You’ve gotta love the blogosphere for being so open. A lot of search bloggers are posting their traffic stats for 2006. I’ve closely guarded my stats since starting ComparisonEngines, but wanted to open up the doors a little bit.
Here are my monthly visitor reports for 2006. Thanks for reading!
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Posted by Brian Smith
There’s a little game of tag going around the blogosphere. Jeff Pulver started it and through about 10 degrees of separation (part of the chain being: Greywolf’s SEO Blog –> Lisa Barone –> Small Business SEM –> me) , the ball has finally fallen in my court.
I’m supposed to tell you 5 things you don’t know about me…
1. I studied Japanese and Chinese in college – until my English got really bad
2. My favorite drink is freshly squeezed orange juice
3. I performed improv and sketch comedy in LA for 3 years
4. My favorite quotation: Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and say, “why not?”
5. I love to bake desserts, and I’m pretty darn good at it. Chocolate Souffle and Creme Brulee. Yummm.
Now I’m supposed to tag 5 other people:
Justin Kitch – CEO Unplugged, Blog Maverick, Frank Addante’s FounderBlog, Ejove Nuwere, Recognizing Deven
5 Comments | Comparison Engines | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith
Dear Shopping Comparison Engines,
Sometimes you don’t listen to your merchants that clearly, but you do pay a little more attention to me. So I want to pass along some advice…
That nice little piece of JavaScript code which you ask merchants to place on their checkout page to track sales is not properly tracking sales through Google Checkout. And if you hadn’t noticed, Google Checkout is already a strong driver of sales for many small and medium sized merchants.
Which means that the conversion rate which you are reporting through that code is wrong for any merchant doing any business through Google Checkout. Now some of you have already told merchants that there’s nothing you can do about it and it’s Google’s problem. Well, lets try to be clear here…when the tracking code you’ve released doesn’t properly get reported when a sale goes through Checkout, that is your problem as the merchant will see consistent costs, but lower conversion rates. And if these merchants are smart, they will start to shift marketing spend to a seemingly more profitable channel and away from you.
In other words, even if it is Google that has to make a change, it’s still your problem.
Next time a merchant calls you up (I mean) emails you, don’t pass the buck. Because you’ll actually be passing the buck to another marketing channel (just what Google wants).
Please look into this tracking issue ASAP. You spend a couple million dollars a month on Adwords, I’d hope that you could talk to someone at Google about the problem.
Your friend,
ComparisonEngines.com
1 Comment | Comparison Engines, Payment Options | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith
Yahoo! Shortcuts must be working for searchers and for Yahoo! Starting last week, I noticed Yahoo! prompting me a lot more to search for coupons, flights, hotels, and movie showtimes. While shortcuts have been around for a while, this is the first time I can remember Yahoo! teaching me use them.
I’m used to getting this after a generic search:
But these showed up when I went to search.yahoo.com or my.yahoo.com:
If you want to learn more about these vertical search results creeping into the main results, check out the series I wrote for SearchDay: Yahoo! Shortcuts, Google OneBox, Microsoft Instant Answers, and Ask Smart Answers
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Posted by Brian Smith
You run a great group for Google Base. I get daily updates and appreciate it when you jump into the conversation. However, I think it would be beneficial to you
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Posted by Brian Smith
Google Base seems to be having some trouble keeping up with merchant (and other) uploads this holiday season. Merchants are used to feed (bulk upload) processing taking about 30mins, but for most accounts processing time now seems to be more like 2-3 days.
While frustrating, things like this happen. And Google Base is in Beta.
Unfortunately, though, this delay in processing causes other problems. Back in October, Google removed its upload limit, allowing feeds to be uploaded more than once per hour. Well, processing latency plus no upload limit causes more headaches for uploaders who can’t update their products. And because Google Base doesn’t have a robust customer service staff, I have a feeling a lot of merchants are not too happy right now as they can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong (nothing).
1 Comment | Comparison Engines, Google Product Search/Google Base | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith
In a Google Base blog post entitled Plastic Surgery:
“You can now view some types of information in a table — or a grid, if you prefer. We updated the sorting and refinement user interface to be cleaner and faster. (The more technical among you may notice we’re using the fun and friendly Google Web Toolkit for the AJAX features.)”
It’s nice to see those nifty design features (mousing over products produces big JavaScript bubble with detailed description) you could previously only find on Become, Like.com, and TheFind. While the big guys are still laughing all the way to the bank, the UI guys at Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, and NexTag must be more than a little despondent today.
The same Google Base blog post also discussed the new ability to rate Base items and write reviews. Will check out the changes in more depth tonight.
Just saw this post from Garrett Rogers with a little more information
1 Comment | Comparison Engines | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith
Search Engine Land, helmed by Danny Sullivan, Barry Schwartz, and Chris Sherman, officially launched today.
Danny invited me along for the ride as a contributor (thank you, Danny!), so you’ll find me writing for Search Engine Land as opposed to Search Engine Watch going forward.
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Posted by Brian Smith
With holiday shopping in full swing, I’ve been posting a data feed optimization tip each business day over at LoveYourFeed.
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Smarter, Become, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, NexTag, and Yahoo! Shopping for contributing a guest post. Who better to provide data feed optimization tips than the shopping comparison engines.
Shopzilla and Google Base – I’d love to see you contribute! Come on, help out your merchants.
If you’re not a merchant submitting feeds, I’d still recommend reading through LoveYourFeed. You’ll get a great sense of what the shopping search engines are working on and some of the frustrations merchants are working through (make sure to check out the comments – thanks to Sushant Ajmani of Sapient for becoming an active contributor).
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Posted by Brian Smith
Search for anything red on TheFind and they will donate $1 per day to Doctors Without Borders (up to $10,000 dollars).
If you haven’t taken a look at TheFind since the launch, make sure to click through. Mouse over a product and click on the ‘closest match’ button. Nice feature. And then of course check out the new color search functionality.
Not sure why 2006 ended up being the year for visual search, but I love what Shopwiki, Become, Smarter, Like, and TheFind have developed.
Related Posts:
ShopWiki – Shop By Color – June 14, 2006
Become Adds Search By Color – October 19, 2006
Smarter Launches Visual Search Beta – October 31, 2006
1 Comment | Comparison Engines, TheFind | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith
