| LED Digest 2217: Open Rates, also Font Sizing |
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5 posts on 4 topics with discussions covering Email Delivery Fall Offs
and Open Rates, Anchor Text and Linking, Font Sizing, and a Weird Problem with CSS...
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======== CONTINUING ===============================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................. August 3, 2006 Issue no. 2217 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Email Delivery Fall Offs ==-- ~ Rich Dudley "There is a difference in deliveries and opens." ~ Nathan Holley "Open rates are unreliable at best, and totally worthless at worst." --== Anchor Text & Linking ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "You mention one link. That's not proof there were no other factors." --== Font Sizing [was: Fixed vs Fluid] ==-- ~ Tom Aman "[Your site forces] me to read it using *your* choice of font size." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Weird Problem with CSS ==-- ~ Tom Anson From: Richard J. Dudley Subject: Email deliveries Since I was on vacation last week, I may have missed if anyone brought this up or not. There is a difference in deliveries and opens. Most e-mailers measure deliveries as those which don't bounce back. If a spam filter catches the message, it may seem as delivered, but probably won't be opened. This would inflate your delivery rates, since most of the trapped messages won't reach the intended recipient. Also, it used to be a fairly common practice for e-mail admins to have a catch-all account, to filter any unknown addresses. I think this practice has declined, and unknowns are let bounce. This will decrease your delivery rates, relative to when a human was filtering messages. Opens are usually tracked when an image -- often a 1x1 px transparent GIF -- is downloaded. Most new e-mail software, including Outlook 2003 and Gmail, block the download of images by default. Even though people may be reading your messages, you may not know it. Rich Dudley www.bloomeryweddings.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Open Rates - Open Can of Worms! LEDers, I'm surprised no one has jumped on this -- open rates? Please... don't get me started. Too late, I started. This is a huge can of worms that really needs to be fully explored. This post is a start, anyway... Open rates are unreliable at best, and totally worthless at worst. First, what are they and how are they tracked? Open rates are so-called because mailing list providers, publishers, and software developers have coined the term for calculating the amount of "read" emails on a list. In other words, how many people actually got the email, opened it, and... well, at least opened it! Lots of ways to do it, but probably the most common is a simple graphic (invisible) embedded in the message. The email is opened, the graphic is called, and the logs show a "view." This view is tracked by server log analytics and the total amount of the list is compared with the total tracked views, thus the open rate is achieved. There are many problems with this. Firstly, ISPs and email providers across the universe have become more restrictive about what they let through, and blackhole lists, authentication, and other strategies apply the first layer of filtering. Second layer filtering may happen on the client side, where either a third-party service, a script for IMAP email, or Eudora's filering tool for POP is employed. Just an overview - but the summation is: lots of hops along the way to intercept the communication. What's the problem with the open rate? Briefly: - Many ISPs and email providers have begun initiating image-blocking within emails. AOL comes to mind, for instance, and there are others. - There's the issue of users who have configured their email reader to block all images from downloading, even while receiving HTML email and reading it while connected. Since they won't be able to download the image, they won't be ticked in the logs. - POP users who download email and read it later offline will not be tracked. Being offline is much more infrequent with so much wireless these days, but it does happen. Like on planes. These false negatives aren't tracked. - And what about Outlook's and Eudora's preview pane feature? A subscriber may never even glance at the email, but if it's loaded into the preview pane it will register a view, and a false positive. - Plain-text emails aren't trackable, unless specialized software is employed. The techniques involved impinge upon unethical ground, IMO, using header tricks and other nefarious schemes. I still think open rates can be helpful, though. For instance, using open rates as a general barometer of list health can be beneficial. Just don't put too much reliance in them. Dr. Mani spoke about his "trim the fat" technique for lists, and I think it makes a lot of sense. It is, however, a pretty aggressive approach and will probably lose you some good subscribers. For old lists, like Adam pointed out, "list fatigue" sets in. Old subscribers often equal low open rates, while newer ones are more prone to reading your emails. But don't equate older subscribers who are less likely to read your email with worthless subscribers. They aren't. For instance, I did a search of the LED archives for Bruce Clay, because I enjoyed his recent post on reciprocal linking and SEO conferences. I found 7 posts by him since 2003 (it appears the entire collection of LEDs isn't up, since I have earlier issues of LED Digest in my email folders somewhere). The last time he contributed here (previous to his recent post) was October of 2004 (see "The Future of SEO" in LED issue 1878). So for nearly 2 years he's been quiet, no doubt busy and not reading every issue of LED. But the point is, he posted again. And I'm sure he will in the future. The LED is an established resource - it has credibility. But the same philosophy applies to smaller, younger lists too (like most of mine). (:-|) BTW - I placed my search here: http://list.audettemedia.com/archives/led.html ... but I also recently visited the LED site and found another archive here: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/129/ ... Adam, which one should we use?! I get confused by too many options. Later, Nathan Holley the invisible man <Moderator Comment> Nathan -- use them both! The list.audettemedia.com archive is attached to our list software and updates automatically when an issue goes to the list. The led-digest.com archives are better organized, better integrated with the site and include both full issues and threaded discussions. My plan is to add them all in threaded form, and I've been working like a crazed monkey on it for the last few weeks. Tell me what you think. -adam -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Linking > My point was that I have seen the anchor > text of one link carry enough weight... - Bob Gladstein, LED 2216 And my point is that you have not demonstrated this. You had a great ranking, but you don't establish that it was due to anything in particular. You mention one link. That's not proof there were no other factors. It's this kind of slip-shod analysis that so permeates the SEO community that makes it difficult to believe anything the SEO community in general says or implies. That is what I mean by "groping blindly", to which you take offense. Now, either you feel Google changed its algorithm or you don't. If you don't, then what was the purpose of your comment? You're trying to have it both ways by implying that the algorithm changed and then insisting you made no such claim. > This was one link. I'm sure it's not the only example > of a single link carrying enough weight to rank a page > that does not contain that text. But it's not an "example of a single link carrying enough weight to rank a page that does not contain that text". You have to show there was nothing else involved, and you haven't done that. > Or maybe you should just quit claiming that > your beliefs are absolute facts. I never make such claims, Bob. You should know better than to put words into my mouth. Michael Martinez -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Font Sizing [was: Fixed width] > Look at my text on my site. You could > not do that without CSS. - Mary Lee, LED 2210 Whether or not you do it with CSS is beside the point but one thing you do on your site is force me to read it using *your* choice of font size. While my browser lets me set the text size to my preference, your site takes that option away from me and makes me use your choice. That makes viewing your site a real problem for anyone who *needs* to see a larger font for comfortable reading. While that is only one aspect of *control*, it is representative of the many problems that a fixed or over controlled design can cause for surfers. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Tom Anson Subject: Weird problem with CSS Hi fellow LEDers, I recently had a friend visit one of my websites (www.therapeutic-grade.com) and comment to me that my links (which are not underlined, but are in a teal color) were not recognized as links. Since I've wondered about this anyway, I decided to make the change on one of my other websites that uses almost the same CSS. On that site, I added unlines to links, but removed the underline and added a grey background to hovers. The result was a little unexpected. (You can see it at www.essential-vitamins.com). Basically, while some of my a:links have the underlining I was after, many of them don't (I have not changed the catalog CSS yet, so those pages don't count here). And anything that was bolded in the text does not have the underline. As far as I know, the grey background works for all of the a:hovers. Another interesting thing is that, at the bottom of the page, I have a link that says, "This page powered by...", but when you hover over the link, it disappears entirely. I'm wondering is someone among you could take a look at, for example, www.essential-vitamins.com/stemTech and let me know what I can do to fix this. Given enough time, I could probably work out the details to some degree myself -- but I really don't have two months to devote to this right now. If someone could be so kind: someone who knows what they are doing could probably fix this in 10 minutes. Thanks much. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com
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