By : Admin

Microsoft is preparing for the first limited beta of its forthcoming Web analytics tool for release; later this year. It has Code-named its product- Gatineau which aims to compete with Google Analytics. It is noteworthy here that Gatineau is similar in many respects to Google Analytics, however it promises to take analytics one step further with the addition of demographic data. Apparently Gatineau will be able to leverage Live ID information to offer demographic information and it will be segmenting Web site visitors by both age and gender.

On the other hand Google Analytics is perhaps the premier marketing tool offered by Google. It has proved helpful to both the marketer and the webmaster. Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your web site. Google Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and what it does once it enters your site. You can monitor up to three sites for free. Google Analytics is extremely valuable in analyzing your marketing funnel. It tracks all the steps leading up to your sales or checkout page, vital information for raising your conversion rate and ROI.

The use of Live ID data in Microsoft’s Gatineau is likely to set off alarm bells as far as privacy is concerned however; there will be no use of personally identifiable data in the product. Microsoft acquired the base technology for Gatineau in May 2006. Perhaps Microsoft is augmenting many of its online features with Web analytics gizmos from DeepMetrix, a 15-year Internet intelligence firm. Gatineau will allow users, once they have set up a profile and added a tracking script to their blog or website, to:

• View reports
• Manage goals
• Manage campaigns

Microsoft’s Gatineau will, of course, integrate with Microsoft’s adCenter – its own pay-per-click engine. It could be assumed that Gatineau will also provide integration with Google’s AdWords. The Microsoft product is likely to gain more features as the beta progresses because as of now, it is on Beta 1 which is work-in-progress.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

You have the world’s finest collection of widgets. You created the world’s best widget website. You have no traffic. You checked in the search engines and found that your site does not appear at all, even though all your competitors’ sites do. Perhaps the search engine robots cannot get to your pages to index them.

Search Engine Robots

Search engine robots are simple creatures. They can “read” text to add to their databases, and they can follow “normal” links–those links that are coded to look like:

<a href="bluewidgets.html">blue widgets</a>
or the slight variation
<a href="bluewidgets.html><img src="bluewidget.gif"></a>

Search engine robots cannot select items from lists; search engine robots cannot type text into boxes; search engine robots cannot click “submit” buttons. That means that no matter how important our dynamically-generated page of blue widgets is, if the only way to access that page is to select it from a list or click on a button, the robot will never be able to visit it. That, in turn, means that it will never appear in the search engine results. So how do you get your dynamic information to show up in non-dynamic ways?

The Painful Solution

One of the reasons that dynamic pages exist is because of the difficulty involved in constantly updating — adding and deleting — pages from your site, based on which widgets you are offering this season. If you have a separate page for each make and model of widget, each of those pages can be spidered. They can all be reached through links that look like:

<a href="bluewidget-1.html">blue widgets style 1</a>
<a href="bluewidget-2.html">blue widgets style 2</a>
<a href="redwidget-1.html">red widgets style 1</a>
<a href="redwidget-2.html">red widgets style 2</a>
<a href="newwidget-1.html">new widgets style 1</a>
<a href="newwidget-2.html">new widgets style 2</a>

The bad news here, of course, is that you now have to create all of those pages. This loses the benefit of drawing the widget information from a database.

A Better Solution

A better solution is to create only a “shell” of each page, and then to dynamically populate the page from our database. By creating a “real” file, you can assign a fixed URL, but still use the database to fill-in the page, using any of various server-side techniques (HTML server-side includes, Perl, Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, PHP, etc.). A simple page like this might suffice:

<html>
<head>
<title>Blue Widgets style 1</title>
</head>
<body>
<!–#exec cgi="myscript.pl?bluewidget-1"–>
</body>
</html>

Save this page as “bluewidget-1.html” and you’re good to go, assuming that “myscript.pl” will actually return the content you want for the body of the page. True, you will have a discrete page for each item in your inventory, but at least you only need to hard-code the bare-bones of that page.

Another Way To Go

There is yet another way to go. This method does not require creating dozens of static pages, or of having to include exotic scripts in your web pages. It also may not work for all search engines!

Some search engine robots just will not follow links that include a “querystring” as part of the URL. You have seen a querystring if you have ever looked at the URL of a page of search results in Google. For example, if you look for “blue widgets” on Google, not only do you get page after page of blue widgets, you also see that these pages have very complicated-looking addresses

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=blue+widgets

In this address, everything after the question mark (”?”) is a querystring. This is used to pass additional information to the web server. While some search engines can follow a complicated address like this, many simply will not follow such a link. That means that if you use a URL like:

http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&model=1,
the robot may not be able to follow it. This is bad.

On the other hand, an increasing number of search engine robots will follow such links. Usually, links like this are created “on the fly” by filling-out forms and clicking a “submit” button, but that doesn’t have to be the case. You can grab that address, querystring and all, and put it into a “normal” link, like this

<a href="http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&model=1">
blue widgets style 1</a>

Put several of these on a page and the search engine robot can now visit your dynamic pages from links that require no button-clicking. Remember that not all robots will follow these links, so your mileage may vary.

As long as the link to the page exists in a form that does not require human intervention to get to it (pulldown menus, search results, form submits, etc) then a bot will follow it.

Widgets Out The Door

Using any of these methods will help search engine robots to find the dynamic pages on your site. This means that the important content on those pages is more likely to be included in the search engine databases, and that people will be better able to find you. That, of course, means that the Widget Queen will reign supreme, knowing that widget customers the world over will now be able to find you and buy your widgets.

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By : Admin

Being in business-to-business (B2B) means need of a lot of continuous efforts to be put in. You can not afford to sit idle as the main focus, today, is not only the revenue generation at all cost but to be as aggressive as possible with the cost saving strategies. It also applies to the marketing and sales operations. Here are seven great low-cost, high-impact initiatives that could transform your marketing department into a lean, efficient, and deadly effective organization.

1. Develop and monitor the performance of your channels.

   Grasping your marketing and sales operations as a set of processes will enable you to evaluate efficiencies in the chain. Eliminating weak links can save your company significant amounts of cash. It is important to know the relative performance of each of the channels. Pruning nonproductive business relationships will improve the health of your organization and enable you to focus on your most profitable channels.

2. Retain and augment your most valued customers.

   The cost of acquiring new customers in these choppy waters is very expensive. Initiatives focused on mining current relationships will prove to be very effective in these lean times. The cost of gaining incremental sales from a current relationship can often be less than that from a new customer. Treat your current customers as assets that must be protected diligently and keep your current franchise of customers productive and well served.

3. Measure value creation for your customers.

   The current macroeconomic downdraft has created a heightened sensitivity to value. Companies are carefully looking at all operations and their impact on profitability. So, take the time to quantify the value your business has on other businesses.

4. Collaborate with customers.

   Product development geared for an existing customer base is a lot easier than trying to launch new products into an uncharted market. Making key customers influence the future of your business model or product pipeline is a great way to build trust. Customer apathy is death. Do whatever it takes to engage your customers in decisions that affect the future of your company’s product or service.

5. Get industry focused.

   Industry specialization or domain expertise is a mandate under tight market conditions. The growth of competition in every space required companies to develop specific capabilities for discrete industry segments. Developing deep expertise within a target market is more effective that attempting to do everything for every market. Execute a marketing strategy that is an inch wide and a mile deep versus a mile wide and an inch deep.

6. Integrate customer contact points.

   Support, delivery, and maintenance activities should be viewed as cross-selling or up-selling opportunities for your existing customer base. This strategy places greater emphasis on your organization to have a cohesive view of the customer. And the only way to achieve this goal is to integrate information collected throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Distribute the sales responsibility across the entire organization by integrating and distributing customer data.

7. Break out the measuring stick.

   The emphasis on delivering tangible value requires marketing organizations to quantify results. Improving a relevant set of performance metrics for your customers should be the central objective of your business. Signing off on performance metric improvement may sound risky, but in these times it’s a risk that must be taken to survive today’s downdraft.

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