Marc Ohmann’s Blog

I just spent 45 minutes watching an interesting screencast from Salesforce.com called Marketing In the Google Era.  The presentation was actually fairly interesting.  No real new material but a well presented overview of good practices that all companies should be following.

The interesting thing is that it seems Salesforce.com doesn’t understand their own material.  I found out about the presentation through an email from Salesforce.  I clicked the link in the email to view the presentation and was presented with this screen.

Yesterday I was in a meeting with a partner from a mid-sized insurance firm here locally.  We were discussing all the exciting aspects of Internet marketing, social media and most importantly public relations online.  Jeff Rabkin from Wowza was in the meeting also and was discussing his recent experiences with Mattress Giant.

For anyone who doesn't want to read the article.  The gist is that a Google search for Mattress Giant displays a negative review from epinions.com as the second organic result.

In our meeting the insurance company partner was amazed that negative results could show up and that Mattress Giant was trying to improve their image online. 

Last month I accidentally typed the letter 'i' twice when writing ZoomInfo on the 'About ' section of the blog so it appeared as ZoomIinfo.  Through the analytics I discovered quickly that I was ranking for this misspelling and quickly corrected the spelling on the site.  However, before I could get it changed I had already had 15 visitors from Google due to the misspelling.  It gets better, those 15 visitors ended up with an average of 4 pageviews each!  Oddly enough due to the misspelling it seems those visitors still found something they were looking for on the site.  Long live the long-tail-of-search.

With the simplicity of Javascript style analytics packages such as Google Analytics compared to the traditional log file parsers, comes the concern that some data (page views) may be overlooked.  One legitimate concern is for browsers with Javascript turned off (which could really be less than 0.05% of all users).  But another concern is for the case where a site removes traditional form posts and replaces them with elegant AJAX calls.  By using the urchinTracker a site can accurately track all sorts of non-pageview events.  Over at Google Support there is a great example of how urchinTracker can be used specifically for tracking AJAX calls.