What web marketing "pros" do: Buy traffic from China

I'm pissed. At midnight last night, while doing research for our class project, I learned the truth about what the "professionals" do for SEO. In between promises of organic results and "building links" for keywords, I was receiving reports showing how traffic to our site had improved significantly. Overall, I was actually pretty pleased.

However, last night, with only a few seconds of time, my world was shattered.

It was on the first page of Google Analytics. 75% of our traffic was coming from language "zh-cn." I knew that "cn" looked like Chinese but wasn't sure. I thought it might have been European as my wife does get a few calls from Europe from time to time but I didn't expect it to be 75%. It turns out it was Chinese and I got a little excited.

"We should make a Chinese language version of the site to cater to our audience!"

That thought lasted for about 14 seconds before I realized that the visitors were only on the site for about 3 seconds compared to 1min 40 seconds for US visitors.

Hackers?!

No. I'm pretty confident that the pros I am paying money to are scamming me by paying for traffic to boost the numbers when they send the reports to us.

This is a sad, sad industry but I am not a sucker any longer!
Simon

Marketing or market research? Facebook #fail

If you are someone who conducts market research, you know that people get a little creeped out when you start "surveying" them instead of just "talking" to them. As a researcher, you are trying to put the subject at ease but in the end, it's never quite the same since they know you are going to use that information...potentially for evil.

The Facebook study revealed to the world this week showed what happens when marketing and market research collide and go awry. Why exactly do people share their data on the web when in aggregate, almost no one would prefer that anyone have access to this data except the people they are explicitly sharing with?

It comes down to lack of options, network effects and the price: zero.

Consumers needs to vote with their actions. It's time to turn off Facebook and start going back to a world where not everything was open.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/jaron-lanier-on-lack-of-transparency-in-facebook-study.html?_r=0

Google buys Songza to sell ads?

Did Apple buy Beats to sell ads?

Clearly the answer is no but yet the WSJ quoted Songza CEO Elias Roman as saying that there was a potential for richer "targeted advertising." This seems a bit short-sighted to me as the acquisition of 5.5M subscribers just to sell ads seems a bit pointless. Google already runs its own Music service and wouldn't want to compete with itself in this space.

The obvious play is the integration of Songza's playlist approach into Google Music - perhaps as a minor reaction to Apple's Beats acquisition.

The battlefield for music streaming has yet to declare a winner but in the mean time, startups like Songza are cashing in.