I attended (and spoke) at the Optimization Summit put on by Optimost in San Francisco this week. After sitting through the presentations and talking to folks who attended, I came away believing that testing tools and techniques are getting better, but still not hitting the prime time. Ann Holland (Marketing Sherpa) gave a great presentation on survey results around testing roadblocks and the reality is that people like the idea of testing and want to test but are highly resource constrained. Marketing, creative, IT, etc. are all overloaded with things to do and try so that makes starting up a testing program difficult. In addition, the knowledge on what and how to test is still way behind where I thought it would be by now.

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If you have never used Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) then you are missing out. This handy tools shows you the trend of searches for a single or group of keywords over time. The current version goes back to January 2004 and is now updated daily (used to be monthly and woefully behind in months). So, what is Google Trends good for?:
1. Looking at trends for your most important keywords: brands, specific products, generic works that drive your business, etc. This is a great view on why certain terms might be doing better or worse now than in 2005.
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Bounce rate is a great way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. Why?
- It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool.
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Received a question from a marketing friend who wanted to have some options for tracking across domains and sub-domains. Depending on how experienced your tech team is and which analytics package you have there are some options. Generally the following is true:

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Came across a handy script at WebAnalyticsDemistified.com that looks at the URL you put in and it returns what web analytics program it is using. Pretty simple, but very interesting and quite clever - especially if you are reviewing packages and want to see who is using what. Click here to give it a go.

The Marketing Sherpa just released a report that highlights an issue that I have been focused on since the launch of Brand Digital almost 4 years ago (wow!). Small Businesses are getting squeezed out of the internet as a communication vehicle due to the fact that things are getting more complex not easier. The report is titled Special Report: State of the Search Marketing Agency Industry 2006 and focuses on search which is the primary driver for small business marketing dollars online. SEM agencies are requiring minimum monthly spend of $3,000 or more (in service fees) and of the 62 agencies interviewed - only 1 actually goes after the economy-value part of the market (small businesses). The focus is on mid-sized and larger firms that can support larger service fees.

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Just back from the Emetrics Summit in Santa Barbara. Here is a quick run down of what I learned:
1) Santa Barabara is a beautiful and expensive place to be (my first time)
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