screen:

“Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Please keep in mind that several approximations are used when computing these results. All traffic statistics are estimates.”

Every client I work with wants a relative measure of how they compare to their competition online. The standard measuring stick is traffic. For years Alexa has been providing a ranking based upon traffic (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), but they didn’t provide what they felt those traffic numbers were. Instead, they provided (and still provide) a relative measure, rank, based upon their collection methods.

Today, there are other options, and ones that go far beyond a relative rankings system or even traffic. For the price (free), no one provides more information than Quantcast. Before we dive in, here’s how Quantcast defines themselves:

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites and services. Only Quantcast combines directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver accurate third-party metrics and easy-to-read profiles on digital media properties.

Here’s a quick overview of some of what you can learn about your competitors on Quantcast’s web site:

• Visits per month
• People per month (individual visitors)
• Gender, age, household income, ethnicity and more of domestic traffic

That’s far more than you’ll find over at Alexa. But, there’s more. Beyond traffic and demographic information, Quantcast also provides:

• Brand and site affinities
• Other sites with similar audiences

Let’s take a look at some of that data. Here’s some sample Quantcast data for John Battelle’s Searchblog (http://battellemedia.com)

Here’s some information Quantcast provides:

• People - Global: 36,884
• People - U.S.: 23,461
• Average Page Views/Visit - US: 1.33 US
• Average Page Views/Visit - Global: 1.31
• 62% of traffic is Male, 38% Female
• The household income for 64% of visitors is between $30,000 an $100,000
• The majority of visitors, 70%, are 35 or over
• Visitors have brand & site affinities for telegraph.co.uk and the Washington Post

How Quantcast arrives at the information it provides is through the combination of panel data and directly measured data. Not all sites on Quantcast are providing directly measurable data, however. John Battelle’s Searchblog is, and you can tell that because on the report page for the web site, there is a “Quantified Publisher” icon toward the top of the page. This indicates that this web site has placed a tracking script on each page of the web site, allowing Quantcast to directly measure (and share) site usage information. If this icon isn’t present, the data Quantcast provides is not nearly as accurate.

Just to be clear, providing competitive metrics isn’t why Quantcast exists. That said, by the nature of the information it provides Quantcast can be used for competitive metrics. If you leverage it for competitive research be sure you understand how Quantcast collects information. If you’re making decisions based on what Quantcast (or any other data provider offers) the first step is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your data source.

In review of a few clients’ analytics this month I kept running across an inbound referrer I hadn’t seen befoere: msplinks.com. First, I just went to msplinks.com, and saw that there is nothing but a blank page there. After trying a few of the URLs from Google Analytics, one worked. It was this one:

http://msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LnJlZGJ1bGxmbHVndGFndXNhLmNvbQ==

And this was the page it returned:

So msplinks are outbound redirections originating at MySpace. But, what is the problem that this truly solves for MySpace? They say it is a security measure, but is it (in whoel or part) to reduce MySpace usage merely for SEO purposes?

A quote from Karen Donovan’s Wired article on Jerry Yang and his participation in a plot to undermine a successful Microsoft purchase of Yahoo (emphasis mine):

…Yang was engineering a plan for a “massive employee walkout” in the aftermath of a Microsoft takeover by offering all of Yahoo’s 14,000 employees the right to quit his or her job and pocket 100 percent acceleration of their equity rights, if there was “substantial adverse alteration” of their jobs.

Yahoo’s compensation consultant calculated that the proposal would cost $1.5 billion, or 3.2 percent of the transaction price. “That’s nuts,” he concluded in an e-mail.

For more background, and where the documentation came from to substantiate the claims being made, read the full article over on Wired’s site