I’m not an early adopter – I just hang around a bunch of them.

By November 17, 2003, enough of these early adopter types (aka friends) had bugged me about LinkedIn that I finally felt compelled to sign up and give it a whirl. For a long, long time it was mostly my techie friends there. And not much happening.

Years later, when facebook took off and I became a Twitter addict, I figured LinkedIn was dead. Unlike these other social media tools, LinkedIn wasn’t “giving back”. You could collect data (ie make connections and add resume items) but beyond that, what was the use? It seemed limited to being a virtual file cabinet for resumes – and I’ve already got enough places to file things, thanks. Read More

Coming to the Internet User Experience conference 4/1 and 4/2? Internet User Experience features local and national experts in website strategy, design, development, and usability. Three Pure Visibility folks will speak at IUE.

• Linda Girard, Pure Visibility’s Co-Founder and Visionary,will present “Search Engine Optimization 101” at 1:30 Tuesday 4/1.
• Edward Vielmetti, Pure Visibility’s Feedback Loop, will be on a panel “Online Communities: Where Did it Start, Where is it Going, and What Does it Mean for Your Business?” at 8:30 Wednesday 4/2.
• Mike Beasley, Pure Visibility’s User Experiologist, will co-present a tutorial “Warp-Speed Usability Evaluation” on cognitive walkthroughs at 1:30 Wednesday 4/2.

If you’ll be there, make sure to stop one of us and say hello!

We’re thrilled to announce our monthly AdWords workshop, scheduled for the second Friday of each month. If you’re relatively new to AdWords or are interested in getting more from your online campaigns, you should register now for Google AdWords Success Workshop. The first training class open to the public will occur April 11, 2008.

Our Google AdWords certified team will host a jam-packed day of best practices, tools, and techniques. Come with your laptop and a Google AdWords account, and you will receive hands-on instruction in how to improve your online advertising to increase your sales and leads. We’ll give you specific instruction in structuring your account, creating an awesome PPC campaign, and measuring your return on investment. We’ll teach you where to spend your time to fine tune it to deliver better results.

What Our AdWords Class Emphasizes

1. How to define your market.
   • set campaign regions and schedules,
   • generate keywords and key phrases,
   • create ad group themes that will be effective,
   • exclude what isn’t your market – negative key phrases,
   • and, of course, setting bids and budgets.
2. Qualify your market through writing targeted ads.
3. Turn your visitors into clients.

Improve your Paid Search ROI!

The concepts are straightforward and easy to learn. Your AdWords training will result in huge wins for your marketing budget and your bottom line. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist as long as you have a calculator and arithmetic skills. Google AdWords is the most measurable advertising system in the history of the world, and you should take advantage of it!

Don’t miss this opportunity to upgrade your PPC managment skills. Register for our AdWords training class.

We’ve seen some recent behavior in Google AdWords markets where a new ad campaign immediately gets a quality score rating that forces minimum bids into the $5 range. There was a time when you could launch a campaign and immediately count on a few inexpensive clicks to get you started, but that day appears to be gone. Instead, the new account has to arrange to buy a few expensive clicks at $5 to get the quality score reset to $1, and a few more expensive clicks at $1 to get reset down to a price that’s competitive. That’s true even if the keywords you are bidding on are so long-tail that no one else is there – you simply need to ante up to play.

As mercenary as this seems, we think there’s something deeper going on. Google has never been an exclusively bottom-line focused company. Their timeline spans years, not quarters, and we believe that ultimately this change is not a short-term revenue strategy. To put it another way, although Google is in the business of selling clicks, their goal has always been to get the most clicks that actually provide value to consumer and vendor alike. With that in mind, we can see this new quality score as the first tentative step into a much more sophisticated exploration of ad quality.

Read More

Why does your business exist? Why should your potential customers choose you over anyone else? What differentiates you from the competition? The people coming to your site may not even know who you are. You’ve got to get this all across to the user immediately, before he or she decides to pass your site by.

After all, when users come to your site, they make a snap judgment about it–whether it has what they want, whether it is trustworthy, whether it is pleasing and easy to use. They scan the pictures and the text to figure out whether this is the site they’re looking for. Good design and good web writing helps people find and learn about your product. Have you given the same attention to your brand? Read More

How accurate is the widely held belief that search engines are the core part of the online user experience? Based on individual case studies from our clients, we think it’s pretty accurate, and their influence is increasing rapidly. In our recent annual review for a major national franchise client we discovered that the total search engine marketing traffic increased nearly sixty percent between 2006 and 2007 for both paid and organic search.

This case study is particularly compelling because this particular client had a site whose page ranks were relatively stable in 2007, allowing what was effectively a baseline measure of a site’s growth entirely due to growth in search engine usage.

What is also noteworthy is the large drop in other marketing channel efforts, such as referrals and direct traffic. Effectively visitors are relying on Google as their “bookmark” engine, often typing in a keyphrase that got them to the site in the past instead of trying to remember or spell the name of the company or service. This is a huge shift in user patterns, as users develop command line approaches to searching and finding information. Note also that referral traffic dropped significantly.

Internet Yellow pages (titled “Paid Directory” in the graph) lag behind in usage, and didn’t increase at nearly the same rate as search engines. The fact that they haven’t enjoyed the same increases is almost certainly a reflection of the poor quality of their product (which in our mind is a reflection of their own philosophy about advertising and generating revenue online) rather than their potential as a search source. In fact we believe that if yellowpages.com, superpages.com, and other systems could get their act together (which in this case simply means “approach their business model like Google does”) they could be real competition for local search.

Why do users click on links? Because they think there will be something good on the other side. Putting it like that makes the answer sound trivial, but that makes it no less true.

Good link text–when a link concisely and accurately describes the destination page–is good for everyone. From a usability perspective, it’s a no-brainer. Most of us are skimmers rather than readers, and poor link text forces the user to slow down and read the text around the link to figure out the context. The user may not even stop to read around the link and simply miss out on a good link. Read More

I was sick last week, and I worked from home for two days. I worked half days because I was tired and half-useless, and I stayed home because I didn’t want to infect my team mates with the same crud I had. Each day I called in for our daily stand-up meeting, and I was amazed by the energy and general oomphiness of the vibe coming across the phone.

Sharing a laugh at the PV stand up meeting

Granted, my expectations were low. I didn’t have music on, no one else was around but a sleepy cat, and I was communicating through low-bandwidth channels like email and chat. And when I called in to the conference line we use when there are multiple offsite folks, the first thing I heard was laughter and goofiness as folks gathered for the standup meeting. Our stand-ups start and end loudly—they’re an energy boom punctuating our workday.

Stand-up is the venue for team-members to share project and task status. Yet, even if there were no actual information exchanged, stand-up improves our day at Pure Visibility by giving our team of analytics data junkies, paid search optimization experts, search engine optimization whizzes, and user experience designers a high energy moment of team in their day of analytical knowledge work. There’s something magic about just coming together in a circle for a quick meeting.

Read More

According to the National Adult Literacy Study, the average adult in the United States reads at a 7th grade level. This study, if it is to be believed, indicates that that when texts are beyond the reading ability of the reader, they give up.

Are we writing text for our websites that is too complicated for our users?

Read More