Smallbrain Solutions

While I am still bullish on the Facebook ads in general, I think the platform needs some work. Fred Wilson points out some weird stats on his post friday and the test ads we put up last week aren’t performing well yet. But I still think they can make sense. Nick at AllFacebook.com isn’t so confident.

Basically, our test ads are targeting some very small groups - and they may be generating branding value without attracting clicks, much like paid search can. However, I think there may be some value shown if you can get it local enough and make the ask tied to a value-add like an action via an application. Heck, I even clicked on and ad for an apartment yesterday. And not even for research purposes… More to come, certainly. We have some requests to do some more testing for clients using bigger test groups - so our outlook will be changing based on those results.

Since I wasn’t blogging much this summer, here are some not-great stats-posts from Valleywag and Reach Students.

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Holy crap. Google may have solved the “unique visitor problem” with a Firefox extension that synchronizes your cookies across different machines. This is wild.

When we look at “Unique Visitor” in any modern cookie-based analytics package those of us who use multiple computers – a fair number – look like completely different visitors to most websites. Well, until we login with a user/password. However, the Google Browser Sync extension will solve that. Since all your cookies are tied together, you look like the same user. Sure, it doesn’t really do much for you as a user aside from letting sites remember you… but that is something, right?

On behalf of all the web analytics professionals out there, please add this today. And if you aren’t using Firefox, you are missing out! [via Clickz]

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Media Daily News reports on a Report from Double-Click that commercial email revenues (er… revenues per email) dropped in the third quarter by 19% compared to Q3 last year. Open Rates have dropped as well, the average dropping from 37.1% open to 34.3%.

Of course, total email revenue continues to increase as the volume of commercial email has increased (you haven’t noticed that in your inbox, have you?). But the marginal return rates decreased.

One of the things that has been difficult in the online political world is to get organizations to share their open and click-through rate information. Smallbrain Solutions may try to start a quarterly survey to that effect…

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So, if you are like most new campaigns/organizations you want to get your site listed on the major search engines - fast.

Well, if you need a quick how-to, check James Allen’s article over at WebProNews.

Here is basically what he did:

a) Sent a press release announcing the site to PRNewswire ($30 bucks to file it).

b) Spent a week blogging and submitted its Atom feed to PingOMatic.com.

That’s it. 24 hours later, the PR was in the search engines and by the end of the week he was spidered and at the top of the search results for his targeted keywords.

Sometimes, it is just that easy.

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I am totally a whore for data… (hint, hint - anyone with an account with Nielsen/NetRatings should give me a call).

Brianstorms.com has a great chart based on a time-series of Dean’s signups. I am less concerned about the explanations and more interested in seeing if anyone else has similar traffic data or numbers from advocacy orgs. I would like to develop some baseline data…

(thanks to Loose Democracy for the link.)

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