Microsoft Leapfrogs Google in Search Traffic

According to Google’s own data, Microsoft’s live.com has taken a commanding lead in the search engine war:

This Just In - Google Storage! (Yawn)

Checking the morning round of news sites, I see that Google’s announcement of on-line storage is making a big splash. I fail to see the excitement. Not only is this already available elsewhere on the net, none of the other companies have a mission statement that reads like Google’s.

From http://www.google.com/corporate/:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Now why the hell would anyone want to put their data on Google’s servers? Or their documents?

I keep reading how Google is the Microsoft killer. Maybe they will be. But in the last few years I notice an increasing number of emails with boilerplate non-disclosure statements in the signature. I’ve worked for a few companies that were absolutely paranoid about their corporate documents. Who knows. Maybe that paranoia rubbed off on me, but even the less zealous companies I worked at weren’t the type that wanted their documents “universally accessible”.

Methinks Google needs to change their stated mission.

Top 10 Signs That Your Google Search Results Suck: Flowchart

I’m working on a new product, and I’ve been doing a lot of search for related content lately. Maybe it’s just me, but my feeling is that the results are getting worse and worse. Hence, the top 10 signs your Google search results suck flowchart:

(Click to enlarge)

How I Finally Got AdWords Tracking To Work

Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through the payment processors or b) the customer clicking the link to return to the BreezeTree web site after the transaction. Based on what I’ve seen in the past week, I’d estimate that those two methods were working about 10% of the time.

Tracking concerns anyone running a web based business because the cost of Google’s advertising is going up up up. They just reported a 46% rise in 3rd Quarter profits. While the boys in Mountain View are getting richer, the rest of us are wondering whether we’re just throwing money away. You think that the Chinese government is rerouting Google traffic to Baidu today in retaliation to Bush’s meeting w/ the Dalai Lama? Nah! My money’s on some Chinese hacker ticked off over the rising cost of AdWords.

To improve tracking, I decided to change the FlowBreeze order confirmation email. The old FlowBreeze confirmation letter included the registration information and a long list of instructions for downloading, installing and registering the software. It also contained a mini getting started guide. I decided to go with a minimalist approach in the email but link to a confirmation page (where the tracking code is). The new email looks like this:

###

Dear [BUYER'S NAME],

Thank you for purchasing FlowBreeze flowcharting software. Your product registration information is as follows:

[REGISTRATION INFO]

If you haven’t already done so, we strongly encourage you to visit the confirmation page:
[CONFIRMATION LINK]

On the confirmation page, you will find…

• A link to download FlowBreeze (if you haven’t already done so).
• Installation and registration instructions.
• How to get started with FlowBreeze.
• Over 100 flowcharting templates.
• Links to help and support.

Again, thank you for your order. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

BreezeTree Software

###

With this system in place, I’m estimating that close to 100% of my customers have visited the confirmation page. Suddenly the light is on. AdWords is actually paying for itself - much better than I thought.

There are some flaws with the system. I’m using both Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking systems, and neither does a great job of tracking. So I have to look at them both. My Venn diagram isn’t as cool as any of Jessica Hagy’s (my fav), but basically the tracking looks like this:

I’ll admit I don’t understand this because both systems are javascript based and placed at the bottom of the confirmation page. I cross referenced my own sales data vs. my server logs vs. Analytics goal tracking for AdWords vs. tracking shown on the AdWords Campaign Management page. Of the sales that come from AdWords clicks, some are tracked only by Analytics, some are tracked only by AdWords, and some are tracked by both.

So to get an accurate total you would need to determine A + B - A Intersect B. Figuring out that Intersect number on a regular basis is going to be a real pain.

Overall, I would say the conclusions to be had are:

• Give your customers a reason to visit your confirmation page.
• Offer something free for their effort (in my case, the 120 flowchart templates).
• Don’t rely on just one of Google Analytics or Google AdWords tracking systems.
• Don’t rely on Google Analytics for your web traffic analysis (the holes in this data reaffirm my opinion that Analytics sucks).

Excel vs. Google Spreadsheets - The Ecosystem Factor

In my last post I kind of took a pot shot at Microsoft’s focus on SharePoint Services, insinuating that the internal push was driven in part by competition from Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I don’t think that Microsoft really has much to worry about. Yeah, Google Spreadsheets are still kind of kludgey. But I’m sure they’ll improve, so that’s not the reason I say this.

The thing they’re lacking is an ecosystem like Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s applications not only allow them to make money, but they allow others to leverage off their systems to make money as well. Nowhere is that more evident than Excel. I had no idea how big the Excel ecosystem was until I developed a commercial add-in for it. But if you read the Google Docs and Spreadsheets terms of service, you’ll see that Google just doesn’t get it. Here’s an excerpt:

“Subject to the Terms, Google grants you a personal, non-transferable and non-exclusive right and license to use the object code of its Software; provided that you do not (and do not allow any third party to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, … unless such activity is expressly permitted or required by law or has been expressly authorized by Google in writing.”

Pretty scary words for an OSCON sponsor. To be fair, I don’t think many of the OSCON sponsors truly open their source code to customers, but that’s another topic. Regardless, as a developer I stay away from things that requires me to get express permission (or a lawyer) before I can touch the keyboard.

If Google really wants to challenge Microsoft, they need to provide terms of service that allow 3rd party developers to leverage off of Google Spreadsheets. And make money doing so. There’s a lot more being done with Excel then a simple grid with graphs. I’ve seen some first class database reporting tools, dashboards, financial analysis packs, statistical packages, and many other add-ins developed in Excel. These are the sorts of things that tie users to a product.

Microsoft’s web based spreadsheet is comprised of three parts - Excel Calculation Services (the engine), Excel Web Access (the browser interface), and Excel Web Services (the API). The fact that they brand the whole package as “Excel Services” shows that they “get” it. Maybe someday, Google Spreadsheets will have a friendly license, like Google Gears does. But until they do, I just don’t think they’ll never be able to fully challenge Excel.

How to Improve Your AdWords Campaign in 10 Simple Steps

Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:

1. Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
2. Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
3. Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
4. Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body.
5. Body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
6. Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.blah.com/keyword.
7. Find tangential keywords. **
8. Always run 2 ads side-by-side. ***
9. Run different campaigns for different geographical regions (e.g. US vs. Europe).
10. Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns with lower CPC and daily budgets.

Notes:

* Make sure to disallow duplicated pages in your robots.txt file to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.

** Example of tangential keywords: I make flowcharting software. I targeted the keywords “E-Myth” and “EMyth” because I figured entrepreneurs who were standardizing their business processes might want to flowchart them. It worked.

*** Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.