November 2006

The ROIGuy has teamed up with Eric Enge from StoneTemple Consulting to conduct a comparative study of the leading analytics platforms. The ROIGuy will be leading the PPC analytics while Eric will take charge of the SEO side. We hope to have some preliminary results early in 2007.

Eric had already got the ball rolling by convincing following analytics firms to provide their software free for a few months to help test and compare against one another:

Omniture
WebSideStory
Indextools
ClickTracks
Google Analytics
Webtrends

We are still seeking participating sites, so if you have a monthly CPC budget of more than $50,000, you handle your campaign in house and you want to run six analytic packages on your site for a while, drop an email to jstein@alchemistmedia.com and eenge@stonetemple.com for consideration.

AOL was a pioneer in online communities, content creation and stickiness. As one of the highest of the high flying companies in the first wave of the popularization of the Internet, AOL built a business model and stuck to it…six years too long.

A shrinking customer base for dial up and the rapid evolution of new models online resulted in a long string of declining quarters and the consensus among pundits that AOL was dead, they just didn’t know it yet.

Earlier this year, AOL decided to abandon the captive access subscriber model and offer non-POP services for free. Sara Kehaulani Goo reports in the Washington Post on Saturday that this strategy is beginning to work.

Numbers released this week showed that in the third quarter, AOL lost 2.5 million Internet access subscribers but held on to 2 million of them as customers of its free service. Executives said they were surprised to see an additional 1 million sign up for free e-mail or download AOL’s software.

The really fascinating part of this story is that AOL has 60 million pages that have never been included in any of the major search engines.

For so long, AOL’s pages were not indexed by Web crawlers, such as those owned by Google Inc. and Yahoo, because they were in a closed network accessible to only paid subscribers. With search as a major driver of Web traffic, AOL has a long way to go to get noticed by Internet users and has been busy tagging its content for indexing by search engines. “We’re 15 percent of where we want to be” in terms of AOL’s presence in search-engine results, AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller said.

It may be 10 years late, but AOL has learned about Search Engine Optimization. That’s why their advertising revenue is up 46 percent from the same quarter last year. Assuming that the content they have already 15% of content they have optimized includes 60% of their best stuff, AOL should still see ad revenue double by time they finish making the rest of their captive content optimized for search.

The ROIGuy has been absent for a couple of weeks while recovering from Oral Surgery. Having the nerves of my teeth exposed to the continual irritation of every breath and every bite has resulted in a dental dam of the creative process.