One of my favorite new features from the Yahoo Panama relaunch is the quality score. In working with Adwords for so long, I kind of felt like I was in a black box when writing new ads. The ads would get distribution for a few days in some campaigns then slowly tail off if the CTR wasn’t high enough, Yahoo gave us a good gauge in to how well your ads were stacking up in comparison to others. On some terms I’m sure a 0.6% CTR might actually be good, whereas a low-traffic highly targeted term, you should be looking at something between 4% - 10%.

So Google announced one more goody for us today. In particular google announced a quality score that will be in our accounts by the end of the week. I hope it works fairly similar to Yahoo, but anything will be an improvement into peering into the black box of quality score.

The problem there is they lose their chat when moving from page to page, but its a much better solution to connect with your customers.

With all the great stuff that’s happening in the low-end analytics world like Measuremap, Mint, and Crazy Egg I’m surprised to see how little progress is being made with the high-end packages (excluding the extremely expensive players like Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends and Websidestory which I didn’t test, but I’m sure there is something to them to be worth 10k for a license).

Overall I think Click Tracks had the best UI and was the best paid solution (the professional version), there are a few bugs with the system, but it’s pretty much on par with google analytics which is free. After all my research I’ve found that the combination of Google Analytics and Statcounter (another free software) was the best solution and gave me all the information in the way I want to see it.

This is how the analytics software outlook plays out for novice users that don’t need very much revenue tracking, use statcounter until there is something that you feel you are missing (like historical reporting). For the intermediate user with a low-budget, use google analytics if you can handle not having any support, or Click Tracks if you need some hand-holding. For the enterprise / big-business users, try the low-cost options, and if there are more advanced features you need build them yourself. You can have a good coder build an online app exactly to report exactly what you want for $5,000 - $7,000.

Today Google announced that any payments processed through Google checkout will be free until the end of the year. This is great news, I’ve always thought that the payment processing industry was a scam, and glad to see that Google is taking it on. Especially for online stores, when transaction processors bear little of the risk, but charge large fees anyway. As Google checkout becomes more ubiquitous I hope to see a push transaction processing fees in the near future. Some people may say that they don’t Google knowing all about their online business, which is probably true, but at the end of the day if they can push down inherent problems within the processing space, it is all the better. I have had problems integrating Checkout in the past, but am definitely stepping up the implementation so we can take advantage of this offer.

The one thing Google needs to do is make the process a bit more full-featured. For instance merchants should be able to enter transactions directly into the Google Checkout admin. If you are looking into a main processor I can say from experience that ChargeNational is one of the Worst Companies I have ever dealt with. If you want to work with a great transaction processor, call PayJunction, they have awesome software.

I have been meaning to write on this company since I heard about them, but then I read on Techcrunch that they upped the ante on shopping with the release of Smack Shopping, which allows users to see the price drop for an item, and can buy at these discounted prices at any time, but if they wait too long the inventory will run out. It is pretty much a dutch-auction for the Internet days, and generates interest much like a site like LuxuryLink does but with a way that is much more fun. Jellyfish is a genius in UI design, and able to take past concepts that may not have worked well online, and make them interesting. Can’t wait to see what they do next.

Unfortunately, when I went to the actual site, I found this:

What really gets me to wonder about this and the comparison shopping industry in general is 1. what do their advertisers think when they see that they are spending money on a search and not even displaying their ads, and 2. I actually think that comparison shopping is a legit way to do PPC arbitrage, but obviously the click thru rate or the CPC is not high enough to justify showing merchant listings (meaning these publishers make more money from adsense then they do selling their own inventory), so the whole industry must not be what it’s cracked up to be.

A new comparison shopping site TheFind.com launched today as an all-encompassing shopping search site. The Company has garnered a bit of buzz, with an interesting write-up at GigaOm and Comparison Engines. Although I like the principle, it’s really been done already, and with better technology (see ShopWiki). The real question here is, do consumers really care. If I search for a PSP on a couple sites, shopzilla, the lowest price I was able to get was $130 (15 results), shopping.com it was $115 (24 results) and on TheFind there were 10,427 results from 98 stores. I noticed one deal for “Sony PSP - System - Value Pack” from Shop4Tech (but when you go to the actual site the item was sold out).

But the real value these comparison services provide is that they have actual people indexing these products together. Is a Sony PSP - System - Value Pack a Sony PSP or some add-ons that come with a PSP? Being relevant in comparison shopping is more than crawling a bunch of sites and handing users useless information. The value-add for comaprison shopping engines is the data matching they have done and the attribute filtering they allow on their categories. Here’s a comparison of mp3 Players attribute filtering from TheFind and PriceGrabber.

Obviously there is a big difference here. When a user is actually trying to make a decision on which MP3 Player is right for them, TheFind.com just won’t cut it. I do see this service useful for someone who is doing meta-comparison shopping that wants to save an extra $2 on toner cartridges, but these people will check Bizrate, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber and TheFind anyway because they are that cheap. The only difference is that Bizrate and Shopping.com are all getting paid for their services, while TheFind is giving away the service for free.