Nick Wilson announced the debut in public beta of the Performancing Metrics service aimed at professional bloggers and their blogs.

Nick has just announced the availability of Performancing Mertrics, which he describes as “a professional grade blog statistics service aimed at professional bloggers.”

Last week, Nick Wilson of Performancing mentioned their new blog metrics service has been in Alpha testing and will be released to public beta soon, as in tomorrow possibly.

Measuring success of your online marketing efforts is a critical, but often underutilized in many web marketing initiatives.

Yahoo! and Marketing Management Analytics, Inc. launched a new service aimed at helping marketers improve their return on overall marketing investments by evaluating the offline sales impact of their online marketing programs. That’s press release speak for knowing if your eggs are in the right basket.

The search engine company has been rumored to be prepping a foray into advertising in a Chicago newspaper, and some job openings in Chicago could indicate Google’s focus there.

A note at the SEW blog pointed out this little gem on Google’s web site, where users can view search metrics by industry as they plan their paid search campaigns.

The essential business case of a website is self-service. To maximize value from self-service, you want a limited menu, a fast transaction and a significant volume of people.

MarketingSherpa just launched their 2nd Annual IT Marketing Metrics Survey. This Survey is focused exclusively on IT Marketers.

Marketers are constantly asking if RSS marketing works and if this can be proved.

Let me preface this report by citing advertisers in 2004 have spent 4 Billion dollars on search engine marketing according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO).

Do you know how effective each of your individual marketing tactics is? Many small business owners market in a vacuum. They spend money on brochures, advertisements and web sites with no real way to tie specific results to specific endeavors.

FeedBurner today manages 1,750 podcasts via SmartCast. That is a significant increase from 750 at the end of 2004.

WebTrends Participates in Marketing Performance Measurement Initiative With Other Technology Innovators and Top Marketers.

At the beginning of the Balanced Scorecard, a book on the new generation of performance metrics, authors Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton present an analogy to drive home their case. They ask you to imagine entering an airline jet cockpit, and in front of the pilot, you see just one gauge.

Well, we’re getting there. We’ve previously proved visitors clicking on a paid listing are of higher quality than “free search” visitors for the same search term, and now we see there is also significant variability in quality of visitor by the term itself, according to the last chart. Look at Customer Loyalty (CL). Much shorter visits, and lower download and newsletter subscribe percentages, but much higher bookmarking percentages. What could this mean, why the difference?

Many home-based online entrepreneurs keep their eyes on the ball, but fail to stop to check the score. In the rush to be online, these entrepreneurs focus too much on where they are going – e.g. increasing their traffic and sales, marketing their sites, improving their content, attracting a community of loyal visitors, and other goals. While important for the success of an online business, they often overlook checking where their businesses are. Many Web publishers fail to understand how users come to the site and what those users do once they get there. Not knowing where exactly a business stands is risky, particularly on the Internet where things change so rapidly.

Recently, I talked with a speaker about her “extremely successful” Website. She based this opinion on the fact that she was selling several e-books every day and generating “some calls”. When I asked if she was reviewing her traffic analysis, she said “No, why should we – it’s clearly working – we can tell that from the sales”. I didn’t ask if she knew how her sales and calls compared to the actual visitor numbers for the site – I suspected that she’d have been shocked to learn how many more opportunities she was losing.

Many companies acknowledge the importance of brands as assets that hold leverageable value and can build and sustain competitive advantage. But in the current challenging economic environment, investments require careful consideration – and measurable proof of return. If brands are to be considered assets, they should be held to the same standards of performance and measurements as other assets, such as real estate or financial investments.

Business leaders worldwide are becoming more aware of the importance of assuring the security of information assets. Information-security issues are among the hottest topics being addressed in trade media for organizational governance, executive, financial, audit, and IT leaders. Conferences covering the latest information-security issues, tools, and problems abound in both the public and private sectors.

For companies, embracing change means seeking out and adopting best practices. Benchmarking–the research and analysis of quantitative, empirical data–is a way to isolate weaknesses and strengths and to make connections between best practices and performances. Once these connections have been made, determining which practices are appropriate for an organization to adopt becomes a competitive imperative.