All 2 entries tagged Ms-Olsb

Form Spam via MS Office Live SB to a Sequence of Sign–ups

Writing about web page http://ppcpromotion.co.uk/adwords-audit

My website ppcpromotion.co.uk is hosted on a MS Office Live Small Business site. I used their built-in form-builder and was going to use their paid-for emailer solution too.

For three months now I have been receiving SPAM messages sent via these forms. Microsoft did not have any safeguards such as a catchpa or email verification.

The SPAM was steady, not a flood, at about 100 alerts per month. The example above has one of the more publishable titles and the large text box was stuffed with weblinks. I could have used an external form designer such as FormLogix some time ago but I was doing some research into Email Autoresponders for a client so elected to thy one of these out.

Microsoft seemed to abandon the CRM space by removing their emailer so I knew I had to move. I have used iContact. These were not brilliant but the costs were realistic and their forms plugged into the site and just worked well where others failed. My leaner forms with meaningful action buttons have already proved to be more effective that Microsoft’s standard one that asked all subscribers to Submit. Even with email confirmation conversions have trebled.

The thing that I am still searching for is an autoresponder that will send the next message when triggered by an action, clicking a link or visiting a page, rather than just by number of days or manually.

I have not yet reviewed the Market Leaders such as InfusionSoft; sorry, Price on Application offers go to the bottom of my list. But I looked back at the use of this by emailer experts such as Perry Marshall and realised that he had got me to sign-up afresh for every list I was on. This is actually good practice but if someone accesses your free download this seems a good time to offer more free stuff. Can this be done? If you want to see how powerfully an autoresponder can be used, just click on Perry’s ad, right and sign up for his 5 day tips & free chart. His Friday emails are always entertaining and sometimes invaluable with the alerts that he sends.

Updated to point to the latest site, still hosted on MS Live SB.
I have been using iContact’s forms for signups since then but recently their policy will not double-signup emails with admin@ sales@etc. They will not send the confirmation emails. This would have blocked 30% of my clients over the past 2 years!

Robert McGonigle : 31 May 2009 16:55 |  Tags: Conversions Email Autoresponders Form Spam Improving Conversions Ms-Olsb |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Online Webstats from Google Analytics, etc just keep improving for you.

Writing about web page http://www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html

I have recently been trying out the new Advanced Segments on Google Analytics. This is just one of several new ‘enterprize class’ features that have been introduced.

I have been using both Analytics online and Sawmill server log processing offline alongside each other for a couple of years. Initially the friendly, fast interface of Analytics could not match the ability of Sawmill to filter, then slice then slice again through the data. Sawmill needed loads of processing power but our two students who tackled data mining of the www.wmccm.co.uk visitor data last year still found most of their results using Sawmill. Their work also helped the team to use Google Analytics better.

Advanced segments represents an enormous catch-up move by Analytics. I have used this to pick out our visitors who view the tenders on CCM and confirmed that these represent about half of our company registrations with two easy clicks. I have not updated to the latest Sawmill release and I am sure that they are also progressing rapidly as a market leader.

It was looking at two /stats pages last night provided by ISPs or their web developer that shocked me into blogging about this topic. They were so outdated, and frankly pathetic, as to be of no real use. Neither even matched the basic free online Xtreme service of 3 years ago. The problem is that these depend on someone to update the stats package, to download the latest tools.

If you are professional enough to need to use a complete package such as Sawmill then there may still be a good business case to upgrade to their latest licence. But the real advantage of the ‘computing in the cloud’ offerings from Google, Microsoft in their Live Office SB suite, etc. is that they continue to improve without you having to do a thing!

Robert McGonigle : 07 Nov 2008 12:14 |  Tags: Advanced Segments Google Analytics Ms-Olsb Stats Webserver Log Webstats |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem