I love HitTail. It is a fantastic SEO tool and the best part….it is free. If you dont know what HitTail is, it is a web based program that will tell you which search terms lead to your site and keep track of the long tail for you. It also has a live section that will show you which websites lead a user to your site (it updates live as a link it clicked that lands on your site).
The free version is limited to 100,000 visits per month. So, conventional thinking would lead you to believe that once you hit that limit, HitTail would stop tracking for the rest of that month and restart next month….oh no. If you hit the limit you either have to upgrade to the $50 a month package or they will end the use of the service for you. Here is an email I got from them today:
I spent the morning going through Google’s new Report which show you where your content ads are displayed (Adsense). I just read a blog article over at the PPC Book that described exactly how I felt. A large number of the poor performing sites are not disclosed but are show as “Domain Ads”. Some of the most clicked URL’s that don’t convert fall under “Domain Ads” (surprise, surprise). Since Google does not show you the domain, you can not block the domain in the campaign setting.
So the entire reason to produce a Placement Performance Report is transparency, but they hide URL’s ….makes sense.
I wrote a post last week about using CrazyEgg to analyze landing page performance. Techcrunch broke the story that CrazyEgg has a new feature called “Confetti”. The new feature will pinpoint exactly where a user clicked and feeds you where they came from, their OS, screen size, browser and time before clicking. It is another feature that makes CrazyEgg a great (free) product.
There is a good discussion over on yCombinator about a guy that went to the Ebay Sellers Conference this past weekend and wore a Google shirt, which he claims led to him being thrown out. If you missed the story, Google wanted to throw an event for Google Checkout to compete with Paypal (owned by Ebay) at Ebay’s conference. So Ebay stopped all of their Adwords campaigns and Google backed down.
So this guy was at the conference to pitch his product to Ebay sellers when his Google apparel caught the attention of Ebay marketing executives, who apparently intimated him to the point that he left (escorted by security).
Regardless if the story is true or false (better if true) this was a great way to create linkbait in this tough linkbait time.
Google Analytics is a great tool (considering it is free) and has improved with the new user interface. The one area that it still lacks is the Site Overlay Tool. Site Overlay shows you how many clicks each link on a particular page is clicked how many lead to the goals you have setup. Frankly, I have not got Site Overlay to work correctly since Google implemented the new UI. It currently does not provide a number for every link on the page. When you are testing landing pages, it’s basically useless.
So, in search of an answer I came across CrazyEgg. All of my dreams have been answered. The UI on this tool is great and it has multiple ways to show the click data. The overlay is cleaner than GA, the list is just that, a list and the heat map that shows exactly where someone clicked on the page. Crazy egg is free up to 5000 visits per month and becomes a premium service from there.
CrazyEgg is highly recommended for landing page optimization testing. The free version should provide enough visits to test your pages and make improvements.
One of our writers (Tyler Ransburgh) was fortunate enough to be quoted in the LA Times for an article about Yahoo. He was asked his opinion on how well the Panama PPC engine works. What he didn’t know, the article was really about Yahoo not meeting their 1st quarter numbers. Thereafter the stock slipped 11%. A few of the people he works with that own Yahoo stock wanted to shot him for not giving them the heads up….nice.
Startup Hustle was started to help startups and small businesses with the ever changing marketing landscape on the internet. The problem is trends can change so quickly that many businesses are still stuck a few months or even years in the past on what use to work and are not sure why traffic or conversions continue to fall. We are going to look at internal and external areas to focus on with the occasional (or continual) smartass remarks.
Google Analytics is a great tool (considering it is free) and has improved with the new user interface. The one area that it still lacks is the Site Overlay Tool. Site Overlay shows you how many clicks each link on a particular page is clicked how many lead to the goals you have setup. Frankly, I have not got Site Overlay to work correctly since Google implemented the new UI. 
