Google AdWords offers targeting by country and language. If you have a US-based company, you might want to start new campaigns that target countries outside the US because:

1. It expands your traffic reach (duh).

2. It truly is possible, even easy, to find keywords that cost around $0.10/click for top positions (especially foreign terms).

3. Lots of people outside the US can speak English (maybe another “duh” is in order?).

If your company does business outside the US, or would like to explore doing business outside the US, AdWords is a great platform for getting started.   Here’s how AdWords management with international targeting options works.

Managing AdWords Country Targeting

Country targeting is set in your campaign settings under “Locations.”   For international targeting, the most important factors for deciding if a user fits your targeting criteria are:

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The objectives and usefulness of personas are disputed topics in professional HCI contexts. I’d like to reopen the debate, by suggesting that personas are based on at least one flawed assumption.

First, though, a quick definition of persona. Personas are narratives that describe hypothetical users of a website, typically through details about their background, their values, their overall information needs, and their specific objectives on a site.

The best descriptions of personas focus on the way that they can function as communication devices, and drive home to business decision-makers that their choices will affect real users. While this might be true to some extent, I feel that some critique is necessary to clarify that personas are not fact, but instead are a pretty nebulous methodology, and not ‘scientific’ tools.

Major philosophical problem 1:
This problem is more a clarification of what personas are not: objective, or able to subject to considerations of proof of concept. Personas are impossible to refute as a scientific technique, because they are based on the construction of hypothetical worlds. As a result, any arguments of whether or not they are good or useful, or bad and not useful, is meaningless. Is astrology useful? If you believe in it, you can use it to validate certain perceived characteristics of your self, others, or situations. But you will never have any evidence as to whether it is valid or not. Personas, I argue, are a similar form of ‘pseudo science’, because there is nothing that can’t be explained through a persona, and there is no single, or even identifiable subset, of correct personas for a given website affliction. Let’s say you are a designer asked to evaluate a website. Can it be said whether there is any truth, in terms of real-world correspondence, between the type of person described and the aspect of the site? Is the persona true? That is impossible to say, regardless of how much sense it may seem to make as one
reads the tasks, needs, etc, associated with the person. If personas live in the world of fiction, how can we possibly tie them to actual aspects of a website and types of people?

Major philosophical problem 2:
Personas assume that there is a real connection between desires (i.e, information needs), actions, and aspects of a website. But these things are not at all necessarily contingent, and I argue that the specific connections personas imply of these sorts are probably quite often completely false, if not verified through other, less subjective techniques. The problem is that, stated in terms of information beliefs and personal values, personas are only a re-description of the action that they are thought to be predicting, and that that action is only a re-description of the aspects of the website that it is thought to be linked to. But in reality, the connections personas imply are logical, not contingent — they are created in the mind of the designer who writes the persona.

In sum, a persona is in my opinion best described as a label. A complicated, completely arbitrary label, used to direct focus to an aspect of a website, but without any foundation in fact.

If you are a huge persona fan, feel free to weight in. My intention in this blog post was not re-hash obvious facts of personas, but instead to touch on some of the more tacit assumptions that go along with them.

There is a question that many newer consumers of paid search products face: How much should I rely on automated tools for management and generation of paid search ads and keywords?

It’s one that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and in my opinion, it’s likely to stay that way. While technologies may come closer and closer to reproducing the ‘gold standard’ of human judgment, accuracy for most automated numerical and natural language tasks continues to lag behind humans, at least for small to moderate paid search accounts.

Human vs Automated Paid Search

This trend reverses when you are working with very high volume accounts (websites). When your paid search visit conversions are in, say, the thousands per campaign, you’ll have a better chance of benefiting from the automated tools. Imagine, for example, what you would pay X paid search professionals to manage 500 campaigns, each of which saw thousands of conversions.

Still, before you go about firing the humans and automating even big accounts, you should inform yourself about a tool’s constraints and abilities. Disambiguating important concepts that pertain to your market, for example, is a process where automated tools tend to lag behind. Advertising on the phrase ‘black leather belt’ that an automated tool deems relevant to your market, when you actually sell ‘black belt six sigma’ courses, is not money well spent. Know enough about the tools you use to prevent these types of mishaps.

Automated tools also may come with limits that prevent you from choosing the budgeting. Omniture’s SearchCenter, for example, requires optimization for a price per conversions, and can’t be capped at a specific level per month, to spread out over a month. Naturally, clicks can’t be guaranteed at any given time, but tools that allow the maximum flexibility of budgeting, such as capping and distributing evenly as possible, are the most useful. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to take the market by storm, even if there might be potential customers out there.

Whether automated or human, paid search management requires some ability to detect anomalies, and to hold on spending when highly unlikely patterns suddenly lead to large spending. Find out whether automated tools are equipped to self-pause, or whether your human paid search manager will be accountable on off-hours for period checks on spending.

In short, human search is a tremendously valuable approach, especially when supported by automated mechanisms. This is particularly true now, as more and more affordable and even free automated tools exist, such as   Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool, Google Adwords Desktop Editor, Google Insights for Search, Keyword Discovery, and Google’s Bid Management tool Conversion Optimizer.

A recent Forrester Research report suggests that embedding video links in email marketing messages can double or triple click-through rates.

I have started to get email messages with embedded videos in my inbox. At this point, they all come from one source, my alma mater, Princeton University. In June, I received three email-with-video messages, one from the alumni association, one from Annual Giving, and another from Princeton Project 55 a separate alumni organization that gave me a public interest fellowship the year after graduation.

I’m not sure if they’re all using the same technology. Two are hosted on Princeton’s Annual Giving campaign site. The Project 55 one is a link to a video/slideshow on YouTube. So, although they’re all from Princeton, they are different in detail.

Each of the videos is a few minutes: the Project 55 one is 4 minutes long, the Project 55 one is about 4 minutes, the Princeton pause one is 2 minutes long. For this reason, they sat in my inbox for a while, waiting for the time I have a couple minutes of idle time and want to stay in front of my computer.

My connection to my alma mater is a deep one, with fond memories and deep friendships, and so these videos are actually quite compelling reminders of that experience. Surprise, at the end there’s a request to continue my support of the University’s work, of Project 55′s work, building on the positive experience recapitulated in the brief video.

So, even though I did not watch the videos immediately, I bet these emails are worth it for Princeton. Perhaps clickthrough is less prompt because the “investment” of time to view the video is greater. But, I’m not sure how extensible this model is. For instance, if I got an email with a video link from another organization, to which I was less strongly connected, I’m not sure I’d open it. If I got a video email from a business, I’m not sure I’d open it.

I’m curious if the stats hold this up – how people respond to these video messages. Forrester’s research suggests that the videos are compelling. I wonder if it is just because they’re new? I also wonder if Forrester’s statistics will hold by the time that everyone is mailing everyone else links to their videos, if this will just saturate. And, I’m curious if your gut on this is like mine, that these videos are suited well to applications like University alumni giving, but not from strangers.

In this era of smart spending, many organizations are evaluating every expense – including domain names. Sure, domains are dirt cheap through many services these days, but if you have a few domain names, and you buy several extensions to each, you’re eventually spending real money.

So, how important is it to maintain the renewals? As with many things in life, “it depends.” In this case, the root questions we can turn to are:

1) Is there a potential impact to your brand if the domain that lapses falls into the hands of a competitor or other site you’d rather not be associated with?

2) If that happened, what would be the cost? That includes the impact on your brand, legal fees, time that could have been spent on proactive efforts, etc.

3) Most importantly, is the savings now worth the risk of what might happen later?

Chances are that makes it a simple question.

The only real gray area is which extensions are important. You’re going to find many differing opinions on which matter, but here’s our take:

The “no brainers” to protect:

• .com
• .net
• .org

For key domain names, consider also:

• .biz
• .info

And if you do business in other countries (or think you might someday):

• reserve the relevant country extensions as well

The next most commonly asked question is – what about .mobi? Personally, I don’t see it taking off. Technology now enables a site to adapt itself to the browser, which is much more elegant (read: user friendly) than forcing people to learn a new domain extension. A quick check of some popular sites reveals even in highly competitive markets, few companies have bothered to reserve a .mobi domain.

If you are interested in doing everything you can be to protect your sites’ domain name (just owning it isn’t always enough!), see also: http://www.circleid.com/posts/help_domain_name_hijacked/.

Also, please note that there are some good ways to maintain the domain names in your organization that you should think about before things get too messy!

Urchin 6.6, an upgrade of Google Analytics Urchin software goes public today. As certified Urchin resellers, Pure Visibility was happy to be part of a beta release of the software.

Here’s the short list on what you need to know: Urchin version 6.6 is a significant upgrade. Features include further AdWords integrations, past problems taken care of, plus some exciting new Roll-Up reporting as in Google Analytics. Not to mention a host of new reports!

One interesting note – with this version Google has even made a move to integrate with competitor YSM for users who need this data. Nice work as usual, Google.

Details on the Features Added in Urchin 6.6

Deep integration with Google AdWords

• Budget Alerts: Users are warned if the budget for an AdWords campaign is in imminent danger of being exhausted. This information is provided automatically from the AdWords system.
• Keyword Generation Tool: This allows you to generate pertinent keywords and to see their projected performance/budget information. It also allows you to add newly generated keywords and delete existing keywords from AdWords campaigns.
• Direct links to the AdWords system: this feature allow you to navigate directly from Urchin to the appropriate screen in your AdWords account, bypassing the login process (assuming you have entered your Adwords account info into Urchin previously)
• The Urchin Tag Manager (or, “semi auto-tagging”): this feature inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs. This feature simplifies the URL tagging process and allows you to easily import AdWords cost data into Urchin. See this AdWords help article for more information.
• AdWords Optimizer: this allows you to optimize your campaign in Urchin and automatically propagate changes into AdWords.
• Copy Campaign Tool: this allows you to copy keyword campaigns into your AdWords account from other campaigns or other ad networks such as Yahoo Search Marketing.

Advertiser View and Advertisement Optimization reporting section

• An Advertiser View profile template and Advertisement Optimization section have been added to provide additional options for advertisement-related reports and to support the above mentioned AdWords-related features.

New reports

• - “Time On Site” report: this report shows the length of time visitors spent on the site in question. It is located under Content Optimization -> Content Performance -> Engagement Metrics.
• - “Performance Comparison” report: this report allows you to compare Campaign, Keyword and Content performance across sources/mediums (e.g. Google|CPC vs Yahoo|organic). It is located in Advertisement Optimization -> Marketing Campaign Results.
• – “CPC Structure” reports: this set of reports is found under Advertisement Optimization. CPC Structure analyzes your campaigns in a handy drilldown tree structure.
• - “Campaign View” report: this report displays paid UTM campaign information (Google and Yahoo campaigns supported).
• - “Keywords View” report: this report displays paid keyword information.

Data API

• – The Data Export API allows you to retrieve Urchin reporting data via SOAP 1.x and REST protocols. Read more about the API in the help center article.

External Authentication (LDAP)

• - In addition to Urchin-specific authentication (now called ‘Native’), Urchin 6.6 supports external authentication that can be configured on ‘per user’ basis. External authentication modules for LDAP and MSAD are provided with Urchin 6.6, while custom modules can be integrated by modifying the configuration files.

New Urchin “Home” Page, or the Rollup Report

• - The Urchin “home” page (the one you get just after logging in) has been modified to provide metrics for all the profiles that are visible to the logged-in user. Profile metrics are provided for the current day (today) and the most recent week, month and year.

Automated CPC Data Import from Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM)

• - Urchin 6.6 allows you to import CPC data from Yahoo Search Marketing in addition to AdWords. YSM campaigns may be copied into an AdWords account via the newly introduced Copy Campaign tool.

Miscellaneous

• - Urchin 6.6, like Urchin 5, allows you to cancel a running log processing job gracefully (without corrupting the database).

Bug Fixes & Feature Enhancements

Administration

• - In Urchin 6.5 and prior versions, profile-related folders were not renamed when a profile was renamed on the admin interface. This has been fixed.

Log Processing

• - In certain cases, Urchin was encountering segmentation fault while processing ELF2 logs. This was resulting in incomplete log processing job and inconsistent reporting data. This has been fixed.
• – Incorrect treatment of the profile’s local-time configuration during log processing was resulting in the reporting data being shifted by hours in the months. This was happening for the months when day light saving starts or ends for the selected profile’s timezone. This has been fixed.

SSL Support

• – A problem with connecting to Urchin via https on Windows 2003 has been fixed.

Utilities

• - The reporting data migration utility (convert-u5data) has been significantly improved. A problem with importing large amounts of data from Urchin 5.7 into Urchin 6.6 has been fixed.

Miscellaneous

• The Urchin Embedded Help and various online Urchin Help Center articles have been updated.