“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.”
-Henry Ford

Why do you hear so many quotes by the great Henry Ford?

He single-handedly changed the operational nature of industry and business on our planet. The genius he displayed introducing the scalable production line earns him a seat in the yet-to-be-built Business Hall of Fame.

But in our 21st century, the Internet has become the engine for conducting every facet of doing business. Although Henry Ford’s era has come and gone, his quote, “Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success” holds true today.

Despite the fact that $70 billion per year is spent annually on Internet advertising, the business world is just now starting to comprehend and initiate the “getting ready” process, as it relates to online advertising.

Mark Hughes, CEO
C3 Metrics

Despite the fact that Internet advertising remains the most trackable form of advertising on earth, today’s online measurement systems are…woefully inadequate. Current online ad tracking systems, in their effort to define the success of every ad dollar, mistakenly give 100% transaction credit to the very last clicked or last viewed ad before an online transaction.

That’s a big “oops,” costing online advertisers $20 billion worldwide.

Example: if four Internet ads contribute to a transaction; today’s outdated systems allocate entire credit to the very last ad completely ignoring the first three ads, which actually drove the revenue.

Zero credit to revenue drivers, and 100% credit to the last ad placed. Are you nervous?

With limitless resources available on the Internet, consumers are able to research like never before, prior to making any final commitment of online action. And today, successful online advertising is like a great recipe for New Orleans Jumbalaya, a combination of ingredients and methods, not just a garnish placed at the very end.

At C3 Metrics (disclosure: I’m the CEO), the attribution modeling recipe takes an enormous amount of ingredients, but then reduces their complexity to simplicity.

At a basic level, C3 assigns credit to Originators, Assists, and Converters within a transaction. An attribution model should capture every online media source from the top of the funnel where sales originate…down to the very bottom of the funnel. So in a $100 transaction, an Originator would receive a fraction of $100 attributed to them—and the Assist and Converter would also receive fractional credit of the $100 attributed to them respectively.

100% of the revenue value is attributed and split among Originators, Assists, and Converters–accounting for the actual drivers of revenue. Then revenue and respective costs from paid media sources converge in a single, elegant number: Attributed Revenue-to-Spend Ratio (ARSR™).

Here’s how it breaks down: If you have a 4.0 ratio for a specific keyword, or specific Display campaign–you’re getting $4.00 in revenue for every dollar spent on that particular media source. Conversely, if you have an ARSR of 1.25 for a particular media buy–you’re getting $1.25 in revenue for every dollar spent.

ARSR™ delivers a quick, actionable, and fully attributed metric. The special reduction sauce for the recipe is the numerator of the ratio (attributed revenue), derived from full funnel attribution…an actionable, and fully attributed metric you can use to analyze weeks of data in about an hour, versus taking days just to set the data up for modeling analysis.

The many hours spent “getting ready” (just preparing the data for attribution modeling is history) With C3’s ARSR™ ratio, it’s easy to identify and scale paid media sources with high numbers, and cut or improve media sources with low numbers.

Now get ready for the results. In the longest running attribution study of its kind (2 yrs) the results are enough to get any media buyer’s motor running:

a) Seven-figures in profit from the advertiser’s higher ROI online ad spend
b) Display ROI improvement of 160%
c) Search ROI improvement of 98%
d) Accurate economic model to measure affiliate performance

Bottom line: millions of dollars in profit.

We’ve gone from driving a Ford Model T to driving a new model…an attribution model.

Are you ready to drive millions in profit?

As reported in Adotas, here are the 7 questions:

Mark Hughes, CEO
C3 Metrics

2. Are there any time limits for tracking and attributing?
Here at LCN, we know that DoubleClick can only track for a maximum of 90 days, so if Hughe’s and his team at C3 Metrics can track longer, it’s a winner for marketers.

3. Does the attribution system cap touchpoints?
Hughes states: “well-known systems purporting attribution, cap out at 10 events …that’s nowhere near full-funnel attribution.”

4. Is view-through attribution done in real-time?
Hughes recommends: Make sure your attribution system incorporates impression-level data into real-time pixel firing.

5. Is there selective pixel firing?

6. Is the attribution algorithm transparent and explainable to your CEO?

And here’s our favorite:
7. How much time do you waste translating data into knowledge?

There are four kinds of tasks that are normally involve in Data mining:

• Classification – the task of generalizing familiar structure to employ to new data
• Clustering – the task of finding groups and structures in the data that are in some way or another the same, without using noted structures in the data.
• Association rule learning – Looks for relationships between variables.
• Regression – Aims to find a function that models the data with the slightest error.

For those of you who are looking for some data mining tools, here are five of the best open-source data mining software that you could get for free:

Orange
Orange is a component-based data mining and machine learning software suite that features friendly yet powerful, fast and versatile visual programming front-end for explorative data analysis and visualization, and Python bindings and libraries for scripting. It contains complete set of components for data preprocessing, feature scoring and filtering, modeling, model evaluation, and exploration techniques. It is written in C++ and Python, and its graphical user interface is based on cross-platform Qt framework.

RapidMiner
RapidMiner, formerly called YALE (Yet Another Learning Environment), is an environment for machine learning and data mining experiments that is utilized for both research and real-world data mining tasks. It enables experiments to be made up of a huge number of arbitrarily nestable operators, which are detailed in XML files and are made with the graphical user interface of RapidMiner. RapidMiner provides more than 500 operators for all main machine learning procedures, and it also combines learning schemes and attribute evaluators of the Weka learning environment. It is available as a stand-alone tool for data analysis and as a data-mining engine that can be integrated into your own products.

Weka
Written in Java, Weka (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) is a well-known suite of machine learning software that supports several typical data mining tasks, particularly data preprocessing, clustering, classification, regression, visualization, and feature selection. Its techniques are based on the hypothesis that the data is available as a single flat file or relation, where each data point is labeled by a fixed number of attributes. Weka provides access to SQL databases utilizing Java Database Connectivity and can process the result returned by a database query. Its main user interface is the Explorer, but the same functionality can be accessed from the command line or through the component-based Knowledge Flow interface.

JHepWork
Designed for scientists, engineers and students, jHepWork is a free and open-source data-analysis framework that is created as an attempt to make a data-analysis environment using open-source packages with a comprehensible user interface and to create a tool competitive to commercial programs. It is specially made for interactive scientific plots in 2D and 3D and contains numerical scientific libraries implemented in Java for mathematical functions, random numbers, and other data mining algorithms. jHepWork is based on a high-level programming language Jython, but Java coding can also be used to call jHepWork numerical and graphical libraries.

KNIME
KNIME (Konstanz Information Miner) is a user friendly, intelligible, and comprehensive open-source data integration, processing, analysis, and exploration platform. It gives users the ability to visually create data flows or pipelines, selectively execute some or all analysis steps, and later study the results, models, and interactive views. KNIME is written in Java, and it is based on Eclipse and makes use of its extension method to support plugins thus providing additional functionality. Through plugins, users can add modules for text, image, and time series processing and the integration of various other open source projects, such as R programming language, Weka, the Chemistry Development Kit, and LibSVM.

About the Author Jun Auza
My name is Jun Auza, I’m the owner/sole-writer of Techsource. I’m a computer science graduate who obviously loves computer hardware/software, and just about anything related to information technology. My other passion is basketball, but unfortunately, basketball doesn’t love me so I’m sticking with computers for now. I am an avid free/open source software user. I’m also a Python, Javascript, VB, HTML, and CSS coder, and still trying to find some time to learn some other programming languages. I believe that free/open source is the only right way to do software that is why I make an effort to contribute to the FOSS community as much as I can. However, like Linus Torvalds, I use the “best tool for the job”, even if that includes proprietary software.

Today looks a bit dismal for TV media companies, and tomorrow looks worse.

Today looks good for Internet ad companies, but tomorrow looks even better.

Today looks good for mobile advertising companies, and tomorrow looks like a party.

Each day, $5 million of advertising flows out of TV and into the nearly $30 billion U.S. Internet ad market. Canoe Ventures was formed to tourniquet this exact trend.

But why are all these TV ad dollars moving over to Internet and Mobile?

It’s hard to track the impact of TV. But in a word, it’s attribution.

Advertisers aren’t able to attribute the value of TV like they can the Internet.

But attribution is just beginning to make its way to the Internet ad market. While most Internet advertisers still attribute 100% credit to the very last Internet ad in the sales funnel…proper attribution systems now allocate credit to a team of Internet ads rather than just the last one (my plug, I’m the CEO of full funnel attribution company C3 Metrics).

Mark Hughes, CEO
C3 Metrics

But display advertising doesn’t just happen online…it happens on TV too.

So how do we take the technologies and algorithms of online attribution like C3 Metrics, and embrace the full funnel beyond the Internet? Couldn’t TV display advertising impact the sales funnel? Indeed it does have a place in the sales funnel.

In fact, Google is betting a lot of it’s financial growth on become a TV media player…after all, it’s double the size of the Internet ad market.

But can attribution be measured on TV like Internet ads?

Enter mobile…and yes it can.

Let’s survey the technology of our living rooms:

TV set top boxes are becoming standard, especially in higher income households. That very set top box has the capability of having a mac address, which can pick up presence of a device within 18 feet of the TV. A smart phone.

You, most likely, while watching TV, will have your smart phone in your pocket, or nearby while watching TV.

So if your TV system can detect the signal and 18 foot presence of your mobile device, we can assume you viewed an ad. If you went to the kitchen, went upstairs, or outside the 18 foot radial zone…guess what, you didn’t view that TV ad.

Now, the next day, you visit an auto manufacturer’s website at work and fill out a form, how can the digital connection of attribution be made?

Mobile. Imagine you have an app on your smart phone…which is bundled with Facebook or bundled with Google’s Android OS. Your smart phone can record the TV ads you saw last night (with what’s called an ISCI code), then when you log on to the Internet, download the ISCI tracking codes of all the TV ads you saw last night to your Gmail account or your Facebook account, and transfer those tiny tracking codes to the auto manufacturers website once you type in your zip code to find a dealer or perform other online actions.

Mobile sits perfectly to capture TV display ads viewed, transfer the data online, and thus add TV’s missing piece of the media funnel–which both Advertisers and sellers of TV ads lack today, but desperately desire.

So TV execs don’t need to plot against Internet advertising execs, both can profit if they see the picture. Advertisers win with better ROI across multiple mediums–all you need is mobile in the middle, mixed with full funnel attribution.

About the Author
Mark Hughes is the CEO & Co-Founder of C3 Metrics. Hughes grew eBay’s Half.com from zero to 8 million online customers as its VP of Marketing in less than three years. Half.com was sold to eBay for over $300 million six months after launch. He has spent close to $100 million online ad dollars, which planted the seeds for creation of C3 Metrics’ attribution algorithms and arrival in 2008—seeing the need to help Advertisers and Networks discover previously missed revenue drivers and increase ROI. Hughes brings a wealth of creative and quantitative experience in consumer marketing from PepsiCo’s Pizza Hut Division; Pep Boys, the automotive aftermarket retailer; and American Mobile Satellite (now XM Satellite Radio). Hughes is the son of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and Hughes’ own book, Buzzmarketing, is published in 14 countries. In its first year of release it was heralded by Fast Company as one of ‘The Ten Best Business Reads of the Year’ and named by The Financial Times of London as one of the ‘Best Business Books of the Year’ along with Freakonomics. Mr. Hughes holds his MBA from Columbia Business School in Marketing & International Business.

And if your business or IT department is in a hurricane zone, how long can you afford to be down?

Whether you run a small advertising firm, work from home as an affiliate marketer or do some freelance SEO work…time is money, and down time can cost your small business thousands of dollars.  Most small to medium-sized businesses cannot afford the traditional disaster recovery options that are available (we are talking hundreds of thousands to millions each year) and having software to back up your data is only half of the solution.

The key to disaster recovery:  You need to have hardware loaded with your applications, and current data, that is ready to run your business should a disaster occur.

“Disaster Recovery during hurricane season, and  in any other season should be a priority for all businesses”, says Brian Blanchette,  VP and General Manager at Elite Technical Solutions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Elite has an innovate program for small to midsize companies – an inexpensive disaster recovery service designed to meet the needs of your business.  “The focus, says Blanchette, “giving you security and peace of mind, without the high costs of traditional disaster recovery plans.”

With the explosion of Twitter and other social media tools, consumers are looking for quicker answers than ever. Within less than an hour, the #t-mobile became a trending topic on Twitter, yet the ‘official’ T-Mobile USA twitter page was only offering promotional material:

Did you get a Motorola CLIQ? How do you like it? Tell us in the T-Mobile Forums! http://ow.ly/yJlI

Reports on Twitter show that this outage seems to be limited to voice and text, yet access to the Internet is still available.

Other reports show that phones are not being recognized on a network while using T-Mobile’s UMA service.

Here are some recent Twitter T-Mobile messages:

rubberduckie219: Nation-wide service failure. T-Mobile FAIL.

MumoFromUmo: T-Mobile has a nationwide outage? What a shame.. I need to make a phone call asap! T-Mobile folks need to get it together …

KaramelKisses83: I’m about 2 go Ham on T-Mobile ass…My phone not allowing me 2 call any mobile 2 mobile people! Anybody else havin problems??

itzDreaFab: RT @Roselyn Feel sorry for all you T-Mobile folks get AT&T or Verizon in your life,you know, the phone companies 4 ppl with good credit! Wow

timmygomez: seriously, t-mobile is just a huge company made up of nothing but FAIL. apparently there’s a nationwide outage going on. cool.

Get in on the conversation here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=T-Mobile

With Gmail down – the only thing a user could do was wait it out and head over to Twitter:

pajaah: Wondering why Gmail is down again.

imthegirl: Apparently I’m awake before Google this morning … No gmail or feedburner … wth?

Of course, the Google Apps Service dashboard, which offers performance information for Google Apps services, which includes Gmail, showed no issues:

Previous outage reported was September 24th when the dashboard showed that Gmail was having service issues

“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 4:29:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. You can access Gmail via IMAP”

Maintaining near perfect up time for a company like Google is critical – especially if they expect to take business away from Outlook.

But this minor outage early on a Saturday morning makes me wonder — could this temporary outage be the result of the Google Wave?

Outsourcing has proven to be an effective way of getting business processes done at a lower cost. On the other hand, the web offers a great platform for marketing. In the light of growing use of the internet for a variety of purposes by people all over the world, marketing on the web can be seen as a good practice. Even during tough economic times, businesses who have used SEO and other internet marketing practices to sell have gained through it. E-commerce and E-business have also supported online sales. All this has facilitated success of online business representation and sales.

While the merit of online marketing is proven, it may be a costly and time consuming affair. In order to tackle these problems, many companies are outsourcing their SEO and SEM needs to offshore destinations. Now a days search engine optimization companies are also outsourcing their projects to offshore destinations.

The labor charges in offshore service providers are very low. Hence, more labor can be hired to work at a cheaper cost. This way, the business goals through online marketing can be achieved faster. The labor force in overseas service providing companies has proved their caliber in handling software and other projects. Also, there are many professionals offshore who are skilled and experienced in handling internet marketing projects. By outsourcing the search engine optimization requirements, business goals of the company can be achieved faster and at lower price.

One such company is SoftLogic Inc with an SEO blog here: http://softlogicinc.wordpress.com/

From their website:

We offer world class web services and web solution to our client’s world wide. It is our principle to build your site with our best web design and web development services. Staffs at softlogic are an excellent blend of technical expertise and creative skills. We have a team of professional web developers and designers who work to create attractive and functional web solutions for your business. Our SEO team comprises of dedicated professionals who know all the tips and tricks to make a website popular and make it rank well on the search engines.

On Thursday, October 1, Eastern Daylight Time, marketers and advertisers have a unique opportunity to learn more about The American Attribution Index (AAI), the first-ever attribution management index that measures the relative effectiveness of each online advertising source and influence factor on consumer purchases and conversions.

Search Marketing Now will host a webcast “The American Attribution Index: Using Advertising Attribution Management to Improve Media Mix Allocation” at 1 PM EDT on October 1.

This webcast is free; registration and more information are available at Search Marketing Now .

Recently announced by ClearSaleing, Inc., leader in advertising analytics and founder of the Attribution Management Forum, and Vetra Analytics, the AAI will ultimately help advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their media mix allocation.

There are three versions of the American Attribution Index: the Aggregate Index, representing average attribution indices across all participating companies and all of their respective industries; Vertical Industry Indices, which represent an industry-specific attribution index across all participating companies in that respective industry; and Company-Specific Indices, developed for a specific company.

Using the AAI, advertisers will be able to discover the relative importance of online media sources in influencing purchase decisions and to benchmark against competitors using the vertical attribution indices. The AAI can also be customized, enabling an individual company to improve the allocation of its online advertising investments.

The introduction of these indices will allow marketers to gain further insight into advertising ROI, and help marketers more profitably allocate advertising budgets across available online options.

Following the main webcast presentation, attendees will have the chance to participate in a live question and answer session about the AAI.

It’s been said that words move quickly on the Internet and for some folks who press the button on a press release – too quickly.

Last week, after publishing a release that was making the rounds on the net regarding a company and their new client, we received the following notice:

Hello.
We published a press release to <DELETED> and you pulled the release from this website. We emailed <DELETED> to please remove our press release, but we want to make sure it is also deleted from your website. Please deleted the press release entitled “<DELETED>” ASAP.  Please email me if you have any questions.
Thank you.

And of course, we promptly complied and removed the press release.

But it made us wonder — in the world of RSS and aggregated feeds, how many copies or partial copies of the release are still out there 8 days later?

669

Yes — that is Six Hundred and Sixty-Nine references in Google Search when you put the name of the press release in quotes.

This shows the true power of the press release for SEO and it should also serve as a warning to be certain you are ready for that release to come out.