Solid Thinking

Recently I noticed that my last 3 post was suddenly attributed to an unknown user (El****less77). I know this was abnormal since I am the only one currently posting on this blog.

I checked my user list and Administrator list, and could not find anything relating to that user ID.

After a long search in the Internet, I found a crude way to solve it thanks to http://www.journeyetc.com/uncategorized/wordpress-permalink-rss-problems/

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Inserting Google AdSense into the Wordpress post content area, as opposed to the sidebar, gives it a more contextual appearance.

This is good because it allows the readers to see any relevant offers that may benefit them.

This website has the instruction needed to insert the Google AdSense ad unit into the Wordpress Post Content page.

Tripartite Skills

The success of a consultancy depends on three skills:

1. Smart = identify opportunity, recommendations; The dream
2. Passion/Aggression = push through, suggest, seek approval; The Drive
3. Discipline = action; The Reality

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First Rate announces exclusive New Zealand and Australian partnership with SearchIgnite.

New Zealand Online Marketing scene just about to get a bit busier.

NZ Herald article: Yahoo backs Google’s response to China hacks

What I read:

Spotted today in the NZ Herald: Kiwi Data Warehousing Soars.

What does  mean to us?

If anything, recession taught us something by looking at the trends faced by the advertising industry. Most pronounced in the offline advertising, companies are rushing to cut their marketing budget by a large amount. They chose to hunker down in the bunker waiting for the artillery barrage of credit crunch to pass away before poking their heads again.

Interestingly, some went exactly the other way around into panic buying mode. They base the sales on percentage concept, where if the conversion rate goes down then in order to maintain the sales volume the base audience number must go up. This “panic sales defense” move lead to massive increases in marketing spend that returns no sales increases.

Why exactly these things happened?

The primary cause is that a lot of businesses, especially in the “calm New Zealand where time forgets”, neglect the importance of information. In particular, a lot of them do not bother to try to know their customers. For most conservative businesses, any sales is as good as the other. For instance, a lot of businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites without bothering to spend a few hundred dollars to get good analytics software such as Google Analytics.

But knowing your customers is paramount to your marketing efficiency. Google Analytics, for example, can be configured to attribute your sales to where the customers are coming from. With this you can recognise which source is valuable and which is not so that when it comes the time to cut down some marketing budget you can be sure you are cutting the right one.

Other useful analysis include customer behavior, such as what do they buy, what are the most favourite products (= promotion opportunities), what are they searching for that made them leave your shop (= product gaps), etc. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook also allow you to engage your customers to gain their trust, and most importantly, feedbacks. Not only that, they also form a free 3rd party data warehousing, where you can conduct data mining to see what people are talking about in relation to your, or your competitors’, products.

With free tools such as these and storage data space becoming cheaper every day, data warehousing and data mining should become a common business practice. It should even be a crime to run a business without thinking about who your customers are.

If you can snipe your enemy from a distance, why blindfold yourself and charge with a short rate inefficient scatter gun?

Facebook Demographics 2009 Age Distribution from Google Ad Planner data - notice the red rectangle.

Notice the red rectangle

Facebook Demographics 2009 from Checkfacebook.com, showing purportedly 60% of Facebook global population from 8 different countries - notice how 18-24 age group is mostly higher than the other age groups.

By Checkfacebook.com

Facebook 2009 US Demographics shown by Facebook Ad demographic targeting tool roughly confirms the data given by Checkfacebook.com, lending strong credibility to it.

Facebook 2009 Demographic for United States

Good food for though. Google Ad Planner data is highly inaccurate? Anyone has any information on how Google Ad Planner data is compiled?

Social Media websites are not exactly Social anymore?

S: (adj) social (tending to move or live together in groups or colonies of the same kind) “ants are social insects”

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What is Google Caffeine Update and how it may impact your online business?

This is from my blog about Google Caffeine Update on First Rate NZ website. Read the complete article on http://www.firstrate.co.nz/blog/the-caffeine-google-search-algorithm-update/

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From the Stuff.co.nz today: News Ltd lashes out at bloggers

News Limited’s chief executive, John Hartigan, has launched a broadside on bloggers and other online amateurs, arguing they are no substitute for professional journalists.

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