You going to this year’s Internet User Experience (IUE)? This will be the fifth annual edition of a several day conference here in Southeastern Michigan, March 30-April 3. The schedule provides 3 days of more intensive workshops and tutorials (March 30, 31, and April 3) surrounding 2 days of conference fun (April 1-2).

No foolin’, the fifth annual IUE conference will be a great event for learning, sharing, and networking.

Pure Visibility’s Co-Founder Linda Girard will provide one of the keynote presentations on April 1 as well as participate in a panel on April 2.

April 1, 2009 – Linda will provide a keynote address, Bringing the Left Brain and Right Brain Together Online: Branding + Optimization.

April 2, 2009 – Linda will participate in a panel presentation Branding Search Engine Optimization and Usability with Karyn Kozo of branding and creative design agency re:group and Laurie Kantner of usability research consultants Tec-Ed.

Other Pure Visibility folks will also be in attendance, so if you’re registered, come find us and say hello. If you aren’t yet registered, you might consider doing so by March 10 to snare early bird pricing and a copy of Dr. Susan Weinschenk’s Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click.

Registration is open!

As I was in the middle of a sentence explaining that it was hard to do something new like social media “wrong”, I had to stop and back-track as I remembered the “Twitter Motrin Scandal of ’08″. It turns out to be a pretty good example of how NOT to do social media. The story got big enough the New York Times covered it, so you can get all of the Motrin Moms backstory on their Motherlode blog.

Beyond the questionable content of the ad that sparked the controversy in the first place, the faux pas that got Motrin into further deep water was a lack of social media monitoring. They simply had no idea the blogosphere – and in particular, Twitter – was going crazy about their ad. In the end, Motrin had no choice but to pull the ad.

Read More

We’re hiring!

We are looking for an enthusiastic Internet search analyst to join our team. The ideal candidate will have experience developing, launching, managing, and optimizing paid search and organic visibility campaigns for clients across multiple search engines. Google AdWords management experience and Google Advertising Professional certification are important qualifications.

Details on the open position can be found in the Internet Search Analyst job description.

To apply please send your resume and cover letter before March 13, 2009 to: jobs@purevisibility.com

As Google Analytics continues to improve its excellent product, it’s important to remember the fundamental nature of traffic patterns for your business and how they can affect your reporting. Even with the introduction of advanced segmentation, motion charts, and other awesome features, there are real-time traffic patterns that can create major errors in your analytics reporting if you don’t account for them.

One of the biggest ones is highly cyclical web traffic, which can have a huge impact on trend comparisons across months.

Why does this matter? Well, let’s look at a real example from one of our clients. If we try to do a traffic comparison month to month, say, between October 2008 and October, 2007, and we didn’t check the cyclical patterns, we would think the increase in traffic in 2008 was 0nly about 0.57%, a pretty small climb for a company that is working hard to improve a site’s traffic.

However, if we look at the month to month comparison to see what the cyclical patterns are, we see that things are a little off:

In this case, the 2008 sample is has two fewer high-traffic days than the 2007 sample. This can have a strong distorting effect.

The fix is simple, however: do your time sample from week to week instead of month to month! In most cases a five week slice, starting and ending on the same day, that includes the entire sample month is all you need, although for some periods you will need a six week slice. In this case, we took a five week slice starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday. The results were pretty dramatic: Once the cyclical traffic had been synchronized, the five week period containing October 2008 had 3.75% more traffic than the five week period containing October 2007.

Google Analytics makes this comparison extremely easy with the use of the calendar function; basically choosing five weeks is nearly as easy as choosing a single month, so week-to-week synchronization is a quick and easy adjustment.

We have heard some concerns that week to week comparison are harder to explain to clients. We appreciate that this makes the time periods a little less fixed than month to month comparisons. But in fact we have created a more formal version of this blog post that basically walks them through the process, and we’ve found that with the pictures shown here, it’s generally very easy for them to understand. One of two things will happen: either they will accept the fact that month-to-month reporting may be inaccurate, but not hold you accountable for trend data at that time period, or they will embrace the week-to-week synchronization.

I mentioned Google’s virtual world, Lively, in a post about advertising in games last Fall. This weekend the New York Times ran a piece about Lively, Dodgeball and other recently axed Google developments and acquisitions. [link] Some internet marketing products number among the programs that have recently been cut, Google Radio and Newspaper Ads.

Sure, focus comes back to the core of Google AdWords, pay per click advertising, which is one of the things Pure Visibility does best. But it was cool to see Google explore new directions in advertising. Read More

A current college student asked me how I got into internet marketing, and what a typical day is like at my job. In case it would be useful to someone, I thought I’d post it here.

How did I get into internet marketing?

Unintentionally, but I’m sure happy I did.

I have a pretty funny career path so far, which you can see on my linkedin profile. I have a science doctorate, but I eventually found it kind of dry and unsatisfying, and I needed a more team-oriented work situation. After I left academia, I started as a technical writer for a science software firm. I became a project manager when I went to the owner of the company to discuss how a project I was on was foundering. He supported me learning more about project management (and other things). Since that time I moved very gradually from project management for software to web design and development to internet marketing. To round out my “on the job” experience, I pursued professional certification from the Project Management Institute, earning my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification in 2005.

My project management skills apply across fields, but I particularly like internet marketing because it is so quantitative and hypothesis-driven. It combines the science side of my brain with the people side of my brain. We can see the impact of implementing our recommendations relatively quickly, and iterate to make things even better. Software and web design projects take a long, long time. I suppose that I need quicker gratification and more data than I was getting in those two fields.

What is a typical day?

My daily schedule varies based on the day of the week and the time in the month. At our company, we do a fair bit of monthly reporting, so there is a monthly rhythm of analysis and reporting in the beginning of the month and implementing/following up later in the month. What this means is that the beginnings of my month focus on quality assurance for reports and having meetings with clients, and the ends of my months tend to center on coordinating next steps on approved items.

Our weekly schedule also has a rhythm. Monday mornings are internal time, where we as a company review the previous week and plan the coming one. We review budgets, deadlines, and projections.

As a project manager, I am involved superficially in many things. I answer client calls and emails, I coordinate with the team on deadlines and deliverables, I try to troubleshoot issues that emerge and clear a path so that the analysts can actually sit down and analyze things. I work with our calendars to schedule and move meetings (internal and with clients). I route and queue requests from clients and internal team members. I prioritize so that the team knows what must be done as opposed to what’s a nice to have. I have a lot of meetings and quick check-ins during the day. I also am on the phone a fair bit. I’m interrupted a lot. I suppose I also interrupt others a fair bit!

Director of Happiness and her pineapple

There are times when I moonlight as an analyst and jump into the data to answer a client question quickly. In those times, I like the focus and the numbers, but when I surface, I’m glad I work on a team who keep me honest, and whom I can help by keeping things straight.

And of course, I love my title, Director of Happiness .

So, you’ve started your social media monitoring effort. You’ve got your finger on the pulse, so to speak, of the “blogosphere,” you’ve got a stream of tweets coming at you, and you’ve got your eye on various message boards. You’re even keeping an eye out for reviews of your business.

What are you going to do with that information?
Read More

On Tuesday February 10, 2009, Pure Visibility’s Michael Beasley will co-present

Introduction to Usability – An Interactive Discussion

under the auspices of the Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association (MIUPA). The event, hosted by Quicken Loans in Livonia, Michigan, will be from 6-8:30PM. Food and networking will start at 6PM, and the program will commence at 7PM.
The program will be led by Michael Beasley, User Experiologist here at Pure Visibility and current MIUPA President, and Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, owner and principal of UsableWorld. They will lead an interactive discussion that will give you the opportunity to pose your own questions to two usability experts. You will learn about such things as:

• What is usability?
• How can I incorporate it into my organization? my projects? How can I deepen our practice of it?
• “Usability”, “User Experience (UX)”, “Human Factors”, “Information Architecture” – what’s deal with all of these names?
• What can my website analytics tell me about the usability of my site?
• How can I use end user tasks and goals to organize my website?

After an introduction to the basics of usability, Mike and Dave will open the floor to questions. You will set the agenda for this discussion through the questions you bring, so come prepared!

Location

Quicken Loans
20255 Victor Parkway
Livonia, MI 48152

Exit 7 Mile East from I-275. North on Victors Parkway from 7 Mile.
Enter main door, go to 3rd floor, meeting will be in the “Puerto Rico Room”

Cost

$10 for MIUPA Members, $5 for full-time non-working students, $15 for all others

RSVP

RSVP via email to events@miupa.org