The JMH Consulting Blog

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

P.J. Fusco’s most recent article on ClickZ mentions the keyword density analyzer at http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

If you are concerned about how your website ranks for specific search phrases, but have never used a keyword density analyzer, here is what you are missing. These tools analyze the content of specific web pages and provide a summary of the number of times a specific term is used in headings, body text, links, etc.

The tool is simple to use and can provide some interesting insight into how well your individual pages are keyword optimized. (You can also use the tool to learn which keywords your competitor sites are optimized around!)

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

The SEMPO Institute offers (what appear to be) some pretty good online education opportunities for search engine marketing. They have a low-cost course for those just starting in search marketing, as well as an advanced and expert level course. While these courses aren’t free and won’t replace years of search optimization experience, they could provide a good start to someone doing a basic site optimization or someone maintaining a professionally optimized website:

http://www.sempoinstitute.com

This morning we’ve had a real lesson in using technology for teaching adults. At a conference in Florida, our internet connection has been spotty (at best) while trying to show examples of YouTube, wikis, etc.

Another great example of how technology impairs our ability to use technology.

Yesterday, I finally finished the last of three dashboards for the continuing education department’s program managers at Emory university. After following a good business analysis process of requirements gathering through to solution creation, we created tools that our managers can open each morning to get up-to-the-minute data that shows overall program health and progress towards goals. Below is the dashboard for the open-enrollment programs. We also build them for corporate learning/contract training and certificate programs. Read the rest of this entry »