It’s no secret that welcoming visitors to your site that are coming from a known location increases those visitors’ primary engagement metrics. Pages per visits and time on site goes up, bounce rate goes down.

Where this becomes extremely interesting is when that traffic is coming from a social bookmarking site. We get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, so in our blogs we set up dedicated messages to welcome returning and first-time Stumblers. It has changed spikes of traffics into long run-off ramps. The importance of this referrer message was driven home when we a cat blog entry became a thumbs-up hit on StumbleUpon but we had forgotten to activate the refer message.

This screen shot shows a spike of 12,309 visitors from StumbleUpon on April 12th to The Cat’s Meow, our cats and kittens blog with another 3,100 visits since then.

The second screen shot shows a spike of 12,180 visitors to Snuzzy our cute and fuzzy blog on January 27th that led to another 80,000 visitors in the ensuing 2 weeks.

These results may be above average, the next time we get a hit from StumbleUpon to our cat blog (after we’ve resumed showing the helpful message to Stumblers) I’ll post the results. But without a doubt the blogs that have Stumbler referrer messages no longer see towering visitor spikes and instead show much more meaningful long run-off ramps.

UPDATE: 4/21/09
Some readers did not understand why referrer messages are so effective for visitors from social bookmarking sites. To clarify I’ve added a screenshot of the message shown to a repeat visitor from StumbleUpon. Note that the first option is for them to StumbleUp. We also quickly remind them what content we post on our site, make it easy for them to join our community on SU, as well as subscribe to the blog feed, and also to join our community and explore some existing crowd-pleaser posts.

We’ve written about Ben Stein’s feelings about the benefit of sharing your life with a dog before. Here on CBS he flat-out suggests that if you’re having a hard, stressful, confusing year … get a dog. “all of life is better with a dog” he says. And he’s right.

Watch CBS Videos Online

 
3 years ago Hurricane Katrina separated 600,000 pets from their families. Most were never reunited. Since then we’ve seen family pets languish in shelters after the fires in Southern California, the floods in Iowa and even the ice storms earlier this month in Kentucky and West Virgina. Just as unbelievable are the statistics that one in three dogs and cats will get lost in their lifetime and more than half do not find their way back home. We hear all too often of pets that end up at shelters on euthanasia lists because the microchip they had wasn’t found by the scanner or the phone number associated with the chip was unavailable.

This confounded us. How could a beloved pet’s connection to their family be so tenuous even though we live in an age of innovative technology? Last year we started discussions with the Bay Area Red Cross who were also very concerned about people’s utter lack of emergency preparedness for their pets (and themselves). We realized that what was needed was a tag that improved upon the traditional single point of contact ID tags that most people still rely on. Our research showed us that such a tag was of great interest to owners, especially if it was priced similarly to a traditional tag and didn’t require annual renewal fees or update charges.

Thus Dogster, Inc. made Together Tag, the world’s first web-based, always-on smart pet tag. A one-time fee of $25 enrolls a dog or cat for their lifetime, with no hidden renewal or subscription costs. Online enrollment is easy, and owners have the option of including primary, secondary, and out-of-state contacts in their pet’s profile, as well as a photo, vet contact info, and any special health, diet and care information. Profile and contact information can be updated any time, for free, making it easy to update your account information while you are on vacation, for example, or if a friend or family member is caring for your pet.

When a pet is reported as missing, we immediately send out alerts to shelters in the area where the pet went missing, as well as to community members - similar to an Amber Alert for missing persons. Members can also use our easy tool to make a printable “lost pet” poster to post in their neighborhood.

One final reason we wanted to do this is to help the Red Cross with their pet safety program, and in doing so help raise awareness about emergency preparedness in general. Dogster and Catster donates $5 for every identification tag sold to the American Red Cross. Proceeds help to support its pet safety program.

To learn more about Together Tag and enroll your pets go to http://www.togethertag.com.

Screenshot: Homepage.

Screeshot: Found Pet Profile Page.

Click images to enlarge

Some Spokespets:

In the 5 years since I started the company I’ve had the pleasure and not so pleasure of doing interview. Last week Andrew Warner of Mixergy interviewed me at length and it was a pleasure. He really knew his stuff, and in accordance with the times he focused it on how to maximize your available resources, determining what is most critical and an oldie but a goodie, how to find work and revenue in a downturn.

He titled it: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Maybe You Should Give Up, but maybe I would have called it “How to Know you Have a Hit … and When You Don’t” ;) It’s gotten a great response int eh comments and on twitter, and if you’re looking to run a profitable Internet business or start one, I think you will find it valuable.

[This and other great interviews can be seen at Mixergy]

Earlier this month I gave a presentation at the Startonomics Conference at UCLA on how to use OKRs, KPIs and discipline to grow your Internet business. I then walk through a case study showing how we used these methodologies to increase our search traffic by 300% in a 15 month period. Not bad for a web service that had already been live for 3 years.

How to Create a Website that Users Eat Up & Beg for More

[Video recorded and hosted by TechZulu]

You can follow along with the original slides:

The Startonomics conferences are put on by the high quality DealMaker Media. If you are starting or growing an Internet business you do a lot worse than catching the next one.

With no notice Yahoo quietly started directing pets.yahoo.com users to a subsection of their women’s vertical Shine.

[Excuse me while I have a David vs. Goliath moment.]

The demise of pets.yahoo.com comes as no surprise, the once popular and lucrative profitable pets.yahoo.com has literally been on cruise control for the last 3 years, without even a dedicated project manager over seeing it. The site homepage rarely changed content, the forums contained unmoderated profanities and nefarious scam-style listings could be seem in the message boards.

It was also a ghost ship on the enterprise-side. Trying to find someone who had the authority to discuss partnerships or licensing deals was like trying to speak to a human at a HMO provider. And we worked over a dozen inside channels. The running joke among their sales people was that thanks to falling page views and a long-term multi-million flat-fee contract with a single advertiser signed in the bubble era, Yahoo Pets was getting ridiculously high CPMs (> $100) for years and had to do almost nothing for it. And it was also understood that eventually the ghost ship would run aground.

Moving it from a dying huge portal to a nascent but growing vertical is the practical move, but now pets on yahoo will be relegated to being a sub-vertical of a vertical which is about the same as being a subsection of a portal. The Shine ad sales team - which I’m sure is quite solid - simply won’t be able to put the the same effort into a sub-vertical. The uniques and page views just won’t add up and neither will the commissions. Likewise, the product manager overseeing the pets sub-vertical won’t have the opportunity to obsess over content like the Shine homepage manager will.

Pure unadulterated passion is what advertisers are looking for and why no pet advertiser ever doubts they’ll reach their target audience with us. It’s what leads them to golden households and lifelong customers. And anything less offers significantly less. You can argue that getting the extended reach of a greater women’s network will increase advertisers and lift impressions, but that’s not what we’re seeing with the integration of NBC’s Petside.com into iVillage.com last year.

It’s a shame really. Yahoo, for all it’s management failings, is one of the truly great people-positive brands. There’s so much they could have done with pets.yahoo.com if they hadn’t been floundering the last 3 years. But what’s worse is there’s so much we could have done with it for them (such as increasing revenue 10x) but they couldn’t even consider that because they had to switch over to focusing only on whale-sized deals. But Yahoo and Shine, we’re still here and will always be open to making great music together. Meanwhile we’ll be doing what the small furry mammals did when the dinosaurs became extinct and exploit the opportunity with all our abilities … after all, behaving like small furry mammals is in our nature.

In response to a number of pings regarding our visibility into 2009 advertising trends, we decided to document what we are booking for the year.

The most important news is that our directly booked deal flow for ‘09 is up 30% over this time last year. The four-part explanation for the increase in a downturn is we (a) are part of an up-trending medium (b) reach a tightly focused demographic (c) have long-standing agency relationships and (d) have a track record of over-the-top engagement metrics.

Up 30% or not, the upcoming year will be very difficult and it’s critical all online publishers are ready to move beyond the banner and focus on custom integrated brand campaigns that give advertisers interactive exposure to precise demographic targets. The banner is not dead, but it’s becoming increasingly insignificant.

In fact high-end highly differentiated directly sold inventory will be critical this year to small and medium publishers. Last year ~17.5% of our monthly revenue came from high-end ad networks but this year we’ll be lucky if we can get 8% from the hurting networks. Advertising-based publishers will sink or swim this year based upon their volume of directly sold ads - or have to find new revenue streams - as network ad revenue is only going to be able to float the most e-fish-ient of boats. 2009 online advertising spending forecasts are still expecting at least nominal growth in 2009, but there is theoretical dissension.

Here are the specifics of what we’re seeing in each major ad sales category.

Direct Sales:
On top of the increased I/Os mentioned above we’re also seeing an increase in overall RFP flow. The Fortune 500 companies that we work with (predominantly household CPGs) have demonstrated little or no concerns about the financial downturn. A majority of our ’09 deals closed after Dec 1 and most of the RFPs came after November 1.

While the high-flying estimates of increased online ad dollars have fallen sharply they are all still showing growth of some sort. Pity print media and to a lesser degree television, but the writing has long been on the wall. Customers time spent online is increasing exponentially and the advertisers are following them there. As much as advertisers trust TV and newspapers gives them results, they all love the trackability of online campaigns. (However see the dissenting opinion)

Even further, within online spending, there’s a clear trend of advertisers from general audience to highly differentiated demographically focused properties. You’ll want to be ahead of that move.

High-End Ad Networks:
The bottom has pretty much fallen out of the large-scale high-end networks. There is still lots of money here, but the networks are reducing publisher rolls as fast as they can. There is still good money for the tightest-fitting publishers, but the bubble is bursting here because the networks can no longer afford to guarantee payments to reserve inventory for advertiser dollars that are shrinking.

Right and left there are concerns that the hefty contractual offerings by Google and Microsoft to control top publishers ad inventory will also be renegotiated.

So like most everyone else, this is a hit in our bottom line and has left us to fill-in our remaining unsold inventory with base advertising networks.

ROS/Bulk Network Advertisers:
January eCPMs numbers are so far down it’s laughable. December hung on and in our primary text and display network ad provides we were getting $0.40-$0.50 eCPMs we always got. But intel from the inside has confirmed we should not be griping about the $0.18 - $0.30 eCPMs we (and likely everyone else) are getting this month. Nor are we going to forecast anything better anytime soon.

This could be considered devastating, but there were so few web publishers that were profitable just from network ads alone, that I doubt we’re going to see many companies go from treading water to failing because of 50% or more rate drops.

As you can imagine we will be putting all our effort into direct sales of deeply integrated brand campaigns,. Not only because that is where all the best advertising money will be in 2009, but because that is where the best advertising money has always been.

[End safe crossing photo by cwalker71.]

Industry big brains Jeremy Liew and Fred Wilson alerted us to a free comScore white paper (free download) that reports on the effect display advertising has on Internet users. Most interesting are the findings that though a person may never click on a display ad, it’s still very common that they later search out that product, find it online or offline, and buy it. This might be surprising to outsiders, but is what our experiences have taught us. When we survey our members they indicate connections to our advertiser even if they report they never clicked on one of their ads.

From the report: “The results presented in this paper will show the manner in which online display ads work in affecting consumer behavior, revealing that there are
indeed latency effects and branding effects even when click rates are
minimal.”

Increased lift overtime for searches of the advertised brand.

 
Starting in 2005 at Dogster/Catster we came to the conclusion that of all the ads types we ran - Strategic (i.e. long-term brand/product presence), Tactical (i.e. short-term call-to-action), CPA (i.e. sign-up/buy right now), and Text (i.e. “pssst, click this”) - the campaigns that gave the best results to advertisers and were most appreciated by the site viewers are the Strategic Campaigns.

The web is very bad at getting anyone to do anything other than what they are doing. (The exception is when their task is to resolve a problem a quickly as possible and then a multitude of options is what the user is looking for.) So whenever a person is at a site because the content engages them (such as NYTimes.com, Pandora, Kongregate, Dogster, Catster) it’s not a great time for them to explore an advertiser’s message. BUT if that advertiser is there for months on end, possibly offering special content or features, the regular site visitor is naturally going to warm to that product. It’s name, coloring, message become associated with the good experience they have on the site.

The comScore data shows what we’ve been finding with our most pleased advertisers. The web is a great way to advertise a brand in the same way NASCAR and Vanity Fair are, by making prospective customers aware and familiar with your product without denying them the pleasure and benefit they are experiencing while they are there.

I’ll rest our case with this member-uploaded image in response to a multi-month Febreze campaign that ran on our site.

MarketingCharts Reports on the Link between Subject Line Length and Email Clicks Weaker is than Thought.

“Marketers should keep in mind that most recipients will likely decide to open an email based on their relationship with the sender and the first 38 to 47 characters of the subject line,” the report stated. “However, that decision may depend less on a subject line of 38 to 47 characters,and more on the information those 38 to 47 characters contain. campaign, the vital piece of information may be the brand name. For another, it may be the consumer benefit.”

Overall, Epsilon recommends that marketers should rethink how they develop subject lines and place increased emphasis on positioning the most important elements first - a concept the company calls “pole position” writing. This includes front loading subject lines with the most important information, keeping the subject line as short as possible to convey the message and using longer subject lines only when there is a compelling reason to do so.

Dave McClure will be quick to tell you spend 80% of your eNewsletter effort on the subject line, 20% on the content. He’s right. What’s the point of a great email if less than 5 in a hundred people open it. Get those open rates up!

Also, on a related note, we’re finding Monday to be the best day to send eNewsletters, the earlier in the day the better. Tuesday is still pretty good, but Monday may be the new personal productivity day as so many people are used to having web-access at work.

Here’s a great list by Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path about what pumps are primed for real adoption in the near future.

Give it a read and see where it takes you. It’s guarenteed the next Amazon, eBay, Facebook or YouTube will get their start just when everyone is saying it’s not a good time to start a new service.

(via Lane Becker)