Analytics, Advertising and everything in between

In the last couple of days our data center and CDN experienced a few network problems.
We decided to immediately take action and start working with a new partner.
Although we will keep supporting the current configuration, we highly recommend you to update the code that imports our script and take it from our new CDN partner.
You can find the new import code here.
I also want to remind everyone about our Safe API option that fully protects you and your site from any network failures we and the Internet might experience. You can find all the details here.

We apologize for all of you who were affected by these failures. We hope that the actions we took and our new partners will make sure these kind of error will never happen again.

A couple of days ago I had an interesting conversation about the differences between intent and interest as it applies to targeting ads.
Google is a huge business because they run the biggest “intent engine” in the world. Millions of people are going to Google every day and effectively state their current intent.
If you search for “XBOX Price” Google assumes that you intend to buy an XBOX.
The question is - Is intent all you need in order to target ads for users in the most efficient way?

I argue that the answer is no. Search is a great indicator for intent, but often enough it is not a good indicator for interest.
If you look at Google Trends you can see that a lot more users are searching for the term “Music” than the term “Britney Spears” although Britney is one of the more popular search terms. Same results if we compare the term “Movies” to “Batman” or “The Dark Knight” which was the most popular movie of the year.
We see the same thing in fashion searches as well as gaming.

When people want to buy something, they search for the exact phrase. This is why Google is a great platform for direct marketers who want to “catch” users just before they decide to buy something. But if you want to target users by their long term interests, search is not the best and definitely not the only place you need to put your money.
For example, take people who search for music. They get to iTunes, Rhapsody or any of the other music services and that’s it. Now for the next year, they will get all their music needs there. If you want to target ads for the some of your artists, how do you know which users tend to like each music genre?
Even if you use the user search data you may draw the wrong conclusions. Maybe I searched for Madonna just in order to buy a present to a friend. But if you will know which music I listened to for the past year, you can really conclude what types of music and artist I like and which ones I might like in the future.

This is the still untapped promise of behavioral targeting - the ability to go from intent to interest. It is especially suited for brand advertisers. Unlike direct marketers, brand advertisers want to reach a certain profile of users. The purpose of these campaigns is to build a long term relationship with the user and not a one night stand.
For example, they want to reach the users who are really engage into business and not the ones who looked for stocks right now because it is the main item in the news. They want to reach the real fashion enthusiasts and not the ones who searched for a dress because it’s prom night. They want to know your interests and not just what you want to buy or do today.

Now, to be fair, search could also give you indicators about interest. If every day for a few months I will search for keywords involving financial terms, we can assume that it is part of my interests. But the question is, how many people use search like that? Don’t most people search for something a couple of times, find the sites they need, bookmark them and than start to go there directly?

This is why in the long run, all these social networks, blogging and video sites might have a very bright future. While Google is sitting on today gold mine of intent data, they might be holding to the gold mine of tomorrow - the user interests data.

Image via CrunchBase

I’m happy to announce the launch of the NuConomy twitter account. We decided to try and do something very different with it than how twitter is used by most companies.
Instead of using it just to keep you updated with our news, we will actually try to be more open and give you more contribution.

We will use our account to tweet on everything we think is interesting and related to our industry (Analytics and Advertising). We will try to build an easy way for you to stay updated on everything new that you really need to know.
And yes. If it means also tweet about announcements of competitors, we will do that.
In order to even be more open, we will try to find interesting people in the industry and give them access to the account (fully attributed) so they can help making this a more useful tool for you.

This is something we will test in the next few weeks and we will be happy to get your feedback and see if you find it useful or not.
So please, try to follow our twitter account and give us your feedback.

Thanks,
Shahar.

Today I’m proud to announce the official launch of a new phase of NuConomy Studio.
During the past few months we have received thousands of requests from all over the world for beta access. Unfortunately, we couldn’t accommodate everyone as we had to focus on developing and scaling our platform.
Today we announce the opening up of our platform, making it available to everyone who needs a better, easier (and free!) way to understand, optimize and monetize their site or digital advertising.
Additionally, we are also officially announcing some really exciting news about new features of the platform.
But before I get into all the details, I wanted to say thank you to the thousands of customers who already put their trust into our platform and use it today. It’s definitely been a bumpy ride sometimes as we learned how to scale the system and worked on performance issues. Your patience, support and feedback has been very valuable and we all really appreciate it. Our first and most important goal is to give you the best experience possible; we promise to continue to work our hardest to make it better. 

So what are we announcing today?

A new era in web analytics – meet Sage, our proactive analytics engine.
We work with thousands of customers - from personal bloggers and small startups to some of the largest sites on the web serving billions of pages every month.
It does not matter if they use us or other analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Omniture, we always hear the same complaints:
1. The smaller publishers keep saying that tracking lots of data and custom segmentations is very cool, but they just don’t have time to sit all day long, slicing and dicing information. They need to run a business.
2. At the same time, the bigger publishers complain about almost the same thing. Tracking everything possible is cool but sometimes there is just too much information to look at. If you have 10 million unique users coming from the US and just 100K from the UK and you suddenly jump to 400K in the UK, your chances to see that are very small. But in reality this is a very interesting and important piece of information for you to know.
Add the fact that now you can also segment your data by multiple criteria (e.g. age, gender, category, geo-location, referrers, keywords, etc.) and you see why getting the most valuable insights into your business became very hard.
Until now the general way vendors tried to attack this problem was by allowing you to create and add more custom reports. We have a very different vision for how web analytics should be done…
Sage is a patented data mining engine that does a lot of the “dirty work” for you. Sage runs every night and automatically slices, dices and analyzes all of your data. Sage compares all of the data of the last day to your historical data and determines what are the changes in your business that you should be aware of. It then pushes this information to you via “stories” so you will simply be able to log on to the system (or receive the info via RSS or email) and immediately understand what you need to focus on today. Even better, you can simply click on any of Sage stories and it will slice all the reports in the system in just the right way so you will be able to keep exploring the data yourself.

But that’s not all… Sage also analyzes your long term history and  finds hidden trends that sometimes are harder to see. It pushes them as well as new stories into the dashboard.  Via the two-way API, you can also take immediate corrective action based on the Sage results; let NuConomy optimize your business, thereby freeing your time to think about how to grow your business.
Examples of Sage results are:

• You had an increase or decrease in one of your site activities with a particular segment
• You had a large change in the keywords or referrers through which users found your site
• You had a change in the performance of one of your campaigns
• Some of your content just became very hot
• Much more…

Unfortunately web analytics is sometime like Microsoft Office. You put a lot of effort on buying or installing it just in order to take advantage of 3% of its power. We really believe that proactive analytics will change this industry and make web analytics more actionable again.
It gives small publishers the ability to find the real insights and focus their precious time on the important things they need to know to make their business better. At the same time, in-house analysts can finally focus on what they get paid for – analyzing insights and helping convert them to a desired on-site activity instead of sitting and slicing reports all day long.

I wanted to give special thanks to Omer van Kloeten, the real magic behind Sage, for all his hard work the past few months.

Are you a Blogger? Cool new plug-ins for major blogging and CMS platforms
As a blogger, this is one of the most exciting features. Today we announce the general availability of our plug-ins to some of the largest blogging and CMS platforms.
These are standard plug-ins which you can simply take and install on your blog in a matter of seconds. The plug-in does all the integration work completely automatically and tracks ~15 different activities across your blog, including RSS feeds and videos.
Even better, for some of the platforms we were able to embed all of the NuConomy Studio user interface inside the blog administration UI itself so you don’t even need to go to another interface to see the NuConomy insights and get smarter about your blog.
I want to highlight some features in the system that we think are particularly cool for bloggers:

• The ability to understand what topics you need to write on in order to encourage more participation and readership from the community.
• The ability to see the top users in your community.
• If you are running a multi-author blog, you are able to understand the different contribution each of your authors gives to the blog.
• Understand the engagement and contribution of videos you embed in your blog.

Later today we will post additional details about the above features and more…
If you have a Wordpress blog, you can simply take our plugin from the Wordpress plug-ins directory. If you are using another platform, such as Community Server, Dasblog or Movable Type, feel free to join our beta program and we will be happy to provide you with access to the plug-in.
Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog as we will have more exciting news around our plug-ins in the next few weeks.

I want to say special thank you to Eran Kampf who made the plugins possible.

Video Analytics
In recent months we saw video become an important and major feature for many of our customers and publishers.
As such we decided to develop a new solution for video.  Today we announce the official release of our new video analytics platform which comes in two flavors:

• Automatic tracking of flash videos (e.g. YouTube)
• A new revamped video API which you can quickly install into your own player

Our video analytics don’t just track how many people viewed your video. We actually allow you to understand how many people watched every second of the video. With this you can easily understand what are the most engaging parts of the video? Did people actually watch the ads in the video? How should you optimize ad placement in and around the video?
And the best thing is that this is all just part of the full NuConomy Studio, so you can use our powerful segmentation and correlation capabilities also on your videos.

OpenID Support
We are big fans of making the web a better, more open place for all of us. As such, we believe that OpenID is one of the more important initiatives out there.

We are really proud to announce that NuConomy Studio now fully supports OpenID. If you already have an OpenID, you can now use it to log into the Studio. If not, you can obtain one from one of the many providers here.

What’s more?
In the next few weeks we will keep pushing new features that will give you better ways to understand and monetize your business. You can stay up to date on all of them in our product blog.

As always we would love to hear your thoughts about our platform and vision. Feel free to contact us through the blog or just email us directly at any time.
And of course - Thanks again for the all NuConomy team who worked days and nights on delivering this platform to you.

Image via CrunchBase

There were quite a few posts  the last couple of days about the Google Yahoo deal. The powers against the deal (a.k.a Microsoft) organized many advertisers to talk loudly about their fear that such a deal will bring with it price fixing from Google side.

But as Danny Sullivan from Ad Age and Marshal Sponder wrote, Google is already fixing prices from day one.
Google has two very big black boxes under its belt.
The first one is the quality score algorithm that determines which ad will appear for each search and also how much the advertiser will pay for it.
Although they give some general guidelines about how this quality score is calculated, Google never really told the world how it is really done.
The second black box is the revenue share Google gives the publisher. As a publisher you have no idea how much of the advertising money is going to your pocket and how much into Google. There is a big chance that even if Google will change this number, you will never really know.
This fact combined with the huge number of publishers and advertisers using their services, gives Google great flexibility in its operations. When times are bad, they can always just add 0.01 cents to their part of the rev share and keep show wall street the growth they need.

With that in mind, you can start to understand why if the deal with Yahoo will take place, Google will have full control over the future of Yahoo. With small tweeks they can control exactly how much money Yahoo will make, how much ads they should give them, and how much money will advertisers will have to pay for these ads.

So is this deal really that bad for the advertisers, the publishers and the market? Maybe… And maybe not. It’s all in the hands of Google two black boxes.

In the last year we have done a lot of work with our customers, helping them targetting their users with product recommendations. You know the drill - the idea of giving a user the experience of “If you purchased this, you might want to purchase also…”.

Recommendations are a great way to enahnce the user expericne and drive your sales up. We saw some hugh imporvements in ROI from email campaigns as well as user satisfaction.
To be honest, we always had Amazon as our role model here. As a loyal customer of Amazon, I alwyas admired their work on deliverin this superior targeting experience.

This is why I was su surpise to get theis email from Amazon…
A month ago, I purchased there my first DSLR camera. A few days ago I got an email from Amazon, stating that they have some recommendations for me based on the fact that I showed interest in cameras.
What were their recommendations? Cameras.
This is a waste of a marketing message. As I already purchased a camera, what I should have been targeted with was other products like lenses and bags.
This is an error we see a lot of vendors do, but I was surprise to see it also from Amazon.

I’m really happy to announce our new partnership with Federated Media.
This is something we have been working on for some time. Federated share a mutual vision with us about what kind of metrics advertisers should get. The idea that tracking the mare traffic and clicks their campaigns generates is simply not enough.

When brand advertisers build digital campaigns in the shape of mini experiences and blogs they are trying to engage audince with their brand. Their goal is not to just pump p traffic, but really facilitate a conversation on their products and brand name.
In order to enable this, Federated just announced a new toolbox for their advertisers. The toolbox will give advertisers unprecedented holistic view on the campaign metrics. They chose us to power everything around engagement measurement.

This is just the first step, and we are working hard together on improving the toolbox and give advertisers the best solution posible.

You can find the official press release here.

I don’t live in the valley enough times to take the new Yahoo - Google deal as personally as a lot of the bloggers around here. Most reactions were somewhere between anger and contempt to true sadness.
Many people gave their explanation to why this deal is actually bad for Yahoo on the long run, detailing how it will put to death their search and search advertising businesses.
But what people are missing is that by signing the deal, Yahoo kills not just their search efforts, they also kill their long term vision.

In the press announcement that Yahoo published there are two very important quotes we need to give our attention to:

“This agreement provides a source of funds to both deliver financial value to stockholders from search monetization and to invest in our broader strategy to transform display advertising”

Basically Yahoo admits that they can’t beat Google in search advertising and that they need to focus on where they are still leaders, the display advertising market. They put their future on trying to lead this still big market.
But here lies the problem. We all know Google, very soon, will go with full power also after this market, and with the relationship they have with so many advertisers and the DoubleClick acquisition, they have everything they need to also win it.
Now let’s go forward. At the same press release Jerry Young also write:

“We believe that the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry.”

This is absolutely true. We all know that web advertising is all about targeting. The better you will target your ads, the better ROI you will give to your advertisers and more money to your publishers. And Targeting is all about data.
What Jerry basically say is that by mining search data to build a better profile of users, you can enhance display advertising performance.
The problem of course lies with the fact that by giving Google access to all those Yahoo search results, they are giving them not just inventory but also this valuable data. They are giving their biggest future competitor their most precious asset they have, securing their failure to win also this battlefield.

Today big news were of course the expected deal between Yahoo and Google.
Yahoo will outsource some (we can guess most) of their search advertising and in site contextual advertising to Google.
This makes Google basically almost unbeatable in search. It’s no longer a technology question of coming up with better algorithm to do contextual advertising. It’s all about the ROI they can give publishers and advertisers. And this is first of all a size question. When you have such a huge amount of advertisers and inventory, you can play the numbers in a way that will maximize the results better than anyone else. Microsoft and the other players simply don’t have a chance.
So there are two big questions that come up to mind:
Is this deal good for advertisers? Still hard to know. In the short run, it definitely makes their lives better. Bid for words on Google and reach also the rich Yahoo traffic. On the long run? When Google own interests is to make prices go up as they take a cut of the sale, it’s always bed to have simply just one player. So for the long run, we have to sit and wait and see how this will play out.
The second important questions is of course - So how can someone beat Google?
It seems that there are now just two ways to beat Google:

1. Create such a better search engine, that you will be able to basically convert Google users. This scenario is very unlikely to happen. The main reason is that it is not a technology question but a psychology one. The Google name is “burned” into people mind so hard that even if you’ll proof to them that your engine can bring better search results, most people will still use Google just out of the fear that they are losing something.

2. Hit Google where it really hurts - the revenue share with their publishers. Google takes approx 30% of advertising money and give the other 70% to the publisher. A year ago there was some discussion in the blogosphere about an open source search platform. A platform that takes on the power of open source to beat Google page rank algorithm and at the same time gives publishers 100% of the advertising deal.
Such a platform can be 29% worse than Google, and still convince a publisher to give it his inventory.
Of course this is all theory. In reality there are many problems in creating sucha platform. From who going to fund the massive datawherhouse needed for this, to how you make sure SEO black hats doesn’t game the sysetm when it is an open source one.

The new comscore data shows what we all could say, that the king of online video is YouTube.
What I find curios is the fact that they claim that on average each YouTube user watched a whopping 50.4 videos on April.

Maybe I’m completely wrong here, but this sound to me like a way too big of a number. My feeling is that this number just shows that YouTube player still falls to black hat tactics of uplifting the number of views of some videos.
I would love to see the number of how many videos were viewed on average per unique user. My guess is that the number will be very different…
If you think I’m wrong here and have other data to show it, please leave it in the comments.