luni, 21 noiembrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Official Denial in Greece Regarding "Indefinite Liquidity and Banking Stability"; Is a Worthless Guarantee Twice as Good When Doubled?
Mission Accomplished: Nothing; Kerry Says No Problem "Lawmakers Have a Year"; Boehner's, Pelosi's "Moral Obligations" Fly Out the Window; McCain's Hypocrisy; Look for US Debt Downgrades
"New Stress High in Our Indicators": Bond Spreads, CDS, Demand Deposits, Euro Basis 3-Month Swaps; Money Market Warning Signals
Ron Paul Smacks Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation
New Currency Controls in US at Currency Online; Capital Flight and Forced Repatriation in Europe

Official Denial in Greece Regarding "Indefinite Liquidity and Banking Stability"; Is a Worthless Guarantee Twice as Good When Doubled?

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 05:33 PM PST

Things are really humming along in Greece, complete with an official denial of instability in the Greek banking system.

Please consider Government Doubles Bank Guarantees

State guarantees to Greek commercial banks are to double from 30 billion to 60 billion euros in order to secure liquidity in the market, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told lawmakers in Athens on Monday.

Addressing Parliament's Financial Affairs Committee, Venizelos said that ensuring the market's cash flow continues will secure the liquidity of the banking system and safeguard bank deposits.

"The Greek banking system is guaranteed with indefinite liquidity and there is no issue with the stability of the system. This is the case for all eurozone countries," Venizelos said.

"Official Denial" is Ominous

The concept of official denial comes from British television sitcom, Yes, Minister.

"The first rule of politics," Sir Humphrey, the wily civil servant in the show, insists is: "never believe anything until it is officially denied."

In case you missed it please see Eurozone Breakup Logistics (Never Believe Anything Until It's Officially Denied)

The statement by Venizelos "there is no issue with the stability of the system" is an ominous sign. So is the doubling of state "guarantees". The sane thing to do in Greece is immediately pull all your funds from Greek Banks.

For further discussion, please see History Suggests Greece Will Freeze Bank Deposits, Exit Euro by Christmas; Spain and Portugal to Follow Next Year; What's the Rational Thing to Do?

That is not a prediction, it is a statement saying "do not take any chances".

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Mission Accomplished: Nothing; Kerry Says No Problem "Lawmakers Have a Year"; Boehner's, Pelosi's "Moral Obligations" Fly Out the Window; McCain's Hypocrisy; Look for US Debt Downgrades

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 03:11 PM PST

The official "deadline" for the alleged SuperCommitte to come to an agreement is November 23. However, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), needs to have reached a deal today.

The Super Wimps failed in their mission as anyone with any common sense might have guessed. There simply is no sense of urgency.

This paragraph from the Bloomberg article Supercommittee Is Said to Be Poised to Announce Failure of Talks says all you need to know:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Democrat on the panel, said lawmakers have a year before the automatic spending cuts are set to occur. "We have an election between now and then and a lot can take place," he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

Yes indeed, the real deadline is not tomorrow but rather 2013. A lot can happen by then, including a decision to not cut anything at all.

Boehner's Moral Obligation Goes Out the Window

Boehner, an Ohio Republican, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, have said they support the trigger. "The markets should know that the deficit reduction will occur," Pelosi said on Nov. 3. Boehner has said he "personally" feels a moral obligation to uphold the cuts.

So much for Boehner's "Moral Obligations" and Pelosi's promise to do something.

McCain Goes One Step Further

McCain, even went one step further.

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, are already trying to use legislative levers to stop the automatic cuts from taking effect.

Cuts? Who Needs Cuts?

Clearly McCain is a hypocrite. Were it not for an even worse setup in Europe, the US dollar would be taking a pounding here.

Expect US Debt Downgrades

Look for further downgrades of US debt by Moody's, Fitch, and S&P.

To even things out, look for downgrades of France as well.

"Super Committee" Idiocy

Please consider what I had to say on July 25, 2011 in "Super Committee" is Super Idiocy

Super Committee Nonsense

I thought it was Tim Geithner who came up with the "Super Committee" idea but he was merely silly enough to latch on to it. The latest hare-brained scheme comes from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Constitutional concerns aside, abdicating legislative responsibility to a super committee with super powers is idiotic. Besides didn't the Gang-of-Six just attempt to do something similar? And where did that plan go after a year of wrangling?

Is a 12 man committee more likely to agree to something than a 6 man committee? Anyone who thinks so has mush for brains.

Of course the whole idea might be to save face for both parties so that no one has to do anything but point fingers and blame the other side for lack of sensible action.

Each passing day delivers more reasons to be disgusted with leaders of both parties.

Mission a Brilliant Success, Achieves 100% of Its Goals

The Super Committee accomplished nothing, as expected, and more importantly, as designed. Neither political party really wanted to do anything about the deficit (because it would cost them votes). By D.C. standards this mission was a "brilliant success". It achieved its purpose, which was to do nothing. Both parties got the smoke-and-mirrors delay they wanted, while pointing fingers at the other side.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

"New Stress High in Our Indicators": Bond Spreads, CDS, Demand Deposits, Euro Basis 3-Month Swaps; Money Market Warning Signals

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 11:06 AM PST

Here are some charts and commentary from Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank in Copenhagen.

Via email, Steen writes ...

We have a new stress high in our indicators. Core Europe is under pressure.

In Europe the two new Super technocrats (Papademos and Monti) meets with EU officials over the course of next two days. Expect "compliance" to be the buzz-word, but Greek opposition party chief resists EU/IMF pressure on pledge: "…there is no need to provide written guarantee because his word can be trusted"

There is rising concern about Greece, and with S&P down nearly 19 points on the open of Europe, it looks like a new level of alertness.

So keep an eye out on ECB and its now massive support program – below is the Gross amount bought – the key this week is last week intervention size.

Safe travels,

Steen Jakobsen | Chief Economist

ECB Securities Markets Programme (Bond Purchases‎) in Millions of Euros

That's quite a bit given the ECB's insistence it will not be a lender of last resort.

Last week there was much ado over nothing when the ECB said it would "limit" the amount of purchases to 20 billion Euros a week. The interventionists all complained.

Did anyone bother to do the math on that? 20 billion euros * 52 = 1.04 trillion Euros and interventionists screamed bloody murder.

Reuters says ECB keeps handbrake on as bond buys hit 8 billion euros.

Handbrake Math, Intervention Math

8 billion euros * 52 = 416 billion Euros, nearly as big as the EFSF.

Moral of the story: There is never enough intervention to suit interventionists.

Why?

Intervention never works. All it can do is create a bigger problem elsewhere.

Stress Indicators

Meanwhile please ponder these charts from Saxo Bank that form the basis of Steen's assertion "We have a new stress high in our indicators."

click on any chart for sharper image

France - Germany 10-Year Government Bond Spread

Italy and Belgium 5-Year US$ CDS

Italy and Greece Demand Deposits

Denmark - Germany 10-Year Government Bond Spread

Euro Basis 3-Month Swaps

Money Market Warning Signals

On November 3, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that will help explain the significance of Euro Basis Swaps. Please consider Three-Month Euro Dollar Cross Currency Basis Swap Widens

Swapping euros into dollars is becoming extremely expensive, according to a leading indicator that is at its widest level since December 2008.

The three-month euro/dollar cross-currency basis swap is at minus 118 basis points versus minus 102 basis points on Wednesday. That's still shy of the minus-215 level it reached amid the financial turmoil of October 2008, but the indicator is now trading at levels where bankers say it is flashing warning signals about the functioning of money markets.

The debt crisis in Europe has created stronger demand for dollars, making it more pricey to get access to such funding. Banks and other firms that operate globally and need dollars have had limited access to the greenback, as investors have been wary of lending to them, so they have been relying more heavily on the euro-dollar swap market to meet their financing needs. This route has become increasingly more costly for them.

Traders say the three-month cross currency basis swap is showing greater stress than the one year swap because borrowers want to fund themselves past the end of the year. They also do not want to be seen as leaning on central banks for long-term funding, which is an option for them.

The Euro Basis 3-Month Swap continues to widen, a clear sign of increasing stress.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Ron Paul Smacks Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 09:59 AM PST

I used to have a modicum of respect for Bob Schieffer, host of Face the Nation. Not anymore. Instead of conducting an interview, Schieffer acted with clear intent to discredit Ron Paul. It backfired on Schieffer when Paul held his ground and refused to be cutoff by Schieffer's biased comments.

Link if YouTube Video does not play: Ron Paul on Face the Nation

Ron Paul supporters should check out and participate in Paul's SuperVoter Bomb. Any amount will help.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

New Currency Controls in US at Currency Online; Capital Flight and Forced Repatriation in Europe

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 08:52 AM PST

A securities analyst sent a note this morning "I just received this today from a company I have used for 3 years."

He was referring to a memo from Currency Online regarding Restriction of our service to USA based clients

Regrettably I write to inform you that, due to changes in legislation, we will be unable to continue to offer our international money transfer services to clients located in the United States of America (USA). As a result, any existing transactions that you have outstanding with Currency Online will be completed in the normal way, however you will be unable to undertake any new transfers.

Below we have anticipated some of the questions you may ask. Should you have any further questions please email us at customercare@currencyonline.com or call us on our free phone number 1866 420 7697.

Q: Can I still access my online account?
A: Yes. While you will be unable to undertake further FX transactions with Currency Online, you can still log into your account and have full access to review funds held on account plus any current and historical transactions.
Q: What happens to my existing FX transactions?
A: Simply complete the contract as normal. Please ensure you deliver your funds by the agreed value date and we will pay your purchased funds to the nominated beneficiary.
Q: What do I do if I have a Market Order in place?
A: As the outcome of a market order is an FX transaction we will unfortunately need to cancel any outstanding Market Orders you have. We shall, if we have not already done so, be calling you directly.
Q: What if I am no longer located in the USA?
A: Simply provide us with your new proof of address and you will be able to continue to use our services as normal.

Once again, please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. We will of course let you know should we resume our services to US based clients. In the meantime, we thank you for your support and understanding.

The team at Currency Online

Capital Flight and Forced Repatriation in Europe

Bruce Krasting had an excellent article over the weekend on ZeroHedge regarding Capital Flight and Forced Repatriation

Put yourself in the mind of a Greek who had some savings in a local bank. What would you do? You would do whatever you could to get your money to high ground. It would be perfectly reasonable for you to do that. And that is exactly what the Greeks have done. They've moved billions of Euros to Swiss banks in an effort to preserve their wealth. In the process they have crippled the Greek banks and have added to the downward spiral in Greece and the rest of the EU.

There was (IMHO) a very significant development on this front last week. A move is being made in Brussels to "force" the Swiss government/banks to transfer all of the assets of Greek citizens back to the Greek banks. For a Greek this means that your money is hostage. It has been functionally expropriated. It will be transferred into a banking system that is fraught with risk. Some portion of the money that goes back to Greece will certainly be lost.

I have talked with some who I know in Athens. They are out of their minds with this development.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission is helping Greece negotiate an agreement with Switzerland to repatriate as much as $81 billion believed to be hidden in Swiss bank accounts, a high level European Union executive body official said Nov. 17.

$81 billion? That's massive. This is not the shopkeeper or pensioner. This is big bucks and that means the Greek shippers. It is a fact that the Greek government doesn't tax the foreign earnings of the shippers. Call that a mistake, but that is the law. As a result, the shippers have held huge bucks in Switzerland. It's not dirty money. Right or wrong, there was no legal tax on this.

The European Commission is working with Switzerland and Greece stop what it believes is an ongoing exodus of money from Greek bank accounts into Swiss and other offshore banking centers, the EU official said.

The only way to stop capital flight is to address the underlying causes of the flight. That can't happen in Greece for years. The alternative is to trap the money, force it to go where it is at most risk. The owner of the money will have no choice. Any rights they might have to preserve their assets will be abrogated.

I'm amazed at this development. The Swiss government/banks are obligated to cooperate with EU tax authorities when there is evidence of tax fraud. But that is not what this is about. The people in Brussels and Bern know that. The fact is that the Greek tax system is so screwed up that there simply are no taxes levied on certain types of income/capital (the shippers). No doubt, some of the Greek cash that is in Switzerland is there because of tax avoidance. But the vast majority is simply safe haven money.

The word "Repatriation" sounds nice enough but really it means "Theft and expropriation". There will be nothing voluntary about this. There will be little (if any) due process.

If you have money in Greek banks, get it out now. If it's a small amount put it under the mattress. If it's a large amount, I am not sure where to tell you to put given pressure on Switzerland and illegal requests from the EU.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn Cool Pics

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Hacks and Scams [infographic]

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 03:08 PM PST

The holiday season signals the time of year when consumers are often at the highest risk of falling victim to hackers and scammers whose schemes can fool even the most experienced online shoppers. This infographic advises web merchants and consumers on how to avoid Black Friday and Cyber Monday attacks.

Source: veracode

Introducing SERP Turkey: A Free Tool to Split-Test and Gather CTR Analytics of SERP Entries

Posted: 20 Nov 2011 12:48 PM PST

Posted by Tom Anthony

SERP Turkey logo

Measuring CTR data in search engine results is notoriously difficult, and with Google's recent move to HTTPS for logged in users it's only going to get worse.

The problems include, but are not limited to:

How can you record the clicks?
How can you know what position you were in?
What snippet was shown?
What did the other entries look like?
What ads were shown?

There are so many factors and no good way to gather the data meaning that the signal-to-noise ratio basically makes the exercise worthless. Furthermore, the delay in making changes (trying a new title, for instance) and getting data is simply agonizing.

What I wanted was a simple way to measure the change in CTR for a given search query's results when I adjusted entries, but nothing existed.... so I built it. I think I got pretty close to what I wanted; it isn't perfect but it is quick, cheap and the signal-to-noise ratio is the best I've seen (certainly for the price!). Here I show you how I tested it, and how you can use it for your own tests.

Introducing SERP Turkey

My plan was simple:

Build a dummy search engine page.
Create multiple instances of the SERPs for a given keyword.
Push Mechanical Turk users to these pages and measure the clicks.
Examine analytics. Be happy.

Basically, SERP Turkey is what I came up with. It allows you to enter a keyword for a search, import the search results from Google for that search and then edit each entry's title, description/snippet, display URL and re-order them as you see fit. You can create multiple variants of the SERPs for split testing, or you can just keep to one and measure the CTR distribution. You can then take your test link and either share it with a pool of testers, send to your friends on Twitter, or do what I did and send it to Amazon Mechanical Turk. (If you don't know- it mTurk is a service that allows you to push simple 'human intelligence tasks' to a workforce of thousands, who you pay a few cents a time to complete your task.)

Each user who visits the test will then be shown the dummy search page and a randomly select variant from those you created, and their click is recorded. You can then examine (and download as CSV) the CTR of each entry for each variant and hopefully draw some conclusions from it. You can run tests that gather results from 200 users for as little as about $10 and the results will be in within 2-3 days.

Before we move on, here is how the dummy search page results look for a test:

You can visit this test page for yourself right here, if you want - feel free to click a result and see what happens. :)

You can see that the navigation links, and adverts that a user would expect to see on a search engine results page are there, but they are blurred out so as not to attract clicks or distract the user. Overall the page looks pretty much like the results pages that a user would be used to seeing. There is some instructional text and a message at the top to make clear that this isn't a real search engine (which would be against Mechanical Turk rules). In this initial version there is no rich snippets or other verticals (news / images / videos), but I would like to add those in for the next version.

So far, so good....

But Tom... are these clicks going to be reliable?!

This was the first thing that I wondered about. Will mTurk testers or other testers (co-workers, Twitter users, or anyone else) really be motivated to do the test properly? Won't mTurk users just click the top hit to collect their payment?

With regards to mTurk, you'll find that most workers do pay attention (not all, but most) because you have to approve their work and their 'approval rate' is a criteria that can bar them from getting more work.

However, that wasn't good enough for me - I wanted data to be sure, so I ran a sanity check test...

I ran a search for 'sharks' and imported the results into SERP Turkey. I then ran a search for 'great white sharks' and I imported the top two results and placed them in positions four and six of the 'sharks' results. I setup the SERP Turkey results page to show that the search term was 'great white sharks', however, the results showed were the 'sharks' results with my two more relevant results inserted.

This is how it looked:

I pushed this out to Amazon Turk and gathered some results to see whether, as I hoped people would click the two relevant results.

I won't keep you in suspense; here is how the results look in SERP Turkey:

(click to enlarge)

The results on the left show the raw clicks (first click per user only - if they went back and clicked a second result it is ignored), and the results on the right showed the results when those faster than five seconds are filtered out. I knew some users wouldn't look properly and I found five seconds a good threshold for filtering out people who just clicked without really looking (you can view any time threshold you want).

You can see in both cases that over 65% of the clicks were focused on the two 'most relevant' results. In both cases the Wikipedia page for 'sharks' in position number 1 also attracted a lot of clicks, but it is also a relevant result and I imagine that it mimics real search results in some sense (it is in position 1, it is wikipedia, it isn't irrelevant).

Conclusion: The point of the experiment was to demonstrate that test users, on the whole, examined the results properly before making a decision. What we found was exactly that - users do seem to pay attention and hunt out the most relevant results.

This experiment involved 200 Amazon Turk users who I paid $0.05 each. When filtered I used 174 data points, as shown above. Total cost to me, with Amazon's fee, was only $11! It took about three days to gather the data- but this could be sped up with a higher bid, if you're in a rush. You can run multiple tests at the same time too.

Test 2: Does Wikipedia really get a higher CTR? Obama lets us know...

So now it seemed the tool worked I wanted to take it for a test drive, and test the split-testing part of the tool. I decided I'd test to see whether just being Wikipedia really is enough to overcome your position. Would a Wikipedia entry in position 3 beat out a relevant entry in position 2?

I ran a search for 'Barack Obama' and imported the results into SERP Turkey. Wikipedia was in predictably in position 1, but I didn't want the fact that many searchers often just click the first result to interfere too much with my experiment. So using the power of the Turkey, I created two variants; the first had the Wikipedia entry in position 2 and the second had the Wikipedia entry in position 3. Here is the first variant:

You can see the top four results are all pretty relevant. You can see the test page for yourself here. Feel free to play around.

I pushed it out to Amazon Turk again, and the results came in:

(click to enlarge)

On the left we see Wikipedia in 2nd, and on the right we see it in 3rd with whitehouse.gov taking the other slot.

Despite whitehouse.gov being a very relevant link, sure enough Wikipedia does overcome being in 3rd position to still garner 1/3rd of the clicks - doubling the whitehouse.gov in position 3.

Another interesting result we see is that when Wikipedia is further from the top of the results it seems the user is more inclined to continue searching yet further down the results, and result number 4 begins to see an uptake in clicks.

Conclusion: It seems that Wikipedia does command additional CTR just for being who they are.

Bonus Conclusion: From a single experiment with so few data points (118 users' clicks are included above) it is hard to draw an accurate conclusion as to how other categories of search will be affected. But it seems that having Wikipedia further from the top is better for the little guys down below in the results.

This one cost me less than $10 on mTurk.

Test 3: Lets tinker with the meta description and measure CTR change

So, I'll start of by saying that I thought this experiment was going to be a fantastic demonstration of how a bad meta description can really damage your CTR. However, this experiment did not go how I expected at all...

So here are the top results (in SERP Turkey, imported from Google) for a search for "electric toothbrushes":

Sonicare have position 1, beating out Wikipedia and their competition. Great job guys, we say... then we look at the snippet. They don't even have a meta description on the page!?

So I thought - ok, let's test how much better they'd do for taking two minutes to add one. All those $$$ just waiting for the taking. So I added a second variant and edited the description:

I based the description from a snippet I found on their site, and tidied it up a bit. Even has the magic word 'free'!

Let's show them what they're missing:

(click to enlarge)

The CTR fell!! I was pretty surprised by this, and I'm not sure I have a very good explanation of why it is.

Tentative Conclusion: The workers for this came from worldwide, and may not be aware of the Sonicare brand. I can only imagine that when I entered my 'improved' description it became clear that this wasn't and informational page but a commercial/brand one, but that workers had interpreted the search as an informational one (or at least wanted review type pages instead of a specific brand). I'm really not sure - I'd welcome your theories in the comments.

Breaking news Conclusion: At time of writing, I'm running a second copy of this test, but instead of my snippet, I took Wikipedia's and added it as Sonicare's snippet. Currently I have only ~70 recorded clicks, but I am seeing an approximate 1.5-2% increase in CTR when I use this non-commercial snippet which seems to confirm my suspicion above.

Lesson: It demonstrates that it is easy to make intuitive leaps that aren't necessarily as straightforward as you imagine. In the case presented, I do think that in reality, for transactional searches that Sonicare is aiming at that having an improved description would be a good thing.

Finally... beware of foreigners!! ;)

So, I'm a Brit. I speak English 1.0, and not the new sparkly version that is popular in the US. I tried to run an experiment for my Mum's horse riding holidays company, Far and Ride (hi Mum!), to test whether they could benefit from an improved title or meta-description. I allowed Turk workers from any country so my job would complete faster (all workers speak English).

I setup two variants, with their current title and a second with a simple change just to measure its impact. I cancelled the Turk job after less than five clicks after realising my mistake. See the top five results and some of the clicks already coming in:

The clicks were focused on those results that spoke about 'horseback riding' instead of 'horse riding', which is the difference between what we say in British English and what you call it in US English.

Why is this important? According to a paper last year (here), approximately 32% of Turk workers are in India, and India speaks a version of English that is still closer to British English than US English. 57% of workers are from the US, with the remaining 11% distributed around the world.

Lesson: Be very careful that you consider language and other demographic factors when you run your test. If you are using mTurk you can target specific countries with your test if you wish. I didn't have time to rerun this test in such a way, unfortunately.

How you can use SERP Turkey. Today. Free.

SERP Turkey is completely free to use, and is available to go right now:

SERP Turkey

It is a bit rough and ready and in need of polish, but I threw it together quickly to test out this concept. If it proves popular then I will invest some more time in polishing it and adding more features (more on that below). But for now, here is how to get started...

When you open SERP Turkey you'll see a simple page:

Enter your search term and press the button. You'll immediately see the second screen:

Here is the only 'tricky' part... You have to visit the Google search results page for your keyword (you can click the link if you're lazy and want Google.com, otherwise you'll have to run it yourself in another window), and then paste the source code for the results page into the box so SERP Turkey can extract the results. Once again, press the button and you'll be shown a confirmation screen that everything went ok. One more button click and you'll be taken to the ''Manage Variants" page:

This page is where you can manage the various variants/samples SERP results. It is pretty self-explanatory - you can view the current result, including the five second filtered versions (you can change the URL parameter to any filter time you want), you can edit, duplicate and deactivate variants.

Deactivating a variant will mean you can continue to look at the results, but the variant won't be shown to the users. You can reactivate variants again should you wish. Duplicating a variant is important as this allows you to then edit that variant and thus begin A/B testing. You can have as many variants as you wish and users will be shown one at random.

Once you have your variants setup how you wish, go to the Dashboard page (link at the top):

This page has your dashboard URL on it. It is very important you don't lose this as it is the only way you can return to see your results or edit your variants! Don't lose it! Bookmark it!

This page also has the test URL which you can give out to your testers. However, if you intend to push it out to mTurk, then you can use my prepared template, and download the input file on this page (see below).

Using mTurk for your testers

As you've seen from my examples, you can run some tests on Amazon's Mechanical Turk extremely cheaply. Setting up with mTurk is very simple and in less than 10 minutes you can have done everything you need to have your first test ready to go. Unfortunately, Turk is open to US users only (but don't despair, you can access it - see below), but you can use any platform for contacting testers that you want.

If you think you want a walkthrough then I've created a separate post on my personal blog how to setup mTurk for use with SERP Turkey:

Setting up Amazon Mechanical Turk with SERP Turkey

If you're an mTurk veteran then you can just use the mTurk HTML template code available here to create your template. You can then download the input file for each of your tests directly from SERP Turkey's dashboard page. This will fill in the search term and provide the link to your test's page.

mTurk users have be asked a question on the platform, so they are given a code after they've clicked. The code seems random, but it actually does encode whether the user timed out or otherwise was not counted towards your CTR scores (they just get a 'user counted' or 'user not counted' token that is unique to each test - see my linked post above for more details).

Alternative to mTurk - Smartsheet.com

mTurk is annoyingly US only, however the Smartsheet Crowdsourcing service actually leverages Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but you don't need to be in the US to use it. You do have to pay a $30 monthly subscription but then you can leverage Turk. You can read my Amazon Turk blog post and adapt. If someone wants to write a Smartsheet SERP Turkey post I'll happily add a link in here and on the SERP Turkey site!

Notes and Future

SERP Turkey 1.0 is a bit rough and ready. If it proves useful to people and there is demand then I have a few ideas I'm considering:

Option to download the click record.
Second click testing so you can see users that hit back and clicked again.
Ads testing.
Save your email to a test.
Rich snippets and verticals (news/image) testing.
Batch tests - so you can push multiple tests at a time to a user along with 'sanity check' test to start so you can decide whether a worker is paying enough attention.
Build in Amazon Turk
3 click tests where users have to select 3 results in order.
Break clicks down by geo-locating users.
Click'n'drag reordering of entries.

Please hit me up by email at turkey@tomanthony.co.uk or via twitter at @TomAnthonySEO if you have a suggestion or feedback.

Wrap up

The tests I've run have been more to illustrate the tool than to gather meaningful data, but I think SERP Turkey provides a cheap way to run some real tests and gather meaningful, and most importantly, actionable data. I'm aware it's not perfect, but for the speed and price you can run tests I hope some of you will find it useful. :)

Now, go and give it a try.

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Historic Day for Veterans

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, Nov.21, 2011

Historic Day for Veterans

This morning, President Obama will sign into law the “VOW to Hire Heroes Act”. This bill provides practical support to transition our vets from combat to careers, by offering employees tax credits for hiring veterans.

This bill will help veterans like Jason, an Army officer in Iraq who managed hundreds of reconstruction projects (worth millions of dollars) for the military but could not find a job once he returned.

Read his story and find out why these credits are so important to veterans.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama greets Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India at the start of their bilateral meeting at the ASEAN Summit in Nusa Dua, Bali, Nov. 18, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Seth's Blog : Your competitive advantage

Your competitive advantage

Are you going to succeed because you return emails a few minutes faster, tweet a bit more often and stay at work an hour longer than anyone else?

I think that's unlikely. When you push to turn intellectual work into factory work (which means more showing up and more following instructions) you're racing to the bottom.

It seems to me that you will succeed because you confronted and overcame anxiety and the lizard brain better than anyone else. Perhaps because you overcame inertia and actually got significantly better at your craft, even when it was uncomfortable because you were risking failure. When you increase your discernment, maximize your awareness of the available options and then go ahead and ship work that scares others... that's when you succeed.

More time on the problem isn't the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won't do.

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luni, 21 noiembrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Introducing SERP Turkey: A Free Tool to Split-Test and Gather CTR Analytics of SERP Entries

Introducing SERP Turkey: A Free Tool to Split-Test and Gather CTR Analytics of SERP Entries

Introducing SERP Turkey

But Tom... are these clicks going to be reliable?!

Test 2: Does Wikipedia really get a higher CTR? Obama lets us know...

Test 3: Lets tinker with the meta description and measure CTR change

Finally... beware of foreigners!! ;)

How you can use SERP Turkey. Today. Free.

SERP Turkey

Using mTurk for your testers

Alternative to mTurk - Smartsheet.com

Notes and Future

Wrap up

Historic Day for Veterans

Seth's Blog : Your competitive advantage

Your competitive advantage

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luni, 21 noiembrie 2011

Introducing SERP Turkey

But Tom... are these clicks going to be reliable?!

Test 2: Does Wikipedia really get a higher CTR? Obama lets us know...

Test 3: Lets tinker with the meta description and measure CTR change

Finally... beware of foreigners!! ;)

How you can use SERP Turkey. Today. Free.

Using mTurk for your testers

Alternative to mTurk - Smartsheet.com

Notes and Future

Wrap up

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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