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, organic visibility, and social media campaigns for clients across multiple search engines. This position has a moderate level of client exposure ranging from providing timely and insightful analysis and reporting of online activities to conducting client training classes and coaching sessions. Google AdWords Certification is required. Google Analytics Individual Qualification is desired.

We are also searching for a dynamic Relationship Manager to serve as the main point of contact for many of our internet marketing campaigns. The ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills and a proven track record of delivering quality service across multiple client engagements. Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is desired. Industry experience preferred.

Follow this link for more details on the open Internet Search Analyst position.
Follow this link for more information on the open Relationship Manager position.

Research on meme tracking online, published recently as part of the ACM Knowledge Discovery conference, may interest any marketers who think about using the web to spread a message. Online press and social media outlets provide a technological base for mass diffusion of memes, but setting out to spread one’s message is no easy task, as anyone who’s tried to do so knows. With the complexity of the web of interactions that must take place to spread a message online, how much can we really know about the cycle by which a message is spread?
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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.

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.

• We occasionally get asked for recommendations on books, blogs, and other resources for those who are new to web metrics and measurement. So, here is a round-up of Pure Visibility’s top five web analytics resources:
  • Best book for Web Analytics: Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik.If you’ve dabbled at all in SEO, you may remember an SEO: An Hour a Day book. Well, the same publisher has contracted one of Google’s top web analytics minds, Avinash Kaushik, to write this similar guide on web analytics. It is introductory, but picking it up guarantees that you’ll be getting your introduction from the best, meaning no best practices left unmentioned.
  • Best blog for Web Analytics: If you like the book, another fantastic source from the same author is Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor.

  This source is especially great for unpacking the oft-confusing definitions of web metrics. It is also a good place for those using Google Analytics, as Avinash is known to include detailed step-by-step introductions to the new features that Google introduces.

  • Best book for Website Optimization (SEO-focus): O’Reilly book Website Optimization.

  How does this pertain to Web Analytics? Well, in our estimation, it is virtually impossible to do any real good for your website through measurement without a sound understanding of Search Engine Optimization. The content in this guide, which covers everything from paid search to the more technical issues that can lead to problems with a site, definitely lives up to the high standards O’Reilly sets for its manuals.

  • Best book for Landing Page Optimization (testing): Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash.

  Landing Page Optimization is the design and implementation of tests for landing pages in your website. By setting up well-planned and executed tests, you can quickly increase the ROI you are seeing for the site. This book is by an entrepreneur of one of the most advanced companies who specialize in large scale testing. It is detailed and well-written, and the discussions of various strategies remain focused on the ultimate objective, of increasing revenue.

  • Best Holistic Marketing Measurement Blog: Forrester Research’s Interactive Marketing Measurement Blog.Forrester is known for their excellent insight into the trends in marketing, online and off, through comprehensive research. This blog is a great resource for interactive marketing measurement, including larger trends like social media engagement measurement, and lead management, both of which tend to be entwined with our more traditional definitions of web analytics.

Got any more favorite resources for Web Analytics? Share them with us!

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A recent New York Times article on web growth in developing countries discusses a situation we see all too often here at Pure Visibility: an increase in web use of U.S. based technologies and products from developing countries, without an equal increase in revenue for the hosting companies.

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Pure Visibility recently supplied a visualization challenge to several students in Professor Mick McQuaid’s Information Visualization 649 course at the University of Michigan School of Information. And the results, a visualization system design for SEO Word Market Analysis by HCI Designers Jasper Liu and Li Li, were fantastic!

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The most difficult part of diving into SEO is not any specific tactic. Instead, just making sense of the enormous amount of information online and off can be overwhelming. Have you ever wondered what the most important pieces of an SEO strategy are? If so, this post is for you.

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I consider myself to be all about change (even before Barack Obama) and feel like if I don’t shake things up in my life every few months then things will get boring. So, you would think when I found out about the new AdWords interface that I would be one of the first on board, but I’m not. I can’t figure out exactly why I’ve resisted using the new interface, but I know part of the reason is because I’m so used to the old interface when I’m not working in the Desktop Editor. This week I finally buckled down and faced this change head on and decided to start using the new interface with a couple of my accounts, after all we are all going to be forced to use this new interface soon.

The new interface looks like the Desktop Editor in terms of navigation. There is a navigational tree along the left that allows you to quickly jump from ad group to ad group and campaign to campaign. In my opinion this is a big improvement over the old interface because the most time consuming thing was moving throughout a large account and waiting for pages to load. Anther big change in the new interface is the addition of graphs that look a lot like Google Analytics graphs. This should make it easier to identify trends in your AdWords accounts where with the old interface you had to either generate reports look at the change history or look at Analytics data to identify long term trends. I imagine these graphs could be very useful for monitoring accounts, but I haven’t found anything interesting yet. Another change that I like is that you can actually edit keywords, previously if you wanted to change a keyword’s matching or spelling you were forced to delete the term and add the changed term back to the account.

So you might think, wow there’s a bunch of new useful features, I should switch to the new interface right away, but not so fast. One of my biggest gripes is how much information is crammed into the new interface window. I have a fairly large monitor (1680×1050 resolution) and I noticed that I needed to have my Firefox window taking up most of the screen in order to see all the information within the new interface. So, I decided to set my screen resolution 1024×768 (which is what a lot of internet users have) and my hunch was correct that it is terrible to navigate throughout the new interface unless you like scrolling left and right as well as up and down. Another big issue I have is just moving around the new interface is choppy and overall pretty sloppy. The new interface is beta like most Google roll outs, but from what I hear they are switching to this new interface in the next few months, so I hope these issues are fixed before the launch. Maybe it’s because I’m using Firefox and on a Mac but even so I don’t think this is ready for prime-time. Overall it has some good new features, but I am not sold yet. Has anyone else used the new interface? I’m interested to know what other people think.