Despite reporting over 800 million active users, Facebook appear to be the current hate-figure of the month. Crimes include interface changes and privacy terms – shocking stuff.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. But for now, it’s cool to hate Facebook.

Which is why Spotify’s decision to force new users to log into their service using a Facebook account is baffling:

A thread on Spotify’s support forum shows an unjustified level of anger being directed towards Spotify. Even though the rule currently only applies to new users, a number of existing and pro users are already cancelling their accounts in triumphant fury.

I suspect the backlash will die down sooner rather than later, but for now can’t help wondering what on earth Spotify were thinking. Any ideas?

Choose your alliances with care.

So say we all.

Share and Enjoy

Why either/or?

Some food for thought:

- Good organic rankings won’t last forever. SEO is a moving target.

- If people click on your ads then they’re working. *

- PPC is more accountable. *

- PPC gets quicker results. *

- SEO is free. (Except it isn’t.)

* = assuming that you’re doing it right.

Some common misdecisions: (not a real word but it should be)

“Because more than 80% of our conversions come from the organic listings.”

“AdWords doesn’t work. It’s too expensive.”

“We can figure this out for ourselves. How hard can it be?”

“PPC is easier.”

“SEO is easier.”

Don’t weigh up whether to focus on AdWords or SEO.

Both work and both can produce great results.

Share and Enjoy

As you read this text, your Google AdWords account is wasting money. I guarantee it.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

On Wednesday October 12th 2011 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (5:00 PM UK, 6:00 Central European) you will have your chance to ask your Google AdWords Questions to Dave Collins.

Who?

Dave is the founder of SoftwarePromotions, and has been working in the software industry since 1997. That’s a long time.

Dave is also a Qualified AdWords Professional and has been handling AdWords accounts for his clients for over 3,000 days. That’s quite a long time too.

Dave has been a prolific and popular speaker at conferences all around the world – in the United States, China, Russia, Germany, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom. He has delivered over 70 presentations at more than 25 different events, conferences, webinars, online classes, an accelerator program for startups and more.

Sign-up for the webinar and enter your questions in the Questions & Comments section, or email them directly to Dave at dave@softwarepromotions.com. He doesn’t get much email so you may well make his day.

We will pick the most interesting questions before the webinar begins, and you can rest assured that your private information won’t be shared with anyone. We’ll also answer as many questions that are asked during the webinar as possible.

There’s nothing to lose and an extraordinary amount to gain. I hope you can join us.

Share and Enjoy

I’m not.

You’re not.

You and I wouldn’t think about using anything else but Google for our searches, right?

But you and I may not be representative of anything other than you and I.

What about them?

- TechCrunch recently reported that Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo account for over 30% of the market share.

- Bing’s year-on-year growth is said to be 41%, compared to Google’s 6.4%.

- Internet Explorer accounts for 72% of Bing search queries, yet is is currently estimated to account for just over 50% of browsers in use today.

This reinforces what we suspected from the outset: that Bing users aren’t the likes of you and I.

So the important question remains:

Who’s using Bing?

Your customers?

The reactive business might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t matter. That the days of optimising individual pages for different search engines are long gone, so we can sit back and watch what happens.

The proactive business might seek out the opportunities that Bing offer, with a view to tapping into a comparatively open market.

Share and Enjoy

My name is Dave Collins and I’m a data addict. Actually screw that. I’m proud of it.

My name is Dave Collins and I love data.

As a company, we measure everything we do. I believe that data is worth more than personal interaction and intuition.

I even have an application on my iPhone to track how well I sleep at night. Er… I just like it, okay?

Google Analytics gives you an enormous amount of information, but what happens to most people when they log into their accounts?

They drown.

There is so much overwhelming information that they have no idea where to begin looking, let alone make sense of what’s in front of them.

Today we have access to more data than we can possibly use. Today we need to know how to make sense of the data.

DigMyData does exactly that – and more. Ultimately it’s an analytical tool for people who don’t like analytical tools:

Forget about spreadsheets. Forget about complicated tables that you need to interpret.

DigMyData essentially does two things.

The first is that it pulls in lots and lots of beautiful data from all your accounts – Google Analytics, Google AdWords, PayPal, Google Checkout, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, your own spreadsheets and more.

The second thing it does it create a chart, showing as few or as many of these data streams as you choose.

By way of a simple example, I have just over 11,000 followers in my Twitter account. And in July this year I decided to see what would happen if I started tweeting more.

Instead of 4-5 tweets a week, I started trying to churn out 40 or more each week.

I ran with it for a few weeks, then looked at the results in DigMyData, starting with the correlation between tweets and traffic to the website:

Whoops.

Or not.

The apparent dip in traffic actually came after a three-week spike in traffic. From the middle of July onwards you can see that the number of tweets and the level of traffic do in fact have a bearing on each other.

So the next thing I did was to compare the number of tweets with number of new sales enquiries:

This was the moment I fell in love with DigMyData. And you should too.

You probably have no shortage of data. Your do, however, have a lack of time to analyse it.

DigMyData allows you to see the correlation between cause and effect instantly.

Imagine trying to compare the effects on sales of spending more on AdWords, with sending out a mass mailing or following-up old sales leads.

These are just two very basic examples and barely scrape the tip of the iceberg.

The best way to see how useful it is is to try it. They’re offering a free extended trial until December 31st, and you’ll be up and running in literally minutes.

I’ve never seen anything like DigMyData. My only regret is that they didn’t bring it out sooner.

Oh and no, they’re not our clients. We just know a great tool when we see one.

Share and Enjoy

I’m running an Action Class for AppSumo today:

Let Dave show you how to get the most value out of Google AdWords!

Google Adwords is a great tool for reaching the world with your product or service. Yet unlike most power tools, it comes with no safety instructions, which can cause you to waste a sizeable portion of your budget without even realising it.

Dave’s goal during this Action Class is to redefine your relationship with Google, by giving you a range of actionable strategies with one single focus: to increase your account’s ROI.

After the talk, Dave will hang around to answer your AdWords related questions in the live Q&A Session.

When? Tuesday, September 6th, from 9:00am-10:00am PST.

Where? Online via a live video stream. Sign up below to get the link before the class starts, and for the video to watch it afterwards.

I hope you can join us.

Sign up for the webinar here.

Share and Enjoy

The Financial Times have withdrawn their app from the Apple Store in response to Apple’s greed with revenue and customer data.

Apple not only demand a 30% cut of revenues, but also retain full ownership of the customer data.

Apple’s terms may well be acceptable to companies with a relatively unknown name, but the FT’s move may signify the start of an interesting trend.

The key point is that the Financial Times are not abandoning the app altogether. They are simply taking it out of the Apple Store, then offering it to their subscribers via a browser-based web app.

Bypassing Apple in this way enables them to retain all of the revenue and data, and chances are that the move will cost them almost nothing in terms of subscribers.

If the model works, this may prove to be a slowly-devastating blow to Apple, as other companies begin to consider their own options.

This has the potential to undermine the whole concept of the App Store, and turn it into little more than an overpriced portal.

My money is on Google being the first to fill the gap in the market. If they can make it easy for users to find software for their devices, then the playing field will once again be levelled.

Time for Google to intervene and rescue the free market economy.

Share and Enjoy