What’s remarketing you ask – great, glad you did. According to Wikipedia, Retargeting (or Remarketing as Google calls it inside Adwords) is…

is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion (in other words, the action intended by the site owner, typically making a purchase)

The reason I wanted to start a discussion on retargeting was to see..

1. Does it work?

and

2. Are you doing it? If so, with success?

Retargeting From the Consumer Side

Here’s my personal story with retargeting:

About a month ago, I was searching for a new car – specifically an Infiniti G37. I didn’t plan on buying one anytime soon, but I was just starting to research. I was on Google and since my search yielded a very targeted paid search ad right to the Infiniti site on the G37, I clicked it. I arrived on the Infiniti site to browse for a few minutes and research. Then, I left.

Well, since Infiniti wants to maximize all their paid clicks, they were able to leverage Google’s remarketing platform to notice that I had clicked the Infiniti PPC ad, but didn’t (in the eyes of whatever Infiniti wants me to do) convert.

Since then, for the past month, every site that I visit that’s showing Adsense, I see something like so:

Photo Credit: Google

You’ll notice that I was on a site about C++, nothing related to cars in this case at all. Typically, Adsense is site sensitive and will serve ads to visitors based on the site’s content, except in the case of remarketing.

You will see ads based on the premise that you previously visited a site from a PPC customer of Google (Infiniti in this case) that didn’t achieve their goal. They do this in hopes to get you (the customer) to convert. So will I convert and give Infiniti my information so they can sell me a new car?

If they keep this remarketing campaign up, I just might indeed. See how this applies to the customers you’re currently losing that don’t convert once they click your PPC ad?

Retargeting From the Advertiser Side

Google makes this super easy. Basically, you select your campaign and then tell the Adwords rule that you want target visitors on the Google Content network (ie. Adsense) that you want to see your ads that previously clicked your PPC ad but didn’t convert. It’s that simple.

Now it’s your turn to share… are you using Remarketing? Is it working? What types of conversion rates are you all seeing? I’d love to see what everyone thinks about remarketing/retargeting in general…

Cheers, Matthew

Like it or not, with critical mass comes targeting. With targeting comes spam and with spammers come fraud.

To that end, with the slew of recent facebook privacy changes, we need to make sure that our profiles are accessible to the level that we want them to be – not some default setting that fb decided was right for us.

For me personally, I try and lock things down, that’s just my choice. You might be different, but that is what’s right for me. Well, I thought I was pretty locked down but after running the Facebook Privacy Scanner tool, I was alerted that my friends could actually share my pictures and other data pretty easily via third party apps. Say What? I thought I had locked all that down. Looks like I hadn’t.

This is what the Facebook Scanner tool alerted me to:

From there, I was able to click the ‘fix’ link and I corrected the settings inside my facebook privacy settings.

Some of you might want full and complete open access to your profile, pictures, content, etc. so that it’s indexable and accessible to the entire planet. Or, you might want to really restrict what data is shared and not shared accordingly.

No matter which side of the fence you are on in relation to data privacy, Reclaim Privacy will alert you to what level of data sharing with the world (either on purpose or inadvertently) you’re currently distributing into the social abyss.

Special thanks to Shane Pike for alerting me to the Reclaim Privacy open source initiative. I hope it’s as helpful to you as it was to me this morning.

Here’s to locking down your data to the level that you want.

Cheers, Matthew

Related Articles:
7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook


Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative


Facebook Privacy Scanner

Here’s a summary from Microsoft about the Microsoft Tag technology:

Microsoft Tag is a breakthrough technology that transforms everyday things in the real world into live links to online information and entertainment.

From your mobile phone, simply snap or scan a Tag image anywhere you see it – in editorials, advertisements, product packaging, signs and storefronts – and gain instant access to Websites, videos, reviews, schedules, contact information, social networks, discounts, promotions and more!

All you need to do is download the free Tag reader on your web enabled camera phone and when you see a Tag, snap or scan it to interact with the world around you in new ways!

For today’s demonstration about the new technology from Microsoft, I set out to see how hard/long this would take. I’m happy to report that it took less than 5 minutes to get setup and running with Microsoft Tag. That’s right, I had this technology implemented and running on my phone and my site in under 5 minutes.

In today’s example, I’ll be using my profile from a new site that we launched this week – Real Estate Agent Resume. The possibilities are endless for real estate applications.

Example of using 2D Barcode Reading on your social profiles

 
After working at CareerBuilder for all those years (8 actually), resumes are very near and dear to my heart. I always thought it would be cool to give real estate agents a way to share their ‘public’ real estate resume if you will…and those ideas all culminated into the launch of a new site which we rolled out this week: Real Estate Agent Resume.

I’ll be using my profile on REAR as the example of how the Microsoft Tagging platform can be implemented, but you can easily use any link, URL, landing page, etc. for combining Microsoft Tags and your online presence.

You might be wondering what the differences are between Microsoft Tag and QR Codes. That article goes over the advantages/disadvantages of each type. In a nutshell, Microsoft Tag will allow you to create a unique tag that can be tied directly to any page, site, URL, etc. (Think your home page, Twitter URL, Facebook Profile, you name it). You can then print that tag out, put it on a listing flyer, business card, heck, even your car window if you wanted.

Next, anyone with a mobile device using the Microsoft tag reader just snaps a picture of your tag and voila, they’re taken directly to your URL that was associated with that Tag.

Creating and using your first Microsoft Tag

 
Creating a new tag is very simple. Once you’re logged into your account, just click create Tag, then assign a URL to the tag you’re creating. After tag creation, you’ll see it in your list of available tags to manage like so:

From here, you can download, email, print and take actions on the tag. If you wanted to get the tag as a PDF or JPG to use inside a flyer or on a site, just download the tag. Here’s my tag I created for my profile page on Real Estate Agent Resume:

If you’ve downloaded the Microsoft Tag Reader to your phone – (Currently supported OS/Devices include: Android,Blackberry,iPhone,J2ME,Java 2 Micro Edition,PalmOS,Symbian S60,Symbian S60 1st Edit,Symbian S60 2nd Edit,Symbian S60 3rd Edit,Symbian S60 5th Edit,Windows Mobile,Windows Phone), take a picture of the tag above with your phone and you’ll be taken directly to my profile page on REAR.

There are so many uses for this application in the Real Estate space – I’d love to hear what you all think? Do you think Microsoft Tag will catch on? If so, how can you see yourself using it?

Cheers, Matthew

Useful links from this article:
Download the Microsoft Tag Reader to your phone

Tag and QR code differences

Microsoft Tag

There are plenty of great tools out there for analytics: Google Analytics, StatCounter, etc. If you’re not tracking your stats for your site(s) today, then you definitely need to be looking at your web analytics.

If you’re new to analytics and aren’t even sure what’s important or where to start, then take a read of Peyman’s article Hits, Visits, Page Views – What’s Important?. That will give you a good intro as to what some basic analytics terms mean and what you should be looking at for tracking your site’s activity.

Today however, I wanted to introduce you to something that takes analytics to another level. Let’s face it, whenever we make a site change, the first thing we want to know is how our site visitors will interact with the new site design. Maybe it’s just an image tweak or new placement, or possibly a completely new home page design you’re about to launch.

The guys over at Clicktale have done an outstanding job of giving webmasters the ability to actually watch user sessions – yep, that’s right – by adding a couple pieces of javascript code to your site in the header and footer, you’ll be able to sample a % of your visitors (or 100%) of them into the Clicktale system. After doing this, it will give you the ability to watch exactly what your visitors are doing once they come to your site. Are they clicking something you have on the page that isn’t linked? Are they scrolling down to the footer only to find no content? This tool will show you what your users are doing on your site(s). Once you sign up for your free (or paid) account, you’ll be well on your way to knowing what your visitors are doing once they get to your site.

After being in this business for well over 10 years now, I’ll say this is by far one of the coolest pieces of tracking software I’ve seen to date. It literally made me say “WOW!, That’s amazing.”

Here’s an example of how the Clicktale investment paid off for us in the first 10 minutes of being used.

We all should be monitoring our sites from the server side for script errors (HTTP 500, 404′s etc.), either by looking at the raw log files from your server or by creating email handlers that intercept these errors and notify you when something’s broken on your site (if you’re not doing this already, or don’t know what the above sentence means, then stay tuned, I’ll be writing a piece on this in the weeks to come).

The one area that’s always been of frustration to me is Javascript errors. You can just ask Shane from our days back at Headhunter.net. They (js errors) can be so frustrating as an engineer because you can’t physically see them happen like you can with server side errors. Since javascript errors occur client side, how would you ever know if one happened unless you discover it testing yourself or using an automated testing tool like selenium.

That being said, we turned on Clicktale for sell my house fast, a new site we launched as part of a national TV campaign we started in January of this year that’s running nationwide on the Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox Cable footprints in major US markets. We wanted to make sure that we were not only monitoring server side errors, but also making sure our users were able to understand and use the site so we could ultimately help them in their time of need.

After turning on Clicktale for all of about 10 minutes, we already had several user sessions recorded and started the playback inside the control panel. What we found was amazing. Not only can you see every mouse click, scroll, and user filling out of a form on the site, you can also see any client side scripting errors. Beautiful! This investment had paid for itself in just 10 minutes.

Not only does Clicktale give you top notch user session play back they also give some incredible heat map tools as well as overlays. It’s probably only a matter of time before some of their features are incorporated into Google Analytics and other analytics software I would imagine.

We’d love to hear what your favorite analytics packages are and what tools you are using to monitor your site(s), etc. Do you have experience with Clicktale? What are you thoughts?

Cheers, Matthew

Over the course of our career(s), we’ve all gained valuable skills in the real estate niche. Some of us have been in the business longer than others, and some of us are more technical than others. That being said, as you reflect on 2009 and look toward 2010, I want to offer you a challenge: look at ways you can give back.

Maybe for you it’s mentoring someone that is new in the Real Estate niche, or maybe it’s sharing your technical knowledge with someone that hasn’t experienced as much as you have on the web. Whatever it might be for you, I encourage you start thinking about how you can give back in 2010. There is always someone out there that needs your help. You just need to figure out the best way to find them.

As always, my door is always open on the technology side if anyone wants to bounce any ideas off me. I’m more than happy to help out! Have a great holiday season all, and a great 2010. A special thanks to Drew and the Zillow team for the great asset that we’re all a part of – the Geek Estate Blog – without you, the contributing authors of Geek Estate, and Drew (+ team), we wouldn’t have this great collaborative resource where we can all learn from each other.

Cheers, Matthew

Happy 2010 everyone!

Everyone has an opinion: the CEO, the developers, the marketing team, your mom (ok, so maybe not your mom). But you get the idea.

Today, I want to introduce to you a tool that will allow you to eliminate the guesswork from site design. Yup, that’s right, no more “I like the blue button right there, because that’s what I think my users will like”. Why not let your visitors tell you what works best?

Enter Google Web Site Optimizer.

This tool (free) from Google will allow you to either A/B test your designs or use multivariate testing to determine what works best for your website. If your goal is conversions, you might be thinking, “Hey, we need more traffic” – but have you ever thought to focus on maximizing the traffic you already are getting to your site? That might be your golden ticket. By doing things like lowering your bounce rate as well as understanding your visitors better, you’ll maximize your ROI on your existing traffic.

Let’s take a quick look at how we ran an experiment at House Buyer Network. Our goal is to help motivated home sellers who want to sell my house. We wanted to understand how our visitors trust our brand a bit better.

For our testing purposes, we chose to run a simple A/B test. The test we ran looked specifically at showing our Thawte SSL Trust Seal on the home page and how that display could/would affect visitor trust in our brand. We’ve had our SSL for a long time but we didn’t show it to our site visitors. The test was turned on for about 5 days (more than enough time to collect visitor and conversion data).

Here’s a sample of the report that Website Optimizer provides:

As you can see from the graph above, the SSL Trust Test we ran performed better than not showing our Thawte SSL Trust Seal on the site. We were easily able to determine (via Google’s Website Optimizer) that the SSL Trust Seal on our home page was able to help improve our conversion goals (to the tune of a double digit improvement).

In a day where everyone has a design opinion, it might be time for you to start looking at Google’s Website Optimizer to eliminate the guesswork from your site design.

It will help and you’ll know really quick what works and what doesn’t. For a full story on how Extra Space (national storage company) used Website Optimizer, take a look at this video.

Good luck with your A/B testing to improve your site conversions and eliminate the guesswork from your website design! Be sure to comment on this post about how the Website Optimizer tool from Google helps your site…

Cheers, Matthew

To take his article a bit deeper on the testing side, I wanted to address a common question folks have when contemplating a new site design:

How can I test a new site without impacting my existing one (from both an end user and search engine perspective)?


Today, I’d like to introduce you to a little known (at least outside the developer community) process that resides on everyone’s computer that runs Microsoft Windows: the Windows Hosts File.

What exactly is a ‘hosts’ file you ask and how can it help me?

Great, glad you did. To use an analogy, the windows hosts file is essentially like a local train track switch that lives on your computer. Before you visit any site in your browser, Windows looks at the Hosts file first before going out to the outside world for DNS resolution (i.e turning a friendly domain name into an IP address to hit for the content).

By adding an entry(s) to your local hosts file, you can bypass global DNS resolution and tell your specific machine (and only your machine) which IP address to use (X) for the friendly domain name you’re trying to reach (Y).

Let’s take a quick peek at the file so we can understand how it works. Click Start, Run, then type in:



notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts






This will bring up the following file in Notepad:

Notice the last line in the file that reads: 74.125.67.100 www.se11411.com. I added this line into my Hosts file for our demo purposes and we’ll dissect below what that line means exactly. Most likely, your Hosts file’s last line will end with the 127.0.0.1 localhost.

The Hosts file basically has two parts you can edit to achieve the results we want. #1 is the IP Address and #2 is the friendly host name (i.e www.your-site.com your-site.com). The IP address is the first column and the second column is the friendly name of the site that we’ll be testing out.

For our demo, I am going to use a test domain we own: Sell411.com – This will show you how to make the domain “www.sell411.com” domain actually point over to some Google IP addresses to load the Google Home Page in your browser.

After making the changes you see above, when you open a new browser and hit www.Sell411.com, you’ll be greeted with the Google Home page as seen below:

Now why would you want to do something like this?

Here’s why: Other than the obvious of using this new knowledge you have to play a trick on your friend, we can use it for some powerful purposes when it comes to site testing.

For example, let’s say you have an existing site you have hosted with Web Host A, we’ll call the site MattSellsHomes.com. We have a new site design that we want to test out without impacting our production site and users. So we go ahead and setup the site on another hosting account (Web Host B).

Once we set that up, we need to get the IP address from Web Host B and then we can edit our local Hosts file as shown above. Simply put the IP address supplied from Web Host B into the Hosts file on your local machine in addition to the MattSellsHomes.com and www.MattSellsHomes.com (these are on the same line and tab delimited in the Hosts file).

Once you do that, you can save the file and close out your browser. You’ll also need to FTP all your site files to Web Host B as well. Once you do that, open a new browser navigate to the MattSellsHomes.com domain. You’re now viewing the site on the Web Host B IP address that you’ll be able to fully test on as well as make changes to without anyone in your production environment seeing.

That’s it, with a little knowledge about the Windows Hosts file, you’ll soon be ready to start making changes to your sites from a testing perspective without impacting your current users or search engine rankings while you’re tweaking your new site design, etc. I’d love to hear how you use the Hosts file in your environments if you currently leverage this process from the Windows Operating System.

I Hope this article will prove useful for you in the future for testing new site designs or for just playing a little April fools joke on your co-workers.

Cheers, Matthew

Important Note: Make sure you remove the Hosts file entry after you’re done testing in case your email is located on the domain you’re testing. Thunderbird or Outlook will try and use the Hosts file as well

My name is Matthew Swanson and I’ve been in the online world right about 10 years now. I started as a web developer at Headhunter.net in March 2000 working with Shane Pike. Headhunter.net transitioned as we were bought by CareerBuilder in 2002 and I worked on the site infrastructure team building the platform for about 7 years in several different roles. Before leaving CareerBuilder in 2007, I helped to launch the CareerBuilder – Facebook partnership.

In March 2007, I joined HBN Interactive as the CTO and run House Buyer Network – our service helps connect tens of thousands of distressed and motivated home sellers with our network of top tier Real Estate Agents across the US and Canada.

When I read Drew’s post about the new Local Market Explorer plugin (LME) for WordPress, I was giddy. We were on the verge of writing one of these internally for use on some of our domain portfolio, so when I read the team (amattie, jmabe, zillow) had cranked out a new plug-in to localize data across various markets and easily show the data within a WordPress installation, I was more than excited to dig in.

In the following guide (all the scripts and XML for this example are included in a zip file at the end of this post), I’m going to share how you can easily take the LME plug-in and integrate it into your site by loading any number or cities and states from a single XML file. Translation – Create many localized content pages from just a small bit of coding and one XML File.

The site from which we’ll use as our example today is Sell My House Fast. This domain has been in our portfolio for some time as we’ve built it out with tips and ideas for home sellers that need to sell quickly. Naturally, adding in local market data into Sell My House Fast made sense, but I wanted to leverage Local Market Explorer in a more generic sense from a geographic perspective – something that would allow us to easily leverage the plug-in across the entire site. Providing the capability to reach all the states in the US as well as include US cities, all with very little hard coded data points.

The remainder of this post is a step-by-step guide on how to leverage a single XML file along with a one PHP script to control which markets you can show on your website using the Local Market Explorer WordPress plug-in. This installation guide assumes you have a standalone version of WordPress installed on your server and also have FTP and .htaccess modification permissions to your files on your server. Also, if you have some basic PHP and XML knowledge, that’s a plus.

Step 1: Download and Install the Local Market Explorer Plugin

Once you’ve got the plug-in installed, you’ll need to grab the corresponding API keys that it requires to function. This is really easy to do as they’ve included links right from your WordPress admin panel to get your API keys.

After you’ve installed the plug-in and configured it as you would like to see it on your site/blog, you’re ready to take on the next step: adding your custom XML file and integrating it into your blog. For those of you that aren’t too technical, I’m going to make this as simple as possible.

Step 2: Download and Install the ExecPHP WordPress Plugin

For those of you that haven’t used ExecPHP, it’s a really sweet WordPress plug-in. It allows you to execute PHP code within a WordPress blog post or page. You just insert your PHP code to get executed on the fly inside your blog post or page and ExecPHP will take care of it for you.

Step 3: Create a Custom XML file for the cities/states you’d like to include

We could always hard code the path to each link we want to include in our site by writing something like:

Marietta, GA Real Estate Data

But this process can be tedious and doesn’t allow us to easily control how many cities show up on our site without writing a ton of code, or creating a ton of static html pages. And we’re all about decreasing the amount of code we have to write to get things done, right?

So the first thing you’ll need is an XML file. For our example, we’ll use a list of cities in California in our XML file – the file is named citystates.xml. Inside this XML file, we’ve listed some cities in the state of California.

Here’s a snippet:

This file will be loaded at run time via our page we create inside WordPress in just a few minutes. Now that we have the XML file with our cities defined, it’s time to put it to use. If you want more states and cities, just add them using the proper syntax as you see above with the proper xml nodes, etc.

With our XML control file created, it’s time to do the heavy lifting with a PHP script to consume the XML file. This will allow us to display the links easily on your site. We’re going to demonstrate putting this into a WordPress page, but you could just as well include this script in your WordPress sidebar as well by editing your template file.

Step 4: The PHP Page to process the Step 3 XML file you created
The name of our PHP script (page) we’ll be using for this example is load_states.php. This is a really simple PHP script (page) that basically looks at a single querystring parameter (“state”) and then loads the cities for that state found in the XML file. (Again, the zip file at the end of the article contains the files you’ll need to download to run this example)

Inside the load_states.php file, you’ll need to make a couple changes to 2 line numbers: line 12 – $_DomainName = “www.your_domain.com” and line #85 $_LocalXML = “path_to_location_xml.xml” (the path on your web server to the location xml file). Once you make these changes, upload the files to the root directory of your website.

Step 5: Time to test the Page directly…
Once you’ve made the changes to the PHP script (page) and updated your cities/states in the citystates.xml file, it’s time to hit the page directly to do a test. In my case, the page I want to hit in my browser will be: http://www.sellmyhousefast.com/load_states.php?state=California.

Note: this will be your domain, not the Sell My House Fast Domain as is with my example case.

You should see something like this is your browser:

Step 6: Create the WordPress page that will hold your PHP code.

Now that we have all the files in place, it’s time to create a WordPress page that will be the holder of the code that will load the citystates.xml file. In my case, I named the page “Sell By City” – you can see the page in action here: Sell by City

The most important part of this page is the content. You’ll want to take all the PHP code from the php script in Step #4 above and paste it into the page you create inside WordPress.

This will allow you to pass in content to the WordPress Page via the Querystring and let the ExecPHP plugin do the heavy lifting on the fly and create the content for the page dynamically. If you want to add more states or cities to your site, you can simply modify the citystates.xml XML file.

Below is how my example page looks when calling it via “Sell By City” page using the following parameter: sell-by-city/?state=California.

We’re almost done…

Step 7: Creating some SEO Friendly URLs

The final step will allow you to create some SEO friendly URLs for your site at the state level. For example, say we wanted to link to 3 different states on our site but we didn’t want to link to the pages like so:

sell-by-city/?state=California

It would make more sense to link to them directly so they would each be a unique page on the site – something like /local/California.html. That would give us a nice SEO friendly link we could use to link to within our site from maybe our sidebar or our header. To accomplish this last bit of modification, we need to make a slight change to the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^local/(.+).html load_states.php?state=$1 [nc]

Notice the three lines above. Line #1 ensures you have the Rewrite Engine on (if you are using WordPress you most likely already have this enabled, same with the next line (#2)). The last line is the one that does what we want. This basically tells the web server to take all requests to the /local/STATENAME.html path and really send them over to our PHP file we created in Step #4 above.

That’s really it. In the end, you’ll have a nice dynamic linking system that will allow you to target N number of city/state combos within your site all with links directly into the Local Market Explorer data. My approach is just one of many when it comes to what you can do with the Local Market Explorer plug-in.

I hope this post has expanded your knowledge as to what you might be able to accomplish with a little creativity along with some simple WordPress plug-ins and tools. If you have any questions, please comment on the post and I’ll be more than happy to help out any way that I can! I’d love to hear how you’re using the Local Market Explorer on your site!

Download the XML, PHP and .htaccess samples from this article

Cheers, Matthew