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The success of your testing program relies heavily on the cooperation of many people in your organization. In today’s By the Numbers column, “Assembling Your Landing Page Optimization Dream Team, Part 2,” Tim Ash continues with a look at more key roles needed for a successful landing page optimization program.

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Former Microsoft and Yahoo employee, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, is heading to WebTrends to become their Vice President of Marketing. Kaykas-Wolff comes to WebTrends directly from a business consulting firm, but previously held senior management roles at Microsoft and a management role at Yahoo.

WebTrends CEO Alex Yoder said, “Jascha is a veteran digital marketer, and brings a successful track record of developing and executing strategies that enhance customer experience and deliver meaningful results. His background with Internet and software companies, along with his first-hand experience with WebTrends, has ideally prepared him to lead the delivery of WebTrends’ vision and solutions to the marketplace.”

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TopRank Online Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association have just announced a partnership to develop and deliver a series of educational workshops on social media marketing entitled, “Social Media Smarts: Introduction to the Social Web, Tools and Tactics.”

With marketers facing tighter budgets in the coming months, social media marketing offers new opportunities for companies to engage customers, improve brand awareness and increase sales with budgets that are more recession friendly than many traditional marketing efforts.

Leading the workshop will be Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, who will introduce participants to the marketing opportunities with social media through best and worst practices examples. As you can see from the photo in this post, I’m much taller than Lee.

But, according to George Markham Director, Education Services at Direct Marketing Association, “Lee is a well rounded digital marketer uniquely qualified with over ten years experience as an internet marketing consultant and a background in corporate training.” Markham adds, “As a consultant working on the front lines of social media marketing for companies large and small, Lee brings first-hand knowledge and real-world examples to teach attendees how to develop a successful social media strategy.”

But I’m still taller.

The Social Media Smarts workshop will provide attendees with insight into blogging and blog marketing, social networks, microblogging, social news and bookmarking, video sharing, image and audio sharing, wikis and social media analytics.

Rounding out the workshop is a social media strategy exercise that will empower attendees to create their own social media strategy and develop a framework for building a business case within their organizations.

Lee is quoted in a press release as saying, “As a high demand digital marketing and PR agency, we’re seeing tremendous benefits from educating in-house marketing staff on the finer points of social media marketing.” He adds, “Offering both good and bad social media marketing examples along with strategy, tools, tactics and analytics can really empower companies to succeed.”

Now, I’ve served on panels with Lee. I know Lee. And that’s exactly the way Lee talks.

The first of the Social Media Smarts workshop series will be conducted in New York, December 4th and 5th, at the Microtek training facility in lower Manhattan. If you are in the nieghborhood, drop by and heckle Lee.

And remember: I’m taller. Actually, I was standing on my toes for this photo. Lee’s actually pretty tall, too.

TNS has launched the next generation of its online advertising monitoring tools. The TNS Digital Suites combines cookie tracking with the TNS 6th Dimension Panel for what they say is a unique analysis of online ad consumption. TNS says current tools overestimate audience sizes, but that their updated online ad tool provides target audience insight with little interference to the user experience.

Mike Saxon, Senior Vice President, Brand and Communications, TNS, explains the need for new measurement and monitoring systems, “For digital advertising, current tools are not meeting the industry demands because the fundamental relationship between advertising and the media that carries it has changed. TNS Digital Suite surveys our panelists, not site visitors, delivering the same kind of accountability and rigorous analysis for online advertising that our customers expect for traditional advertising.”

TNS is touting the benefits of the new tool as:

• No more unpopular pop-up surveys
• Control for cookie deletion, capturing ad exposure on multiple computers (home/work/school) for each panelist
• Accurate ad effectiveness measures for the target audience, using the 6th Dimension panelists profiles (over 150 panelists characteristics)
• Advanced analysis through longer surveys (up to 30 minutes long against 7-8 minutes)
• Surveys taken at the convenience of the panelists instead of the current proximate surveys which occur immediately after ad exposure
• Analysis available based on frequency and time since last exposure

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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Google Analytics is now offering Flash tracking. The tracking code is translated into ActionScript 3 programming language. While Google Analytics has been able to provide workarounds in the past, this new feature simplifies the way to track Flash, Flex, and AS3 Content.

Sprout, a company that helps businesses create rich media content, used the code to track videos across MySpace and iGoogle. The Google Analytics team talked to them about their experience:

What do you think of the announcement? Leave us a comment and let us know.

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The accountability of online marketing is only as good as the analytics an advertiser employs. In today’s vertical search column, “Offline and Online Conversions Tracking: Increase Your ROI,” local search expert Gregg Stewart explains that tracking conversions — both online and offline — can be tricky, but it is an important part of any online marketing program, especially for businesses with a local presence.

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Earlier this year, Google launched a media measurement tool called Ad Planner, designed to assist media buyers in their purchasing decisions. The tool was available in limited release by invitation/application only.

Now, the tool is available to anyone with a Google account. There are also some new features for Ad Planner.

Define your audience by keywords and geography - You can use search terms and location to help determine your target audience

Site results management - Choose among three new ranking methods to display results from the sites you’re considering running your campaigns on. Select from niche sites, larger sites, or a balance of the two.

Interactive bubble chart - this feature helps offers a visual that helps you compare demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors.

International demographic data - Check out audience data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

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Over at the Official Google blog, Dan Russell of the Search Quality team, has written a lengthy post on field studying search behavior. One of the things Russell discovered is that there is often a disparity between what people say they’re searching for and what they actually do search for.

There’s also a disparity between what they searched for and what they remember searching for later on.

Another area Russell dives into is eye tracking. Here’s a video showing the eye tracking of 3 different people searching for “school backpack.”

Last but not least, Russell explained the discovery that the “Advanced Search” page was really turning searchers off. They often were so overwhelmed or uninspired by the options, that they left the advanced options blank. They used that information to re-design the Advanced Search page.

All in all it was a nice little insight into how Google doesn’t just use tech testing such as Website Optimizer or Analytics to create a better experience for their users, but watching actual human behavior in person is extremely useful as well.

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Sometimes, a company’s marketing efforts can have an unintentional impact from a link building perspective. Such is the case with this fantasy sports community site focused on building communities in Facebook and other social media environments. In today’s Web analytics and ROI column, “Social Media Link Building: From Fantasy to Reality,” Eric Enge shares the successful strategy of Citizen Sports Network.

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Just in time for a weakening economy and the holiday retail season, Google will begin rolling out 7 new features to Analytics over the coming weeks.

The new updates are enterprise level features that Google will now be offering for free.

First up is an integration with AdSense. This one will be rolled out over several months, so if you don’t see it for a while, you’ll know why. You’ll be able to view AdSense performance based on page and referring site. Plus, you’ll be able to tell where you’re traffic is coming from geographically.

The rest of the updates will begin rolling out over the next few weeks. Don’t expect to see them all at once. You’ll more likely see them added one at a time. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Updated user interface. You may have seen this already today on your account. This is a cosmetic update with a cleaner look.
• Updated management interface. Soon, you’ll be given a summarized glimpse at your stats upon logging into analytics. Also included are added administrative abiliies to rename and delete accounts and profiles.
• Custom reporting. You can create reports based on the data that’s important to you and organized how you want to see it. Choose which stats you want on the x and y axis and what data you want to drill into.
• Advanced segmentation. Check out data on subsets of traffic. You can use this feature to compare traffic from paid search versus organic search, for example. You can integrate this with custom reporting, as well.
• Motion Charts This takes your data and visualizes it using colors and bubbles. Sound funky? Check out this video to learn more:

• New API - People have done some pretty creative things with Google Analytics from mobile and desktop applications to Grease Monkey scripts. Now, developers have it easier with the new Google Analytics API. Google is hoping that third party developers will dream up applications that aren’t currently floating around the offices in Mountain View.

Google has a YouTube channel dedicated to these updates. It’s a great way to learn more about how the new features work. Check it out and then let us know your impressions of these coming changes by leaving a comment.

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