The JMH Consulting Blog

Ion interactive recently delivered a terrific webinar about landing page optimization. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, landing page optimization is the process of designing (or redesigning) specific pages on your website that are used as entrance points for online marketing. For example, when someone clicks a pay-per-click ad, they are directed to some page on your site. Professional marketers often create specific pages for this purpose so they can better control what action users take after arriving at the site. The process of creating and testing such pages is called landing page optimization.

Here’s a link to Ion interactive’s webinar on landing page optimization.

A colleague recently asked for my input on compensating instructors/SMEs for helping to develop asynchronous online content or transitioning traditional content into an online format. Since this area is still somewhat new, there aren’t a lot of good standard financial models out there and many people struggle with the mechanics of crafting these types of agreements. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter: Read the rest of this entry »

Almost every time I deliver a presentation on pay-per-click marketing, a question about click fraud comes up. Many advertisers are justifiably concerned about wasting marketing dollars on fraudulent clicks that originate primarily from competitors and publishers who benefit financially from ads on their sites. Ron Jones just published an article explaining some aspects of click fraud and suggesting some approaches to identifying it. The article is available here: http://searchenginewatch.com/3633616

In the end, fraudulent clicks are going to happen. In my opinion, the most valuable defense is to ensure that your website generates a high enough ROI to overcome fraudulent clicks. While you should never ignore click fraud , as long as your cost-per-conversion is within your acceptable range, it doesn’t matter if you click fraud is 2% or 12%…you’re still coming out ahead.

I recently finished reading What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis and found it one of the most approachable and valuable business books that I’ve read in years. He spends the first half of the book describing the social trends and business decisions that helped Google dominate the online search and advertising markets. In the second half, Jarvis applies those same principles to other industries…hypothesizing on how Google might run an airline, restaurant, or university (among others). Even if you aren’t in a position to adopt most of the principles he suggests, this book will get your brain churning about you could Google-fy your programs!

If you haven’t been keeping up with the increasing amount of free educational content online, this article from Yahoo! is a good starting point:
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090409/ap_on_hi_te/on_the_net_youtube_edu_2

Each day, more schools are putting free content on I-Tunes, YouTube, and other sources…some of it somes directly from the classroom. Of course, you can’t currently get credit for watching lectures online, but I don’t know that anyone can predict where this trend will take us ten years from now.

IBM has developed a new visualization tool for data sets called Many Eyes. They claim that its “goal is to ‘democratize’ visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.” The product is still in beta, but the results look promising:

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/

I read an article this week about the importance of setting the right goals for search engine optimization. I couldn’t agree more. Several years ago, the goal of most search optimization projects was to rank higher for specific terms related to your classes. However, that purpose has been steadily shifting toward increasing traffic from search engines. Consider this, you could rank first on a term that is searched on 10 times per month or rank 8th on a term that is searched on 10,000 times per month. Which would you prefer? Using “traffic to the site” is obviously a better measure of success than a simple ranking calculation.

This article takes that one step further and suggests that the true measure of SEO’s success should bew measured by the increase in business driven by search engines. This requires a good web analytics system and conversion tracking on your website, but the results can help you hone SEO efforts to maximize ROI.

Here is a link to that article: http://searchenginewatch.com/3633182

Steve Stoffle, at Emory University, recently alerted me to this educational resource for continuing educators. Academic Impressions offers online and classroom based education for administrators in higher education. In early March, they are offering two sessions for continuing education:
Using Measurement in Continuing Education Decision-Making
Financial Information for Continuing Education Decision-Making

You can purchase a “Site Connection” to the webinars, which means that several people can view them for a single price. Here is their website:
https://www.academicimpressions.com