Lately we have received a few questions at Pure Visibility about whether or not a company should buy multiple domain names/extensions and how many variations of their company name is enough. Unfortunately, there is not one simple answer to this question and it really depends on the company. Most of the time we do recommend to buy not only your company URL, but to get common misspellings and alternative names that a potential customer might use to find your company. As far as purchasing multiple extensions such as the .org, .net and .mobi we typically don’t recommend doing so unless you have a good reason for it. A good example of a company purchasing multiple domain extensions is USAJobs whose main domain extension is .gov They also purchased usajobs.com; clearly they learned from the whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov debacle.

I recently talked to a client who was informed that a competitor was interested in buying their company name with the .net extension. The law can be a little unclear about whether you can buy any url if it has a trademarked name in it, so, the client was considering just buying the other extension to avoid legal headaches (see avoiding copyright infringment on your domain name for more details.) I concurred that it was logical to buy the .net to avoid headaches, but also told them to rest assured that they don’t have to purchase every extension out there.

The important next step is to not make a duplicate site at the .net address, rather, set up a 301 redirect. If you simply make a clone of your site you will risk being marked as spam by Google and getting de-indexed. How to redirect parked domains.

I also had a client contact us about the .mobi extension in particular. They were informed that .mobi was the up and coming URL for mobile devices and thought it would be a good idea to buy this extension before a competitor could beat them to it. We decided that for them it would be a better idea not to buy the .mobi extension because, if they wanted their site to be visible on a cell phone browser they could edit their current site design to be mobile friendly (make your site mobile friendly.) I believe that you don’t need to purchase the .mobi extension until it becomes more popular, currently someone using a mobile browser would typically type in .com because it is the most familiar but this could change in the future.

The rule of thumb I use when buying domain extensions is make sure I have the .com and if I have a compelling reason to purchase additional extensions then I do it. If there is reason to believe a competitor might purchase my url with a different extension then I spend the small amount of money ($5.00-$30.00/year) it takes to buy the additional domains

Through some strange twist of fate, I procured the dubious honor of writing today’s blog post. That’s right, for the first time ever, the internet is about to experience the immense untapped blogging power of Alex Wyszewianski, Intern Extraordinaire! I couldn’t decide what to write for my first blog post, so I asked Jason for some advice. That went something like this…

Teh_Pwnage1337: What’s the deal on this whole blog post thing?
aZnPlaya257: Um, do a tie-in to viral marketing. Write something on where internet memes come from.
Teh_Pwnage1337: I can’t do that. It would involve scads of NSFW content.
aZnPlaya257: Ok, what about writing about online communities instead of all their glorious, sordid content?
Teh_Pwnage1337: what about online communities?
aZnPlaya257: People are crazy about Facebook and MySpace, but they don’t really understand what those sites are for or why they’re valuable
Teh_Pwnage1337: Hold up. Did you seriously just use Facebook and MySpace as the two examples of internet communities?
aZnPlaya257: You object?
Teh_Pwnage1337: Oh lawd… you know what this means, don’t you?
Teh_Pwnage1337: By your powers combined…
Blogger98387: I am a blog post!

Advertisers are going crazy trying to capitalize on social networking sites, but why are they interested in social networking sites and not forum-based internet communities? Internet communities have existed since the dawn of the world wide web.

The internet is an amazing thing. While it used to be that you might be the only person you knew who was interested in growing mosses and other accent plants for your Bonsai trees, there are now plenty of internet forums and message boards where you can discuss your techniques and findings with other like minded individuals around the world.

Forums have a simple interface, designed to help organize topics. Someone creates a topic post in one of several subforums, and others respond to their topic, forming a thread. The original post, or OP, declares the topic of the thread, which is why it is called the topic post. These threads stimulate discussion, or answer a question. Most forum members post under a “handle,” “screen name,” or “alias.” Whether or not people on the forum know what your name is, or what you look like, the purpose of a forum is topical discussion, and they do this well.

Not only does the internet empower people to create groups (or communities) centered around their interests, it is also the source of many of those interests.

For instance, I am a big fan of Pure Pwnage, an internet television show that began as a mocumentry about a fictional “pro gamer,” someone who leads a lifestyle centered around playing video games with people all over the world via the internet.

I was immediately hooked, and felt the need to share my new favorite show with my friends. Sadly, only a few of my friends are also gamers. Fortunately for me, there are an associated set of Pure Pwnage forums which has 49,441 members who are more than happy to talk about a cinimatographically impressive multi season epic while pwning up some Counter Strike at Digital Ops.

Social networking sites are about who you know and who you can meet, not about shared interests. While some social networking sites offer “groups” to gather together people with shared interests, the goal here is to find other people who share your interests, not to discuss them in detail or to share knowledge. On a social networking site, the user’s name and appearance are central features of their profile, where people leave little messages for other people to look at. Social networking sites exist to provide a method of connecting people and helping them communicate.

Perhaps the appeal of the social networking sites is the fancier layouts and visuals. However, the simpler interface of the forums just indicates that they’re made to facilitate more substantial communication. Major internet communities and social networking sites both boast huge online user communities. What factor is it that social networking sites have that internet communities don’t that causes social networking sites to get all the attention?

Seth Godin wrote a great article bemoaning the shortage in Search Engine Marketing of podiatrists–i.e., targeted, inexpensive, efficient specialists as opposed to dramatic and overly complex generalists (“Doctors” in his example). He observes that there are people who already know how to be “podiatrists”, but wonders if any of them are trying to market themselves as such. Funny he should mention that!

Firms with these skills exist in droves, but in our experience it’s hard to convince people to use them. We think it’s because Search Engine Marketing is still an unknown, and, for most people, an unproven practice, especially when the primary indicator of success–”Black Box” search engine algorithms–change monthly or even weekly.

So how is a consumer supposed to choose a good Search Engine Marketing company? Interview them! This is what we’d look for in a company. It should:

• be client and results focused. Fairly early in the discussion, a good Internet Marketing company should be able to describe how Internet Marketing will apply to your business model.
• place an emphasis on metrics. Internet Marketing is a moving target. Work with firms that emphasize how they will test assumptions and how they rely on published research to drive their processes. Read their blog to see how they think about this aspect of their work.
• show humility about their work. Work with firms that are willing to learn from their mistakes. There’s no such thing as a perfect Internet Marketing engagement.
• explain things simply. The fundamental concepts of internet marketing are simple; it’s the details that are hairy. An Internet Marketing firm that can simply describe its vision will be better at getting those details right in a way that works for you.
• enjoy client loyalty. Although not all engagements are long-term, successful Internet Marketing Companies have strong, long-term engagements with a large portion of the people in their portfolio because they know how to identify needs and execute. Ask the firm flat-out: for long-term engagements, how many companies decide to renew their contract with you?
• be certified either in an analytics tool or a Paid Search tool. Or both. Why? Because companies that can take the time to get their people certified are committed to training and professional development. Better trained people provide better service.

SEO consultant has some good questions to ask that can elicit this information. We like this overview as well, although it may be too in-depth and dependent on documentation, which isn’t a strong indication of effectiveness. Still, these questions are good start. Good luck!

What can we learn from “An Inconvenient Truth” about how to tell a
complicated story with a chart or graph? Well, that it’s often a very difficult task.

A recent post addressed some basic guidelines common to information visualization design and evaluations. I’d now like to bring up a question related to both these tasks – what effect does type of audience have on these guidelines? Often, information visualization books, such as Card’s excellent Using Vision to Think, which covers numerous aspects of data viz, do not give much treatment to questions of the designated perceiver. On a general level, it may seem obvious – a visualization targeting clients should be simpler to process than one designed for analysts who have more time to spend visually exploring the data. But this doesn’t do justice to some of the finer target audience-based distinctions, which can lead to debates over guidelines and best practices if unmentioned.

In checking around for online discussions around this, while there are plenty of blogs devoted to info viz, I found that most (like information aesthetics, or meryl’s) seem to focus primarily on supplying a survey of novel and interesting visualizations, without going too far into evaluating them empirically, or considering the design process.

One online resource that did touch on this aspect of design is The Adobe Design Center Think Tank’s article on
the controversial visualization of the temp/carbon monoxide relationship in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth”:

The controversy was around labeling of the y-axis, and that a perceiver can’t tell whether warmer temperatures precede or follow the rises in levels of carbon dioxide. According the graph’s designers Duarte Design (who helped create all the graphs in the movie, but failed to comment on this particular design), “In general, you want to keep the visuals minimal and eliminate background noise to emphasize your point.” The Adobe article goes on to point out that “dumbing down” or simplifying the graphics can make your audience unlikely to agree with the pattern you’re trying to enforce through the graph, citing Edward Tufte’s famous observation that less is often just less when it comes to visualizing information, as it sacrifices nuance and thus credibility. Isn’t science “complicated”?, people tend to think, and its difficult to convince them otherwise.

Adobe ends the article with a reference to how combined narrative / visulalizations are becoming “the most common way of presenting information for businesses, academics, and the military.” To be effective, dramatic results must be carefully introduced; the realization must be gradual to make the visualization seem accurate and believable.

To me, this begins to touch on some features that can distinguish visualizations designed for those familiar with a topic but not immersed in the data, such as clients coming to a company with an analysis need, versus those geared toward the analysts themselves.

Its a somewhat debatable issue, in my opinion. I’ve met people (including a company I designed a viz for) that ultimately decided if they were to put a visualization in front of clients, it had to be simplistic. Myself (perhaps as an analyst?) am not satisfied with overly-simplistic graphs in any context; its the data that interests me.

I thought it would be a fun exercise to try and categorize real distinguishing features of viz’s for each audience type, and some that are shared:

Client Audience

• prettier – (custom color schemes?)
• make use of convention as a default
• metaphors/branding interwoven in design
• delivered in narrative context

Analyst Audience

• multiple views
• access to info on data mapping
• interactivity
• access to much granularity

Shared Characteristics

• maximize automatic processing
• use easily distinguishable colors – (beward of red/green color blindness, which is relatively common)
• minimize use of text by default

Pure Visibility is an Apple shop. When I came to Pure Visibility and got my MacBook, it was the first time that I had worked with a Mac all day long, every day. It took a while to get used to this new environment and separate the aspects of OS X that I didn’t like from the aspects that were simply different than what I was used to.

I’ve now been here for a while. There seem to be some great things about OS X, some things that are arbitrarily different, and there are some areas where there is room for improvements in usability. In writing about them, I’m not trying to assert the superiority of one operating system over another. Rather, I take the position that there’s always room for improvement.

My newly installed OS X came configured to look for software updates on a weekly basis. That’s no problem. The problem is in the Software Update application’s main screen.

Every Thursday morning, I get into the office and start up my computer. Not too long after I’ve started checking email and looking through my calendar and getting started on the day’s work, this window pops open telling me what software updates are available. Fair enough. However, the only option it gives me is to install the update right there on the spot. That would be fine, except that just about every week, there is a software update that requires restarting the computer.

So, every Thursday, not too long after I’ve started working, Software Update asks me if I’d like to drop everything I’m doing and restart the computer.

Of course, I can just ignore Software Update until it is convenient for me to restart. It could happen, but pretty often, I spend my day at work actually working. Or I’ll have something that I’m working on that I want to leave open if I take a break.

Instead, I can wait until the end of the day and install the software updates. Assuming I remember to do it – it is apparently possible to shut off the computer without installing those updates or Software Update asking you if you’d still like to install the updates. If I do remember to install them, then I’m stuck waiting for the computer to finish restarting before I can shut it down and leave. There doesn’t seem to be any way to just have the computer install the updates and shut down rather than restart.

Alternatively, I can close the window or quit Software Update, and then run it again later or wait until next week. The problem there is that I have to either run it again later or wait until next week. Updating software doesn’t correspond to any of my goals. Why should I have to remember to run Software Update again later when it is solely for the benefit of the computer? If I leave it until the following week, then I’m just back in the same situation again on Thursday morning.

So what would I do to improve this? How about one more button: “Install these updates when I shut down the computer.” Software Update then goes away, and then next time you shut down the computer, it takes that little bit of extra time to install the updates. It could even do it the next time you restart, too, in case you happen to do that first.

That way, you can have it whichever way you like it: If you enjoy dropping whatever you’re doing and rebooting, you can install the updates immediately. If you enjoy working for the computer rather than having the computer work for you, you can just close Software Update and manually start it whenever you choose. If you want to get the software updates but want to keep working, then you have the option to unobtrusively slip them in when in works for you.

Naturally, after writing this post, the next time I shut down my computer, OS X flashed a dialog informing me that it was installing some updates just before the computer finished shutting off. I have no idea how I got that to happen, and my search for information online has turned up nothing. Given that I can’t figure out how to get it to happen again, I think this post still stands.

We love cake! Every month we have a birthday or two and we celebrate with a gathering around the “cake”. The cake will come in various shapes and sizes, but this month is extra special for a few reasons.
Yesterday, we celebrated some very special birthdays: Jason Young (our Information Superhighway Tour Guide), Daniel O’Neil (our Alchemist), and Dunrie Greiling (our Director of Happiness).

So of course we would need a very special cake for these very special team members! Only the best will do, after all, Jason is a foodie, Dunrie is an exquisite baker, and Daniel…well he loves his cake!

This chocolate raspberry cake with white frosting (design based on a Google search listing) was amazing and who knew that Ann Arbor’s very own Jefferson Market made these delicious birthday cakes! Well of course Jessica Hullman (our Analytics Muse) did – thank you for enlightening us Jessica!

And Happy Birthday Jason, Daniel and Dunrie!!!

At long last we are thrilled to announce the release of O’Reilly Media’s Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine and Conversion Rate Secrets. This book details search engine marketing best practices: showing readers how to optimize their conversion rates and performance tune their websites to boost the return on any Web site investment.

This is the second edition of a book written by Ann Arbor, MI website optimization guru Andy King. In this edition, Andy tapped us to contribute two chapters: Chapter 3 – Pay Per Click Optimization and Chapter 4 – PPC Case Study featuring our work for Body Glove Mobile Accessories Group.

Our Pure Visibility team learned a lot throughout the course of writing these chapters, personally, I was amazed at how much hard work and revisions go into putting out a finished bound copy. The hard work was worth it and I’ve never seen a book with such an in depth and thorough analysis of PPC marketing. We are confident that if you have an interest in Pay Per Click Optimization or Website Optimization you will learn a ton from this book.

Recently the New York Times published an article about Yahoo!’s attempt to bootstrap the next generation of search by opening their search platform to start-up partners. Yahoo!’s revenue gain from this approach, at least short-term, is probably not going to be significant. But it does suggest a potential threat to Google’s dominance. Why? Simply put, Yahoo! is trying commoditize Google’s secret weapon, “relevance”, which would open the way for the next innovation in search.

Relevance has been the key innovation in online search since about 2005, but it’s not the first innovation, and Yahoo! is banking on the reasonable assumption that it won’t be the last. The state of the art in search has moved through a series of innovations, each of which created a top competitor. These were, in rough order,

Directories like Galaxy, where content was managed and organized largely by humans,

Content-Rich Search engines like Alta Vista, which provided enormous amounts of information without the kind of rigorous relevance we expect today,

Portal-based search engines like Yahoo!, where the engine was part of a community, and

Relevance-based search engines, which has been the core of Google’s brand from its inception.

With each generation the previous innovation generally became a commoditized feature of a new product: something that people expected, rather than something that differentiated the product from other products.

So can Yahoo! commoditize relevance? It depends on whether or not relevance is truly ready to become a standard feature of search. If it’s not ready, then new services won’t satisfy a key need and won’t be used. Ask.com, for example, had an innovative interface that emphasized usability, but its searches lacked relevance. As a result people never adopted the engine, but opted to stay instead with Google and Yahoo!, both of which provide excellent relevance in searches.

Still, if Yahoo! can succeed in providing its relevance engine as a feeder for companies that are providing additional value ON TOP OF their relevance engine, they could create a new revolution in search by giving developers a demanded and key feature that will be added to some new search innovation.

That could, yet again, change everything.

Information visualization has become a big part of web analytics, with Google Analytics leading the pack when it comes to visualizing user interactions with a site, and a few new tools for social media analysis touting visualization capabilities as reasons to invest. With newer technologies making it easier than ever to create visualizations, as well as allowing more visually-engaging options than ever before as 3D becomes easier to process, a post on some of the basic guidelines that can be used when judging the effectiveness of a visualization seemed worthwhile.

Let’s start with an example. Below are two visualizations of a wave form from Stuart Card’s Using Vision to Think”:

Clearly, the bottom graphic is more effective. But why?

One of the fundamental requirements in information visualization concerns use of basic human perceptive abilities. Ideally, a visualization allows for fast interpretation by making use of automatic processing, the kind that allows forms to pop-out without any conscious attempt. Is how well a graph does this subjective to judge? To some degree, perhaps, but just as usability standards exist, so do general guidelines for designing graphs.

Now, for an example closer to SEM, here’s the map portion of the Map Overlay report in Google Analytics:

I am actually not a huge fan of this graph, though most GA graphs are fairly intuitive. Ideally, a visualization should convey distinction well without cognitive overload, even between similar values. Otherwise, we could just use tables for everything. In the map, by using a gradient, the colors on the left side of the scale appear more or less the same. When I see most of the map appearing the same color, one hardly discernible from the background, my first assumption is that these countries aren’t bringing any traffic, or are bringing maybe 1-5 people (based on the scale in the lower left). In actuality, several are bringing web traffic in the hundreds. The graph gives the impression of a pattern, as it should, but the error in the judgment it encourages is worth considering. As a fan of visualizations, rather than tables, I’d rather the surprise came from the former, but with this graph I need the table to get a real sense of the data.

Here’s another map example, Mark Newman (of UM)’s well-known graph of US Election Results in the 2006 Congressional Election:

I like how the borders are de-prioritized in favor of giving the viewer a better sense of the distribution of democrats and republicans, but the state outlines allow one to still note what state.

An easy evaluation measure is to consider whether the mapping of the data to the visualizing structure is expressive, meaning it represents all and only the data in the source table. The classic example of a violation is a bar graph being used to graph two non-ordinal variables (like countries versus food exports).

A final major consideration usually concerns “focus + context”, a term used often in HCI and interface design, referring to providing both the big picture and the detailed view. Zoom is a classic distortion example that demonstrates focus + context when done right. The best visualizations are those like the zoom capabilities of Google Maps, where details don’t come at the expense of the bigger picture:

So, there’s a joke around the office that besides a few obvious stand-outs (our co-founder Linda Girard is one), that we’re a kind of odd bunch here at Pure Visibility. We’ve used the phrase “nerds with social skills” to describe the mix on our team (often in the same person) of hard nosed data analysis and more qualitative business analysis skills.

As we work for our clients, whether we’re improving the visibility of their site through search engine optimization and AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN PPC management or improving their site’s performance through tuning its usability, we use a combination of hard skills (let the numbers speak for themselves, prove it to me) and soft skills (listening to our clients, listening to our clients’ customers). I think the word cloud for our blog proves it. Because we’ve got a nice mix of technology and domain terms (“website” “salesforce” “online” “bounce” “AdWords” “domain”) as well as analytical terms (“know” “measure”) we’ve got “people” as big as any of them.

We believe the people are what should drive the technology, rather than the reverse. What does your blog’s word cloud say about you? Find out at Wordle.net.