Although Apple’s stock ear buds are great for casual listening in a quiet environment and for speaking on the phone (and I have no shame in saying it), they suck at work because co-workers can hear your music and they are useless outside because of ambiance noise.

In a nutshell, I was ready to risk uncomfortable in-ear headphones for unconditional sound quality. And at $159, they’re not cheap either.

So I bought these suckers and I will have to agree with the press, they sound awesome.

A couple of thoughts:

• In-ear headphone are not great for hands free calling because they make it hard to hear yourself which is weird, trust me.  Come to think of it, I should have bought the standard model without the microphone, which is a bit ironic (more on that later).
• High-end earphones comes with all sorts of accessories like filters, cleaners, tips and what not. I like it.
• Filters do get dirty so you need to change them… the Audéo comes with a couple but I can see how you would need to buy extras after a year or two… definitely makes you want to clean your ears more often
• I prefer Audéo’s default filters (the grey ones) which have a flatter sound.

Now for the ‘free’ part

The microphone stopped working (everything else still worked fine) so I send a 2 lines email asking how I could return them (they have a 2 year warranty, which is surprising for something that have a life expectancy of one ‘oups, I just sat on my bag’).

A couple of days later I receive a FedEx package. I had no clues what it was even looking at the shape of the box, which is always fun. It was a brand new pair of Audéo. Say what!?

I didn’t even talk to the guys. I sent a 2 lines email. That’s it. I didn’t even get an reply email from them. Zip. Nada. Well except from my brand new earphones.

A couple of weeks later I actually saw that a FedEx envelope came with the package, presumably to send the defective earphones over… It wasn’t really clear to be honest so I’m keeping both until I hear from them, he he he.

I don’t know if it’s good or clueless customer service but at this point, I don’t really care. My recommendation? Grab a pair: they sound great, they’re comfortable and if you’re lucky, you might just get 2 pairs for the price of one.

booya

If you want to see more about those babies, here’s an unboxing video (not from me):

You read an article on The New York Times, scroll to the end, just when you’re about to leave, a right to left sliding article headline appears. Of course this article is related to the one you were just reading. It’s the ‘related articles’ concept taken one step further. The sliding movement brings attention without being annoying.

One more magazine & and pack of chewing gum in your grocery cart…

One more page view in your browser.

Someday, maybe a decade from now, some new technology will rise and allow other companies to threaten Facebook. But until then there is little to stop them. Their march to dominance has just begun.

So here what it looks on theglobeandmail.com:

1. Land on an article I find interesting and click on the new “like” button (you can add a comment if you want):

Like an article

2. Not only it will be posted on my Facebook feed:

Facebook activity feed

3. But it will be right there on theglobeandmail.com for my Facebook friends to see (home page and article)!

Hey JF liked an article, let’s go see what’s it about :

theglobeandmail.com home page

theglobeandmail.com article

For example, let’s say I copy this sentence:

Here is what I get when I paste it:

Fast forward to today. Those questions have been answered. Facebook is profitable and probably is running at a billion dollar plus revenue run rate today.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/25/the-age-of-facebook/#ixzz0m8TvpbFP

You can see that it adds a link directly to the article (Read more: …) and include some kind of tracking code behind a hash tag.

Works in Chrome, IE & Firefox!

Nice!

This is the horror story of a guy who tried to get the bounce rate metric in Omniture.

PS: No Omniture rep where injured during the making of this story.

Chapter 1: What’s the formula?

Bounce rate is kind of a standard web analytics metric, no? Well not for our friends at Omniture. First of all, you need to build the metric because it doesn’t come by default. I quickly found the formula in the help section:

[Single Access] / [Entry Pages]

Once my calculated metric “Bounce Rate” was built, I thought it was just a matter of selecting the metric in your reports, right? That would be too easy…

See, in SiteCatalyst, you cannot use traffic metrics with conversion variables. Since bounce rate is built from traffic metrics and your campaign codes are stored in a conversion variable, the bounce rate is not available in the campaign reports! Snap!

Chapter 2: New traffic variable!

Ok, I am not discouraged. If I need a traffic variable, traffic variable it will be.

The solution was to set an s.prop to the campaign tracking code in our JavaScript file. (In this particular implementation, the campaign code is pushed on every page and uses the GetValOnce plugin to send it only once to Omniture.)

Setting this s.prop would allow campaigns to show in traffic reports with their bounce rate. Everything was smooth running until I realized all campaign bounce rates were at 99%…  Damn it! What was going on?

After investigating the issue, I discovered that ‘Single Access’ in Omniture is not calculated on page view per se, but rather calculated on the value of the s.prop. Hence, let’s say

1. you land on a page where s.pageName=”Search Results”
2. you visit a second page where s.pageName=”Search Results”
3. then you exit the site

Then looking at a page name report, this visit would be considered a bounce because it has never visited a page with a page name other than ‘Search Results’!

Now, since all page views of a visit had obviously the same campaign code (unless a visitor used 2 campaign codes during the same visit), all visits were considered ‘Single Access’! Crap!

Chapter 3: Google & Twitter to the rescue!

Back to the drawing board… Let’s hit Google and see what it has to say about it:

On the Omni Man Blog, I found an article explaining how to concatenate the page name with the campaign tracking code in an s.prop. This allows to enable pathing and see the bounce rate for specific campaigns.

This solution works and I especially like the ability to see bounce rate for a specific page/campaign combination. But it has one big caveat: there is no way to apply classification on your campaigns! So you’re stuck with bounce rates at the campaign code level; no way to see bounce rate for a channel or sub-channel for example which is a problem when you have hundreds of campaign codes. On top of that, campaign codes are not always self-descriptive… hence why classification is so handy!

Seeing myself in a dead-end, I post the following Tweet:

To my surprise (I’m not what you would call a Twitter power user) I quickly get two replies:

From @adamgreco:

And @OmnitureCare:

The first one referred to the article I had already found and the second one was another very recent article from the Omni Man Blog.

I soon discover that this second article explains how to fix the individual tracking code problem and see bounce rates at the traffic source & channel level. The solution involves setting an s.prop to the traffic source/channel on the first page visited, then setting the same s.prop to a dummy value such as ‘Did not bounce’. The goal is simply to have a different value on the second page so it’s not considered a ‘Single Access’. Quite clever actually. Great!

But I quickly spot another issue: the classification needs to be done on the fly by the JavaScript file. This can be done by looking at unique identifiers for each traffic sources (ex: ?afflD= for affiliates) . Problem is, I don’t have unique identifiers for all my channels. Bummer!

A second solution is proposed: use a DB Vista rule. But I don’t like DB Vista rules much. They cost money, are not super easy and quick to implement, and you lose a bit of transparency and control since only Omniture client care can bring changes to them.

Chapter 4: The path to illumination!

And this is when we found another solution! Drums rolling!

Inspired by the solution just above, we set an s.prop to “Did Not Bounce” on the second page of a visit. But instead of identifying the channel thought the Javascript file or though a DB Vista Rule, we set that s.prop to the campaign tracking code and use SAINT classification to identify the channels!

So it goes like this:

1. Set the campaign tracking code to an s.prop
2. Check the s.prop to see if it matches the s_campaign cookie value that gets set by the getValOnce plugin. If the two values match, set the s.prop to ’Did Not bounce’

Et voilà! Simple non?

Chapter 5: The path is illuminated, but I still need a flashlight

Now that I have bounce rate by channel, what about bounce rate for the entire site? For some kind of reason, the metric was not available under ‘My Calc Metrics’ top menu.  I’ll spare you the details and jump right to the conclusion: I found an article on Google that explains that the site bounce rate is actually another calculated metric formula!

[Total Single Access] / [Total Entries]

By selecting any traffic report, just add this metric and you will see the site bounce rate (which is weird, but c’est la vie)!

Final Thoughts

Bounce rate is just one of the many frustrations that come with SiteCatalyst (“sorry, you can only do this with Discover” anyone?). Simply put, Omniture SiteCatalyst feels like a cross between an 800 hundred pound gorilla and an 800 pounds sloth. It’s uber powerful but moves so slowly, it’s maddening.

Useless? Maybe not. But with Google Analytics constantly releasing new features, Omniture is doomed to stay isolated as a niche player only appropriate to companies with full dedicated web analytics teams composed of both analysts and programmers.

Avinash 10/90 rule has never seemed so relevant…

This ad finished in third place during Google's display ad builder contest. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/04/display-ad-builder-contest-winners.html

Image ads on Adwords’ content network don’t get the praise they deserve. In my experience, they get much higher CTR & conversion rate at just a tad higher CPC (resulting in a much lower CPA).

Want to get started with Google Adwords image ads? Here’s what you need to know:

Sizes

Sorted in order of impressions (your mileage may vary). In terms of click through rate, box formats tend to do better .

Image ads

1. 728×79
2. 300×239
3. 160×578
4. 468×49
5. 336×269
6. 120×578
7. 200×189
8. 250×239

The sizes are non-standard to make room for a display URL & a Google link.

Flash ads

1. 728×90
2. 300×250
3. 160×600
4. 468×60
5. 336×280
6. 120×600
7. 200×200
8. 250×250

More information on sizes

Specs

Image ads

Static (non-animated) image ads can be formatted as .JPEG, .PNG, or .GIF files.

Image ad files must be 50K or smaller.

Flash ads

See the complete technical requirements

There is a lot to it so make sure you read carefully. In a nutshell, you can’t do rich media (ex: no expandable banner), animation is restricted to 30 seconds, no extra calls is permitted (ex: no countdown based on a server’s time), no audio, make sure you include the clickTAG etc.

More resources:

• Image Ads on Google Adwords help
• Complete advertising policies for image ads
• Examples of image ads

It did for me

Can you spell BING?

Credit to Adam Muscott

Update – May 5th, 2010

This new interface was officially released today!