Archive for September, 2007
Personalized Search Ads
September 14th, 2007
Matthew24/7 Real Media Inc. has conducted direct marketing campaigns with online advertising distributed via Internet search engines across a network of more than 950 Web sites.
Campaigns conducted in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region combined Internet searches with geographic, behavioral and keyword targeting.
Ads were personalized and customized to match specific Internet keyword searches initiated by individual consumers. The targeting resulted in increased click-through and response rates, according to the digital marketing agency.
Linking search and display advertising is an important step in integrating advertising strategies to take advantage of the Internet’s vast reach and targeting potential, said Brian Lesser, director of product marketing for 24/7.
Techniques like behavioral targeting and demographic targeting give advertisers an idea of what users might be looking for, but search targeting allows advertisers to serve ads based on what they know a particular consumer is interested in buying, according to Lesser.
One Million iphones Sold
September 11th, 2007
MatthewApple Inc. sold its millionth iPhone over the weekend, days after it slashed the price by a third to spur sales.
The milestone was reached weeks earlier than expected and sent shares of Apple up $4.94, or 3.8 percent, to $136.71. The stock regained some of the ground it lost after the price cut spooked investors as a sign of weak demand and slimmer margins.
It took just 74 days for the combination cell phone-iPod to hit the 1 million mark, which Apple had said it would achieve by the end of September. By comparison, it took two years for the company to sell 1 million iPods, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted in a statement.
Last week, Apple knocked $200 off the price of the 8-gigabyte iPhone, bringing its price to $399, and discontinued the 4-gigabyte version. Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris declined to comment on whether the price cut helped spur sales.
The price cut may have helped a bit, but Apple clearly was on track already to exceed its own expectations, analysts say.
“I’d argue that sales have been fairly strong, and this alleviates concerns that sales were weak,” said Shaw Wu, analyst at American Technology Research.
The swift price cut — not surprising in the cell phone industry but rare behavior for Apple — angered hundreds of early buyers who bought the touch-screen gadget for top dollar. In response to all the negative reaction, Jobs issued an apology the next day and offered customers $100 credits.
Apple had said it was lowering the iPhone price to attract more customers, in time for the holiday season.
The move, which many analysts had predicted — but not quite so quickly — adds pressure to Apple’s rivals, but it also was possibly part of a broader strategy for its entire product lineup.
On the same day Apple slashed the iPhone price to $399, it unveiled a new iPod, also for $399. The iPod Touch is basically the same as the iPhone but without the cell phone capability.
Apple cut the price of the hybrid iPod-cell phone to prevent an onslaught of consumers from abandoning it in favor of the Touch, Tim Bajarin, analyst with Creative Strategies, speculated. “They solved the cannibalization problem with this,” he said.
Web Design Colors
September 11th, 2007
MatthewCorporations understand the power of color and spend a lot of time and money using it for office colors, advertising, logos, websites and more. How are your colors working for you?
Research has shown the following psychological effects to these colors:
Blue - Cool, subduing, melancholy, contemplative, sober, cold, sky, water, ice
Red - passionate, exciting, fervid, active, heat, fire, blood
Green - quieting, refreshing, peaceful, health but it can also denote illness or guilt
Purple - dignified, pompous, religious, mournful, mystic, cool, mist, darkness, shadow
Yellow - cheerful, inspiring, vital, celestial, denoting high spirit, health, and sunlight
Black - style, class, romance, funereal, ominous, deadly, depressing, night, emptiness
Web Statistics Made Easy
September 11th, 2007
MatthewHere is a quick explanation of your web statistics.
Hits: “A “Hit” is a term used that represents the number of files downloaded from a server to your computer. For example, if a page has 20 different graphics, and someone visited it, it would count as 21 hits, one for the page load, and twenty for all the different graphics. The only real use for this statistic is for server administrators, so they can determine the server load.
Visits: The Number of Visitors shows you how many users come to your site and request a page. The visitor can move around your site visiting several pages, however he will still be counted as only one visitor. An exception to this rule occurs in the rare occasion when a visitor takes more than half an hour (or the amount of time set by your host) to click from one page to another, in which case the program will register two visitors.
Page Views: A parameter indicates how many pages have been requested. It is a very important number because it is indicative of the “stickiness” of your site. Stickiness is a good thing: if, for example, your statistics show 10 visitors, but 50 page views, it means that, on average, each visitor has viewed 5 pages. A large “page views per visitor” ratio usually means that your site is so interesting and valuable that users are inclined to “stick around” and explore.
Google Wifi
September 11th, 2007
MatthewThe Mountain View WiFi network just celebrated its first anniversary, and they thought you’d appreciate a few data points. The network’s 400+ mesh routers cover about 12 square miles and 25,000 homes to serve approximately 15,000 unique users each week month. Since the beginning of 2007, traffic has grown almost 10 percent each month, and the network now handles over 300 gigabytes of data each day, sent to over 100 distinct types of WiFi devices. Virtually the entire city has been taking advantage of the network, with 95 percent of the mesh routers being used on any given day.
Around the globe and across the U. S., many people are still not able to access the online services that are increasingly helpful, if not essential, tools for our daily lives. This is why google is committed to promoting alternative platforms for people to access the web, no matter where you are, what you’re doing or what device you’re using.
For those who have been following the effort to create a free wireless network in San Francisco, we continue to hope that EarthLink and The City will find a way to enable all San Franciscans to enjoy the free WiFi network they deserve. On a broader scale, they hope that the success of the Mountain View model will encourage others to think creatively about how to address access issues in many other communities.
Google Mobile Search
September 11th, 2007
MatthewGoogle quietly launched a page explaining all of their mobile search features at mobile.google.com. Anyone who has gone to www.google.com on their cell phone or portable device in recent times might have noticed that you were being shown a different user-interface than when you were using a normal browser. That’s because google has been forwarding mobile devices to a WML gateway to make using Google on your phone/PDA a more pleasurable experience. From what I’ve seen of Google’s XHTML mobile search — available at http://www.google.com/xhtml if your phone’s browser won’t automatically redirect from Google.com — they’re using many of the same methods along with some upgrades to make phone-searching as easy as possible.
Check your web rankings
September 11th, 2007
MatthewMake it a habit to check your search engine rankings at least weekly. This will give you a good idea of your visibility on the Web and alert you to any trends - up or down - in your rankings. You should check all of your important keywords and key phrases, and check all the search engines that matter to you, not just Google. There are programs available that will automate this task. One of the best is Web Position, but there are many other tools on the market, including free ones
First Impressions
September 7th, 2007
MatthewWithin the first three seconds of a new encounter, you are evaluated… even if it is just a glance.
People appraise your visual and behavioral appearance from head to toe. They observe your demeanor, mannerisms, and body language and even assess your grooming and accessories – watch, handbag, briefcase. Within only three seconds, you make an indelible impression. You may intrigue some and disenchant others.
This first impression process occurs in every new situation. Within the first few seconds, people pass judgment on you – looking for common surface clues. Once the first impression is made, it is virtually irreversible.
The process works like this:
It is human nature to constantly make these appraisals, in business and social environments.
CSS turns 10
September 7th, 2007
MatthewCSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.
Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.
Consider the fine designs in the CSS Zen Garden. What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree…and then uses that text as a background image.
A background image!
There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?
There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.
A brief history of web fonts
This is not a new idea. In 1998, CSS2 described a way to link to fonts from style sheets, and both Microsoft and Netscape added support for web fonts in their browsers. However, neither vendor supported the most widely used font format, TrueType. Instead, they each picked a different, little-used format with few tools to support it (EOT and TrueDoc, respectively). And so web fonts disappeared from the designer’s toolbox.
Better news
It’s a pleasure for me to announce that web fonts are back! Use them. Seperate yourself from others