Thursday, March 20, 2014
Here is where you should get your landscaping and gardening stuff done in Bangalore :)
If you are looking for garden landscaping in Bangalore, do give a dekko to GreenMyLife. In addition to this, they also run a gardening shop online and can also help you set up balcony gardens etc. And yes, Gitanjali started it !
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Long time .. time to shake off the dust
Whoa ! Its been a rather long time since I made a post here. How time flies. Our startup - Ohana Media is doing pretty well - and there's a nifty product coming up for launch from us very soon. Stay tuned on that, and drop me a mail at shameekc At ohana hyphen media dot com. if you are interested in simplifying and driving efficiencies in your digital marketing effort - and would like to participate in a closed beta.
Meanwhile - here's a little toy we built last week - helps us do some of our stuff - hope it helps you too - Facebook share graph discovery tool
Meanwhile - here's a little toy we built last week - helps us do some of our stuff - hope it helps you too - Facebook share graph discovery tool
Monday, April 27, 2009
SEO 101 – How to fix a fever without a thermometer
Here's a guest post from Birla - Asklaila's CTO. For your reading pleasure ...
How to fix a fever without a thermometer
Yes. You got it right. You can’t. We know that thermometer is no wonder drug to fix fever but an essential part of fixing it. In fact it is pretty much the starting point. I am assuming you are past the stage where you have realized how important SEO can be to you as an online business and have decided to do something about it. Let me help you to get started.
So first things is to measure where you are. There are few important metrics which need to be measured. Broadly you can classify the metric into three segments.
How to fix a fever without a thermometer
Yes. You got it right. You can’t. We know that thermometer is no wonder drug to fix fever but an essential part of fixing it. In fact it is pretty much the starting point. I am assuming you are past the stage where you have realized how important SEO can be to you as an online business and have decided to do something about it. Let me help you to get started.
So first things is to measure where you are. There are few important metrics which need to be measured. Broadly you can classify the metric into three segments.
Users, Site and Search Engines.
In this post I will focus on talking about measuring Search Engines. Measuring SEs enable you to track your visibility to millions of audience for hom SEs are the starting points of their Internet experience.
Index Size
This gives you an idea of how many documents of your website are visible to search engines. You can easily find it by giving “site:domain-name.com” as query to your favourite search engine.
This gives you an idea of how many documents of your website are visible to search engines. You can easily find it by giving “site:domain-name.com” as query to your favourite search engine.
Index Size Breakup
It is not sufficient to just see overall index size but you should also break it up by the different type of pages you have in your site. Eg. If you are a retail site, you might have pages which show multiple products and you might have pages which show complete details of a single product. It is important for you to understand how search engines look at different type of pages on your site.
It is not sufficient to just see overall index size but you should also break it up by the different type of pages you have in your site. Eg. If you are a retail site, you might have pages which show multiple products and you might have pages which show complete details of a single product. It is important for you to understand how search engines look at different type of pages on your site.
You might also have the type of pages broken up by geography or categories. You should also breakup your index size from those perspectives.
Inlinks
Election time and you need to track how many people have voted for you on the internet. Inlinks monitoring does that for you. You should also do some more analysis on the quality of sites which link to you. Sorting them by their Alexa rank can help you a little bit to understand the quality.
Inlinks
Election time and you need to track how many people have voted for you on the internet. Inlinks monitoring does that for you. You should also do some more analysis on the quality of sites which link to you. Sorting them by their Alexa rank can help you a little bit to understand the quality.
Cache
You should always look at how search engines view you by looking at their cached pages.
You should always look at how search engines view you by looking at their cached pages.
Automation
It is important that you automate the entire process of generating these metrics. It is simple and straightforward and any scripting language can help you write this in few days ( or may be hours if your programming skills are less rusty than mine )
It is important that you automate the entire process of generating these metrics. It is simple and straightforward and any scripting language can help you write this in few days ( or may be hours if your programming skills are less rusty than mine )
Relative Grading
Being an IIT student, one thing I learned (unfortunately hard way) that it is not just sufficient to do well but also do well relative to your surroundings. This is like measuring the body temperature to 100 degree Farenheit but not knowing what the ideal body temperature should be. Obviously you are not going to get any idea of your fever just with measurement. It is important to measure regularly and measure your peers also. Since public APIs are available for tracking all this, you can track this for any site. A good idea is to figure out your competition and track all the parameters for all of them. Make sure that you store all the parameters in a database so that you can do long term analysis. Analyzing this for a large number of sites also ensures that you can also normalize anomalies which are very common in numbers reported by search engines.
So now you have all the keys to test drive your new car, enjoy the drive..... and do not forget to share your experiences.
Being an IIT student, one thing I learned (unfortunately hard way) that it is not just sufficient to do well but also do well relative to your surroundings. This is like measuring the body temperature to 100 degree Farenheit but not knowing what the ideal body temperature should be. Obviously you are not going to get any idea of your fever just with measurement. It is important to measure regularly and measure your peers also. Since public APIs are available for tracking all this, you can track this for any site. A good idea is to figure out your competition and track all the parameters for all of them. Make sure that you store all the parameters in a database so that you can do long term analysis. Analyzing this for a large number of sites also ensures that you can also normalize anomalies which are very common in numbers reported by search engines.
So now you have all the keys to test drive your new car, enjoy the drive..... and do not forget to share your experiences.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Testing and monitoring your landing pages
Here are two nifty tools I highly recommend:
a) One perennial problem for folks in website design is trying to make their sites work across various versions of browsers. If you are a search marketeer, you probably create specific mini sites and landing pages - most people I know would just check it in IE and Firefox - whatever versions are available in their machines - and forget about it. You should realize that you may be potentially screwing up your landing pages in many browsers by doing this. Why not check screenshots of your landing page in 30+ browsers without having to set up the infrastructure yourself - http://browsershots.org
While this is not a recommended approach if you are a web products company (you would need to get your testing team to actually try out all their test cases in a reasonably large set of browsers - no shortcuts !) - this works particularly well if you are a marketeer with a mini-site or a single landing page for a search campaign. For FREE !
b) You dont want to land in a situation where your search clicks are piling up - and your mini-site is down - either you could set up your own site monitoring tool (which is not the best solution - lets say you are targetting UAE as one of your target countries in your ad campaigns, and because of some network issues, your mini-site is not reachable from UAE - you need to know immediately so you can pause your campaign and stop losing money.
Or your website could go down - or become slow with a lot of hits - or something else could go drastically wrong !
To prevent against this, I would strongly advise you sign up for an account with http://www.pingdom.com - although its a paid for service - its extremely worthwhile for both marketeers with mini-sites and web product companies. You can monitor a bunch of parameters about your website - including response times, uptimes - and get alerts on SMS whenever something goes down. Immensely useful - for a small cost.
a) One perennial problem for folks in website design is trying to make their sites work across various versions of browsers. If you are a search marketeer, you probably create specific mini sites and landing pages - most people I know would just check it in IE and Firefox - whatever versions are available in their machines - and forget about it. You should realize that you may be potentially screwing up your landing pages in many browsers by doing this. Why not check screenshots of your landing page in 30+ browsers without having to set up the infrastructure yourself - http://browsershots.org
While this is not a recommended approach if you are a web products company (you would need to get your testing team to actually try out all their test cases in a reasonably large set of browsers - no shortcuts !) - this works particularly well if you are a marketeer with a mini-site or a single landing page for a search campaign. For FREE !
b) You dont want to land in a situation where your search clicks are piling up - and your mini-site is down - either you could set up your own site monitoring tool (which is not the best solution - lets say you are targetting UAE as one of your target countries in your ad campaigns, and because of some network issues, your mini-site is not reachable from UAE - you need to know immediately so you can pause your campaign and stop losing money.
Or your website could go down - or become slow with a lot of hits - or something else could go drastically wrong !
To prevent against this, I would strongly advise you sign up for an account with http://www.pingdom.com - although its a paid for service - its extremely worthwhile for both marketeers with mini-sites and web product companies. You can monitor a bunch of parameters about your website - including response times, uptimes - and get alerts on SMS whenever something goes down. Immensely useful - for a small cost.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Real time conversion tracking
One of my biggest gripes with Google is that it does not provide real time conversion tracking - usually you can expect Google's conversion tracking to reflect 24 hours after a lead has actually been generated. This is highly sub-optimal for any serious search marketeer. Although View tracking with a javascript tag can take quite some amount of time simply because of the amount of data that needs to be processed, conversion tracking in a thank you page after an action has been taken does not generate as much data - so I fail to understand why Google would introduce a time lag in this. The only reason I can think of is that Google does not want advertisers to become extremely efficient - and wants advertisers to leave money on the table by making suboptimal decisions ( I hope I am not starting a flame war here !)
My recommendation is to use an industry grade conversion tracking software, where you can see which of your clicks are converting, from which geos, for which keywords - in real time - so that your campaign managers can be always on the lookout for optimization opportunities - in near real-time!
If you cant afford a paid solution, you can try out http://www.tracking202.com - a free alternative. The best part about this tool is the "Spy View" which you can use to constantly monitor which of your clicks are converting - with very little lag.
If you dont want the SAAS solution, you can even install your own version of the software from http://www.prosper202.com - just make sure that if you are expecting volumes of more than 5000 clicks per day, you use a dedicated server and MySQL5.1 and above.
Tracking202 is really meant for affiliate marketeers - but can be used by search marketeers helping direct clients with their search marketing efforts too - by using a subset of the features available.
Not only does it support the usual 1x1 pixel based conversion tracking, but it also supports Postback URLs through which your tracking IDs (SubIDs) can be posted back to the tracker when a conversion happens - this is supported by most affiliate/CPA networks you may sign up with ( Experienced affiliate marketeers would know what I am talking about - if you are a newbie please learn more about SubIDs here with an example - http://zacjohnson.com/how-to-setup-subid-tracking-urls/ )
My recommendation is to use an industry grade conversion tracking software, where you can see which of your clicks are converting, from which geos, for which keywords - in real time - so that your campaign managers can be always on the lookout for optimization opportunities - in near real-time!
If you cant afford a paid solution, you can try out http://www.tracking202.com - a free alternative. The best part about this tool is the "Spy View" which you can use to constantly monitor which of your clicks are converting - with very little lag.
If you dont want the SAAS solution, you can even install your own version of the software from http://www.prosper202.com - just make sure that if you are expecting volumes of more than 5000 clicks per day, you use a dedicated server and MySQL5.1 and above.
Tracking202 is really meant for affiliate marketeers - but can be used by search marketeers helping direct clients with their search marketing efforts too - by using a subset of the features available.
Not only does it support the usual 1x1 pixel based conversion tracking, but it also supports Postback URLs through which your tracking IDs (SubIDs) can be posted back to the tracker when a conversion happens - this is supported by most affiliate/CPA networks you may sign up with ( Experienced affiliate marketeers would know what I am talking about - if you are a newbie please learn more about SubIDs here with an example - http://zacjohnson.com/how-to-setup-subid-tracking-urls/ )
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Learning Digital Marketing
Lots of folks pinged me asking me about good resources to learn digital marketing on your own. While there's no substitute to hands on experimentation - I have compiled a list of a bunch of Books and CDs which I believe could be a great starting point for accelerating your digital marketing learning. Unfortunately, most of these arent available in bookstores in India, so you may have to order them online from US. You can find and order these titles online from my amazon store
If any of you know some other titles which are useful - do drop me a note.
A great resource for the absolute beginner is this free emarketing textbook published by the good guys at Quirk. Download it, and digest it over a weekend - its a fairly easy and crisp read.
If any of you know some other titles which are useful - do drop me a note.
A great resource for the absolute beginner is this free emarketing textbook published by the good guys at Quirk. Download it, and digest it over a weekend - its a fairly easy and crisp read.
AdaptiveAds acquired !
AdaptiveAds, an ad network which focusses on the personalization piece of the spectrum,and built out of Pune, has been acquired by Glam Media. Although the sum is undisclosed, I hope this has been a successful exit - we need some successful exits in the Indian startup domain, for folks to really get excited about working with startups.
The other interesting thing about AdaptiveAds is that they had actually started out by focussing on personalization technology for ad creatives only, and used to be called personiva. Then they rebranded themselves and went ahead to launch an ad network.
http://www.adaptiveads.com
The other interesting thing about AdaptiveAds is that they had actually started out by focussing on personalization technology for ad creatives only, and used to be called personiva. Then they rebranded themselves and went ahead to launch an ad network.
http://www.adaptiveads.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
