Archive for September, 2008
Top 10 Plugins For Wordpress Blogs
One of the great benefits of running Wordpress is the ability to add in plugins. For those of you unfamiliar to the concept of plugins, they are essentially applications that run in conjunction with Wordpress to perform some kind of function. I currently utilize a wide variety of plugins, but some of my favorite plugins are:
- Akismet - Great built in plugin that controls all of your comment spam.
- All in One Adsense and YPN - Plugin that automatically inserts Adsense and YPN ads into your posts.
- All in One SEO Pack - Automatically creates meta description, meta keywords, etc.
- Contact Form II - Easily allows you to create contact forms to add to your pages and posts.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - Automatically redirects Wordpress feeds to Feedburner feeds for tracking.
- Google Analyticator - Adds your Google Analytics account to all posts. Also tracks outgoing links, etc.
- Google XML Sitemaps - Creates an XML sitemap that alerts Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.
- Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Update your Wordpress to the newest version automatically.
- Wordpress Database Backup - Emails you a backup of your Wordpress database whenever you prefer.
- WP Super Cache - Fast caching module for Wordpress. Make your blog Digg proof.
What additional plug in make your top 10 list?
My Google Analytics Wish List
Google Analytics is a very robust web analytics solution that Google provides for free, but there are several features that I would love to add to my wish list for consideration in future updates:
- Ability to remove yourself from accounts. I have several old clients who still have me listed on their Google Analytics and have no way to remove myself. Being able to remove yourself from a Google Analytics account would be a great feature.
- Ability to limit access to reports. Right now Google has two account levels (Administrator and User) which is fine, but I’d love to have the ability to gradually increase the amount of reports that users new to web analytics see. Even as a standard user Google Analytics can be overwhelming, and with subsequent training users could have access to more and more reports.
- Create dashboards that encompass multiple sites. I’d love to have the ability to create a dashboard similar to what Omniture offers that is completely customizable, and offers the ability to create droplets from multiple sites within a single dashboard.
- Show me whats changed. There are third party plug ins that allow you to see what keywords have changed, but it requires Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the plug in to work. Not exactly perfect integration. I would like to see this integrated along with information reporting on increasing and decreases across top content, referring sites, etc.
- Simplify goal tracking. The difference between head, exact, and regular expression is not clearly defined in my opinion. Offer the ability to paste additional JavaScript onto your goal page similar to Adwords conversion tracking as an option to tracking conversions. Same thing could be applied to the funnel visualization as many CMS (content management system) solutions offer the ability to customize the page, but not the URL in question.
- Standardize on exact keyword tracking. Currently if you use broad or phrase match in your search engine marketing campaigns the exact keyword is not passed into your web analytics. ROI Revolution has created a great script that places this under user-defined in the visitors section of Google Analytics, but this is not a standard feature.
- Offer offline tracking integration. This one might be a stretch, but I’d love to be able to create a vanity URL through Google for my offline campaigns and then have it redirected and show up in referring sites. I do this normally through purchasing URLs and then 301 redirecting them myself, but for the majority of users this is probably a more advanced feature. Additionally using Voicestar or other solution for phone number tracking would be great.
- Segment out paid vs. organic for other search engines. Right now you have to manually tag all of your destination URLs for Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask if you want them to be segmented out. There are ways to help automate this as I’ve previously blogged about, but still not a true automation. I’d love to see a way of specifying a key that could them automatically sort the campaigns as appropriate.
- Improved site overlay. A plug in like what Omniture uses seems to work consistently better than what Google Analytics uses, especially for sites that use JavaScript, AJAX, and use of other non standard technologies.
- Creation of custom variables for future expansion. Just as how ROI Revolution came out with the exact keyword tracking I would love to have future expansion of custom variables that can be utilized.
What other features would you love for Google Analytics to include in future releases?
Utilizing Adwords To Take Advantage of Metrolink Situation
On Friday a Metrolink train crashed in Los Angeles killing 25 people. This was the deadliest train crash in over 25 years. Almost immediately after this occurred lawyers started buying up keywords such as ‘metrolink crash’ advertising their services. While the practice is fairly common to take advantage of breaking news to buy traffic this seems a little shady. The lawyers who we saw engaging in this include:
- Larry H Parker
- Seeg Miller Johnson
- Get a Referral
- Eisenburg
I completely understand that everyone needs to make a living, but I can’t believe that this is great for your brand as a lawyer to be seen as an ambulence chaser, and possibly the companies or agencies running SEM for these lawyers are simply looking for leads. Has anyone else seen this kind of activity taking place?
Top 5 Tips To Increase Email Marketing Open Rates
Email Marketing is still a widely used online marketing tactic, and can successfully be blasted out to your mailing lists to promote services, announce coupons, communicate your brand, launch new products and services, etc. As email open rates continue to decline here are some tips to increase your open rate. In the near future we’ll look at increasing CTR once you’ve had them actually open the email.
Headline
- Create a sense of urgency
- Play on curiosity
- Add in controversial headline
- Should be 35 characters or less
- Personalize the subject line
From Address
- Try changing the from name
- Try changing the from email address
Testing
- Create email accounts at all major email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.)
- Test to see if any of our email is going into spam
- If so we’ll need to get on a clean domain to send them out
- Test with and without images as some email software is blocking based upon images
Day of the Week Average Open Rate
- Sunday 41.1%
- Saturday 36.7%
- Wednesday 34.0%
- Friday 32.8%
- Tuesday 29.6%
- Thursday 24.6%
- Monday 23.2%
Time of Day and Format
- 8:00AM EST had the highest open rate
- 66% send as plain text (0.46% undeliverable rate)
- 24% send mime format/HTML (0.56% undeliverable rate)
- 10% send HTML only (1.09% undeliverable rate)
Whats With The Intense Apple Fascination?
Today at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event Steve Jobs made a couple announcements:
- He isn’t dead
- Apple iTunes 8 is coming out with minimal new features
- iPhone/iPod Touch 2.1 software update will be available Friday
- New iPod Nanos are soon available with three new colors
As a 3G iPhone user I’m looking forward to 2.1 just with the hope that it will fix my iPhone so that I can finally use apps that I’ve downloaded and paid for. Beyond that, and for my own selfish need of wanting my iPhone to work the announcements made today were minimal at best. You wouldn’t get that impression though if you looked at Techmeme, Digg, and other sites. I took a few screenshots of sites to see the press that Apple is getting. Here is techmeme.com:
Sorry, it wouldn’t fit on one page. Even on my 1650×1080 20″ Mac monitor Apple dominated all stories above the fold, and even stretched below it. In the end Apple stories related to todays ‘announcement’ accounted for approximately 60% or more of techmeme’s entire homepage. The second image shows everything below the fold:
When I went over to Digg the homepage had at least three Apple stories. While Kevin Rose had accurately predicted most of today’s proceedings, and while not all of the stories were positive towards Apple they once again dominated the homepage of Digg.
Now I’m not anti-Apple, but has anyone seen a company dominate the news as much as Apple does? Whatever they announce is immediately picked up by CNN, MSNBC, etc. I get it, they dominate the MP3 market, and have cool ads, along with a phone that everyone wants. Does that mean Apple deserves all of this essentially free press? Ohh well, I guess it lets them concentrate on paying for those nifty takeover ads on cnn.com and others:
What does everyone else think? Please feel free to share your comments.
How To Tag Yahoo Search Marketing Campaigns for Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a robust free web analytics application and provides integration with Google Adwords that allows for automatic importing of your Adwords account performance into Google Analytics. That’s great, but what about for Yahoo Search Marketing? Google and Yahoo account for roughly 90% of search engine market share, and most people in SEM run Search Marketing in conjunction with Adwords. In the past it was possible to manually tag all of your destination URLs by keyword, but it was a time consuming task. What you can do though is to add the following query string at the end of your destination URL:
?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc%20&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}
This will automatically insert the keyword, ad group, and campaign into Google Analytics along with the source of yahoo and medium of cpc. This should match up what you have with Google Adwords with the exception of cost and keyword position data that is not directly brought in. Copying and pasting this onto your destination URLs can easily be done through excel and then uploaded directly to your Yahoo Search Marketing account. If you need help just ask your Yahoo rep who can initiate a bulk upload of your excel export. I’ll be writing up a similar post for Microsoft adCenter shortly.
Fix For Google Chrome: The application failed to initialize properly (0xC0000005).
After doing some research it looks like the issue I mentioned previously is caused by Symantec Endpoint Protection. While there is currently no official fix from Google there are three known ways that you can solve this problem. None of which is a great solution, but until Google and Symantec can come up with a solution, these three should resolve the issue:
Option #1
1) Back up the registry on an affected system.
2) Open the registry on the Agent system by entering regedit from a run prompt.
3) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SysPlant.
4) Open the Start DWORD.
5) Change the value to 4 to disable the drivers.
6) Reboot the system to commit the changes.
Option #2
1) Navigate to Control Panel and Add/Remove Programs for XP or Programs and Features for Vista.
2) Scroll down to Symantec Endpoint Protection and hit Change or Modify.
3) Choose Modify from the Symantec menu.
4) Uninstall Application and Device Control from the menu.
5) Restart your computer.
6) Attempt to reinstall Google Chrome.
Option #3
1) Go to the following website and look at the latest registry files to download to automate this process for you. The fix has been mentioned in a few message boards as successfully working for those of you who don’t want to mess with Option #1 or Option #2.
If anyone has any additional methods to resolve this issue please let me know and I will update this post.
Google Chrome Crashes and Burns
While I have had my issues with Google on a few occassions I was optimistic to try out Google Chrome as I mentioned yesterday. I waited till about noon and fired up VMWare Fusion at work on my MacBook Pro and installed Chrome without issue on Windows XP. It seemed to work ok, although the initial reviewson Chrome left much to be desired, and at least left Firefox the speed king. I thought I would give it a shot when I got home from work and the gym so I fired up my trusty Dell desktop and Windows Vista and installed it. The machine itself is about a year and a half old with a Duo 2 processor and 2 gigs of RAM on the 32 bit version of Vista. After installation I’m immediately greeted with:
Wow that’s not good. What happened? I read Matt Cutt’s blog entry today, which in part touted how stable it was, and not full of bugs. Part of his self Q&A mentioned:
Q: This is going to be some buggy, crashing piece of beta download, isn’t it?
A: No, I don’t really think so. Google determined one million pages that users are likely to surf to. Then a piece of software known as “ChromeBot” ran a torture test by loading those one million pages that we crawled for every new build of Google Chrome. This is a smart testing methodology because this real-world torture test quickly highlighted which bugs were most important to fix and helped determine priorities for the most important bugs. So Google Chrome has already been automatically “fuzz tested” on tons of web pages. Google Chrome is very robust against anything the web can throw at it. If I had to guess where the browser might crash, it would be because we haven’t seen Google Chrome run across all the weird, wild hardware that runs Windows. But I’ve been using Google Chrome for months with essentially no crashes; it’s been rock-solid for me.
Now I wasn’t expecting a rock solid piece of software, but at least the ability to launch the browser, and navigate to a website I thought was within reach. I understand that testing one million pages is quite a feat, but ensuring that the application can be installed on a run of the mill Dell computer with Vista might be helpful as well. Clicking “Ok’ on the error message just left me with the following:
I appreciate the humor that Google put on the sad face, but all it did was leave me frustrated. Rebooting didn’t solve the problem, either did un-installing and reinstalling. After I sent a message to Google letting them know about the problem I haven’t found much about the problem online so far. So here I sit eager to play around with Google’s first attempt at a web browser, but unable to do so because of error messages and sad faces that leave me reminisicent of the days of the sad Mac icon:
Has anyone else had any issues with Google Chrome, either during installation or while utilizing the browser? Update: This issue has been somewhat resolved and you can read about it here.
Google Chrome
Today Google announced that their new web browser, ‘Chrome’ will be available for download tomorrow. The download location is available at this location. Surprisingly enough Mozilla says that they are not concerned, but when Google funds 90% of your company I guess you have to say that. What is left to be determined is how this will play into market share. Currently in the web analytics profiles that I administrate Internet Explorer is dominant, and Firefox only plays a minor role. For those of you who have more tech savvy sites obviously you’ll see Firefox higher. Here at Sonicko Firefox had a 57% share of browsers for the month of August, far higher than the normal 8-12% that most sites see. If anyone has any initial reviews of Chrome please feel free to post them.
