However, for those cases in which there is no crm backing up the pricing strategy and generating some kind of pricing insight, we can actually use these tools to find out the right price range yelding the highest revenue per clic, thus helping us to maximize our ROI and online advertisement spending. I focus on this kpis because that very price, if referring to on/offline business, could not provide the same advantages in a offline environment: revenue per visitors refers strictly to the online side of the business, linking online advertisement spending to actual conversions.

In this chart we relate revenue per visitor with the price of the product adquired through the online channel. We tested different prices on a 2$ increase scale, and tracked down revenue per visitor. Considering that a lower price generates a higher conversion rate, revenue per visitor goes up, until elasticity to price seems almost irrelevant. Then prices still goes up, but the conversion rate decreases and so revenue per visitor.

Tracking the correlation in between price and revenue per visitor we can actually maximize overall profit, finding the right price (or the right price range) yelding the maximum ROI per visitor, hence giving us a pretty clear idea on the elasticity to price of our prospect.

Base price and upselling optimization
However this can turn pretty tricky if we consider a base price and and upselling price. The right price range for your base product might not be the same for the total upselling price. This case is pretty common in all those industry which strongly relies on ancillary revenues (travel and accomodation) and generic upselling (banks, insurance). In all these cases, there’s a different elasticity to price depending on product category and purchase intent, so this can affect directly your pricing strategy.

As for this chart, the optimal price range for the base product it is not the same as for the total upselling product. All this can be achieved pretty easily with a multivariate testing. At least a few hundreds of conversion might be necessary to achieve some statistical relevance, however most a/b testing tools already take care of this.

Besides that, it makes you understand quite well the strong drive Google employees have for constant optimization, something you don’t see in that many companies after all…

Here’s the full presentation: building faster mobile websites

In the last two months the value has increased by 10-fold and in the last year the value has increased by nearly 100-fold. Bitcoins are exhibiting tell-tale signs of a bbubble, just like the Tulip Bulb Mania in the 1600s and other countless bubbles since then.

We are currently at the point where average people re starting to take notice and think, “Maybe I should get in on this too” and start investing money into it, further perpetuating the bubble and giving it it’s last big expansion before it finally bursts. If you do want to get in on bitcoin don’t do it right now at the end of the mania, wait until it crashes and buy when it’s low again and everyone who thought they just became near-millionaires are licking their wounds from greedily holding on to their bitcoins too long.

References:
Bitcoin Resources
BitCoin Talk
Huge Repository of Bitcoin Resources

Throughout all our formal education years we grow a distorted and heavily biased vision of life and work, we build up absurd expectations and this eventually leads to equally absurd delusions. I’m referring to the idea that a multinational company might be the best place to work, while you soon discover that a small, agile and hungry for success startup might really be the best place to work, despite salary and other conditions.

This presentation flawlessy explain that, I should definetely go back and read it again every single time I find myself wondering about what might next step should be.

It’s been quite a long time since I haven’t had the chance to play around with any potencially “mainstream” kind of vulnerability and this is due to two main things: I’m pretty busy with consulting and I left the “security” scene years ago (and to be honest, I have never been really into it, except for a few contributions to sourceforge, a linux kernel module, some rootkit and a script to operate massive smurf attacks, highest point of my script-kid career).

Being pretty busy with consultancy makes me often forget the importance of the “lower” layers of the tcp/ip stack, those which makes this whole thing work, from the dialup cables to your ethernet controller up until your browser javascript libraries.

Who holds the knowledge of all this levels would master this whole thing (well robably not) but sometimes I’d like to examinate CEO and digital marketing manager (I become pretty familiar with this very type of human being lately) on their proficiency of the internet. Most of them just jumped on the internet bandwagon without any knowledge of what lies behind their screens, they’re obviously more keen on understanding the end result, since this whole thing turned into a wonderful money making machine and that’s what they are after and, as we all do, we do take this whole thing for granted. We never imagine that there might be a f* huge zero day vulnerability ready to be exploited straitgh out of your browser, messing everything up.

Back in the days ip spoofing was quite a common feature of the most common script kiddie. Still it reaquired some skills, or at least a good list of updated proxies and some scripting.

According to this article from @bilawalhameed, it seems quite an easy thing to exploit, nothing like a buffer overflow with memory handling and all that, its just about a few lines of code. Thanks to himself pointing this out to the community, relevant fixies to major browser and on their way, so this will be soon fixed, no worries, you can keep shopping safe.

Anyway, to me here lies the morale: do ever f* take any of this for granted. It is great and beautiful and shiny and it gets more usable and friendly day by day, but there’s a lot of work behind, lots of code and a complex but logical structure of layers which makes all these wonders happen and this might not work perfectly forever. Please be considerate while using this, and most of all be aware that it is as fragile as complex. I say be aware, because it seems that most people running this nowadays completely ignore its complexity and inner vulnerability.

A brief resume of all the presentation available here.

According to a study recently released by Nielsen, time spent online by users watching videos increased 45%. Also overall number of streams and streams by users increased significantly on month-to-month and year-to-year basis. If videos are considered this important by users, SEO on-site video optimization becomes a necessity, not just a secondary task to a more traditional search engine optimization.

First things first: file types currently crawled by Google

Google can crawl the following video file types: mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf, so long as the files are accessible via HTTP. Metafiles requiring a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported. Just make sure you’re video is available in one of the mentioned formats and you should be fine.

What to optimize videos for?

Videos can searched through Google Video, Youtube or generic Social Media platform.

However the same optimization focus might easily be applied to all of these sources, considering that Google alone and Youtube make up for a 90% of all video search queries. A slightly different approach might be considered if we want the video to spread virally through social networks, hence some strategic planning ahead of the launch and  strict

URL structure

As for generic pages, the video URL must comply with the most typical URL optimization tips: avoid too many nested folders, keep your video file name clear and with relevant keywords separated by an hyphen.

Page text

Content surrounding the embedded video is considered relevant as well, so make sure you add some relevant text description to your video in the same frame or page area. It must be something related to the video, able also to spark some interest on the users and make sure your keywords are always present.

File names

Always keep your keyword list at hand, you’ll have to make sure that the video file name contains at least some of the keywords you want to be ranked for.

Create a video sitemap

If your website features a significant amount of embedded videos, you’d better get a video sitemap. A video sitemap would definitely help Google when going through your website trying to index and categorize your content, making sure no video gets lost or not indexed.

How to manually create a video sitemap

1. Create a text file and save it with an .xml extension.
2. Write the following lines at the beginning of the file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

1. Write the following to the bottom of the file:

</urlset>

1. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.

<url>     <loc>http://www.yoururl.com/</loc>     <lastmod>2011-01-01</lastmod>     <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>     <priority>0.8</priority> </url>

1. Upload your Sitemap to your site.  The file should be located at www.yoururl.com/sitemap.xml

Google’s webmaster central states, “Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.  If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.” As such, each video URL entry in the sitemap must contain:

• Video Title
• Short Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

Further information on the topic available here.