Targeting on Intent and in-video ads – The Monday Oct 25th Roundup

It’s almost Halloween, which means that it’s almost time to find a new image for the roundup. And as always, with Halloween comes the rain, loads and loads of it.

This week we have a bunch of posts from around the web, including John Mu on how Google may change your title tags, adage on in-video ads, Michael Gray on conditionally changing content based on traffic intent, and James Kobielus on using analytics to tell who has the biggest impact on customer satisfaction.

• John Mu over at Google Webmaster Help has admitted something interesting: it ends up that Google may change your title in the search results if it finds it lacking.
• Adage reports that a new study by “the CW Network” shows that users watched 95% of commercials that accompanied streaming content. This is all good and fine, but lets face it: this data isn’t that useful. Why are people watching it? Are they going to be favourable toward it? Why is it that as we move more and more towards interactive, targeted marketing, these big advertising groups are still spending boatloads of cash on implementing last-generation marketing tactics?

• Michael Gray has another bit of awesome semi-blackhat coding theory on his blog. Specifically, how to conditionally change content based on traffic intent. This follows on the heels of his last post on why you would want to conditionally redirect traffic (for ad targeting, obviously).
• Six revisions has a set of random CSS tricks that you may not know about. Some of them are obvious (like using !important) and some of them silly (like enlarging a div on hover), but a couple are useful.

•  Avinash is back, this time with the best Web Analytics 2.0 tools. Some really great tools in here that I didn’t even know about, like Percent Mobile.
• Winning an award for longest title, James Kobielus’ blog has a post on using advanced analytics to spotlight people who have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction.

• Talk about going back to basics… Six Revisions has a post on hyperlink design, and why it is so important. I don’t know, at this point we’re so trained to see links that I doubt anything short of bad design is going to make a real difference.
• Cnet, of all people, has a story right now on how Google tested Google Instant.

• Adobe has released its own HTML 5 video player, which hopefully will be implemented alongside flash video players so as not to inhibit viewing on non-flash players.
• Take that UX guys! Apparently making fonts hard to read increases learning rates.