Tracking Browsers Without Cookies Or IP Addresses?
Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string.
If you visit Panopticlick, you can get an reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it."
Twitter Intros Local Trends
The new feature, rolled out last night, lets users "localize" their top trends, by country or by city. The spot reserved for Trending Topics on the right hand column of the site now reads Trending: Worldwide. Users can change locations with a pull down menu.
Countries include Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, the UK, and the US. On the city side, the service is largely confined to the US, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonion, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. London and Sao Paulo are also on the list.
Twitter is currently working on adding more cities.
Facebook, Attorney General of California, and Web 3.0
Due to overwhelming privacy concerns, many large web companies are now employing a new position: CPO "Chief Privacy Officer." Chris Kelly is Facebook's CPO, now running for AG in California.
The interview touches a bit on "Web 3.0" and the direction things are headed. Worth the read.
Read the whole interview: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes
How you can find SmartBox??!
Well, the easiest way is simply to Google us. Like this:  http://tinyurl.com/ybtfdg9
Or, if you can't remember the name of my business, try just my name: http://tinyurl.com/ycszv22
:)
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s
'People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,' says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 'College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.' Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less.
'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen.
12 Things Made Obsolete This Decade
HuffPostTech took a look back at 12 things that became obsolete this decade.
From fax machines to landline phones check them out (and get nostalgic) in the slideshow below!
We'll start with the YellowPages..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/26/obsolete-things-that-expi_n_402674.html?slidenumber=EAtemGCqMvg%3D&slideshow
Adding an authorized user to your Google Analytics account
Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08
From the executive summary: 'In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.' Has the flow and importance of information really become this prolific in our daily lives?
Failure Rate Study in Netbooks and Notebooks
Three PC manufacturers — Asus, Toshiba, and Sony — boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate. HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years.
Microsoft Office 2010 to Include Social Networking
Microsoft recognizes the social networking trend by adding Outlook Social Connector to the Outlook 2010 application. Outlook Social Connector will let you see emails, status updates, shared files and photos, and more all in a single view. You will also be able to see who your mutual friends are and other information to help you maintain and extend your social network.Read more @ PCWorld
The accelerating decline of newspapers
The newest numbers on newspaper circulation, released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, paint a dismal picture for an industry already feeling the pressures of an advertising slump coupled with the worst business downturn since the Great Depression.
The ABC data estimate that 30.4 million Americans now pay to buy a newspaper Monday through Saturday, on average, and about 40 million do so on Sunday. These figures come from 379 of the nation's largest newspapers. In 1940, 41.1 million Americans bought a daily newspaper, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
In September, for instance, Nielsen reported that the New York Times was the Internet's most popular newspaper site, with an average of 21.5 million unique visitors per month, up 7 percent compared with a year earlier. Yet last week, the Times Co. reported a 27 percent drop in ad revenue for the quarter. At The Washington Post, which has lost $143 million through the first six months of 2009, the number of monthly unique online users was down 29 percent, to 9.2 million, compared with September of last year, just before the presidential election.
Read more @ The Washington Post
Better Twitter Results in Google Search
“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information,” explains Marissa Mayer.
The most difficult problem that Google has to solve is ranking tweets, as most microblogging search engines sort the results by date and aren’t able to filter spam and irrelevant results.
Twitter’s blog explains why the company co-founded by two ex-Googlers partnered with Google. “Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”
In the meantime, Bing has released a Twitter search engine that sorts the results by date and highlights the top links shared by Twitter users.
Microsoft Reaches Deal To Bring Twitter And Facebook Data To Bing
Google Analytics Gets a Bunch of New Features
Google announced a number of new and upcoming features for Google Analytics today. The features, Google says, focus on three things: power, flexibility, and intelligence.
It is the intelligence aspect, which Google places the most prominence on, and this comes in the form of a feature called "Analytics Intelligence," which will provide users with automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of their site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly, and monthly periods. Users can be notified by email or right within the Google Analytics user interface.
Google has also added goals for "time on site" and "pages per visit," as well as the ability to define up to 20 goals per profile. Here's some more on that:
Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. They will be adding a code snippet for users to add to their mobile sites. PHP, Perl, JSP, and ASPX sites will be supported.
"iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website," says Dai Pham of the Google Analytics Team. "What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement."
They have also added Advanced Table Filtering, which allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Here's more on that feature:
Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics, and they are also adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.
Google says that it will be going into more detail on the new features in the coming days on the Google Analytics Blog. The features will be appearing in Google Analytics accounts gradually over the coming weeks.
Madison Avenue: Applying Traditional Marketing Best Practices to Search Marketing
Beyond catchy slogans and brand icons, web marketing today is about gathering data and targeting your customers with offers that are custom tailored to their location, budget and needs.
A Data-Driven Approach to Marketing
Traditional advertising firms often conduct surveys or test groups in order to analyze the impact of a particular message before releasing a product. In today's marketing environment, trends are constantly shifting and you can launch a new campaign in a matter of hours based upon what you learn from your customers.
Web analytics provides insights into which parts of your website are generating the most leads and which need to be improved to ensure a seamless conversion funnel from beginning to end. The major advantage of small businesses today is that you can be nimble, responding to shifts in the marketplace by introducing a new special offer, service offering or approach that might take your larger competitors weeks to create.
As a successful business owner, you understand the power of cultivating brand loyalty through personal relationships. Effective online marketing carries those principles over from traditional advertising by segmenting potential customers according to their needs, and adjusting that message in real-time.
Are All 800 Numbers Treated Equal?
Whether it's the power of subconscious perception or reasoned logic, subtle clues on a web page can strongly impact our behavior on that site. Take for example the display of toll-free phone numbers. Most sites invite calls from visitors by prominently displaying their phone number on their web pages. Many times, these numbers are of the toll-free variety, with prefixes of "800", "888", "877" or "866".
Although the "800" prefix has been around for over 40 years, its next oldest sibling, "888" is only 13 years old. The "877" prefix came about 11 years ago, while the youngest "866" has only been in use for 9 years.
Does the longer legacy of the "800" prefix result in higher conversions when tested against the newer toll-free prefixes?
We utilized our call tracking software to create a test that would determine if the use of various toll-free prefixes produced different conversion rates. We wanted to measure the impact the different prefixes had on both call-in conversions and online conversions.
Our sample included 18,100 visits to one lead generation site. All visits were from paid search ads in Google and resulted in 2,614 combined call-in and online conversions. The visits were split evenly among 4 distinct landing pages, each page displaying a different toll free number. Other than the different phone numbers, the landing pages were identical. All visits were recorded during the 1st quarter of 2009.
Chart A shows conversion rates for call-in leads by prefix. Interestingly, our highest conversion rate corresponds to the oldest prefix (800) and the lowest conversion rate corresponds to the youngest prefix (866). Thus, the age of the prefix appears to directly impact the call-in conversion rate. The longer the prefix has existed, the higher its conversion rate. The magnitude of the difference between the best performing "800" prefix and worst performing "866" prefixes is 1.64 percentage points. This means that the "800" prefix had a 59.8% higher call-in conversion rate than the identical page with an "866" phone number.
CHART A
Can different toll-free prefixes impact the online (form fills) conversion rate? As expected, while the results on call-in conversions were significant, the impact on online conversions (form fills) was somewhat less than conclusive as seen in Chart B.
CHART B
The toll-free prefix that accompanied the page yielding the highest online conversion rate was "888", followed closely by "866". The "800" and "877" prefixes converted almost identically for online conversions. The spread between the highest and lowest conversion rates was .76 percentage points, less than half that of the difference in call-in conversion rates. Notice how these conversion rate results were almost opposite that of call-in conversions.
Chart C shows the results of our test on with the combined conversion rates. Notice now that the "888" and "800" prefixes convert at almost the same rate followed by the "877" and then the "866" prefixes.
CHART C
If we place the same value to a call-in lead as an online lead, we can see in Chart D the projected revenues from the four prefixes. For the purposes of this exercise, we assumed that the value of a lead is $100.
CHART D
Based on our observed combined conversion rates, the page with the "888" prefix would generate the most revenue.
In some instances, though, companies might place a higher value from a call-in lead. Sometimes call-in leads come from more highly motivated prospects, or prospects with a greater sense of urgency. If we were to value a call-in lead at twice (average order value of $200) that of an online lead (average order value of $100), the results become more striking.
The page with the "888" prefix clearly brings in the most revenue indicative of the strong call-in conversion rate for that prefix. In fact, the "888" prefix would generate 19.5% more revenue than the page with the"866" prefix.
Based on our study, the greater the difference between the average order value of the prefixes, the greater the impact expected on revenue generated.
Here are two important take-aways from our study:
- As part of your landing page testing and optimization, you should perform a similar test to see if there are opportunities to increase your conversion rates. Call tracking software makes this an easy and inexpensive test.
- Understand the values of both your call-in and online conversions and factor that into your results. For ecommerce companies, a call-in sale gives the opportunity for an upsell, potentially increasing the average order value of call-in leads. Lead generation companies may also benefit more from call-in leads by being able to capture the prospect when the prospect is most interested and motivated to discuss their needs.
SEO vs. PPC - The Final Round
http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com/reports/trafficsource-report.pdf
Massive Phishing Attack Steals Millions of Passwords
Microsoft has done their part in blocking all known hijacked Hotmail accounts and created tools to help users who had lost control of their email. An analysis of the data from Hotmail showed the most common password among the compromised accounts to be '12345.' On their end, Google responded to the attacks by forcing password resets on the affected accounts.
Why women rule social networking
Tracking Offline Marketing through Google Analytics
This little known trick with Analytics can easily track any offline advertisement's exact return on your investment. You can also apply this to tracking return on an email sequence, or split testing an email sequence against another for best ROI.
From the video, here is the HTML template I promised:. You'll need to remove the trackable link here that we created in the video and replace it with your own, save it as index.htm, and upload it into a new folder on your website (such as 'offer').
<HTML><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.indianasmiles.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=aweber&utm_campaign=9secrets1"></HTML>
Visit our website for more free video tips and information about profiting from local online advertising: http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com
Extracting Exact Keywords Searched from Google Adwords & Analytics
Using this process, you can extract the exact phrase your visitor searched for and include it in your Analytics report.
Referencing the video, here is the text for you to copy/paste into your Analytics filters.
Filter 1: Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (\?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Medium: (cpc|ppc)
Output To -> Constructor: Custom Field 1: $A3
Filter 2:Field A -> Extract A: Custom Field 1: (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A1)
Make sure the sequence is correct or it will not work!!
Visit our website for more free video tips and information about profiting from local online advertising: http://www.smartboxwebmarketing.com
The Rocky Mountain Bank Incident
Here's what SmartBox can do for Your Business -
SmartBox has the knowledge and experience to take care of all your IT needs. We know how busy you are, which is why we take pride in our ability to bring our computer repair, sales, networking & web design services as well as voice & data wiring directly to your office, 7 days a week. If you've got questions or require assistance, we have the answers. Have an issue you need resolved?
To put it bluntly, SmartBox offers unparalleled knowledge, experience, customer service, and prices. But for those that need more reasons to choose us over the high-priced competition, we've compiled a list of 11 reasons why SmartBox is your best choice.
* Knowledge and Experience. Our technicians have years of proven experience and a near-perfect customer satisfaction rating. We are also Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and CompTia certified.
* No Geeks. While our knowledge of computer repair and maintenance may make us appear to be geeks, we assure you that our customer service is top quality and we'll explain everything with clarity.
* Price. No Geeks. No Squads. No High Prices.
* 'Fix It' Guarantee. We'll diagnose your computer. If we can't fix it, you don't pay. Simple as that.
* On-Site Service. We're available to come to you 7 days a week! We are based in New Albany, Indiana and service the entire Southern Indiana and Louisville area.
* Remote Service. Take advantage of our Remote Support Tool, which allows us to help you straight from our office, all while you watch, anywhere in the world.
* Free Back-ups. Computers always seem to crash at the most inconvenient times. We know how stressful it can be to lose your data, so we store backups of all the computers we work on for free up to 6 months.
* Flexible Hours. We do our best to accommodate your busy schedule, including after hours and weekend service at no extra charge.
* We're Local. SmartBox is a locally owned and operated in New Albany, Indiana.
* Extraordinary Service. We offer the personal touch that the corporate owned 'geek services' can't match.
* A Great Reputation. Delivering quality services for PC users is what we've been doing since 2001.
"So.. What Can SmartBox Do For You?"
- SmartBox - Computer Sales. Extraordinary Service. (view on Google Sidewiki)
Just wrote a Sidewiki
Why SmartBox? And what is "Web Marketing"?
For the last 9 years, Smartbox Marketing has led the way in web design, search engine optimization, and market solutions for the small business professional.
Internet marketing has grown up. Stylized, "me-too" template solutions sold by one-size-fits-all medical marketing companies just don't work anymore. Your practice is unique and it deserves a unique brand and a unique marketing niche. These marketing companies do the same thing for each client and the end result is that no one gets ahead of the rest.
You deserve better.
Yes, they will go on about all the directories in which you will be listed, but guess what? Your competitors are listed in those same directories. Each year fewer and fewer copies of the Yellow Pages are being printed. There's a good reason for that. Directory marketing is dying. If it doesn't work in real time, don't expect it to work on the net.
Here's what we do – the SmartBox difference:
* Provide in-depth analysis of existing websites.
* We tell you exactly what works, what doesn't, and why.
* We design your website to your specifications with an eye to what works
* We write your content to be both highly readable and friendly to Google.
* We provide a ridiculously easy to use tool to track your leads and ROI
* We keep you abreast of the latest technologies and advise you on new tips and tricks.
Why do we do it?
Simple. Because we know that if we do not increase the productivity of your website, we won't have you for a client very long. SmartBox is a turnkey solution for professionals like dentists, chiropractors, attorneys, doctors, and other businesses that provide services and need to use the internet as a marketing vehicle. Nowadays with the dominance of Google, the web is the largest and most important marketing medium available for any industry and SmartBox helps very busy people take advantage of that through web design, content, video, search engine optimization and advertising, blogs, phone conversion tracking, social networking, and anything else that’s crucial to their online reputation.
Local Online Advertising with SmartBox - Final Cut!
Microsoft says "Too Old" to Critical Update for Windows XP
Dominating the Search Engines for Local Businesses across the US
is Dominating the Search Engines for local businesses across the US

