Half-Geek | Web 2.0 Strategy

new adwords interface coming

Google is introducing a new interface for adwords. This is a big deal for Google, the adwords product is still an unrivaled revenue stream within their business and they have not made any significant changes to the existing interface since 2003.

The official launch for the big change is at SES NYC on March 24, however, those who are interested can sign up for the new adwords beta and have a play with the new system, switching between the old a new interface at will.

The new interface incorporates a number of updates including:

• New 'account tree' style navigation
• In-Line editing of keywords, bids & ad placements
• Integrated reports on campaign management pages
• Roll-up views of all keywords, ads & placements in a campaign
• Ability to filter data faster
• Performance summary graphs to help pick trends faster

A little bit of research suggests that the new interface has already been tested by our English counterparts late in 2008. Have any of you had a play yet? If so what are your initial thoughts?

my bad trademe...........my bad

Over the last 12-18 months I have been partial to a little bit of constructive trademe criticism here on half-geek. Lack of web 2.0 type features and increases in trademe seller fees have been the crux of my sour grape posts. Today, however, I realized the error of my ways.....

I have 5 months left on the lease agreement for my apartment, however, I don't need it anymore. I need to get out of the lease. My property manager informed me that I must abide by the contract and arrange new tenants that comply at my own cost (advertising etc...). She says that it's a bummer for me that I need to go through this 3 weeks before Xmas as it will be hard to re let the apartment at this time.

So this morning at 11.47 I post a classified ad on trademe. My complaints about the 14 day listing fee of $59 or so dollars will prove to be short lived.....within 3 hours I have had a lady come through our apartment and place an application, contact the property manager and place a verbal agreement to take over our lease. Thats fast ROI, very fast.

If I were unaware of trademe (far fetched I know but stick with me) and someone had of suggested to me that they could re-let my apartment within 12 hours for under $60 I would not have hesitated in accepting such an offer.

My bad trademe, I forgot how powerful and cost effective you truly are.

The thing is that it's easy to give trademe a hard time when you don't really have a need for it. Over the past couple of years I have sorta fallen into that category. This got me wondering, how many kiwis have not used trademe yet?

There are only roughly 1.8 million trademe users in the total New Zealand population of roughly 4.8 million. So,while trademe are seriously dominant in the kiwi online space, there are still 3 million kiwis that don't use the service. Therefore, trademe must still move forward with an agressive online marketing strategy to ensure that they truly do replace the word e-commerce in the dictionary of kiwi slang.

If you want a lesson in online marketing strategy from trademe, look no further than this very post you are reading. If you are going to be successful in e-commerce, I mean big time successful, you need to have the ability to launch and implement tactics that will encourage people to recommend your website to other people. Tactics that generate online recommendations with links back to your site (such as blog posts) are particularly valuable as they increase your link popularity (crucial SEO factor).

In the case of trademe, they have mastered this very ability simply by being the best at the service the offer. Sure they are a monopoly, however, so were telecom new zealand and how many blog posts to you read by people who have had a problem with telecom only to have an extremely positive experience which changed their minds?

Hiwise 'to go' widget

Apart from late 2006 when they lost all New Zealand ISP data for four months or so, I have always been a huge fan of Hitwise.

If you serious about competing online and really owning your 'eco-system', you need to understand not only how your website performs but how your site is performing relative to other sites in your 'eco-system'.

Data that relates to your eco-system is called 'competitive intelligence'. This is where hitwise excels.

Recently the team at hitwise have launched a new widget called 'hitwise to go'. It's a bit of a bummer that you need the yahoo widget engine installed to run the new widget, however, it could be worth it....

Downloading the hitwise widget will allow you to get regular updates from the 'hitwise to go' data feed, which includes weekly online user behavior stats such as top performing websites, most searched for products and brands.

The widget is definitely a great tool for those of us who place importance on up to the minute data on how consumers are using the internet.

Odiogo audio feed- listen up!

Okay everyone listen up! No I mean really listen. Just click the listen button above this text and you can enjoy the pleasure of half-geek.com with your eyes closed thanks to new technology from odiogo.

If your have a preferred RSS reader such as pageflakes, you can subsribe to an audio version of my RSS feed thanks again to odiogo. The button at the top of each of my posts also enables straight to iTunes, MP3 download or MP3 player functions.

Odiogo creates text-to-speech podcasts, and I have installed the blogger plugin for half-geek.com which is built on the typepad blogging platform. Im loving the price tag- FREE! I have to say that I was not optimistic about the results when I first applied to odiogo for a free account. Man was I wrong, I think my posts sound great!

I may even start making some small adjustments to make my posts sound even better using this audio blogging technology. Odiogo even have a nifty model to reward higher traffic sites with a portion of advertising revenue from ads that can be embedded in the audio content.

The odiogo technology offers some great benefits to bloggers, and more importantly their communities of readers:

• Automatic podcast generation
• “Near-human” quality text-to-speech (try it!)
• Drag-and-drop integration on your blog
• Detailed download statistics
• Make money from embedded ads
• Leverages RSS feeds of all blogging platforms such as Typepad and Blogger

New Zealand website ranking tool

Just as I finish a post about how to get around online marketing problems unique to New Zealand, I find a local website ranking tool called rankr out of the ProjectX team.

It seems that we are starting to develop a network of developers in wellington who understand the problems that face online marketers in New Zealand and are interested in providing nice solutions. Great news....:)

ProjectX are responsible for the mapping technology that drives smaps. I am not sure how new or serious the rankr site is, but I see it as being a good step in the right direction for kiwi online marketing tool's and services.

The rankr site aims to provide traffic ranking data for the top 5000 websites in New Zealand. The data derives from Alexa. Alexa is typically a somewhat useless tool for most kiwi websites which are lost in the mass of US traffic. Rankr works by segmenting out the applicable New Zealand data from Alexa, making the data more useful for online marketers in New Zealand.

Gaining decent competitor data is pretty much limited to those with deep enough pockets for hitwise.

I have conducted some basic testing on the site and to be honest, the site is not ideal from a usability perspective at present. However, rankr is in beta and if ProjectX previous work is anything to go by I would suggest that rankr is worth a bookmark.