Optimizing Bids, Drupal for Designers and GA Hacks – The Monday Oct 18th Roundup

Late roundup this week as I’ve been busy all morning. We’re finishing up the details of our new blog and if we can get some slave labour coders to transmit our BlogCFC posts into our new WordPress blog, then we’ll be up in a jiffy.

This week we’ve got sneaky ways to optimize product bids, Drupal for designers, and GA hacks. Fun stuff.

• We start the week with Mailchimp and their latest research into spammy email design mistakes. They decided to send a bunch of emails to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and see what happened. The result was a huge number of false positives. The post then goes on to explain some of the key mistakes.
• Get Elastic has some sneaky ways to optimize product bids on Comparison Search.

• Oh InspiredMag, where were you when we were re-doing vkistudios.com? They have an introduction to Drupal for Web Designers.
• Microsoft is warning that a wave of java exploits have exploded, bursting past pdf exploits.

• e-nor has a guide to measuring the impact of brand marketing using Google Analytics. At issue is the last-click attribution model which makes it so that if someone comes to your site, looks around, then comes back directly later, that is attributed as their entrance source. If you want to watch branding results it becomes difficult. Their solution consists of changing credit to the last campaign/traffic source regardless of whether the visit was “direct” or not.
• Yesterday SEOMoz posted 5 quick GA Hacks including filters for counting ” ” and “/”, segmenting funnels, and more.

• Cennydd Bowles wants us to end hover “abuse” now. While I appreciate a lot of what he says, hover/onmouseover provides a lot of functionality that would be significantly harder and more time consuming using combinations of onclick and other functionality.
• I’ve posted these a few times before, but this time from Six Revisions: Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices.

• Unbounce has a how-to on capturing leads from Twitter in three steps. I won’t spoil them for you.
• Surprise surprise, a bunch of Facebook apps have been found to violate their privacy terms.