Inspired Impressions

I normally don’t trust reports that are created by companies that just so happen to offer services that alleviate the issues pointed out in the reports. That’s why click fraud has not really been a big concern to me as long as I operated with tier1 search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) I’ve been using PPC for a lot of years and feel the tier1 engines have a lot more to lose by allowing click fraud than they do by implementing procedures to stop it. Tier2 engines are a different story for another post.

Google recently launched click fraud reporting in the adwords interface. It is pretty limited, but it’s a step in the right direction. Hopefully, they will open it up a bit more and allow us to get a bit more granular.

The new click fraud reports by themselves weren’t really postworthy, but Google’s recently released analysis of how third parties track click fraud certainly is. Among key findings about 3rd party cilck fraud audit companies are:

• Failure to properly identify user’s browse behavior vs. actual ad clicks
• Fictitious clicks generated across multiple PPC channels
• Duplicated click activity within fraud reports
• Severely overstated, fictitious clicks

For example, in one particular report from ClickFacts, there were 2261 reported events; however, over 1800 of these were duplicated events. In this same case, ClickFacts reported 6 unique click events and duplicated each one 9 times resulting in 54 “click fraud” events. when Google compared this to their logs, they found only a single click for the entire month from that IP address or search query and a charge of $0.57. Remember these reports come from the company that released widely published reports claiming industrywide 36% click fraud.

ClickFacts response to Google’s challenges was to limit the amount of data they submit to claim click fraud as well as to severely reduce their sample size for click analysis.

Another report from Adwatcher claimed the advertiser received about 12,000 clicks for the month;however, in actuality, the advertiser only received 6,800 clicks, of which 800 were attributed as invalid by Google.

The report was very interesting and an easy read. Of course, if you torture data enough it will surrender whatever you’re looking for, but I don’t believe it’s in Google’s long term interest to profit from click fraud, and as such, I believe they are going to a reasonable length to combat the reality of click fraud.

Here’s Google’s email reply to a request for Conversion Tracking with Google checkout:

…As for persisting analytics tracking, that’s something that isn’t possible with the way Checkout currently works.  However, we’ve heard loud and clear from many merchants that this is something that we need to somehow enable.  We have nothing to announce at this time, but we’re working on some things to address this particular problem…

Hopefully sooner, rather than later.

What happens when you violate theses #3 of the Cluetrain Manifesto.. “Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice,” is you end up with WalMart.com’s “Hub”

WalMart is trying, and failing miserably, to jump on the Myspace.com bandwagon by building their own social networking site. They’re the annoying kid who always tries to interject in your conversation with one his own experiences that is in no way relevant to the discussion you were having. Not much social networking that’s going to happen in that environment.
Here’s an excerpt from Bob Garfield’s review at AdAge:

Here’s a sample Hub post from “Holly” — who happens not to be a random Hubster, but a child actress with grown-up ghostwriters. Bad grown-up ghostwriters. (Warning: If you are squeamish seeing others embarrass themselves, this would be a good time to turn the page.)

“Shopping will be my number ONE hobby this fall. I am going to be the most fashionable teen at school! I’ll be on the lookout for the latest fashions. From leggings to layers, to boots and flats, big belts and headbands! I’ll be looking for it all! Layering is SO IN right now. Hobo bags are also in style. OH! And big sunglasses! WHOO!! I don’t know where to stop! With all of the new clothes I’ll be getting, the kids at school will be begging me for fashion tips! “

It won’t be long before executives at WalMart report to the board that that social networking concept sweeping the internet is just a crock and has no basis for longevity in the “real” world.

It’s sites like the Hub that are really clogging the tubes.

One thing that has changed is the new Google Checkout. We’ve been working with GC (Gbuy as it was known in beta) for a while now. I really like the UI for the customer experience. Checkout is easy and pretty much painless.

On our backend, it is pretty straightforward and foolproof. Just a series of XML passing back and forth between us and Google updating the order status and injecting orders into our backend.

It has a lot more legs than MS Passport and I think it will prove to be a value add for Ecommerce in general, and particularly the consumer.

Having said all that, here are my issues:
Once a customer places an order, there is no way to edit the order. If the customer requests expedited shipping after the order was placed, you have to either give it (expedited shipping) away at no additional charge, or cancel the order and reprocess it in your internal order management system.

When an order is placed by the customer, their credit card/debit card is authorized to ensure available funds, and to hold such available funds. If the order is not charged within 3 days, Google will re-authorize the card and then capture the funds, resulting in 2 auths and a capture. This presents problems for debit card owners over weekends and holidays. Google stated that they are working on this to extend the timeframe for re-auth.

Orders tend to get in a state of “reviewing”, meaning the funds have not been authorized and the merchant cannot process the order, quite often. It seems these orders are being subject to a manual review. Based on customer feedback, I think this happens more often when the original auth fails and the customer has to go back and edit the credit card information.

Google has a Payment Guarantee Policy that should cover fraud as Google performs the AVS and CVN matches and doesn’t give the merchant any additional billing information. Some orders have a full match on the AVS and CVN, but Google still denies their eligibility for the Payment Guarantee Policy.

From Google:

“Google relies on a variety of proprietary systems–including internal data sources and advanced risk modeling–to evaluate the risk levels associated with transactions. If the risk level for a particular transaction is too high, Google will not cover the transaction under the Payment Guarantee Policy.”

These orders are still covered under the Chargeback Resolution Policy, but that does not guarantee you will receive your funds back for chargebacks.

The last drawback I’ll talk about, and it is big, is that there is no way to persist your website metrics through checkout. We use Omniture analytics and there is no way to report that a visitor that used Google checkout completed a transaction. There’s not even a way to use Google adwords conversion tracking in Google checkout. This results in a low conversion rate whereby, we have to do manual ‘cipherin’ to figure out the true conversion. I hope Google allows us to place code on the “thank you” page in the near future as this is a real pain in the ass.

Overall though, I think the product is great. Although it may be in beta for the next 3-5 years, they’ve already made some strong improvements to the product. I have high hopes for the future.

I was going through some of my old presentations and ran across a great piece that I had used as an idea starter at a marketing ideation meeting. I apologize to the original author as I didn’t make note of his/her name at the time; however, his/her points are well worth repeating:

Many retailers go to a lot of trouble making their customers feel like “guests.” I’d like to suggest that they would be better off trying to forge friendships.

Treating your customer as a guest isn’t a bad idea, it’s just short sighted. A guest may be pleased and satisfied with a particular visit, but it doesn’t translate into the same affinity and desire to return again and again, that is felt when visiting a good friend.

Friendships are special things. You go out of your way to see friends. You care about their health, what they need, and you enjoy their company. Guests are frequently unwelcome and sometimes they know it. Friends are rarely unwelcome.

It takes two to create a friendship. Retailers have to get to know their customers and listen to their concerns in order to establish the trust necessary for a strong, loyal, long-lived friendship.
At this moment, hundreds of retailers are trying to capture loyalty. Retailers understand the concept of repeat business and want to do what they can to get it. Both online and offline stores, from Amazon.com to WalMart, use a variety of tactics to get to know their customers’ habits.

Statistics indicate that profits can be increased by 25-125 percent just by retaining 5 percent more customers. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that loyalty, guest, and personalized programs are becoming big business. They all share the same basic goal of capturing market share and gaining repeat business. Smart retailers should be looking at these programs as a way to turn their customers into friends.

It takes patience. It takes more than one visit. However, as friendships develop, great things start to happen. The increased loyalty brings referrals (new friendships). It makes marketing efforts more efficient and effective. It can help a retailer gain co-op advertising from vendors designed to meet their friends’ needs. Friends visit more and spend more because they know that this retailer is a friend who cares about they want.

Friendship is the most effective branding a store can ever use. It isn’t loyalty programs that set retailers apart from their competition, it is friendships.

Edit: The author is Melody Vargas.

Google finally launched dayparting which can be a very effective measure for cost savings and improved ROI.

Be careful when implementing as you may decide that since sales are slack during a certain time of the day that your ads should be turned off during those hours, when those clicks could actually lead to sales during a repeat visit during a different time of day. Ensure that your analytics package is tracking the time of the click and not just the time of the sale to ensure you're dayparting most efficiently. I use Omniture Sitecatalyst as well as Google conversion tracking. Out of the box, Omniture doesn't tag the visit with the time of day, so I use a custom metric to assign the hour of day, 21:00 for example, and measure the revenue/conversion rate per keyword off of that metric.

Search Engine Watch forums has a great thread about the Top 10 Adcenter Fixes

Some of my favorites fixes extracted from the thread: 

#2 My top issue - Organize the site navigation according to a date or date range. None of the data presented on any page has any meaning if one has no idea of what timeframe it represents. Going to the report function is NOT a solution. We need to navigate from page to page according to a selected date or timeframe.. today, yesterday, last 7 days and so on. Even if the data lags by 24 hours we can work with it. Without this we can't manage campaigns at all.

6 Rejected keywords..there is no rhyme or reason to them. I have a keyword that is accepted and an obvious misspelling of it rejected. Landing page not relevant! The incorrectly spelled word, does not spell another meaningful word. How can this happen? Bankruptcy, Bankrupcy.

11. Better search functionality within Adcenter. If I don't know what campaign and order I'm looking for already, it's *really* hard to find it, because the search function doesn't seem to work properly. I get errors.

12. Add a "find" tool where we can find all ads that have a certain URL parameter, are at or above a certain CPC, etc. - and then give us a way to edit multiple CPCs on multiple orders on a mass basis. Bid management within the interface is an absolute nightmare right now.

14. Fix dynamic keyword insertion to allow for capitalization: {keyword}. {Keyword}, and {KeyWord}; and default copy if the keyword is too long.

I've been using adCenter since around September of last year, and it has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. I give credit to Microsoft for having a presence on the thread and communicating with the users about their issues.

adCenter has been a very good tool for me in terms of ROI, but the interface is still not user friendly and I'd love to see the click and relative revenue volume pick up.

Jump to read the entire thread. 

Thanks to Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped (who received from James Boulter), Google is testing feedback buttons on Google Adwords.

I don't see consumers saying this "link was helpful" because by the time they discover that, they are already on the advertiser's website and hopefully, completing a transaction. I see this as a collecting negative feedback only, which isn't so bad either. This ends up as a tool for Google to penalize those with poor relevancy which indirectly benefits those with marginal or good relevancy.

Posted at the Search Engine Watch blog…

New Google AdWords Dayparting & Ad Scheduling Coming
The new features will allow advertisers to schedule the ads to show on weekends or weekdays only, or on other set days the advertiser specifies. Dayparting is also included allowing advertisers to schedule their ads during specific hours, such as to run late at night or at lunchtime only.

Internet Retailer recently reported the value of dayparting over here at Golfballs.com and the addition to the Google UI will be very welcome. As Jennifer says, it's a move to catch up to Microsoft adCenter's dayparting and demographic targeting options.

I've been beta testing MSN adCenter (PPC Search) for quite a while and have not been impressed with the application so far. They've made tremendous improvements to the UI now that it is out of beta, but it seems that every feature that should be a positive tick for MSN works out to be a negative for the advertiser. It seems they're putting revenue potential ahead of their customer's requirements and expectations.

MSN has a great set of ad targeting options, at least they could be. One example is the demographics targeting or, "Incremental Pricing for targeting" as they call it. This sounds great. I'm in the golf industry so I would like to target the "Males" "35+" demographic.

At issue here is that AdCenter only allows a "positive bid increase" in multiples of 10%. Doesn't sound that bad at first until you think about the 10-100 or so keywords I'm bidding on within the same "order" (an order is the same as an adgroup on Google), all at varying levels of CPC. If I already know the maximum CPC I'm willing to pay for the keyword phrase "Titleist Pro V1", how do I determine what percentage to increase my bids for males only? For the 35-50 demographic? For the 50-65 demographic?

If I assume I can increase my bids 30% for the term "Titleist Pro V1" for those given demographics, how does that affect the keyword phrase "Titleist golf ball" that is also within the same adgroup and subject to the same increase? So if I increase bids by a percentage for a given demographic, then my individual keyword bids should be lowered to maintain my target CPC. What happens when MSN can't determine the demographics of the searcher? I assume I'll get outbid because my base CPC bid is too low.

It would be easy for MSN to offer "negative bid percentages" rather than forcing me to place positive bid percentages for the demographic options. This way, I could maintain my set Max CPC on the keyword level and decrease my bids by 70% for women and 18-25 year olds. No offense to women or young people… you get my drift.

Naturally that would seem to decrease my adspend on adCenter, but it would actually play in the inverse as the more optimal my campaign is running, the more money I'll throw at it. That's why Google commands over 50% of my Search budget and second tier engines get 0%.

One way to get to the true ROAS is to use adCenter's conversion tracking tool in addition to the Omniture Analytics package I currently use. This way, I could manipulate the incremental pricing and keyword CPC until I hit my target ROAS. Again, great in theory, but adCenter does not track conversion on the keyword level, but on the Campaign level. If you're not familiar with adCenter's heirarchy, it's: Campaign>Order>Keyword. So adCenter tracks at the most macro level it possibly can which is of little to no use to the advertiser, but good for MSN's short-term revenue.

MSN conversion tracking also advertises their adCenter services on all checkout confirmation pages, regardless of how the customer was referred.

So I won't be using MSN's new targeting options or their conversion tracking. Google will continue to dominate my adspend and I'll hope that MSN gets it together and builds their applications for their advertisers and consumers and not primarily their pocketbook, because when advertisers and consumers win, their pocketbook will follow.

Philips has a great site to launch its Bodygroom shaver. It's a flash site that talks about men's bodygrooming and why it's important. A good bit of the dialog is censored because it brags about such things as women "eating frozen yogurt off of your bleeep" if you are clean shaven.

I enjoy when a large brand with strong brand equity gets off of its Ivory tower and creates advertising that the consumer might actually be interested in. I hope it proves successful and we we get see more of this in the future. It's not exactly Cluetrain, as it's not a bi-directional dialog with the consumer, but at least it's stepping away from traditional "corporatespeak" and "positioning".

It would be interesting to see if this type of viral site could drive the next generation of affiliate sales. Currently affiliates offer coupons or malls that drive traffic to a merchant in exchange for commission on sales. What if this Philips website was actually an affiliate produced site and the "where to buy" link as well as every other external link was funneled through Linkshare or CJ? Provided it was effective and viral, I wonder how the Earnings per Click (EPC) would translate?

Anyway, check out the site as it's is very fun and entertaining. By the way, it is a European site which explains why it is a little more risque than we would see in the US.

EDIT: It's been eating at me that I mentioned Cluetrain in the above paragraph. To be clear, this is not Cluetrain, it's just an entertaining advertisement and nothing more. A better example of Cluetrain is how WordPress (the maker of this blog software) is communicating with it's users about why their blogs are not being served all the time. Matt is completely open about the network issues they are having and does not attempt to hide anything. If you read the comments, you will see the true effect of Cluetrain and Pinko Marketing

I'm sure Jack Trout, Forbes.com columnist and Ad Executive, is a brilliant Ad Executive, but he gets paid to sell his advertising services to a company that in turn, want to sell their products or services to consumers. To an ad exec like Jack, the last thing he wants to see is traditional marketing values erode within the digital economy. To rephrase, the values are not eroding, but the channels used to deliver them are.

An incredibly arrogant statement Jack makes is "If I go to all this trouble developing a positioning strategy for my product, I want to see that message delivered."  Marketing should not be about delivering what you create. It should be about listening to what your consumers want and doing all you can to help them develop their own favorable brand impression. Some companies accomplish this through the quality of their product, others through superior customer service, and best case, both.

As an ad exec, it is Jack's job to sell a product no matter how lame it is. If Jack's job was to promote the King Kong movie he references in the article, of course he doesn't want Word of Mouth to control the brand as it was described as "Too long, too loud and overdone." His job is to paint a pretty brand portrait, no matter how inaccurate, of the product and sell it as the "miracle cure."

More importantly, for the companies that manufacture those products or services, if you or your agency is scared of Word of Mouth, then you shouldn't be spending your $ on agencies or advertising, you should be spending it on improving your product or service. If done right, Word of Mouth wil deliver ROI substantially higher than the ad agency you hired to churn spin.

To help companies with inferior products, there will always be a place, and a need, for ad execs like Jack. How else could a company like Folger's Coffee dominate the retail ground roast coffee market? It surely wasn't built on taste.

For the rest of you that create a truly great product that doesn't need insincere spin, Tara Hunt has created a great Marketing Map in the spirit of Pinko Marketing that shows the difference between Traditional Advertising and "get out of the way marketing"

I received 2 requests by email to participate in surveys today. One from Google regarding a beta service and the other from MSN regarding Adcenter. See if you can determine which survey request is more compelling and which I will take time out of my day to complete.

First Google's:

Hello Brandon,

We hope you're enjoying the XXXX Google XXXXXXXXXX. As part of the next phase of this test, we'd like to invite you to participate in our phone survey regarding XXXXXXXXXXXX. By participating in this survey, you'll help us continue to enhance this product for you. In addition, we'll give you a $100 AdWords credit in exchange for your time.

Survey details:

- We're conducting phone surveys from XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
- This 30-minute survey will address XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
- You'll receive a $100 credit in your AdWords account within three days of completing the survey.

To participate in this survey and claim your $100 AdWords credit, please respond to this message with a date and time when we may call you. If you have any questions, please feel free to respond to this email.

Now MSN's:

Brandon,

Microsoft really appreciates your company’s participation in the pilot phase of the roll out for their new pay-for-performance advertising product, adCenter. As a critical part of this pilot process, Microsoft has engaged our firm, Sacerdote & Co., Inc. to gain feedback from early users, customers like you, on their current pilot experiences and future requirements.

The feedback process is a very short 2-part written survey covering satisfaction and technology. Afterwards, we will want to have a telephone discussion with you about a few of your responses to the written survey, in order to better understand your opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the current offering and what Microsoft needs to do to make it a compelling offer.

Please return the written surveys to us at XXXXXXX or fax it to XXXXXXXX. After we receive your written surveys, one of our associates will contact you by telephone.
If you have any questions, please call XXXXXXXX at Sacerdote & Co., Inc.

Please direct Microsoft-related questions to XXXXX at Microsoft. Thank you so much for your time. Your feedback is a critical part of Microsoft’s product development.

So let's see… One offers $100 and the other offers… nothing. Hmmm 

When I took a job at Community Coffee as Consumer Direct Manager, my marketing experience was almost completely in the online world. I could run PPC, Organic SEO and affiliate marketing as good, or better than most, but I had a unique challenge. Community Coffee’s B2C division was about 50 years old, and at least half of those customers had no email address. The order management system didn’t even have a customer field for their email address. I knew I had to learn the catalog industry quickly. How was it that I could keep getting those 4-color catalogs from companies I had little history with? How can Gevalia possibly afford to send me so many letters with rich offers of free coffeemakers, plush bathrobes or mugs just to join their coffee club?

Well, there’s nothing I love more than a new challenge, so I embarked on a mission to figure out the mystery. Like a true ‘net guy, I researched online and I bought many books about “database marketing.” One of my favorite books is from someone I’ll call “the godfather of database marketing.” Those in the industry may or may not scoff at that, but Arthur M. Hughes became my godfather and mentor for the upcoming years. The book is called Strategic Database Marketing and the experience I received from the book was incredible.

Who knew there was such a database marketing gospel full of completely virgin vernacular: RFM, LTV, deciles, regressions, Nths, Quintiles and so much more. I realized that I was an acquisition expert, but I had no idea how to retain and remarket effectively to my existing customer base. I was both excited and overwhelmed. Where do I start? The answer for me and for most of you who are still stuck on the word Quintile is to start simple with RFM and LTV.

RFM? Well that stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary of course. Oh, that’s right, you’re still stuck on the word quintile. Wash that out of your head and focus. The point of RFM is that “People who have bought from you recently are much more likely to respond to a new offer than someone who had made a purchase in the distant past” (Hughes.)
So wouldn’t it make sense to group your customers according to when their last purchase occurred, or Recency? If you were to send a direct mail piece to your customer list, do you think Joe will respond to your offer for 10% off on his next order if he just purchased yesterday? What about Sally who typically purchases every 60 days (her buy cycle) and it’s been 55 days since her last order ? If you group your customers and market to each group, Joe may get a brand building piece or a satisfaction survey, whereas Sally will get a 10% off offer and Tom, who typically has a 30 day buy cycle, and it’s been 60 since he last ordered, will get a richer free shipping offer, or a BOGO (buy one get one free.)

Now that you understand the role of Recency, you can apply the same logic to Frequency, or how many orders each customer has contributed. A customer that has only placed a single order with you will traditionally be worth less than a customer with 2 orders. I’m not saying don’t pursue customers with 1 order, just control your spend as your response rate will be considerably less. So now you can group your customers according to frequency and market to each group differently. For example: customers with 1 order, customers with 2-3 orders, customers with 4-6 orders, customers with 7-10 orders and customers with 11 or more orders.

Customers can also be grouped according to their Monetary contribution, but as Arthur Hughes points out, the monetary segmentation produces less reliable results, and for the most part, I didn’t use this segmentaion in any area other than for customer service so our CSR’s would know if they were speaking to a “good customer.”

Once you have your RFM segmentation complete with a R value, an F value and an M value assigned to each of your customers, it can then be your primary weapon in determining which groups, or “cells” are profitable and which are not. What if you could take a cell and mail to a small sample (yes, an Nth) of the customers in the cell to measure their response rate. If all of the customers within a cell have similar buying characteristics, it would make sense that they would respond similarly to your offer. If your mail test proves that it was an unsuccessful offer, then you’ve saved a lot of money by not mailing to the rest of the customers within the cell. What if your offer is profitable? Well, I’m glad you asked; you then mail to the rest of the cell and reap in the rewards of your brilliant marketing strategy.

Once you build RF or RFM codes for all of your customers, use that power in the online world as well. Target introductory offers to those with few orders and little frequency, or email richer offers to those that are outside their buy cycle. The possibilities for marketing efficiency are endless!
As much as I wanted to drone on about LTV, or Lifetime Value, I’ll have to save that for a later post. You’ve got a lot to read

I’ve been testing MSN Adcenter since October of last year and found that is was cumbersome to use and to get a good overall view of campaign performance. All of your “orders”, or ads, were displayed in a linear view with no heirarchy to the campaign that they belonged to.

It was such a pain that I just didn’t manage the campaign as diligently as I do Google Adwords or other channels. Well I just logged in, and amen, they’ve now grouped the orders within their respective campaigns, so now rather than having 100 or so orders to look at in one view, I have 7 campaigns that I can drill into if I want to see the orders and keywords.

If you are in the PPC space, but haven’t used Adcenter yet, it has been very profitable, but doesn’t deliver a tremendous amount of traffic as it is in beta. If interested, here is the link, but it looks like it’s still in beta and you’ll have to apply to be approved.

The Wall Street Journal published a good article on the v7ndotcom elursrebmem SEO contest. No, I have no ambitions of winning. This is a rough crowd.

I didn’t even think about the possibility of the following as depicted in this quote from the current front-runner of the contest. (He has the #1 ranking on Google for the phrase  “v7ndotcom elursrebmem”)

But he says that being a front-runner makes you a target for the black hatters. They might, for instance, “promote” your site via the sort of spam that Google is known to frown upon. The end result of that, says Mr. Westergren, is that your site could be demoted.
Full WSJ Article

As I said, they’re a rough group. If you rank #1, the competitors can spam your domain and get you dropped in the rankings. There’s so many angles to these types of contests that they are very interesting to watch.

This has always been an interesting metric to me. I’ve also noticed that AOL converts much higher than the other search engines/browsers. MSN’s new Adcenter is performing well with low volumne and I don’t agree that Yahoo converts better than AOL. I’ve had terrible results with Yahoo and pretty decent results with Google.

For the month of January, AOL Search generated the best conversion rate at business-to consumer e-commerce sites (6.17 percent), followed by MSN (6.03 percent), Yahoo (4.07 percent) and Google (3.83 percent), according to the WebSideStory Index, a new statistical barometer that features techno-graphic and e-commerce trends culled from the millions of users that visit web sites using the company’s award-winning web analytics technology, HBX Analytics. The study includes traffic from both organic and paid keywords. full press release

Cooks Illustrated did a great job of turning a negative technical problem into a strong reassurance that “we will protect your data”

Dear Friend of Cook’s,

As you have probably noticed, our Web site has been offline since Monday. This was due to a file being deleted in the “back office” part of our site over the weekend. We did not know how, or by whom, this file was deleted. As we do retain sensitive personal information from our Web members and registrants, we decided, for security reasons, to take the site down immediately.

As soon as we discovered the problem, we took steps to determine the cause and to determine whether or not any personal information was subject to unauthorized access. As of today, Friday, February 3, we have no indication that any sensitive personal information was compromised, nor can we say for sure whether this event was caused by a purposeful act or by a system malfunction.

Out of an abundance of caution, we have removed all credit card information from our servers before bringing the site back online. That means that all aspects of our Web site are functional except for your personal account information and My Favorites. As soon as we have determined that it is appropriate for us to reintegrate the credit card information with our online services (hopefully early next week) our site will be restored to full functionality.

Although we were, of course, anxious to bring our Web site back online quickly, our most immediate concern has been the security of our customers’ sensitive information, and we therefore wished to move deliberately. This has required a bit of patience on your part and also on ours. Here, as in cooking, haste is no virtue. (Much like you, however, I do find waiting painful.)

We intend to update all paid Web site members by mail or email as soon as we have concluded our analysis.

Thanks so much for your patience.

Christopher Kimball
Founder and Editor
Cook’s Illustrated

Cooks Illustrated could have easily covered up the problem as a non-issue and continued with business as usual. Instead they showed that their customers are their #1 priority.

Kudos to Christopher Kimball and his team for being forthright with their technical issue. Establishing trust is similar to building a brand. You can’t force it. You have to practice it and let the consumers decide where you fall. I will continue to be a loyal subscriber, and now, also an advocate.

How creative. Who want’s to read a blog about ice cream? Apparently no one, that’s why John Nardini, Vice President of Marketing for Denali Flavors (Moose Tracks Ice Cream), writes a financial blog about personal finance tips that is sponsored by none other than Moose Tracks Ice Cream. I’ll refrain from comment on the all flash site for now where the only text on the page is the title tag… “Home Page.”

Traffic to the Ice Cream site has increased 30% since he started FreeMoneyFinance.com.

Now it could be argued that Moose Tracks’ traffic increased 30% because they started with a low base of absolutely no search engine traffic because search engines have nothing to index on the page, (who searches for ice cream anyway) but again, that’s another post. But regardless of where they started, John was very ingenious to go the route of a financial blog to direct traffic to the ice cream site.

The good news is that 68% of consumers dealt with increased Holiday email by just deleting the email, bad news is that 34% of the consumers said they report it as spam to their ISPs, and that is up from 23.4% the previous year.

So if you are CAN-SPAM compliant, what are you to do? “60% of the consumers surveyed said that knowing and trusting the sender was a key factor in determining if they would open an e-mail. Also, 48% of those surveyed said they opened mail from companies that had previously sent e-mails they found valuable. ” says the study from Return Path.

If you provide valuable, relevant and timely email content, your open rates, click-through rates, customers and ultimately your revenue will all appreciate it. After the the high of the Christmas rush, it’s hard to settle into the post-holiday slow period. Resist the temptation to increase email frequency - ensure your email content is relevant to your consumers. Use this slow time to evaluate, test, measure and improve your site relevancy and conversion rate with A/B testing and usability analysis. Set short term and long term goals not only for your website, but for yourself as well.