Marketing Pilgrim

UPDATE: Winners announced here.

Usability guru and best-selling author Bryan Eisenberg is back with another great book. Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer sees Eisenberg team up with John Quarto-vonTivadar, and Lisa T. Davis to deliver the definitive guide to Google’s web page multivariate testing tool.

I’ve just finished reading Always Be Testing which finally opened my eyes to just how easy Website Optimizer is to use and just how valuable it is for any web site owner. Following Eisenberg’s advice, I’ve not only set up the perfect multivariate web page test, but I also know which variables to test.

If you rely on your web site to generate even just a few pennies in revenue, you must pick up a copy of this book! And, in case a new book purchase is not in your budget, Bryan Eisenberg has graciously offered to give away some copies to Marketing Pilgrim readers.

If you’re following me on Twitter, you’d have read my reaction to news that Google Suggest had finally made its way to Google’s homepage search box.

Turns out, that’s probably the biggest news of the day. Today really is a slow news day. I’ll keep digging for something worthy of your brilliant mind, but in the meantime consider these Picks an amuse-bouche for the day.

• I’ve not checked the accuracy of the data, but you have to be impressed with Khalid’s attempt to provide the "Ultimate Rank" of SEO blogs. Yeah, it’s linkbait, yeah he’s massaging the egos of those on the list–wohoo, we’re #8 –but it looks like a lot of work went it to compiling the list.
• Before Google, there was no such thing as a 4-year beta. Seeking Alpha suggests Google’s beta label is a free pass to ignore glitches.

The Olympics is over and US advertisers should be pleased with the results. Not only did we take home a lot of gold from athletes, this Olympics brought record web site traffic – and an experiment in online video advertising. The two weeks long Olympics was a test in how video advertising would play out.

According to eMarketer – NBC – the lead sponsor of the games, gets a bronze for their work. They brought in $5.75 million for running video ads. The Wall Street Journal reported NBC made only a quarter of what CBS Sports made streaming a college basketball tournament earlier this year.

There’s only one thing on my mind: Football!

Yep, the college football season gets underway this week and I’m hoping NCSU can pull off an upset down at South Carolina on Thursday.

I need a distraction-to keep my mind off football–and these Picks will do nicely!

• AdAge reports on rumors that Microsoft and WPP might do a deal that involves the exchange of Avenue A/Razorfish and 24/7 Real Media.
• Want some creative ideas for your site’s "Add to Cart" button? Linda Bustos takes a look at a bunch of before and after designs for popular etailers.
• Daniel Jacome makes his argument for why Google’s entry to the web measurement space won’t hurt comScore.
• Real estate search engine Trulia announces a bunch of new features including an interface for mobile devices.
• Google adds geolocation to its Gears offline plug-in.

A California resident is suing Google for trespassing. Apparently Google’s Street View driver ignored a "No Trespassing" sign, drove down a private road, and snapped photos of the resident’s house.

The resident decided that simply submitting a removal request was too easy–and lacked any kind of chance for a settlement from Google–so the case is now before a judge. While legal-eagles will enjoy the debate over whether this truly is an invasion of privacy, or trespassing, I got a kick out of Ars Technica’s comparison to how Google should have treated the sign:

In the real world, things like private roads and trespassing signs serve the same purpose as the tools Google provides for turning away its indexing robots; they are opt-out mechanisms from an earlier age. Forcing people to build a private road, erect a sign, and then still use some online tools to have the pictures pulled (after already being available to the world) seems unduly burdensome on a common-sense level, and it has little to do with whether a stranger pulls into your driveway simply in order to turn around.

This Washington Post piece about business blogging both perplexes and delights me.

Why perplexed? It opens and closes with a case study about Jason Calacanis. While Calacanis was at the frontier of blogging for dollars–and extremely successful with Weblogs Inc–the case study talks about Calacanis’s decision to dump blogging in favor of a newsletter. It simply doesn’t fit with the remainder of the article. It’s almost as if the journalist had the interviewing lying around and decided to push a square peg into a round hole.

OK, that aside, if you are weighing the advantages of your business joining the blogosphere, then you should make time to read the article. While it won’t offer all the answers to your questions, it will provide you with some real world examples of how businesses are growing thanks to blogging.

Saying "I told you so" often smacks of smugness, but it appears we were right about Google’s decision to make the AdSense for Feeds migration a manual process.

Google will soon provide a self-service process to migrate from an account on the original FeedBurner website to a Google Account. We have temporarily paused processing of new manual migration requests; we are working doggedly through the initial queue of requests and will re-open account migration services as soon as the first batch is completed.

(If you have already submitted a migration request, please look for an email response from Google once your migration has completed).

(Emphasis added)

Back in June of 2007, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the search engine reputation of the presidential candidates in contention. As part of our report, we noted that of the Democratic hopefuls, Barack Obama had zero negative search results–the best of all Democrats. Who had the most negative search results?

Joe Biden.

Yep, the newly anointed running mate to Barack Obama had more negative search results–across Google and Yahoo–than any of the 8 candidates, vying for the Democratic nomination.

Before you rush off to review Joe Biden’s search results in Google today, keep in mind that the freshness of Google’s results mean that Biden’s naming as Obama’s vice president, will skew the current sentiment.

While search engine sentiment doesn’t remain static–John McCain made dramatic improvements to his, when we checked again in February 2008–Joe Biden is a strange choice for Barack Obama.