ExactTarget Campaign Monitoring Widget

In an earlier post I commented on a cool Google Analytics widget that allowed for key web metrics to be displayed as a widget on the users desktop by the Yahoo! Widgets desktop application.

And then I ran across a neat email campaign monitoring widget for ExactTarget created by Doug Karr. In full disclosure I used to work for ExactTarget and my company is an agency client and preferred partner, so I may be biased...but I think this is a great tool!

Basically you enter a "job id" (a unique id applied to an email send) and then it updates that campaign every 15 minutes so you get near real time reporting on campaign activity. Pretty slick.

Also, There is another "Advanced Tracking" widget, but as of right now I could not get it to install properly on my computer. I do look forward to using it once they get it figured out! Once it is I will post it here.

So if your an ExactTarget client and find yourself obsessively logging in to see how your email marketing campaign in doing...this little tool may be the answer!

Open Source CMS Done Right

Okay...the time has come for me to formally endorse a content management system.

I have come across ALOT of content applications in the 7 years of developing on the web. I have even built some of my own from scratch.

In my career I have used Interwoven, Hot Banana, Web Side Story, Plone, Drupal, Post Nuke, and a host of smaller PHP and .NET applications.

About three years ago I came across an open source CMS that went by the name of Mambo. While at the time I was impressed with the functionality, i was not entirely sold on the ease of implementation and the community was somewhat fractured.

So I went on about my search and settled on some smaller open source program that did "just enough to get the job done".

Fast forward to about 6 months ago where I revisited Mambo. It appeared that the community had finally split into 2 camps...the new community calling itself Joomla. I decided I would take them out for a spin.

What I learned right away was that this new Joomla application was an unbelieveable improvement with a huge community of developers and users. Mambo was improved as well - but the community seemed to be lagging while Joomla seemeed to be thriving.

If any of you have experience directly with open source applications it is no secret that they are only as good as the community supporting it. Well, Joomla is the best supported application I have ever come across. The community is rich and the list of extensions run a mile long. Chances are good that if you need it, someone has developed it.

I have developed a handful of websites using Joomla now, and have to say that I cant imagine going back. I was recently asked to do some work in Hot Banana again and it was so painful to navigate and customize. Not to mention that its written in Cold Fusion...yuck

Implementing Joomla is easy once you understand how it works... and believe me, its worth it. You need no direct knowledge of programming to install it and creating templates is fun and easy. Joomla is a simple content management system that can "extended" to make it as complex as you need it to be. Think about Firefox and all its extensions and you will get a good idea of how Joomla works.

So I highly recommend Joomla when you decide to navigate the murky road of CMS. I have used my share of them and must tell you that it is heads and tails above all open source... as well as most commercial applications. So dont spend all your money on a proprietary CMS, instead donate to Open Source Matters (the not-for-profit responsible for Joomla) download the program and benefit from the community of thousands and the hundreds of open source extensions that Joomla offers

Its no wonder Joomla was awarded the best Open Source CMS for 2006. You should check it out!

Great Free Tool for Building Online Presentations

I have built alot of Flash presentations in my lifetime and they can be really effective at getting a point across, especially if you have a complex story to tell.

The problem was that developing those presentations either in house or outsourcing it to an agency quickly costs a lot of time and money. They were "nice to have" but always fell into the ever elusive "3rd Phase" when talking about our phased online strategy. No one ever wanted to commit the resources and budget to it.

Lately I have been marketing a lot of software and putting together an effective presentation whether it is in Powerpoint or Flash has become as important as ever. An online demonstration can help prospects a great deal when they are narrowing down their selection. The more info you can show them...the better.

So thats why I was very impressed when I came across this little tool called "Wink". Its extremely simple to understand and use...and the best part is that its free!

You can get up and running almost instantly. You just download the application, fire it up, and press play. It will immediately start recording your mouse movements and you can narrate by simply talking into your microphone. When you are done, you can add descriptions, pictures, arrows, sounds, interactive buttons, and even links to urls to help you further tell your story. It makes putting together an effective presentation quick and easy!

What do you have to loose? Go try it out!

Google Analytics Desktop Widget for Yahoo

I have been evaluating a cool tool provided by VivAlytics for the Yahoo widgets desktop application.

Its pretty simple to get up and running. You just download the Yahoo Widget Engine and then download the VivAlytics Google Analytics Desktop Widget ...and after customizing the application to view the reports you want regular access to - Voila! You have all of your favorite metrics available to you right from the desktop.

If you dont want to get deluged with scheduled email reports and dont want to have to login to Google Analytics every time you want to recieve your favorite metrics then this little tool may be for you.

I actually found that the Yahoo Widget Engine 4.0 to be a very cool application and have found a number of tools that I am using it for so its worth checking out on its own. There are hundreds of widgets available for it and its increasing every day.If you take VivAlytics for a test drive let us know your experiences here!

Google Analytics gets a facelift

Here it is...

If you logged into your Google account recently you saw a notice about Google Analytics undergoing a face lift. So I was pleasantly suprised when I logged into my account today and saw that my account had been migrated already and I was able to take it out for an initial test drive!

I have to say that I really love the new interface. Its much more intuitive and even simpler to use and understand than before...which was hard to do since it was already a pretty sleek and easy to use interface.

Here are the main improvements:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.
  

I have to say that I really think the interface is a huge improvement in helping you find the information that is most important to you. Where you usually had to dig through to find the data - you are now able to get to it more quickly, save it, and share it.

So far I am very impressed. What do you think?

Marketing Tool Review: Crazy Egg

When I first started blogging I came across an analytics tool called Crazy Egg. I saw that it was free and decided to take it on a test drive. It has been almost 2 months now and I have to say that its a pretty neat tool and has some cool features - however because of its simplicity I would not use it as my lone solution for analytics.

Crazy Egg is marketed primarily as a testing tool. This can be misleading for those looking for a real testing solution ala Offermatica or Website Optimizer (Google's free tool). If you are looking for a way to do complex multivariate splits do not turn here - it does not handle content serving.

What Crazy Egg does allow you to do is to set up simple tests within the application where a specified number of visitors are tracked per page. Once that number of visitors is reached the test completes and stats are recorded for the test. The next step is to make a change to the page and run another test - typically with the same visitor count. This is supposed to provide insight as to what is working and what you may wish to change.

So if you want to conduct some simple(and manual) tests this tool will work fine.

Crazy Eggs biggest asset is that it is simple to follow for those who do better understanding visually (I am one of them). Crazy Egg has some unique features... the one that I found to be the most interesting is the heat map. It tracks where in a web page user clicks are being recorded and visually displays the results over the web page itself. This is rather interesting data and could be used to better understand your visitor behavior.

The biggest drawback for me is that you cannot use this tool with a true testing application. If you are using Google Website Optimizer doing concurrent split/multivariate tests then Crazy Egg is not useful. Crazy Egg does its tracking at the page level which gets muddy because it shares split level traffic and inconsistent page elements.

But I still like to use Crazy Egg in addition to other testing and analytics tools because of some of its unique features. And if you are new and interested in web page testing then this tool is a great place to start... it is both easy to implement and simple to understand.

Grade: B

Have your own thoughts or experiences with Crazy Egg? Share them!

Catching your competition with their pants down

Imagine if you knew when a major competitor came to your site and what pages they were spending all of their time on? Wouldn't it be great if you could catch the bastards spying on you?

I read a great post from the WebAnalytics.be blog that did a simple walk-through on how to do some pretty cool competitive analysis using Google Analytics.

This is a great idea if you are worried that you might have competition lurking in the weeds. Once you know a competitor (or multiple competitors) are eyeballing a particular product - you can begin asking yourself why. You may find that you can turn the insight into a competitive advantage...

Who doesnt like catching the competition with their pants down?

Simple tool to improve your SEO

There are alot of tools out there to help you with SEO. Some of the best tools are extensions for Firefox. You can see some of them here. They are a must have in any optimizers arsenal.

But a cool SEO tool I have used previously is SEO Doc by Instant Position.

This is a great little tool especially if you are new to search optimization and need some guidance when getting started in SEO. It evaluates everything for you based on what keywords you want to target - and lets you know in simple terms how well you score on individual areas of search optimization (meta, title tags, keyword frequency, inbound link popularity, body content, ect.)

I have used SEO Doc to do search optimization for clients and had great results. It helped me target the keyword phrases that I wanted to use for my most important pages and proved extremely helpful in helping me get them to the top of the search listings in all of the major search engines.

But that doesnt mean that I used it once and then sat back and waited for the results to come in. I still had to research and tweak my keyword content even after getting optimized in SEO Doc. This is true of any SEO tool, even the more costly tools like Web Position. Search optimization is an ongoing process - but very worthwhile once you are successful. SEO Doc is great tool to propel you in the right direction if you arent sure how to get started.

A members costs very little at $80 a year and you can get a feel for how it works by testing out the simplified free version. You can also sign up for a free one day trial if you want to see how the full version works - which I definitely suggest. By doing so you will gain access to a plethora of other online marketing tools in addition to SEO Doc.

Take a test drive and let me know your thoughts!

Google Website Optimizer Open to Everyone!

I have been testing this tool for a few months now and I am excited about its release to the public!

This finally brings sophisticated split and multivariate testing to the small business marketers that don't have the budget for an expensive tool like Offermatica. The beauty once again is that Google provides it for free.

My personal experience with it has been great.

The power of Website Optimizer tool is evident. It is very easy to set up simple test right away - it took me 30 minutes to get my first one set up. You can test simple page elements or entirely different layouts - the choices are entirely up to you. All that is required is a little knowledge of html and what makes sense to test. Everything is available to you - long term and short term tests, A/B splits, or large multivariate tests.

Once note: Some people may run into issues if they are running a fairly sophisticated content management system or don't have access to the back end. However this shouldn't hinder using it for landing pages unless they are tied to your CMS as well. Landing pages are arguably the most important pages of your site so it makes sense to begin there. Detach them and begin testing!

And for most websites the implementation will be simple across all of their web pages.

What is cool is that combined with Google Analytics, this is extremely powerful. Now you not only have a place to measure traffic in aggregate, but a easier way to do testing. No more having multiple landing pages to keep track of - just set up your tests and the data comes pouring in.

You will still need to know what to do with that data, however. Check out this post for a little help.

So with the launch of this new product you no longer have to spend thousands of dollars to compete. The playing field is leveling and the small business marketer can rejoice. Now its time to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with testing and analytics!

9 Firefox add-ons I cant live without

First off - I am a rabid Firefox fan...not because its open source (I love that too) but because its a very thin application that you can build out and customize.

Being a marketer, I find that I have rapidly accumulated a ton of tools to help me with everything from search marketing, web design, usability, social networking, and competitive research. I have way too many to list in one article - and some are more of a personal preference than practical, but I thought it would be a good place to share my favorites... and more specifically those integrated with Firefox.

Web Developer 1.1.3

Its safe to say that I use this application daily. It is the ultimate companion for any website designer/developer. This tool is so versatile that covering everything it does would be impossible to do here -it could be its own article. If I had to sum up what I use it for mostly would be for its validation ability, real time style sheet editing, visual guides, and document control. Go here to see everything this awesome tool can do...

IE Tab

I no longer open up separate explorer windows for websites and applications that only support IE (i cant believe they still exist either...) Its also great for doing some quick browser testing. A must have if you are still forced to use IE every once in awhile.

FireFTP

I have grown very close to this add on. I used to use any number of free-ware applications to ftp files into my sites, but since integrating it into my browser - I have not gone back. Its a simple yet powerful tool for those people who have a handful of websites that they want to ftp files into and don't want to leave their browser to do it.

Rankquest SEO Toolbar and Search Status

The combination of these two add-ons are perfect for keeping track of your website and competitor websites in search engines. They offer pagerank and alexa rank in the status bar and one click access to an array of traffic details. If you want to get serious about SEO, these tools are absolutely required.

Colorzilla and Measure It

These little add-ons come in really handy when I am designing. I can click a small eyedropper or ruler in the status bar to easily get everything from website color values to pixel measurements of anything online.

Dictionary Search

If you are anything like me you probably aren't a walking resource library and come across words every day that you don't know their meaning. The cool thing about this little tool is that you can double click any word in a web page and instantly pull up its dictionary meanings in a small pop up window. Efficient!

Google Preview

This is a great little feature that adds a web page thumbnail to Google search listings. Its especially helpful for when you are doing multiple searches and need a quick visual to help guide your clicks.

Like I said, there are alot of others that I use - but these are the cool little ones that make my day a little easier. If you have some that you love share them here!

Branded Desktop RSS: Lessons Learned

Have you ever heard of Southwest "Ding"? They have achieved crazy success with their RSS based desktop application - driving over 1 million downloads and $60 million in sales per year since its launch.

When I was with a previous company I managed the development of a similar application. It was closely modeled after the Southwest Ding desktop app as a way for customers to make the most out of their membership. When I left the company over a year ago, the product was getting serious traction - but not after some interesting lessons were learned.

The company I worked for was in timeshare (or vacation ownership...the word "timeshare" is taboo now in the industry) and the desktop application was available for members to find good deals on vacations to exchange for their own. It was also a good way for the company to promote inventory they wanted to move. It seemed like a win for both the company and the customer.

When we launched it the adoption rate was steady, but soon after the complaints came pouring in...

Some typical complaints:

• Cannot not use the application due to not meeting the system requirements
• Paranoid about it affecting the functionality/performance of their computer
• Worries about security and computer viruses
  
• Worried about getting spam

It was quite amazing. We thought that we had thought of everything - but it was some of the obvious concerns that were ringing true...

Majority of timeshare owners were older and more skeptical of downloading applications on their computers - and many were not extremely comfortable with technology in general, so our online tutorials and FAQ went by unnoticed. What we got instead was a deluge of email and phone calls about the very same topics covered in the FAQ and online tutorials!

So we quickly ramped up our customer support so we could respond to their incoming questions and concerns. We began monitoring the response in the call center and online... there are quite a few blogs dedicated to timeshare ownership and as soon as we released the app to the public - they were all over it. Their response was extremely eye opening.

So we began soothing member concerns right away by using both a support phone line and through email. We also added a support blog as a part of the application which helped immensely. We had made assumptions that just turned out to be incorrect - and were in need of a full support mechanism to ensure our products success.

The lesson here is that while desktop RSS applications can be extremely successful - they can also pose a large commitment of resources to support it. Before you take the plunge, make sure that you accurately anticipate what your user response will be and be ready to answer questions. Your product success and development hinges on this 2 way communication.

What we learned (quite obviously) was that the choice to download an application to ones desktop is a quite a personal one - and needs to be treated with alot of respect. If you are successful - then you have an open and direct line of communication with your customer - and the opportunity to build a relationship on trust and mutual benefit. If you fail - you will most likely loose them forever. Its all about the lifetime value of the customer vs. the cost of customer acquisition. This is why if done correctly - desktop RSS is a viable marketing tool.

So as a result of being able to respond to their customer's initial concerns , the product is very successful and has become a major channel for the marketing department. They are able to use it to communicate to their customers in ways that even email cannot.

If you are interested in companies that specialize in desktop RSS applications - I highly recommend The Port...they are building a superior solution and can customize it for the specific needs of your business.

If you are interested in learning more about desktop RSS here is a great article on top desktop applications being used today.

Happy Marketing!

Rise of the KPI

I was reading an interesting Marketing Sherpa article that summarizes top marketers analytics frustrations and had a couple of thoughts.

Check out the article here...

The second frustration listed in the article discusses the wealth of information and how such a small amount of it is useful. This is the place where I think some SMBs gets overwhelmed.

The article goes on to discuss how Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) can help you decide what information is worth tracking and measuring. This is where the playing field levels considerably.

The truth is that you don't need a huge analytics platform to measure against most of your KPIs. If you understand what impacts visitor behavior and how you can measure that you are already half way home. Something as simple as "average depth of visit" can be a truly telling statement if you run an ecommerce website that has a defined purchase conversion funnel. If buying the red widget takes 5 steps to complete an order and your average depth of visit is 2 pages...you have a serious problem.

Its important to approach analytics in order...

1. Do an audit of your business and revisit the goals you had for the website when you built it.
• Revisit that website RFP and proposal from when you had the website built. Are the business goals the same today as they were then?
  
2. Spend concerted time understanding the website and the actual process of taking action.
• Its amazing how many SMB's don't actually know what is involved for their customers to take action on their website. Reintroduce yourself to your website and get familiar with how you expect your users to find and interact with it.
  
3. Understand what impacts that behavior
• Is the online demonstration too long?
• Are there too many steps to purchase?
• Did search traffic lead to increased revenue?
  
4. Open up your analytics tool and find the metrics that measure that behavior
• Time spent on page
• Average depth of visit, exit pages
• referrers
  
5. Create dashboards that track those metrics

If you do any of this out of order - you might find that you are tracking things that aren't really actionable and therefore an inefficient use of your time. Spending time fully understanding your business and its online presence will make all the difference.

Why I chose Google Blogger

The decision to start blogging had come to me a long time ago. I had developed blogs before but did not fully understand the shear amount of time involved with creating and posting to one regularly.

After shelving my ambitions for a year and doing more research/reading I decided to pull the trigger and fully devote myself to blogging on a topic that I am passionate about. I have to admit that I am excited and slightly intimidated to put myself out there.

Unlike a lot of bloggers who begin on a whim - choose a blog publishing solution and move on, I actually evaluated a handful of them for a year before deciding on my choice.

I looked into typepad, blogger, wordpress, and social network blogs like myspace and xanga. I also tried open source content management blogs like Joomla with varied results for each.

What pushed me over the edge was the new Google Blogger.

The first conclusion that I came to was that I did not want to mess with hosting if I didn't have to. I fully understand the implications with not hosting my blog myself - but it would actually be a hinderance to me. I would probably end up spending all my time customizing the application instead of writing anything.

Another conclusion that I came to was that I didn't want to pay anything. I like free applications and open source software - so being a cheap ass definitely played a part.

The social network blogs were weak in their extensibility...and the content management was overkill.

But I wasn't sold on blogger until the "new blogger" came out.

The first (and obvious) benefit was the integration with my Google account which is great because I hop between my google apps quite frequently.

But the most impressive changes were the way in which a person with html experience can build out their own blog templates and edit the styles from within the interface. This is great if I decide I want to change colors or fonts of particular content - I can specify the variable in my blogger template and update it anytime without having to edit the css again. This may come from the fact that I have a graphic design background and get bored easily with the look and feel - so this was a nice feature.

I also love that I can use my own domain. I didnt want a blogspot address (there was no way I would have that) and I was going to go with a different application based solely on that fact. But new blogger beat me to the punch and fixed it before I had come to any definite conclusions.

The widget options were nice and suited most of my needs. I rarely found an app or widget that I could not easily integrate into the new blogger. And most 3rd party widgets are custom configured for blogger and wordpress which made extending the template very easy.

Overall, I found that the new blogger was more than suited for what I wanted to accomplish. It provides me the freedom to build out cool, custom templates and add new features on the fly. The functionality is what you would expect and provides very few limitations.

Now I understand that pro bloggers out there will decry me for placing my uptime/downtime into google's hands, but some of the best blogs I read are good old blogger blogs with the blogspot address. And I have seen both uptime and downtime for blogs from every stripe. I am not looking to become a powerhouse blogmaster with 10 blogs...I dont have that kind of time and I if I did I would be golfing instead.

So I chose the new blogger and I have to say that i am very pleased with it so far.

Let me know what you think - do you use blogger? or did you come to a different conclusion?

Passing values into landing pages from a url

For those of you that are building out multiple landing pages I have a simple javascript that may help you with passing variables from campaign url strings into your landing pages.

For example, if you have landing pages that contain identical forms and only need unique "lead source" information you can use this javascript to pull a variable passed in a url string to change the lead source information.

Place the following code where you would normally put your hidden lead source fields.

<script>
function getQueryVariable(variable) {
var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
var vars = query.split("&");
for (var i=0;i<vars.length;i++) {
var pair = vars[i].split("=");
if (pair[0] == variable) {
return pair[1];
}
}
}

</script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"><!--
document.write('<input ');
document.write(' type="hidden" ');
document.write(' name="lead_source" ');
document.write(' value="' + getQueryVariable("ls") + '">');
//--></script>

You can then access the page with the variable attached to the url:

www.yourwebpage.com/landingpage.html?ls=leadsource1

The variable populates the hidden form field with the lead source information.

<input name="lead_source" value="leadsource1" type="hidden">

When the user clicks submit the information will populate in salesforce.com eliminating the need for multiple landing pages.

You can also use this in correlation with you analytics link ids to maintain consistency in your reporting. Just change the variable in this line of code:

document.write(' value="' + getQueryVariable("change-this-value") + '">');

You can be creative and use this script to pass multiple values if needed...think about personalizing the landing page from a personalized url string in an email. You could pre-populate a form or even personalize the landing page with their name or any number of attributes in the email database!

Best of luck to you!

Google Reader and Blogging

I have to say that most of the fun in building out a blog is evaluating the shear amount of plug-ins, widgets, components, ect that you will find available to you. I have to say that I could blog for months on just that topic alone because I must have evaluated over a hundred of them, but I only want to bring the most relevant ones to topic here...so I digress.

One that I find particularly cool is the widget for sharing your google reader articles. While you dont actually need the widget - you only need a reader that allows you to create a shared feed and a blog that reads RSS feeds, its actually a great little tool.

It allows me to quickly post links to great articles without having to think twice about it. I just click on the shared button and the link instantly appears on my blog in a content area on the right...awesome! For me this is all about the flow of information and any time I can easily share it I get excited!

So check out the little gray box on the right for some great content from around the web!