ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

Measuring success of your online marketing efforts is a critical, but often underutilized in many web marketing initiatives. Recently I took a survey for Jupiter Research and one of the questions got me thinking about the different metrics that companies use:

• Brand impact (i.e., increased brand awareness, intent or favorability)
• Number of impressions
• Position of paid listing
• Number of clicks
• Ratio of new to returning visitors
• Amount of increased website traffic
• Duration of website visits
• Amount of increased traffic to physical store
• Amount of increased volume to call center
• Number of leads generated for products sold online
• Number of leads generated for products sold offline
• Number of immediate sales generated for products sold online

There are four major ways to get traffic to your site: search engines, links from other sites, feeds (especially blogs) and advertising. Of those four, a lot of effort is spent trying to get a good ranking in the various search engines, especially Google. Why? Because a good ranking is a sure way to get a lot of traffic, and the #1 spot on the search engine results page (SERP) for a given keyphrase is a prime traffic generator indeed. (Well, assuming anyone’s actually searching for that keyphrase…)

Some readers I’ve talked to have expressed surprise in discovering their own page in the #1 position on a Google SERP. “How is this possible?”, they ask, “when there are no links to my page and it has no PageRank?”

There are two fallacies here. One is that the Google “link:” command shows all the links to a given page. It doesn’t, it only shows a partial list of pages that meet some unknown criteria. A better way to find out who links to your page is to search for your page’s URL while excluding your own site. For example, to find out which pages in Google link to www.memwg.com/blog/adsense I can do this search:

www.memwg.com/blog/adsense -site:memwg.com

Today I was going to address some of the comments that Stu Drew left about managing to get a high ranking for his private-label rights articles blog entry, but I’m going to defer that to a later time. If you’re interested in that topic, let me point you to an article I’ve written about the so-called “Google Sandbox” that should address some of the questions: Redcowl Bluesingksy: Why the Google Sandbox Doesn’t Exist.

I want to talk some more about Google’s indexing of AdSense pages. In case you hadn’t heard, Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that the AdSense crawler is feeding pages into Google’s new “BigDaddy” search indexes. This confirms what others had noticed about what the AdSense crawler (usually referred to as the “mediabot”) is doing. Or does it?

As always, there are different ways to look at what’s happening. We know that pages crawled by the mediabot are now making their way into the Google search index. What we don’t know, however, is whether those pages are being pushed or pulled into the index. Let me explain.

Let’s think of the innards of the Google search engine as a bunch of black boxes. (Disclaimer: I have no special knowledge of how things actually work internally.) For our purposes, we’re only concerned with three of those boxes:

Yesterday, Matt Cutts posted more details about the caching that Google’s crawlers are now doing to further clarify the whole AdSense push vs. AdSense pull issue. One of things he mentioned was how webmasters can turn on “gzip encoding” to save even further bandwidth. Since not everyone reading this is a webmaster, I thought I’d explain what he meant in further detail.

HTTP Headers

As you know, the HTTP protocol is what a web browser uses to communicate with a web server. The browser (a type of web client or user agent) always initiates the conversation with the web server by sending it a URL. In other words, if you type http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense into your browser to read this blog, the browser sends a request (technically, a “GET” request) to the server located at www.memwg.com for the content located at the path /blog/adsense.