Compete.com bought for $75m

TNS bought Compete for $75m.

Wow. I wonder if Alexa is valued at $75m.

TNS have a product called 6th dimension which is a large marketing intelligence panel of about 1m million users in the States. I imagine they'll merge/integrate into that.

I can only hope that Compete's normal service via Compete.com continues as normal. It may just have been a branding tool (which worked very well, given how TechCrunch backed it) so I guess there's a risk that the service there will be cut back a bit or, more likely, we don't see any new developments to draw our attention.

I also note the lack of news on Compete.com about the deal. Nothing in the blog yet - which explains why TechCrunch and the SEM blogs haven't yet picked up on this.

Update: Ah. Here it is Compete.com's blog post. Looks like I was right about the 6th Dimension tie in.

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madKast adding blog analytics

madKast is a widget start up that I've had an 'like - remove - like - remove' relationship with for a while.

I'm currently in a "remove" stage of this relationship and have banished their widget from this blog. They're a very clued up start up so they emailed to ask why. They also let me know about this...


You can get a live view of this old data here

This is a blog analytics offering. Not only can I see my traffic lines (as a their widget is on every page) I can see how often their widget is used to share my blog posts - and that's an insight unique to madKast. It's a clever thing for them to share.

I also like the way they look at the reading trends of my readers. I can see which other blogs people are looking at. In fact, in many ways this looks a lot like MyBlogLog except the analytics are more thorough (we have share data) and prettier (we have graphs).

I certainly might put the madKast widget back on but I removed it last time because it simply stopped working.

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Social Media success at Cadbury?

If this is a success - it's one of the biggest successes I've seen in the social media landscape.

Cadbury is due to bring back their famous 1980s chocolate bar - the Wispa.

Brand Republic has coverage and is citing social network pressure (sub needed).

The lobbying on Facebook and MySpace resulted in a 14,000 people "Bring Back Wispa" group. You can find Wispa archive adverts such as this one for Wispa Gold (which lasted longer than Wispa itself) on YouTube.



I think this is an interesting move from Cadbury. Sure, the collective voice of Wispa fans on the net is strong but is it enough to support a whole product line? There are more than 14,000 news agents in the UK and so the Bring Back Wispa group could equate to less than one chocolate bar being sold from every other shop in the UK. That wouldn't be a success. On the other than, as a public sample survey the 14,000 figure is huge.

This move follows Proctor and Gamble pulling their internet ad campaigns and blaming poor metrics for online. P&G don't sell products to you and me. P&G sell products to the likes of ASDA and Tesco. When P&G advertise on the TV they're doing that to encourage us to go to the shops and ask for P&G products. Cadbury is in the same boat; they don't sell their chocolate bars directly to us, they advertise so that we demand their chocolate from retailers and it is the retailers who then buy from Cadbury.

P&G picked up a lot of criticism for their move to stall their online efforts. I suspect they were not prepared for how vocal the net community is. They also seemed to be slightly shaky in their understanding of where TV is going (IPTV or V+, anyone?).

P&G may being Luddite about online and Cadbury may being progressive - but we're yet to see who's right.

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MyBlogLog should go after FeedBurner

I think it's too late for FeedBurner to go after MyBlogLog.

FeedBurner and MyBlogLog come from very different directions but are ultimately marching towards a meeting.

MyBlogLog lets you see who has been on your blog; either through standard web metrics or the canny photograph log. You also use MyBlogLog to help promote your site.

FeedBurner allows users to look after RSS feeds and track who is reading them. By an overwhelming majority most web sites that issue RSS feeds are blogs or blog-based platforms.

In essence MyBlogLog gives you stats about who is actually visiting your blog and FeedBurner gives you stats on who is viewing your blog remotely. FeedBurner would be enhanced with improved on-page tracking and if it had a quirky social media promotion style feature. MyBlogLog would be enhanced if it worked with RSS feeds. Most people subscribe to their favourite blogs via Google Reader, Bloglines or similar external source.

If MyBlogLog gobbled up FeedBurner then they would end up with a nice user base, Yahoo would have some tasty data to crunch through and a large database of RSS feeds.

As it happens Yahoo has a patent application called Integration of personalized portals with web content syndication. Yahoo could do a lot with a database of RSS feeds. This particular patent describes how the search engine first identifies pages with RSS feeds, presents that information to searchers and then allows users to add those RSS feeds to a personalised portal. This personalised portal is Yahoo's MyWeb. However, the personalised portal could so easily become a profile page on MyBlogLog.

My feeling is that FeedBurner is more robust than MyBlogLog. MBL will have to innovate and impress in order to avoid being a flash in the pan. Yahoo clearly has some ideas for it. I just wonder whether they are thinking along similar lines.

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Linking to other sites increases your stickyness

I really like Google Analytics. You can do more clever analytical reviews with it than many people assume. Ever since I kicked this blog out of the long grass at the start of the year I've been using user-defined segmentation. I've been tracking link clicks.

On this blog there are four types of clicks that I track:

• Blog Clicks - clicks on the blog roll
• External Clicks - clicks to external sites
• Nav Clicks - clicks on the navigation
• Social Clicks - clicks on the digg, del.icio.us, etc links at the bottom of the posts

The P/Visit column is the one to watch. This records the pages per visit. The highest value is on External-Clicks up at 2.89. That's nearly twice as many page views any other.

To be brutal - these are low P/Visit counts. Blogs tend to be low as readers pop in based on an RSS prompt or tag match and then leave again. However, this data goes back until Janurary so there is a clear trend.

This data should not be taken as scientific. I've not closed the test. I meddled with my tracking some point.

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Sirrah, I disagree

I'm glad that Brandt Dainow of Think Metrics has published a study of click through data over at iMedia Connection. Most SEO agencies will not, cannot, do this. Think Metrics is analytics rather than SEO.

The data is fun to look at. I don't agree with the conclusion;

"1st Position Isn't Worth It".

It's no secret that 1st position is rarely the best for ROI. That's not news. What about volume? The first position is often best for volume.

Dainow's figures also lead him to conclude;

"There is no relationship between the position of an advertisement in the Google Ad listings and the chance of that ad being clicked on."

I guess this is a study of AdWords which appear on the first page. There's certainly a big difference in clicks between page 1 and page 3. No secret here either. In fact, just to repeat, there can often be a difference in the number of clicks you get at position 1 than you do at, say, 8.

Of course, you don't have to believe me. You can drop your bids to position 8 and see what happens.

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Is the US Department of State watching Andy Beal, webpronews or Flickr?

I was going to include a little run down of who has been checking out the site since World of Search on Flickr. One particular visitor caught my interest.

I've had a visit from the U.S. Department of State. They came to the site through Andy Beal's WebProNews article.

I'm sure it is just a friendly WebTech who happens to be on the Department of State's infrastructure (which is huge) but it did put a smile on my face. Maybe I'll get another visit.

Did I say I really like Google Analytics? I do. Few people realise how much information you can get out from it.

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Which is better for SEO? Absolute Unique Visitors, New or Returning Visitors?

Ha. This blog title is a loaded question.

Which is better for SEO? Absolute Unique Visitors, New or Returning Visitors?

Simply put different web sites have different needs and different visitors do different things. A client rang with the "Which is better?" question within minutes of Google posting a useful walk-through on their Analytics Blog. I recommend this Google blog above many others. You will find countless SEO blogs but this is the only analytics blog.

The client in question is the marketing manager for a content site with a subscription model. You get a teaser of an article for free and if you want to read the whole thing then you need to subscribe to the site.

Absolute Unique Visitors are important to them because they represent people finding the site. This is their search traffic as well as links from elsewhere - blog citations, Google Desktop alerts, forum links, social search links or even direct traffic. Each absolute unique visitor is someone who could become a subscriber. If comparison date range is large enough then absolute unique visitors are highly unlikely to already be a subscriber.

That can't be said for New or Returning visits. A New Visitor could well be someone who has discovered the site before. A "New Visit" can come from an "Prior Visitor". The Google Analytics GUI talks about "Visitor Type" (as shown on the right of the screen shot below) but really we're talking about visits rather than visitors.



New and Returning visitors are still important for our content client though. Why? These are the people more likely to link to the teaser/free content on the site. That's easy to imagine how that works in the blogosphere. If you have a reader who returns to your site again and again then your chances of appearing in their blog list is much higher. Someone may be an avid reader of your site via RSS but if they're reading your work from a distance then they're less likely to reference you directly. The RSS reader is passive. Someone on your site is active. If someone is on your site then they're exposed to the "Blog This" button and your other social search lures.

Had I had a financial services client ask me the same question then we would have a slightly different scenario. If you're a bank, for example, then it simply does not matter how often someone applies for a credit card or a mortgage. They'll do it once and you will either approve or reject them. Once rejected it really does not matter how often they come back to your site (unless their financial situation changes). Web users rarely link to finance content. How many people actually blog about Barclays' great personal banking? One person. Me. I did it just now and no one is likely to do it again for a while! (Splogs being the exception). We can't really say that someone returning to a financial service provider again and again are any more likely to link to the site than someone who has just discovered it.

In fact, it could be argued that the people (the absolute unique visitors) who have just discovered a financial service site are the people most likely to link to it via a "Hey, I've just discovered..." post.

If we go back to the credit card example, the rejected returning visitor is not worth much but a brand spanking new visitor is. The absolute unique visitor is the visitor who represents the best chance of a lead and conversion.

We could end it there but I think it is worth while pointing out how brand skews all of this. In terms of search promotion and ROI that returning user may not be important to the bank. In terms of brand strength then that returning user is. A rule of thumb is that is the returning visits which offer the best reflection of brand strength. These are the people who liked what they saw the first time around to come back. That's always good for brand.

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