Want to crawl out of Google purgatory? Here are some tips.

Tobi Elkin catches up with the CEO of BlueLithium, Inc., a performance-based ad network.

Reverse domain name services lookups? Server error reporting? Server load metrics? Although these aren't of particular interest to most marketers unless they spend the majority of their time in the server room, many analytics programs offer them just the same. ClickTracks 6, however, is designed specifically to exclude this data, offering only the metrics that marketers are interested in, such as which ads bring the most visitors, where visitors go on the site, and how long they spend there. ClickTracks CEO John Marshall says the product is aimed especially at e-commerce site managers who find other analytics products overly …

Here's a look at three passionate beverage brand loyalists who blog about their favorite brand.

It had all the makings of a cautionary tale. A 21-year-old entrepreneur named Alex Tew from Wiltshire, U.K., concocted a scheme to sell $1 million worth of ad space on the individual pixels of a single Web page. Gimmick-obsessed advertisers shilling poker and ringtones snatched up every last pixel, making Tew an instant millionaire and inspiring a rash of media coverage and copycat sites like "Million Dollar Advertiser" and 1000tags.com. All this hoopla caught the unwelcome eye of online extortionists, who crashed Tew's "Million Dollar Homepage" after he refused to cough up a $50,000 ransom. The site went back …

Be warned that the next time your mother reminds you to drink your Ovaltine, she may have been paid to do it. That's because Experience, Inc. has taken its online brand influencer services offline. The company now uses non-professional recruits to spread the word about particular brands and products via blogs, e-mails, product placements, casual discussions, posters, fliers, and sampling. Recruits are also expected to encourage friends and loved ones to complete brand surveys. Experience focuses on influencing free-spending and easily influenced 18- to 34-year-olds. "Our job is to develop brand ambassadors," enthuses Jennifer Floren, founder and …

Dunkin' Donuts, an online innovator? To launch its new Turbo Ice coffee drink, the donut chain hired advergaming pioneer BrandGames to produce a series of amusing animated shorts and games about Slacker Turtle, a lazy kid in a turtle suit who manages to win races against his nemesis, Da Hare, by drinking Turbo Ice. To draw surfers to the site, BrandGames created rich media banner ads that carried short-form animated movies. The shorts ran on entertainment, music, and gaming sites.Rather than the usual animated come-ons, however, the Dunkin' Donuts ads were true stand-alone films, uncluttered by text and …

Say you notice a huge, unexpected spike in time spent online with mortgage refinancing content and you want to know -- now, not a month from now -- what creative has encouraged that interest. That's where Coremetrics 2006, a new Web site and campaign analytics suite, can help. Coremetrics' proprietary Live profiles enable marketers to quickly analyze and visualize online marketing performance on a variety of metrics and across multiple Web properties. Coremetrics 2006's one-click segmentation feature drills down into site usage, traffic, and transaction data to offer insight into whatever patterns marketers need to analyze -- online revenues, …

In a novel marketing mash-up, TLC Industries, a Schaumburg, Ill.-based maker of video arcade games, is angling to merge online and offline promotion, in-store branding, and events. Its Online Onpremise program enables consumers to play an addictive game like virtual pool at a Web site, then invites them to play the same game with their same user ID on branded arcade machines at pizza parlors and sports bars. The combination of connected arcade machines and online play allows for continuous national tournaments. The coin-operated machines essentially let patrons underwrite the promotion with their quarters. Sponsors can place messaging on …

For a new organization based on an old idea, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is using some mighty trendy tactics to get out the, er, word. WOMMA's Web site (womma.org) hosts blogs, podcasts, and e-mail newsletters to help teach marketers the basics on how to use the world's oldest form of advertising. WOMMA calls it "Word of Mouth Basic Training," or WOMBAT for short. "WOMBAT is the definitive resource for anyone ready to learn how to do word-of-mouth marketing the right way," says WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz, whose resume includes stints at GasPedal Ventures and the Association …