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Tickets for the second Think Visibility Conference, scheduled for 12 September, went on sale yesterday. You’ll have to move quick if you want one, because they sold out in just a few days last time. Continue reading…
Your favourite search engine is Google, right? Or is it…
A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third. Continue reading…
Direct mail – you know, the printed stuff that comes through your letterbox – is a waste of time, right? Proper old skool marketing. No one wants (or reads) that junk anymore… do they? Continue reading…
As widely reported yesterday and today, Twitter have made a “small settings update” that removes choice from users about how they experience their Twitter stream. Continue reading…
You might have a problem with the volume of packaging that their product creates, but it’s hard not to love graze.com, a company who deliver healthy snacks to your desk. I have been well and truly seduced – even if I do feel a hefty twinge of guilt with every box I receive. Continue reading…
Tweetdeck has been my favourite Twitter client for the past six months, but hey – that’s a long time on the web and now I find that I’ve just been seduced by a shiny, new, Mac-native app. Continue reading…
The economy might be struggling but there’s still a lot of optimism around in Leeds, if this weekend’s Enterprise Show is anything to go by. Continue reading…
Lots of people have added a feed of latest tweets to the sidebar of their site or blog and when I was planning my site I assumed I would do the same. But I’ve recently started to have second thoughts. Continue reading…
The UK got its first look at ‘Street View‘ in Google Maps today. 
After various sightings of the Google car over the past few months, they have now launched the feature for a few major cities and the results are pretty breathtaking (take a look at Old Broadcasting House, where I work).
Like many people, I wasted a couple of hours looking around places I know spent some time researching the product. The detail and quality of the images is quite incredible (even if the face recognition software sometimes blurs out the wrong thing). Whilst oo-ing and ah-ing over it with some of my coworkers, we discussed what motivates Google to invest in products like this and how they plan to make any money out of the service (or any of its other free offerings). Continue reading…
Whilst watching Comic Relief Does The Apprentice last night, Sir Allan referred to the comment made by “some schmuck on Dragon’s Den”:
“Profit is sanity; Turnover is Vanity.”
It’s exactly the same in the world of search marketing:
“Conversions are sanity; Traffic is vanity.”
It’s easy to be seduced by the ever-increasing traffic that comes to a site as a result of improving on your search engine optimisation or buying clicks on the pay-per-click platforms. But if that traffic isn’t converting to something tangible – sales, enquiries, sign-ups, downloads, etc than you have acquired nothing more than boasting rights.
The moral? Make sure that you always idenity at least one action that you can track as a ‘conversion goal’ within your stats and measure your site’s performance against that. Don’t look just as the volume of traffic.