One of my favorite things about the Pure Visibility team is that many of us walk, bike, and bus to work.

Since we’ve moved from the Pineapple Building (on Depot Street) to the First National Building (201 S. Main Street), we’re now within the boundaries of getDowntown’s Go! Pass, an inexpensive yearly bus pass for downtown commuters. But, even before our move and access to the bus passes, I was struck by the team’s commitment to low impact, low hassle commuting.

Yes, we do use cars to go to client meetings. Yes, our team includes folks who do drive to work. Still, there’s something wonderful about our group of dedicated pedestrians and the support we get from each other to make it work.

Nancy Shore of getDowntown had similar thoughts in her post Pure Visibility et al. are super commuters.

I joined Pure Visibility in June, 2007 as the new Director of Happiness. After I broadcast my new title via LinkedIn and after the press release was picked up locally, I’ve had lots of questions.

Who coined the title?

Linda Girard, Pure Visibility’s Visionary and Co-Founder, dropped into the chair next to me sometime in my first week and tossed it out as an idea. We hadn’t settled on a title during the negotiations, Director of Customer Service was a possibility, as was Ombudsman. I also liked the ring and gender-confusion of Ombudsman, but the meaning of it is addressing complaints. The goal of Director of Happiness is to prevent complaints in the first place. I have to say that I was instantly charmed by Director of Happiness, and its luster has not yet worn off, despite some gentle mocking from more cynical friends and colleagues. Read More

Google Universal Search is an effort by Google to drive more traffic to its other properties by including links to vertical search engine results that blend in with regular web page listings. If a vertical search result is considered more relevant, it can knock a regular web listing off of the first page. Universal Search doesn’t totally replace Google’s OneBox results. These are results that appear at the top of the search results that have a different format from the regular web listings and that don’t knock regular web listings off the first page. Results can appear from Google’s video, images, news, books, and local search engines. Search Engine Land provides a nice summary of the changes. Read More

The inexperienced AdWords user often leaves the default settings active, a good idea or big mistake depending on the feature in question as well as the nature of the account. When it comes to the Content Network, many SEO experts advise turning it off entirely, claiming it a waste of resources better spent optimizing for Google search alone. Advice to be taken seriously, given some of the inadequacies of the Content Network feature. For one, the nature of the sites in the Content Network assigned to a given account is for the most part shrouded in mystery. Your ads may show on high-traffic, topically-related blogs, thus reaching a targeting users that may otherwise have been missed. Or they might be inappropriately generated on a site like MySpace or even as a result of a Gmail user’s account (a new and slightly creepy feature!) based on the still-limited technology by which relevancy between an ad and actual page content is assessed. Read More

What do YouTube, Marxist theory, and the attention economy have to do with SEO? Blogger (and author of Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture) John Battelle writes:

“SEO is persuasion. We live in a world of persuasion. Our attention is constantly being sought after. I see SEO as a tactical way to persuade someone to pay attention to a piece of information.” Read More

Today’s SEO researcher enjoys the choice between numerous keyword generation tools, each of which offers their own relative strengths and weaknesses.

Take, for example, both Yahoo’s Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Keyword Discovery Tool. I use these two interchangeably, often because what I expect to be fairly common search terms bring up no data in one or the other database. I’m hesitant to trust either tool completely, mostly because of some strange inconsistencies as well as the skewed nature of the data. Not to mention the irritating way both are prone to crashing, and require frequently reloading the page. Read More

A recent report from the Center for Media Research that found the proportion between new and repeat visitors in cookie-based tracking tools was inaccurate.

The essential argument was that third-party cookies are consistently flushed by security programs because they are generally seen as superfluous or violations of security and/or privacy. According the research, 31% of all web browsers have their cookies cleared each month.

The consequence of this is that the visitors coming to the site are not identified based on their prior visits.

The whole study is here if you have a subscription, which is free.

Pay Per Click generates measurable sales data remarkably quickly, but sometimes we still have to wait a while for any given ad group and set of ads to generate enough traffic to create a reasonable statistical result.

How long exactly? Well, the most effective measure that we have used is based on the venerable confidence interval statistics measure, which is the same one used to identify the significance of poll surveys that are often seen on the nightly news. In those surveys a question is posed with two possible answers, such as “Do you think Three-eyed Wombats are good or bad for the Cleveland economy?” After a sufficiently large sample size, the difference between the “good” and “bad” answers can be shown to be significant with a high degree of confidence, generally around 95%. Read More

Google recently released a video about the value of Branding (you can see it Here) that was very telling. It was, essentially, an education about how different companies perceive branding and its value, followed by compliments they paid Google about branding. The education portion was about 2/3rds of the video, which is not surprising because Google is not, and will not in the foreseeable future, be a good platform for branding products.

Branding is a difficult thing to quantify and market, but the essential nature of it is something that is at once familiar yet exciting. Ze Frank has a brilliant video blog about branding that sums up the essence of this concept using Jon-Benet Ramsey as the “brand” example. Read More

Day Parting is a growing part of the PPC field, with many systems and tools trying to take advantage of different traffic cycles for particular products and services. There are a lot of misconceptions about what day parting is and how it can be used, but we do believe that it is useful if you keep in mind that the goal for any direct marketing PPC campaign is to lower cost per conversion while increasing or maintaining total traffic.

How might day parting work to do this? Well, consider two scenarios:

Market I:

A market where there is truly different cost per click on keyphrases for different times of day with about the same conversion rates. This is often the case in competitive markets where other advertisers increase the bids of their ads in order to get higher rankings.

Market II:

Markets with very different conversion rates at any given time of day, but with about the same traffic rates.

In market (1), Day Parting allows an advertiser to segment the market and literally put a cost per conversion value on any given period of the day. For example, the cost per click in the morning might be $5 and $20 in the afternoon. In that situation, the first goal is to capture as many of the $5 customers as possible and only go after the $20 customers after all other choices have been expended. As long as the ROI stays above what the client wants, the advertiser can continue to increase visibility during competitive time periods and therefore get more total traffic and sales. But if they start with the cheaper clicks they will ultimately have better margins.In market (2), the same is true except that the advertiser should choose time periods with the highest conversion rates first and then start to work into increasingly low conversion rates.

Usually the real world is a combination of the two, so the best way to measure the value of a given time period is to simply talk about cost per conversion.

At the simplest level, any given time period should have a cpConv that will either be more or less than what the client is willing to pay. Assuming that the client has fewer advertising dollars to spend than total available clicks for a given word market, the model is fairly simple. If all periods are less than what the client is willing to pay, advertise all the time. If not, skip those periods that aren’t profitable and advertise during the time periods in decreasing levels of profitability.

This is the simple model, but in truth one major consideration makes things a little more complicated. Many advertisers have a budget that far exceeds what PPC can actually cost. In other words, they could advertise all the time and not run out of money. What do you tell those folks in terms of their ad spend budget? It is at this point that the decisions about day parting leave the realm of direct sales and enter into branding, which is a discussion for another time.