Some more interesting information came out in regards to the click fraud rates on the major engines. Google and Yahoo have been suggesting over the last year or so that the rate of fraud was somewhere around 2%. Not so, according to a new study done by the Fair Isaac company. Their figure is closer to 10%-15%, and the figures are supported somewhat by the independent studies done by Click Forensics and Click Fraud Network. I am sure this is an argument that will continue as long as search engines display search results, but the bottom line is that if you can avoid pay per click long term, do so. There is enough natural traffic out there, you just need to have good fresh content and back links to get in front of your audience.

I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice. I do this because I like all the plugins and the tabbed browsing. I assume that due to the great functionality and ease of use of Firefox, that a lot of other people also use it, but it turns out I was wrong. In an interesting study of site traffic from Site Pro News, it turns out that Internet Explorer is still king.

Over 58% of internet users use some version of IE. 33% are using Firefox, but this figure may be a little skewed, as most of the people visiting Sitepronews are industry insiders and marketers. If you were to track browsers on a retail site, the proportion using IE would be a lot higher. So if your site resolves really well on Firefox, but not so well on IE, you need to fix it. It could be losing you business.

So when did everyone get their first email address? ‘95? ‘97? Then when did you finally feel comfortable buying something online, giving out your credit card information without fear of getting your life stolen from you? ‘98 maybe? Back then, could you imagine purchasing the majority of what you buy online instead of in stores? If it’s not your reality now, it’s pretty darn close. Now, I bet you have absolutely no problem letting amazon or ebay remember your cc numbers. Simply amazing what can happen in 10 years.

Well, online retail has officially been around for 13 or 14 years, according to shop.org. And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon (obviously). But what’s really interesting is that it’s showing absolutely no signs of saturation whatsoever. In fact, according to Forrester Research, online retail grew 25% last year, and it’s expected to grow 18% this year.

What’s even more interesting is that the study doesn’t take into account buying decisions that are made online but made in brick-and-mortar stores. Buyers are increasing looking to blogs and other social media outlets to help them make decisions. So online retail will officially grow 18% this year, but what percentage of buying decisions will be made online? With the increasing popularity of blogs and video, online retail growth might be more than they expect.

Is it just because I haven’t been paying attention, or is Google showing a bunch of new search options on their search results pages?
I conducted a search on Google today, and noticed that the additional options shown on the home page are now listed in a new column down the left hand side of the page. But it goes a little further than the options on the home page. You can now refine the results down to “groups”, “patents”, “products”, “scholar” and “maps”.

The one I found most interesting was “products”. This refined search gave me product pictures, more options for searching within price ranges, brands, seller ratings and related searches. A shopping comparison channel, right there on Google. Obviously they had some stuff left over from Froogle, and it gives them a chance to re-promote the ailing Google Checkout. Tune in for how retailers can improve rankings in this new space using blog marketing and linking campaigns.

In a recent study by Marketing Sherpa, reproduced in the Marketing Pilgrim, it appears that viral video is taking off, albeit a little slower than expected. Almost 30% of marketers polled reported great results from their viral video campaigns. Only two forms of promotion received a better reception; micro sites developed for a specific product or launch with the “cool factor”, and online games or puzzles. It seems that the downside of this poll is that if you put out a dull video no-one will watch it.

Given that two thirds of the people who responded to this poll reported that they were planning on a video marketing campaign this year, the message is clear. Do an interesting guerrilla video and take advantage of the window of opportunity that video presents.

In a follow up to a previous article, it appears that comment spam is becoming a very big problem for blogs. As a blog administrator you want to get feedback from clients and your readership, but you just keep getting messages from spammers who just want to siphon off the page rank created by your diligent article writing. You could turn off the comments, but that would negate one of the benefits of blogging. You need a filter, and after exhaustive research I have determined that the best one out there is an excellent creation from the folks at Wordpress. It is called Askismet, and is available as a plug in. Check it out.

As we continue to see exceptional results from our blog linking programs, one thing that we are noticing is that the programs can be operated a lot like pay per click campaigns. In the old world of SEO, there was no real way to control rankings. You were lucky if you got your home page ranked. You weren’t about to argue that the home page does not convert for a specific category, or product.

Not so with our programs. If you want to target a category or product page for rankings, you can do that. I have heard back from several clients that not only are they seeing more traffic, they are also seeing significantly higher conversions into sales. And that should be the goal for any marketing campaign. If we increase your traffic, we are only doing a fraction of our job. An increase in sales is a true measure of our success.

Interesting article in Marketing Shift about the continuing efforts of newspapers to find a way to become more topical and capture some of what is going on online. Hearst Newspapers signed up with Brightcove to distribute video from readers. User generated content is incredibly valuable, and the newspaper conglomerate can use video to generate increased ad revenues on its newspaper portals. Expect more efforts from traditional media to tap into the web 2.0, blog and video revolution as it continues.

I heard about this product from a client the other day. It sounds very much like a scam that was circulating a couple of years ago, where half a dozen companies in Vegas were selling the exclusive rights to a keyword. The theory is that when people have a certain toolbar, when you conduct a search on a specific keyword, then a website’s banner ad appears. I checked out the MySpace Guardian toolbar. It’s a great concept. Everyone is nervous about predators online, so they download the toolbar in their millions, and then receive your banner ad every time they search for your keywords. Sounds like a winner, except how many people have the toolbar, how does it protect you from online predators, and why will people not get sick of the intrusive banners? They are pretty big.

If anyone from the company would like to give me some feedback, it would be much appreciated.

Technorati, the pioneering blog search engine announced their take on the blogosphere earlier today in a post by David Sifry. The key points, or what I found interesting were;

*There are currently over 70 million blogs, with 120,00 new ones being created daily, or 1.4 every second.
*People post new content on their blogs 1.5 million times a day or 17 times a second.
*Spam is on the rise with somewhere between 3000 and 7000 new fake blogs being created every day. In December of 2006 there were 11,000 fake blogs created every day.

In February, Over 2.5 million post had tagged content, and 35% of all posts, or 230 million, used tags. These figures do not include the effect of Myspace. There are 250,000 new Myspace accounts created every day. Each one of them comes with a blog.

Our company harnesses the power and tremendous influence of blogs to help our clients gain market share and increase their online exposure. Blogs and viral marketing present a window of opportunity, and as always the early adopters are seeing the greatest gains.