In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 16, 2007:

Cookies: expiring sooner to improve privacy [Official Google Blog]

Last month Google pledged to make changes to it’s cookie implementation in response to several privacy reports that slammed the search engine’s policy of setting cookies that don’t expire until 2038. The idea, according to Google, was to keep users from having to keep entering and re-entering their preferences (which are stored on the cookie). To address the issue, Google’s cookie policy has been changed in two main ways: 1) cookies will be set to expire in 2 years 2) users who return to Google will have their cookies automatically renewed before that 2 year period passes. If you visit Google once - and never return - the cookie will expire in two years (assuming you don’t deleted it first). Those of us who use Google (or a Google property) daily will have their cookies auto-renewed at some point over the next two years. I don’t understand why 2 years was selected, though. If auto-renewing of the cookie is an option, why not have those cookies expire in 6 months… or 8 months… or even a year. Surely if that much time has passed since someone visited Google they’ll have forgotten that they set any preferences anyway!

How Successful is Your Landing Page? The 3 Key Metrics You Need to Know [Copyblogger]

So what are the “3 key metrics”, you ask? According to Roberta Rosenberg (and Practical Ecommerce), the three key metrics to track landing page successfulness are: 1) conversion rate 2) page abandonment rate 3) cost per sale. Conversion rate is simple: it’s the percentage of visitors who buy, sign-up, contact, or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish on your landing page. Page abandonment rate refers to the number of people who hit your landing page… and then hit the road. And cost per sale is a measure of how much you spend on each sale (when advertising, marketing, maintenance, etc is all factored together). A lot of people tend to focus on conversions and forget that many other factors play into the successfulness of any campaign online. In fact, if you’re not thoroughly analyzing as much data about your visitors and your site as possible, it’s quite possible that you’re missing out those coveted conversions.

Happy Monday night, everyone! See you tomorrow…