I just had an interesting demo of Blackfoot, Inc.’s Analytix reporting system. This tool is the brainchild of Martin Wesley who used to be lead sales guy at AtlasDMT (technology side of Avenue A). Martin has spent a good bit of time in the ad serving and technology arena trying to solve peoples problems and the decision basically came down to this: Build one large system that can manage all channels or create a reporting system that can link the best of breed systems together with backend data to give the marketer a unified view of the customer over their lifetime. Analytix is not CRM as it doesn’t spit out emails, but does centralize the data from all of your customer data systems - including acquisition, retention, customer service, offline, etc. Very cool, very powerful - check it out at www.blackfootinc.com

I just had an interesting meeting with Yahoo! Search Marketing in which we were reviewing performance for last quarter for one of our clients. One of the interesting pieces of the analysis was a look at the index of demographic information against certain keywords. We have one very broad keyword that we’ve been working on to convert better and based on this analysis, this broad keyword was indexing much higher on the 17 and under market vs more exact keywords. This totally changed the potential approaches we might have towards getting this keyword to convert. Read more to follow the logic of why this is good…

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You can’t ignore SEO – the opportunity to increase your Website traffic is right at your fingertips. You may believe that there is just too much involved and that the results are not worth the time or dollars spent to implement. But as you will see, it can be a huge traffic generator for virtually zero cost.

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Google has released a slew of new ad tools lately. We’ve been using them for various clients and have some thoughts on the following: Google Analytics (formerly Urchin), Campaign History & Content Bidding Beta

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The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. You don’t have to actually answer the questions. Just read the blog straight through, and you’ll get the point. This was passed on by one of our clients and makes me proud to work with people of this character.

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As we prepare for the Search Engine Marketing Workshop tomorrow, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of search. Currently, we all focus on extracting the most value from the engines for our products using SEO or Paid. But, if we think about what search really is - a way to find information - and expand it past the constraints of web pages, search becomes a lot more interesting.

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