Pure Visibility received a FastTrack award at AnnArbor.com’s Deals of the Year celebration Friday night.   We were one of 10 companies in the Ann Arbor region to demonstrate consistent growth since 2006.

FastTrack awards are presented to companies with consistent records of growth. To qualify, Pure Visibility reported 2009 revenues greater than 2008 revenues and average growth of 20 percent in 2006, 2007 and 2008.

We’re sharing our expertise!  Don’t miss your chance to hear from Pure Visibility’s expert team what you need to know NOW about Internet marketing.

On November 9, Linda Girard and Jeremy Lopatin will talk “Search, Social and Mobile Trends – 2011” at Ann Arbor SPARK’s Marketing Roundtable.  Learn what Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and mobile apps mean to your business in 2011.  Don’t forget to register in advance!

On November 15, Catherine Juon will present “Search Engine Optimization” at the National Multi Housing Council’s Technology Conference. She’ll cover management and operational challenges related to successful implementation of a strategy to secure leads that convert to leases.

On November 17, Catherine will present “Sales & Marketing 3.0,” to attendees of the Michigan Emerging conference.  Catherine, and the team at Pure Visibility, is passionate about creating abundance in Michigan – her talk is aimed at helping Michigan companies achieve greater sales and success through Internet marketing.  Don’t miss it!

Next Thursday, November 11th is World Usability Day 2010, there is a great free event at Michigan State University, not too far from Pure Visibility, and there’s still time to register! This is a great opportunity to learn more about designing mobile applications. Read More

Hello from the Pure Visibility newbie! After three full weeks on the job, I thought I’d venture out into blog land to introduce myself, and talk about TextWrangler, a tool that’s been a huge help as I learn more about testing regular expressions (or RegEx) in Google Analytics. Regular expressions are character patterns used to match text.

After some hands on experience using RegEx in Analytics, I could understand their usefulness, and wanted to make sure I was applying the expressions correctly. It can be tricky to test, because you may THINK you’ve correctly applied the result in GA if you’re seeing any results returned, but even if you see results, it’s possible that you’re not seeing the entire picture. Luckily, there is a great tool called TextWrangler, that makes it easy to test regular expressions, so you make sure you’re using the right expressions when searching in Analytics reports. TextWrangler is a free text editor available on Macs. TinyEdit has the same functionality needed for testing RegEx, and is available for Windows Users.

In my position as an analyst, I will mostly use RegEx in Google Analytics, to view groups of data based on sets of rules that I determine.  For example:

Many people arrive at the Pure Visibility site after looking for information about QR codes.  However, there are many variations of these terms: qr code, q r code, qr codes, qr-code, and so on.  To really understand how many people arrive at the site after searching on these terms, I need to use regular expressions in my Analytics reports.  But first, I want to make to make sure that I’m using the right regular expressions to bring up the appropriate results! So, I’ll test in TextWrangler using the following steps:

1. First, enter several variations of the terms you want to have returned, as well as some terms you do NOT want to be returned.
2. Next, hit Command/Apple + F to begin the process of returning results using RegEx.
3. Make sure your cursor is at the top of the screen, as you will only see results for terms below your cursor (this has happened to me more than once!).
4. Make sure you’ve selected ‘Grep’ under the matching option.  Select any other fields appropriate to your search.
5. Use the appropriate regular expression/s in the ‘Find’ box.  In this case, I want to find any terms containing the letters Q and R in the same search term, so I’ll use parenthesis to group, and the pipe, to include an ‘or’ statement.  Using (qr|q r) means that I’ll find terms where Q and R appear directly next to each other OR with a space in between.
6. Hit ‘Next’ or ‘Find All’ to see which results are returned.  Assuming you used the proper expression, you’re all set to plug into Analytics! If you didn’t get the results you expected, make sure your cursor was set to the top of the page, and review the article from the Google Analytics Help Center if needed.

Now, you’re ready for the real thing.  After logging into your Google Analytics account, select the appropriate report, and apply the RegEx in the search field.

Have fun and happy RegExing!