Conversion Optimization Trends Shaping 2001
With ad budgets shrinking after the dot-com crash, 2001 was the year businesses started measuring conversion instead of just traffic.
The Archive
2001
A Practical Guide to Keyword Research
Keyword research uncovers the exact words customers use and the intent behind them, the starting point for SEO and paid search. Here's how to research intent.
How Online Reputation Changed Digital Marketing in 2001
The year search results, eBay feedback scores and archived newsgroup posts started mattering more to a company's reputation than its own marketing copy.
A Practical Guide to Online Advertising
A decision framework for where to put your online advertising budget now that the market has pulled back and spending has to justify itself.
A Practical Guide to Website Usability
If people can't easily use your site, nothing else in marketing matters. A practical breakdown of how usability drives conversions, trust and site design.
A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing Post-Dot-Com Crash
Affiliate marketing survived the dot-com crash better than most advertising, but bankruptcies and cookie fraud mean publishers must vet partners carefully.
A Practical Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Overture invented pay-per-click search, letting advertisers bid directly for placement. Here's how the bid-for-position model works and where it falls short.
SEO Grows Up: Forums, Consultants and Shared Jargon
How search engine optimization went from a webmaster's side task to an actual job title, with its own forums, consultants and vocabulary.
Building an Email Strategy After the Dot-Com Crash
How to build an email marketing program in 2001, a year when shrinking ad budgets pushed businesses toward the cheapest channel they already owned.
A Practical Guide to Google Ads
How Google's year-old AdWords program prices, targets and ranks ads today, and why Overture's rival model is pushing the industry toward paying for clicks.
How Search Engine Marketing Changed Marketing in 2001
Why the 2001 ad market crash pushed marketing budgets out of banner ads and into search engine marketing, where every dollar could be measured.
Case Study: Winning With E-Commerce
A 2001 case study in surviving the dot-com shakeout: how one retailer fixed checkout friction and matched spend to buyer intent instead of chasing traffic.
The Rise of Online Surveys
How online surveys evolved from expensive market-research projects into a self-serve tool any business could run, tracing the shift from 1994 to 2001.
Why Web Content Strategy Matters for Your Bottom Line
After the dot-com crash wiped out ad budgets, businesses that owned real content kept growing while banner-dependent sites disappeared. Here's why.
Mastering Conversion Optimization: A Marketer's Playbook
A step-by-step process for finding and fixing conversion leaks in 2001, using server logs and manual page comparisons rather than dedicated testing software.
The Rise of Keyword Research
How keyword research became its own discipline, from WordTracker's 1998 launch to search engines abandoning the meta keywords tag.
The Rise of Online Reputation
How eBay feedback scores, Amazon reviews and Google's 2001 purchase of the Usenet archives turned online reputation into something businesses had to manage.
How Online Advertising Changed Digital Marketing in 2001
The year online ad spending fell for the first time, and why that shock pushed the whole industry toward accountability.
The State of Website Usability in 2001
A federal accessibility deadline, a widely read new book and a still-splintered browser market defined what usability meant for businesses in 2001.
How Affiliate Marketing Changed Digital Marketing in 2001
Why pay-for-performance affiliate programs kept growing in 2001 even as the rest of the online ad market shrank.
The State of Pay-Per-Click Advertising in 2001
A snapshot of where keyword bidding stands three years after GoTo.com launched the model, and why it's outperforming the rest of the online ad market.
Building an SEO Strategy for the Google Ranking Era
A 2001 build guide written for a search landscape where Google's link-based ranking is now the thing every strategy has to be built around.
Common Email Marketing Mistakes in a Post-Crash Crunch
The mistakes that hurt email marketing programs in 2001, when tighter post-crash budgets pushed teams toward shortcuts that damaged deliverability.
The State of Google AdWords in 2001
A snapshot of Google AdWords in its first full year: still a flat-rate, self-serve experiment overshadowed by the pay-per-click model Overture had proven out.
The Rise of Search Engine Marketing
The origin story of pay-per-click advertising, from GoTo.com's 1998 auction model to Google AdWords' 2000 launch.