One of our aims at Smart Insights is to make marketers aware of the many software tools that can be used to take advantage of the unique communications benefits of digital media.
Ultimately, these software tools should help customers too. Website personalization or behavioural targeting tools are an interesting class of tools since they can benefit both companies and customers, yet there are privacy concerns about how the data is collected is used.
This category of website personalization and behavioural targeting tools is also interesting since everyone still quotes the Amazon personalized recommendation "collaborative filtering" technique - read paper describing the algorithm. Most are still wowed by the accuracy of the technique (apart from when buying gifts for others...), but it doesn't seem to give rise to too many privacy complaints.
Magiq dynamic website personalization software
When I bumped into Malcolm Duckett at the last Econsultancy Masterclass presenting Magiq I was…
Q. Who would you say the market leaders are from an e-commerce perspective? i.e what companies are you aware of that provide a complete outsourced online shop(s) through to order handling and fulfillment on a multi-country basis?
A. I think there are a limited number of Ecommerce solution providers that can deliver this. There are more that work on in individual countries or markets, but fewer which can offer the international fulfillment.
For me, these are best known suppliers which I believe have the scale to help you I would recommend taking a look at :
1. GSI Commerce international Ecommerce solutions
2. Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS)
3. Venda Ecommerce Fulfillment
To review others I suggest you download the Gartner Ecommerce Leaders Magic Quadrant:
…
This year, I've heard from quite a few companies and agencies recommending What Users Do for improving their sites and services. I was intrigued by the relatively low cost compared to traditional usability services, so thought it would be useful to share some background on the service.
Smart Insights are independent of companies providing tools to improve digital marketing, but are keen to share ideas of the options available and what people think of them - see for example our post reviewing website user feedback tool options. So, please share your experience on similar usability services. Thanks.
Over now to Lee Duddell of What Users Do. Here are my questions...
1 What is whatusersdo? Which types of sites/pages does it work best for?
whatusersdo makes it easy for website owners to improve User Experience by observing real people using their…
My most popular blog post in the last year has comfortably been the post on buzz monitoring software tools (aka social listening tools). Problem is, there are around 30 tools on the list and of course, there are more not covered.
So the obvious question for the marketer is "how on earth do I decide which tool to select for my company?". Well the original post does categorise the software according to purpose, but selecting the right one needs some assistance.
I had seen some nice case studies about a tool called Social Radar, including this one on the Infegy Buzz Study blog using it to evaluate sentiment around the iPad launch. So when I got a chance to meet and interview Gray Dudek, the Managing Director of Infegy Europe, the creators of Social Radar, I had some obvious questions to ask, and I asked them from a potential…
Our digital marketing software update showcases the latest software tools to help improve your digital marketing from the ones we have reviewed this week.
We include software in different categories including SEO, Email marketing, Social media and web analytics
Sign-up to our enewsletter if you'd like a reminder of the updates each Friday.
Our recommendations on Internet marketing tools for week starting 30th August 2010
6 Page monitoring services and plugins
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: Yes we can use feeds or Google Alerts to keep an eye on new announcements, but"€¦
Implication: if you have a competitor page you have to monitor for product or client news these are great options.
Best tools to customise Facebook Pages
Value: [rating=4]
Commentary: A review of the 12 best services for making Facebook page tabs.
Implication: Econsultancy had a…
Tools to determine target keywords are well-established. But new tools - see Market Potential / Market Demand Tools - provide a lot more analysis of market potential or customer demand for products than the established software/systems. Many of these query the excellent Google research database available direct from Google as the Googlr Keyword Tool or Google Insights for Search.
For ideas on using these analysis tools - see this series on Keyphrase analysis by James Gurd.
Most popular keyphrase analysis tools
The best known and longest established keyword tools are:
Google Keyword Planner - Formerly the Google Keyword Tool
Google Trends - good for geographic variation and time series
UberSuggest - Excellent tool for international evaluation
Word Tracker US and UK versions available
Keyword Discovery US and UK versions available
Google Analytics SEO: Queries tool and Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries
Market Potential / Market Demand Tools
These are the newcomers…
The pace of development of new software to help digital marketers measure, manage and improve through 2009 has been incredible.
There has also been no shortage of statistics about how consumer search and socialise online.
This page shows the most popular types of software and statistics according to the "voice of the crowd" - that's use you - I have featured these tools and software in my Twitter - partly to be useful and partly just so I can remember the developments without doing a full blog post.
This top 10 list is ordered according to how many people have clicked through from Twitter to my directory created with Mediwiki - you can also view the full list of software tools and statistics for digital marketers.
Social Media Usage Statistics…
A comparison of 36 social media monitoring software tools
There are a bewildering number of social media monitoring tools to choose from. A 2015 comparison of social media listening tools from Ideya Ltd shows that there are around 250 tools available. Of these 191 are paid, with the remainder free or using a combined model.
How to decide which tool(s) is best for you?
Knowing how to decide on the best tool is certainly challenging. This post isn't as comprehensive or up-to-date as the latest Ideya report, thanks to all the merger and acquisition activity in this area, but it compares 36 of the best known social media listening tools including free and paid. If you want to know the free tools go straight to category 4.
The bulk of the work on the original post was completed by a specialist, Michael Brewer of Clerestorey who compiled this comprehensive directory of…
Bit.ly is now the defacto standard for URL shorteners in Twitter and Tweetdeck, etc, but I find many marketers aren't aware of how it can also be used for tracking the effectiveness of their content. It's essential to check you're staying relevant and useful through this instant feedback.
Before we get to the 4 steps, here is an example of a new (Nov 2009) "click summary" feature in Bit.ly which you access from your home page. You can see that this gives you a great overview of:
Geographical location of your audience
Use of Twitter.com (just 17%) for interacting against other applications - 20%
How to use Bit.ly to track PR effectiveness
The first 4 steps to get this feedback on what your followers are interested in take just 5 minutes to setup and it's automatic after that, so if you're not already, get tracking!
Step 1…
We all know the Long Tail is important to keyword research for search engine marketing. This recent keyword analysis by Hitwise from US data showed that top 1,000 search terms account for just 11% of traffic:
Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic
We all see similar patterns in our own / client's web analytics, with the majority of individual referrals from tail keyphrases.
But how can we understand the long-tail phrases we need to target and refine our existing approach?
Pattern recognition through stems and qualifiers
I have always believed that successful keyword research and copywriting for SEO is down the analysts "pattern recognition" based on finding the main stem terms and qualifers using this type of structured analysis and format:
<pre-qualifier(s)> + [stem(s)] + <post-qualifier(s)>
+- <cheap> +-…
