Lies, Damned Lies...

AdSense becomes a content delivery network

In a move that I predicted on this blog 18 months ago (ok, really I just called out that a colleague had predicted it, but I shall take my prognostication credits where I can), Google has announced that it's going to be using the AdSense network to distribute new episodes (I suppose you could use that terrible neologism, webisodes) of a web-only cartoon from Seth McFarlane (he of Family Guy fame), called "Seth McFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy".

The new program gives a different spin to the Google Content Network, the name that Google has used up until now to describe the AdSense ad network. Monetization will come from in-stream ads, but also from customized animated ads for brands themselves, presumably infused with MacFarlane's trademark dark/smutty humor.

The New York Times (a member of the Google Content Network) gushes about the new development, describing it as a "a bold step into the distribution business, one that, if successful, will surely send shock waves through the entertainment business". But it has a point - by turning AdSense units into real content (albeit content that is designed to generate clicks), Google is in one sense going into competition with its own AdSense content partners - the thousands of websites which host Google ads, and make money from clicks on those ads.

Any publisher who runs ads on their site has to navigate the fine line between making the site's content successful (which will draw users back in future, and keep them clicking around the site), and making the site's ads successful (which pay the bills, but carry users away from the site). This balance is challenging enough when the ads are obviously ads, but when the ad units start to carry compelling content from people like Seth MacFarlane, it could detract from the site's own content. The short-term payoff for the publisher might be elevated click revenue from these webisodes (perhaps we should call them "adisodes"?), but the long-term effect may be decreased engagement with the site's own content, and dissatisfaction from advertisers that the publisher is working with. Only time will tell.

[By the way, my favorite Family Guy character is Stewie, of course. Is there any other choice?]

What will Google do next with Google Analytics?

So I'm a little late with my obligatory post-E-metrics blog post; my excuse is that I flew straight from San Francisco to Mexico for a vacation, and have just made it back.

A fixed presence at E-metrics summits these days is our good friend, Google - in fact, this year, both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer were sponsoring the show (possibly a somewhat inefficient use of marketing dollars, but there you go). In terms of sheer numbers of customers, Google Analytics is the 500 lb gorilla of web analytics, as anyone reading this blog will doubtless know. But where next for the two and a half-year-old wunderkind of web analytics?

One of my favorite things to do at E-metrics is to catch up with friends from the industry, and Google evangelist Avinash Kaushik and I had a very pleasant coffee where we discussed just this topic. Just to be clear, Avinash didn't reveal anything about Google's future plans for GA, but it became clear to me (from that discussion and others) that Google is scratching its head a little about how (or whether) to provide GA to enterprise clients (i.e. big companies). A lot of people are expecting it to, but for all GA's success, it remains a relatively simple analytics package, incapable of the detailed reports that you can pull with Omniture or even Webtrends. And it doesn't really seem to be in Google's DNA to provide a very feature-rich application stack like these other companies provide. In many ways they're the Microsoft Office to Google's Docs & Spreadsheets. So how to square the circle?

Whilst I was sunning myself in Mexico, I had a chance to reflect on how Google could address this challenge and here are my thoughts. As you know, I like to make predictions, just for the fun of sparking a bit of debate, so feel free to use the comments box to let me know precisely what banned substance it is that I'm smoking.

 

Prediction 1: Google will release a comprehensive mid-tier API for GA

I'm hardly going out on a limb with this prediction - it's been something that Google-watchers have been crying out for for some time (and some people have taken unilateral action to fix). But most talk about APIs has been to provide a programmatic way of pulling existing GA reports - i.e. a "front-end" API. What I'm talking about here (hence the use of the term "mid-tier") is an API into GA's data store that allows pretty much any data set to be extracted to a third-party system and then processed into a report.

Google would have to be very careful not to overwhelm their systems by providing such an API, of course; it would be all too easy to write a call which asked for all the data for a very busy site; but those eventualities could be predicted and prevented fairly easily. Note that I'm also not saying that Google will provide this API for free; there's no reason that it might not choose to charge for access to such a comprehensive data service.

You might be thinking, why would Google release an Analytics API at all? After all, isn't the point of GA to encourage people to use Google's tools to optimize their campaigns, and therefore spend more money with Google? Well, only partially. The main benefit to Google in the deployment of GA is the huge amount of data that it gives them access to. In an API scenario, Google would still control instrumentation of the site and collection of the data, and would therefore still accrue the same benefits from it as they do currently.

Prediction 1a: Related Google products will use the Google Behavior Data API

I've decided to give the new API a name - the Google Behavior Data API - to distinguish it from Google Analytics itself.

If they don't already, Google's various behavior data-consuming products (principally, Analytics and Website Optimizer) will use the same API for data access. You probably won't see any visible change in the products as a result of this. This might already have happened behind the scenes.

Prediction 1b: The Google data collection .js tag will become a "universal" tag

If Google opens up the mid-tier of their system, they'll also (eventually) need to open up the data collection part, making it possible to collect any custom variable or event you want, and subsequently being able to access this through the API. This will require new functionality in the JavaScript tag to support customizable data collection. The importance of this ability will become clear in predictions 2 and 3, below.

 

Prediction 2: The Google Behavior Data API will create a new industry of "third-party" web analytics tools

I've railed before against new entrants to the web analytics business, asking what value they can possibly add at this stage in the game. But one of the reasons I've been so skeptical in the past is that most of these folks building these kinds of new tools just don't appreciate how much effort has to go into collecting and storing the data in a format that makes it easy to deliver reports, and easy to expand functionality in the future.

A mid-tier Data API would mean that such companies could rely on Google for all the basic data collection, primary processing and warehousing, and just focus on developing interesting new reports. As long as the underlying platform is flexible, this frees up these companies to innovate at the front-end without having to worry about the back-end.

The upshot of this is that you may see web analytics functionality popping up in all sorts of places that it might not otherwise, especially in the SMB market, such as CMS/blog tools, e-commerce systems, sales automation systems and the like. Some of these systems already provide integration with Google Checkout, for example, so using Google's Data API for reporting & analytics would be a logical next step.

 

Prediction 3: Eventually, even the big guys will use the Behavior Data API

This is the big one, of course, and the most contentious. Why would a company like Omniture or Webtrends, or CoreMetrics hand over data collection to Google? Omniture, for example, has put a lot of effort behind its Universal Tag architecture, and data is as useful to them (or will be, ultimately) as it is to Google.

One chief reason is switching costs. If an Enterprise web analytics vendor wants to convert a GA customer onto their platform, then offering a "no reinstrumentation" proposition is going to be attractive. It is true that the different beacon code provided by different vendors capture different (unique) things, but there would be value in being able to say to a customer "just give us your API key and we'll do the rest", even if it did mean offering a reduced set of reports (although a universal tag with custom variables would offset this issue).

Another reason, however, is cost. It costs web analytics vendors a lot of money to host the servers for data capture and initial processing, and is one of the things that contributes to the rose-tinged bottom line of these companies. It costs Google money too, of course, but Google can probably provision servers more cheaply than anyone else on the planet (except, perhaps, our good selves), and is able to leverage the benefit of having access to the data to offset the cost.

This eventuality also neatly solves the problem of "GA in the enterprise". With the API in place, Google is free to reach agreements with the bigger web analytics vendors that preserves those vendors' positions with their customers whilst allowing GA to get in and get access to the data. "Maverick" implementation of GA by outlying departments of big companies is an increasing problem faced by the major Enterprise vendors. Being able to consume this data in their own tools would decrease the vendors' need to charge for every last byte of data they're collecting, and would enable them to say "Sure! Instrument with GA, and you'll see the aggregate numbers in our tool, too".

 

So, those are my predictions. Feel free to add yours below.

Yahoo AMP vs Google adManager

The last few weeks have seen plenty of interesting announcements from our esteemed competitors, Yahoo! and Google. But two that you might not have paid so much attention to are are Yahoo's launch of AMP! (those guys have got to get over this whole silly exclamation point thing), and Google's new AdManager product. Both are aimed at making it easier for publishers to sell their ad inventory, though both are part of a bigger story.

Sometimes it seems like publisher ad serving is the red-headed stepchild of the industry - frowsty, boring technology used by publishers and ad sales houses to push inventory around from pillar to post in an attempt to get it off the publisher's hands before it goes stale. But publisher ad serving has one killer attribute - whoever provides the primary ad tag on a publisher's site can control (or at least influence) how that publisher's inventory is monetized. Control that tag, and you're the nightclub bouncer, magnanimously letting the pretty girls in whilst keeping the spotty boys out. If you're just another ad network serving ads into that ad unit, you're the spotty boy hanging about the back door. What's more, whoever owns the primary ad tag gets to see all the traffic data, a treasure trove of information for anyone trying to build a behaviorally targeted ad network.

So, since Google and Yahoo now both have significant ad network operations (AdSense and YPN), it makes sense for both of them to offer free ad serving technologies to publishers. How do they stack up? Should they even be compared?

Yahoo AMP

Yahoo has been working on a new ad platform/exchange for some time, under the title of Project Apex. Some noise was made about Apex shortly after Jerry Yang took over Yahoo last year. The offering is aimed at publishers, and purports to offer a radically simplified/more powerful way of managing and monetizing online ad inventory. Reaction to the announcement has been mixed; the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN), which AMP is seen as an evolution of, has been dogged with editorial quality issues, affecting advertiser ROI and driving advertisers into the arms of Google. So a certain amount of skepticism attends this latest announcement.

There's relatively little publicly available information to help differentiate AMP from YPN (and Yahoo aren't likely to tell me much for the time being). The main theme seems to be that AMP is a much more 'open' platform than YPN, meaning that publishers can use it to direct inventory to any third-party ad network or advertiser, without having to have Yahoo 'represent' (i.e. take a cut of the value of) their media. The video preview of the technology also makes much of a publisher's ability to cross-sell other publishers' inventory as part of a negotiated sale, by tapping into Yahoo's Newspaper Alliance network.

Additionally, there's talk of an API, enabling ad networks to integrate with the platform. In this latter respect it's hard to see a clear difference between this offering and the Right Media Exchange (RMX) - in fact, a previous working title for AMP was the Advertiser/Publisher Exchange.

It's too early to say whether AMP is actually any good, though the demo looks pretty and appealing - the principle danger is that Yahoo is re-re-inventing the wheel here, potentially ignoring the YPN and RMX code bases and coding something new from scratch. And the effort does seem to be squarely in the negotiated space - i.e. the sort of inventory that is Yahoo's bread and butter; we can count on Yahoo knowing a thing or two about this kind of inventory, but I wonder how it's going to address the highest-growth part of online ad sales - the tail.

In September, Jerry Yang said that AMP would take three years, which seems to imply something of this nature, and which caused gasps from the likes of ValleyWag at the time. But now Yahoo says they'll have something out during the summer. Presumably they'll have a lot more to add even then.

Google AdManager

A couple of weeks before the Yahoo announcement, Google announced the beta of Google AdManager. The timing of Google's announcement was significant (or at least an unfortunate coincidence) because it almost exactly coincided with the completion of Google's acquisition of DoubleClick. AdManager (which shares a name with a Microsoft product, Atlas AdManager, which I believe is the subject of some discussion of a legal nature between our two companies) is positioned as an easy-to-use, self-serve inventory management tool, allowing publishers to manage their reserved and discretionary inventory, and select ad networks for the latter (including, crucially, Google AdSense).

The motivation behind AdManager (and AMP) can be seen in a quote from MyYearbook.com on the AdManager website (my highlighting):

"The AdSense integration feature has been helpful with helping us optimize our remnant inventory. There have been numerous days where we made more money because Ad Manager was able to auto adjust and send AdSense more inventory."

It seems like the primary positioning of AdManager is as a trade-up from AdSense - for publishers who have been using AdSense and perhaps another ad server (or doing something clunky like serving ads manually), AdManager represents the next step up, as this comment from this forum thread shows:

"What we used to do before is, insert the adsense code or any other affiliate banner code in the adslot MANUALLY! If you want to insert adbrite code there instead of adsense code, we will edit the code and upload it right?? OR some people also use other PAID third party hosted ad servers/their own ad servers!."

The interesting thing about this announcement (and the reason the timing seems so unfortunate) is that DoubleClick already has a publisher ad server on its books - DART for Publishers (DFP). DFP ain't no slouch - it's the market leader, with about a 60% share (our own Atlas AdManager, by contrast, has about a 10% share amongst publishers). But Google AdManager and DFP fulfil very similar roles - helping publishers to define, predict and sell online inventory. So it will be interesting to see how this situation plays out now that the DoubleClick acquisition is closed.

What's also interesting about this product is what it says about Google's innate attitude to online advertising - that it is a process that should be simple and as automated as possible.

Compare and Contrast

So the bottom line is that these are two quite different products, aimed at solving a different set of problems. But these two products paint a fascinating picture of Yahoo and Google's attitudes to online ad sales.

Yahoo seems to be thinking of itself as a semi-neutral ad network/exchange, enabling its publisher partners to build and sell their own on- and off-network inventory packages and then clear/settle them through Yahoo's infrastructure. Even Yahoo's Newspaper Alliance is itself a member of a larger network, quadrantONE. AMP will scale well at the top-end of the market, but its features will mean little to smaller publishers who just want to monetize remnant inventory simply.

Google, on the other hand, seems to view itself as the uber-network. This is understandable, since it has such a huge network of publishers via AdSense. AdManager seems primarily to be aimed at increasing the amount of inventory that is made available to Google's network, as opposed to allowing publishers to build their own mini-networks - publishers are very much expected to be the end-nodes, in Google's worldview. Google AdManager will scale well into the tail, but lacks the sophisticated required by larger publishers.

To be fair, Google does have more convincingly third-party sell-side assets in DoubleClick (including the DoubleClick Exchange), whilst Yahoo has its own network in the form of YPN, so these positionings are not exclusive, but I think they are representative of the attitude that both companies bring to this business.

Clifton leaves Google; Coremetrics gets $60m; Webtrends gets new CEO

Well, it's been a busy Web Analytics weekend. First I read an interview with the recently departed heard of Google Analytics in Europe, Brian Clifton, over on Mel Carson's blog. Brian is returning to his roots at Omega DM (the analytics/marketing consultancy he founded). Mel has captured Brian's thoughts well in his post, so I won't attempt to recreate them here. Good luck, Brian.

Next to cross my desk was the news on Friday that Coremetrics has secured a series E (I didn't know the letters went that high, to be honest) funding round of $60m, courtesy (principally) of 3i. Joe Davis (Coremetrics CEO) is tight-lipped about exactly what he's going to spend the money on, but takes the opportunity of the press release to assert how bullish he is about the outlook for the company. $60m is a decent chunk of money and does change the dynamics of the industry, allowing Coremetrics to potentially pursue an acquisition-led strategy to build out the breadth of offerings that it has. It still won't give it the deep pockets of Omniture, but it could help it compete more effectively with Webtrends.

Speaking of Webtrends, the final piece of news to hit today is that Webtrends has found itself a new CEO - Dan Stickel, former head of syndication at Google. I know next to nothing about Dan Stickel (I know that he has a beard, and that he used to run Macrovision and served a spell at AltaVista); I'm slightly wondering how his experience is going to be directly relevant to Webtrends's business, but it speaks well of the company that they can attract a senior Google exec. Good luck, Dan.

News, news, news...

Sigh. Blog post topics seem to be like buses - you wait ages for one to come along, and then three come along all at once. Actually, I've got four things to post about, but I'm going to leave two until after the weekend. Here are the other two. Funnily enough, they're related - both are about benchmark data.

1. Compete.com cashes in

Online traffic benchmarking service Compete.com has been bought by UK-based market research firm TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres). This is a good result for the folks at Compete, who have been waging a four-way battle with Quantcast, Alexa, and Comscore. Funnily enough the deal isn't stellar, despite the significant attention that Compete (and benchmarking services in general) has been getting recently - it's only a guaranteed $75m, with another $75m payable on achievement of revenue targets. Compete Inc has accepted about $43m in investment since it started in 2,000, so I guess the investors are pleased but not delighted.

The rest of TNS's business is pretty traditional market research stuff, so it'll be interesting to see how they integrate/expoit Compete's capabilities. Moving the footprint outside of the US seems like one obvious goal they may look to achieve in the not-too-distant future.

2. Google Analytics rolls out new data sharing feature

Logging onto Google Analytics this week, I was interested to see the new data sharing options that the product is making available:

So the key option in the above list is #2 - allowing GA to share your data with its "benchmarking service", where data from sites in a similar industry will be aggregated together for benchmark reports, like the sample below:

This is a smart thing for Google to do, as it provides an incentive for GA users to share their data by providing them with a solid benefit in return. It will be interesting to see how GA determines which industry a site is in; I guess they will mine the search index for those sites and use some behavioral targeting-type techniques to drop a site into a category based upon the words that appear on the site's pages. I have no idea how they'll categorize my site - they'll probably drop it into a "blogs" industry segment, since Google already knows that my site is a blog.

The other smart part of this move is to make it easy to turn off data sharing altogether. I presume that this means that no GA data will be used to inform decisions about, for example, keyword ranking in Adwords; though GA's terms of use are still a little vague on this point. As I was discussing with Brian Clifton a couple of weeks ago in London, our part of the web analytics industry (companies that offer services for free, and monetize the service indirectly) need to be super-clear about how the data is going to be used.

Trust me, I work for Microsoft

I am on the plane back from London after a fun few days with the folks there. It's always a pleasure to return to my home town, though it's a little strange returning there now that I don't live there any more, and rather eye-wateringly expensive now that I'm paid in dollars ($100 cab fare, anyone? How about an $8 tube ticket?).

Highlight of the trip was my panel session at SES London with Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg, Brian Clifton of Google and Steve Jackson, discussing the future of web analytics in search. Our host, Kevin Ryan, quizzed us about the "rise" of the free tools and what tensions that would create with site owners (and their visitors) having to get used to sharing their data with companies like Google and Microsoft. Can we be trusted not to misuse the data entrusted to us for nefarious ends?

Brian was a little coy about this, insisting that for Google to misuse the data it gets from Google Analytics (for example, to manipulate bid pricing) would be tantamount to fraud, and so of course would be out of the question. I believe him, and believe the same of Microsoft too - it would be suicidal (not to mention morally reprehensible and howlingly naive) of Microsoft to take anything other than the greatest care with the data we collect from Gatineau. But - and let's not beat about the bush here - this data is of value to us, and the benefit we get from it subsidizes the development of free tools like GA and Gatineau. And we need to be open and honest about that.

Where Brian and I differed on the panel was that I can all too easily believe that the general public will not be totally reassured by any insistence we make that we will look after their data and only use it responsibly. Maybe this is because I work for a company that - how can I put it? - doesn't enjoy the highest levels of trust in the industry. For me, building trust in our stewardship of data is something that we have had to do day by day, brick by brick, but more importantly something that we will always need to continue to do - a garden that we will always need to tend, if you like.

It's certainly not enough simply to stay inside the law and expect to maintain user trust simply because nothing bad (like a data leak) has happened on our watch. Even if we feel we are doing everything right, if we stop trying to build trust, it will wither away.

The rest of the panel discussion passed without much incident, and afterwards I had a chance to have a good chat with Bryan (with a Y) about the plans that FutureNow are putting together to create a new class of offering in the site/campaign optimization/analytics space. I look forward to further announcements from Bryan on this soon.

The formalities (such as they were) of SES done, we retired to Spanish restaurant Moro (the name of which generated an impromptu "Who's on first base?" gag - "Where are we going?" "To Moro" "I thought we were going tonight" "We are, we're going to Moro" "We're going twice?" "No, just once - to Moro", "I thought you said we were going tonight", etc), where we were joined by my UK colleague and adCenter stalwart Mel Carson (whom you should sponsor), Rob Stevens of UK usability firm Bunnyfoot, and the inimitable Dennis Mortensen. A fine time was had by all, with Bryan E taking a number of deeply unflattering photos of us and uploading them via his mobile to Facebook.

And then, after dinner, for me, the highlight of the evening - finally meeting Dave Naylor (the man who leaked the screenshots of Gatineau back in August last year) in the flesh for the first time. And what a nice man he is.

Googleburner? Feedboogle? Fondleburger?

TechCrunch is carrying an (apparently authoritative) story that Google is to buy Feedburner for an amount estimated at around $100m. It's not quite $6bn, but it's a healthy amount.

This is another smart portfolio move from Google, though few companies could justify paying so much for the opportunity to monetize RSS feeds. In Google's case, the math is easy: Feedburner has around 700,000 feeds under management - that's a lot of ad impression and click opportunities. Plus, Google gets to integrate feed measurement into GA, automatic instrumentation into Blogger, and even, possibly, some integration with Google Reader, which is the #1 RSS reader in the market.

Measuring RSS usage remains a perennially tricky problem for blog (or other content site) owners. The Feedburner approach is to 'skin' the raw RSS feed from the real blog and re-present it with extra widgets (including tracking pixels and ads). When a user clicks on a link in the feed to view the original article online, this click is tracked through an adserver-style redirect, enabling Feedburner to offer the range of reports that it does.

The sharpest technical corner for a blog owner to negotiate in the process of setting up Feedburner is modifying the page meta tag information that tells a browser (such as IE7 or Firefox) what the address of the page's RSS feed is. Doing this is essential because if you don't (and the meta tag still points to the page's 'native' feed), RSS subscribers will just pull the native feed and not any of the Feedburner goodness.

But modifying RSS meta tags, whilst not terribly complex, requires some knowledge of HTML. There are still many blog owners for whom the phrase "requires some knowledge of HTML" represents a very, very deep chasm which they know they never have any hope of crossing in their lifetime. So a blogging platform that can auto-generate the meta tag for you is a boon.

Gatineau has Google running scared

Well.... no. Okay, that's not true. Just fancied writing a sensationalist headline after a day at E-metrics London.

But Gatineau did get a mention at the recent WebGuild event on Web Analytics at Google's offices in Mountain View. Paul Botto, head of enterprise sales for Google Analytics (and formerly of Urchin), said that "the race would be on" when we release Gatineau later this year. Google is (naturally) planning to release some enhancements to Google Analytics - likely to include the ability to track non-page-level events (i.e. DIV changes and Ajax calls) - to coincide with the release of Gatineau.

There's something faintly nerve-wracking about being in Google's headlights - though I feel considerably more comfortable being in this position as part of the Microsoft behemoth than in my former life at wee little WebAbacus. And it's nice to be talked about, at least.

But the Google comment has me thinking: when Gatineau comes out, will you give it a try? Answers in the box below, please - and feel free to elaborate in the comments. Come back to this post any time to see the results; voting will close after a month.

Update [4/2/07]: If you would like to be involved in the Gatineau beta (and haven't already asked), please e-mail us at gat-beta@microsoft.com. If you've alread y requested a beta place, you're in our system, and we'll get back to you when the time is right ;-)

The deleting-your-Google-cookies industry

I'm always amazed by the economic niches that grow up around the periphery of big companies and industries. It's a great demonstration of the Darwinian roots of capitalism. So I was delighted to discover (in a purely academic sense, of course) via GoogleWatch that a little industry has grown up around the business of managing (and deleting, if you want to) your Google cookies.

Of course, the effects of anti-spyware programs such as Adsgone on third-party cookies have been understood for some time, but this more recent development of utilities that specifically target Google is interesting - and more than a little worrying for those of us who use cookies for very similar purposes.

The reasons that Google (and Microsoft, and Yahoo!) set persistent cookies are broadly two-fold:

1. To make it easier for you to log in the next time you come back to the site
2. To recognize you the next time you come back, even if you don't log in

Of these, no. 2 is the most important for the search engine; if you can start building up a profile of people's search (and other) behavior, and tie this to some registration information that they may have provided, you gain the ability to offer much more targeted advertising to that person.

So, for example, perhaps I spend a day online searching for all things Chrysler-related - Chrysler dealerships, Chrysler reviews, etc. Then, a month later, I come back and search for "Auto repair shop Seattle". It might be useful if the first paid results shown were for auto shops which specialized in Chrysler cars, wouldn't it? The auto shop in question would probably pay a little more to get to the top of the results in this situation - and anything that drives up the price of ads is good - good for Google, good for us, good for Yahoo!.

Of course, this sort of second-guessing of people's preferences makes people nervous - what else is Google keeping about me? Hence the deleting-your-Google-cookies industry, and things like the recent FTC complaint against Microsoft (seems a little harsh to single us out, but I guess that's what you get for being a huge and not-particularly-loved target). But people need to remember that it's advertising revenues that fund the cool stuff they get for free; including Gatineau.

So there's a balance to be struck, and a lot of education still to do. And we need to be at the forefront of that education process, or this time next year I'll be blogging about the deleting-your-Microsoft-cookies industry.

WikiSeek - new Wikipedia search engine

Via an article on TechCrunch, I learn that a new search engine front-end for Wikipedia, WikiSeek, has just launched. Major features are:

• Nice, Google/Live-style results page (rather than the crappy results page that the Wikipedia search produces)
• Results from Wikipedia itself and referenced Wikipedia sources only
• A tag cloud of results (though am I alone in finding tag clouds a bit gimmicky?)
• Sponsored links in the results page (via Google)

The company behind WikiSeek, SearchMe, plans to donate the majority of the revenue it gets from the sponsored results to the Wikimedia Foundation. I'd always wondered how Wikipedia could afford to keep running, though I'm guessing a lot of people (even possibly stingy old me) might put their hand in their pocket to support Wikipedia if it became clear that it was having trouble paying its bandwidth bills, so useful a resource it is.

If you want to add WikiSeek to the search box in your browser (IE7 or FF), they have a tool to do that too. Sweet.

Google for all your content needs?

My colleague Mark has an interesting post on his blog about a hint from Google that they could re-purpose the AdSense engine to deliver personalized content in general, rather than just advertising content. They'd need to build an explicit preference engine into the system, but if that thought's occurred to me, then you can bet it's occurred to the smarts at the Googleplex. Scary!

Web analytics in your sidebar

Whilst browsing the Windows Live Gallery today, I came across a  gadget from MetriServe Web Analytics which shows basic web stats in your sidebar on Windows Vista (they also have a Mac OSX widget). Gimmicky as this may seem to the hard-bitten web analytics warriors amongst you, I think this is cool because it helps to drive user engagement with web analytics - having something permanent the user's desktop drives that web analytics 'addiction' which is the first step to integrating thinking about web analytics into site planning & design.

It's also a smart move for MetriServe because it is a free 'teaser' for their paid web analytics service - and anyone in the web analytics market who's not one of the big players these days needs to find some way of differentiating. My only criticism is that the gadget seems rather simple - for me, the attraction of this would be that it would draw the user in, offering some (very) simple exploration tools within the gadget itself, and then a click-through to a fully fledged analytics package. MetriServe don't seem to have done this.

Sadly also for MetriServe, this is eminently reproducible - as Google has shown, since there exists a Google Desktop Gadget for Google Analytics:

This is quite a nice implementation, but again there's no link through to the full GA interface; plus, the 'View Days' option is completely broken (it does nothing). That little goblin in the picture is my daughter, by the way.

Google's Website Optimizer

Yesterday at the E-metrics Summit in Washington DC, Google launched a new service under their Adwords brand, called Google Website Optimizer. It's an automated A/B testing/optimization tool for Adwords advertisers to enable them to maximize the conversion rates they get from the keyword campaigns.

In essence, the system allows you to test the effect of changing various attributes of a particular page (the 'landing' page) on conversion rates later on in the site. You have to host the landing page on Google's Pages service, so that they can auto-rotate the various attributes (title, image, body copy etc).

The Optimizer service then runs an 'experiment' which involves showing various combinations of the page attributes to a proportion of users, and measuring the associated conversion rates. Once Google has decided that they've gathered enough data, you can see the results in the following report:

This report shows that 'Combination 11' delivers the best up-lift in conversion rate (indicated by the green bar on that line of the report). You can also examine the performance of individual attributes which make up that combination.

So what do I think? Well, it looks neat - though the need to host your landing pages on Google Pages will limit the appeal. I haven't actually tried to set it up myself, so I don't know how easy it is to get going with.

I can see this having a lot of appeal to advertisers, which is where it seems to be targeted - people who are spending money with Google on Adwords and want better value. There's been some talk that this would really appeal to publishers, but I'm not sure I see that myself - firstly, publisher sites don't tend to have a well-defined conversion point, and secondly, the success of a publisher's site can't be distilled down in this way.

Publishers need to generate enough loyalty and (to use an old-fashioned term) 'stickiness' on their site to ensure (if this is their revenue model) that people will eventually see an ad that appeals to them, and click it. Plus, publishers need to understand how the actual content of their articles generates click-out behaviour on ads they're hosting - this kind of service will help them to understand the best generic kinds of content, but not the specific content that works best.

So it'll be interesting to see how the take-up of this service goes. And it's very interesting for us folks at Microsoft to understand where Google's focus is when it comes to web analytics.

Should web analytics be free?

Yet again there's an interesting post on Avinash's blog about whether web analytics applications should be free. Avinash has been unjustly accused by a friend of his of asserting that all web analytics applications should be free, which he doesn't believe, though he does believe that a lot of people spend too much money on web analytics  software, and not enough on web analytics people. I completely agree with his position.

In the web analytics industry, there is room for both 'free' and paid-for solutions. The 'free' solutions fall into two camps - those that are created out of the kindness of someone's heart (or are open source), which will necessarily be fairly rudimentary, and those which are subsidized by other revenue for the companies that create them, which are more sophisticated. This is the camp into which Google Analytics and Microsoft's forthcoming web analytics add-on to adCenter fall [disclosure: this is the project I'm working on right now]. Both of these solutions are subsidized by the revenues they (indirectly) generate on the ad networks of their parent companies.

So if you want advanced web analytics functionality but don't want to pay for it yourself, you need to be comfortable that the people providing it have their own agenda. And one of the key things you have to be comfortable with is that your data, and the presentation of it, is being hosted by a company who, with the best will in the world, aren't truly impartial - Google wants to drive Adwords revenues, and we want to drive revenues through adCenter. But nevertheless, there's been a lot of concern about entrusting your web analytics data to Google, and, when we launch, I'm sure there'll be just as much concern about our solution.

We've been having detailed discussions here about reassuring people that despite the fact that we have our own agenda to pursue (bringing people to our ad network), we will maintain the highest standards of impartiality and respect for the privacy of the data we're collecting, and actively work to help people understand marketing response across both Microsoft and non-Microsoft channels.

But many organizations will want to deal with a truly independent vendor, and, furthermore, one whose product development decisions are not influenced by the desire to monetize their ad network. In that case, the software's got to be paid for somehow, and at least if you're paying for it yourself, you have a nice straightforward relationship with the vendor.  Not every type of site (for example, an intranet) can drive advertising revenues, so for these kinds of site, a paid-for solution is the best option.