Perception is everything, especially when it comes to the realm of marketing. Take “SEO.” Terms like “snake oil salesman,” “scammers” and “black hat” quickly come to mind. Before I started working in the industry, I had the same word associations.

On the other side of the marketing spectrum is the trendy title of “growth hacker.” Silicon Valley’s Internet marketers have adopted the title, made it trendy and use definitions like: one who’s passion and focus is pushing a metric through use of a testable and scalable methodology to describe what they do.

At it’s core, I firmly believe in what the term “growth hacker” stands for. I list it on this website and on my Twitter profile. With big data so prevalent, we need to change the way we make strategic marketing decisions in the Web 2.0 world. As data-driven marketing has evolved, so too can the title.

But self-proclaimed growth hackers are often capable of the same evil that SEOs are (fairly or unfairly) known for.

LinkedIn uses confusing terminology and spams their users email contacts, sending “invites” to everybody you have ever emailed.

AirBnB created fake email accounts and spammed Craiglist.

To a growth hacker, those might be smart ways to promote through available social channels. But is it really that different than somebody executing link spam through a plugin? Both are misleading users to grow the reach of a business.

What you call yourself or what your profession is doesn’t make you “black hat” or a scammer. It’s the strategies you create, how you execute them and what moral code guides your actions. 

Here’s a simple code snippet that will allow you to randomly display different ad formats using Google AdSense. You’ll want to set up each ad as a separate custom channel in AdSense so you can track the results as they come in. Testing different ad widths, heights, formats, etc can help you maximize your revenue. See which channel provides the highest CTR and, ultimately, revenue. I use this on a few sites to find which ad formats work best.

A few observations I’ve had over the years with testing ad formats:

• Larger ads tend to have much higher CTR
• Wider ads improve CTR
• Rich media ads have higher CTR (and pay more)

You’ll want to test everything though, as the most effective option depends largely on your website’s layout, content and audience.

Google’s much ballyhooed Penguin 2.0 update was expected to target sites that engaged in link spam, but it looks like there’s been a host of other changes. I wrote how localization is much more prominent in organic listings already.

Another change I’ve seen is the ever-increasing rise of brands ranking highly in Google’s search results. Big box brands like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Overstock and more rank for nearly every ecommerce keyword. It’s rare to see smaller ecommerce stores (read: small businesses) ranking at all in the top five positions and sometimes even on the first page.

The biggest winners of the Penguin 2.0 update were all huge brands: YouTube (Google owned), eBay, Google, Amazon and Walmart.

How do small businesses compete as these giants take away more and more visits online? They seem to have two options:

1. Invest in becoming more of a brand online. This makes sense, but the level of investment needed to compete with big box retailers is significant. Most smaller ecommerce stores simply can’t afford it.

2. Start leveraging user generated content on 3rd party sites. Powerhouse sites that are ranking extremely well like YouTube, eHow and Slideshare are all user powered. For a lot of ecommerce websites, you’ll have a better shot at ranking on page 1 in Google for difficult terms by creating a video or slideshow on a 3rd party site than you would investing in your own domain.

This is the sad reality of Google’s heavy push on brand importance in search engine results. The only hope for your average online retailer is to bow down to Google and create content on a Google or Amazon owned property since they are more likely to be ranked highly than a standalone site.

Google has said that they are really pushing user experience when it comes to ranking pages in their search engine. Eric Schmidt says “brands filter out the cesspool.”

Brands certainly have their advantages: mostly consistent experience, larger inventory, low prices.

But they don’t have the knowledge and passion that a smaller and more focused company has. If you are buying a product, you’re likely to find more relevant and trustworthy information from a specialty store.

While Walmart and brick and mortar big box stores are pushing more and more small businesses out, the web provides a chance to level the playing field for entrepreneurs and mom and pop shops. It’s just as easy for a web user to visit Walmart.com as it is to go the website of your local furniture store or clothing shop.

The web provides such a unique opportunity to place more value on knowledge, experience and quality in the marketplace yet Google keeps pushing big box retailers more with every update. (Perhaps the shift is because Google themselves have become the biggest of all big box retailers.)

Google’s Age of Brands is starting to look a lot like the physical stores in American small towns. When big brands can easily rank for anything they want to in Google, you end up with Overstock.com selling insurance, Amazon selling groceries, Google selling airline tickets, and the Huffington Post as the leading authority on “divorce.”

Neat little work around for those pesky 0 second visit durations in Google Analytics.

It involves adding a jQuery plugin that tracks how far down the screen users scroll. You can use that as a more useful metric for interaction time on a web page.

It’s not technically eliminating the way Google classifies visit duration, but improves upon their poor data by giving you a more accurate metric.

Rand Fishkin tweeted something curious last night. His blog was featured on the front page of Hacker News and recieved over 25,000 visits. Nice.

But all the traffic should up as direct in Google Analytics.

The reason for this? HN is forcing https and is no longer passing referral data. This is similar to Google’s move to SSL that created the (not provided) fiasco.

Sad to see a huge site with as much influence as HN block all referral data. It’s harmful to them as there’s no way to quantify the impact of being on the front page of Hacker News anymore. Gone will be all the “Here’s what being on the front page of HN looks like” posts.  I also worry that sites like Reddit might be next.

A lot of sites are already losing around 50% of their search data with (not provided) and browsers with SSL search enabled by default. There’s not going to be any referral data left if large sites keep moving to https.

Here’s the post I wrote this week for our company blog at WebpageFX.

It has lots of ideas on how to scale your web traffic. As your site and company grows, you need to adjust your online marketing strategy accordingly. The most successful businesses online are the ones who can quickly move from 0 visitors to 1,000 and from 1,000 to 10,000…and so on and so forth.

The best way to acquire visitors and customers 1-100 is much different than visitors 1,000-1,100. Scaling your traffic sources can be a tricky thing. Hopefully my post provided some insight into that process.

A fascinating study on data retrieved from Facebook by Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram|Alpha has a personal analytics app for Facebook that they’ve collected data from.

Interesting thought process on creating a process to identify spam. Should be a way to come up with a pretty accurate solution measuring outbound links against word count, PA, DA, inbound links, etc.