• Interview customers
• Develop website personas
• Conduct a usability study on your website – watch how users interact
• Do keyword research for your industry – try out Google Insights, a free tool based on real world search history

Phone numbers within Google AdWords are getting an upgrade. Google will now automatically update all phone numbers within ad text to a Click-to-call number. This will have the largest impact on mobile phones.

While searching on your mobile device, if you come across an ad similar to the one shown, you will now be able to immediately dial the number by clicking on it. Google Voice users signed in on their desktop will also be able to call by clicking.

This feature is separate from Call Extensions which once applied to your AdWords campaign, creates a unique phone number that is trackable by Google. This is done by dynamically creating a phone number that once it is dialed, routs through Google’s system for tracking, and is then immediately forwarded to the company’s call center or office. Google uses a “pay-per-call” model (similar to pay-per-click) to charge for this feature.

Google does not charge for including phone numbers within the ad text. There are many benefits for both Call Extensions and Click-to-call numbers. It is best to use whichever one provides the largest return. Happy calling!

Now that Google+ has reached 20 million users, in order to stay in the social media game you’ll have four services to keep track of. Facebook and Twitter are the obvious big dogs. LinkedIn, the business social network, has been increasing in popularity and importance. With a huge number of initial sign-ups and very positive press, Google+ doesn’t seem to be going away. Most speculate that once more people start using big G’s new network and business pages are integrated, even more growth can be expected.

So how do you manage having a presence on four different social networks? There is no universally correct way. Everyone should develop their own strategy. To help find how others created theirs, I surveyed a group of marketers in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area. All of them have a strong presence on multiple social networks. The survey asked which of the big four networks they use, what their strategy was, and what impact, if any, Google+ has had.

With these tips you can develop a social media strategy that works for you and effecively targets your audience of followers.

Facebook

Facebook Usage

With over a quarter-billion users, Facebook is the largest social network. One main difference from Twitter and Google+ is that, for both these networks people have to agree to follow each other in order to “become friends.” This fosters a more personal experience. Users tend to know each other before becoming friends.

The usage chart indicates how people surveyed use Facebook. Personal usage is on the far left in darker colors while Networking and Work is lighter and to the right. This same format is used to show usage for the other social networks. As you can see, most use Facebook for personal, family, and entertainment.

“…when I share things that are more personal or family oriented I sometimes go straight to Facebook.”

“Facebook is more oriented toward keeping up with friends and family relationships.”

“I use Facebook to post more about what I am doing and who I am doing it with.”

Twitter

Twitter Usage

Twitter is a mixed bag of sorts. Usage is spread fairly evenly except for family use. Twitter is the service that tends to “stay out of the way.” They provide a method for you to share 140 characters of thoughts or links with others. The rest is up to you. Even though it is a very simple, limited interface, people often find it the most confusing. Regular users often have found specific ways Twitter can deliver custom news or information to them.

“…I use it as an aggregator of news or stories from reporters/networks I enjoy, bloggers I read, music news I care about…”

“Twitter is just for fun – mostly just follow/tweet my hobbies.”

“(Twitter) has really allowed me to build my personal brand…”

“I often cross post from Twitter.”

People tend to find their own personal use for Twitter. Often times other services feed into Twitter so they may have personal and work topics in the same stream.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Usage

LinkedIn promotes itself as the professional social network. Its more about creating a network of business associates. People you’ve done work for, companies you’ve worked at. Content can be shared but tends to be more focused to business news or the users related industry. You can see from the usage chart that there is a heavy lean towards networking and work.

“LinkedIn is only about professional networking…”

“I’m not posting entertainment stuff on LinkedIn…”

“I use (LinkedIn) for the forums and to keep a professional network. I rarely find the feed interesting but will regularly use it to see who is reading my profile and to have professional contacts…”

Besides being marketed towards professionals, LinkedIn does not allow you to share photos. One major reason it will always lean towards the work and not personal side of the usage chart.

Google+

Google+ Usage

Do a a Google Search and you will find dozens of reviews for Google+. It combines many features from each of the other big three. So how are people using it? How should you use it?

“Try not to post the same things on each network. Google+ is the only one that may cross that line…”

“Basically it is a good middle ground between Facebook and Twitter for me.”

“…with Circles I can be more precise in who I share with and really tailor content to that group.”

“I think I’ll enjoy it more when I start following the Twitter audience, bloggers, news, companies.”

“Google+ appears to be a composite of the major social media approaches.”

Finding Your Strategy

Your strategy needs to be your personal strategy. Many of those surveyed spoke on tailoring content to your audience. Keep track of who is following you and determine what would interest them.

“Create and build a personal brand through sharing content that is relevant to the audience, while still keeping one main thing in mind: BEING SOCIAL.”

This quote brings up another important point. Be yourself. You can turn off your followers if all you are posting “seven ways to…” or “top five reasons to…” links. Engage your audience. Respond to them. Let them see who you really are while still staying with in the boundaries of the specific social network.

“Be myself and always be transparent. Also, have fun with it!”

“I definitely think transparency is important, but that doesn’t mean post everything all the time. It just means to be aware of conflicting view points and to not get trapped in an echo chamber of similar content and people. This also allows for more interaction, and much more interesting discussion and connections.

So get out there, post, share, and have fun developing your personal social media strategy.

Note: Some graphs were captured from Google’s June Inside Search event video stream which can be viewed here.

Google recently held their Inside Search event in San Francisco. They introduced new technologies and applications for voice search, image search, and Google Goggles. The other main focus of the event was explaining Google’s continued development of mobile search.

So why is Google focusing on mobile search? It has the potential to be another very profitable revenue stream. It can also offset slower periods of desktop search volume.

Below are some rough search volumes for Google by day of the week. Notice that search volume on desktops is highest on Monday. It then gradually trends downward until the weekend. Saturday has the lowest volume of desktop search.

Now compare it to the volume of mobile search. It stays much more consistent from Monday to Thursday. What’s important for Google is that it peaks on Saturday. Mobile search’s busiest time is desktop’s slowest.

Let’s compare search volume throughout the day. Here we see the volume of desktop searches by two hour increments. People obviously search less late at night on desktops. Search volume then grows rapidly until lunch time. People leave their desktop computers and go out into the world. When they return, they have more things they need to search for, hence the peak around 3pm. Volume then steadily declines until a sharp drop off around 11pm when people are heading to bed.

Just as with search volume throughout the week, mobile search volume compliments desktop search over the course of the day.

Notice the peaks at lunchtime and the steady increase. It even peaks at 11pm. People search on their mobile devices until about midnight. At which point volume declines quickly.

Its not just mobile search that people are using. Business Insider’s article on mobile apps vs. web consumption shows that more minutes per day are spent in mobile applications than the web.

businessinsider.com

Why is Google so interested in these mobile search trends? Google’s revenue from AdWords declines with drops in search volumes. Obviously mobile search is not on the same scale as desktop. If Google can make searching on mobile devices easy to use, more effective, and ultimately more widely used, they can offset some of the dip in their AdWords revenue.

So what does this mean for your business? Mobile devices have much smaller screens compared to the large monitors of desktops and laptops. When viewing mobile versions of the search engine results page, there is often only room for one or two sponsored ads.

If your business can achieve the top placement your ad will take up the majority of a users screen. If your campaign is well targeted the ad may have a higher chance of getting clicked. Less competition and a larger share of the visible screen could increase click through ratios.

Mobile may provide lower volumes of traffic but depending on what type of conversion you’re seeking, it may prove to be profitable. Users often search for something on their phone during the day, then visit the site directly when they get home to their desktop. Mobile search could be another effective branding or lead generating strategy.

It is now up to Google to continue to improve mobile search. Additional features like voice search can grow the use of mobile search. Google is focused on this to improve their business, you may be able to as well.

The   growing popularity of smart phones is leading to a very fundamental change in the way advertisers reach out to users. It’s generally safe to assume by now that in a small group of people, someone has a smart phone with them. The better question would be is it already in their hands, or still in their pocket or purse.   The evolution of this mobile marketing landscape presents some new and interesting ways that advertising touches us on a daily basis, but it is also boosting the use of a much older technology; the QR (quick response) Code, AKA, the barcode.  Apps on new cell phones are now able to read these codes, allowing virtually any traditional form of marketing to easily become a launch pad for a multimedia experience.

My personal favorite use of QR codes is by the Detroit Red Wings. I’m bias, yes, but you find me a better use. I bet you the Colorado Avalanche aren’t doing anything nearly as cool yet. On the big screen, the Wings gave instructions on which free apps to have downloaded, and which page in the program to turn to. What the fans got is a hilarious YouTube video named ‘Kronwalled”, linked below. The best Kronwalling happens 22 seconds in. Anyone that makes that face is really asking for a good Kronwalling. According to the Red Wings, people watching the video through a mobile device watched the video from beginning to end 22% of the time, far exceeding their expectations. They also plan to experiment with and integrate more multimedia placements with their traditional ad mediums.

Another experimental use of QR codes came from the Weather Channel, who surprisingly always seems to be at the forefront of new technology (widgets, phone apps, desktop alerts, and now QR codes). They took this a step further than the Red Wings, putting a large QR code on screen during a broadcast. Scan it with your phone, and it takes you to the Android marketplace, where you can download the weather channel app for your mobile phone. Genius!

Other interesting uses I’ve seen or heard of lately include several restaurants with these codes in their windows. You scan the code, and it takes you to a Google Reviews page where you can read what other people thought, see the menu and hours of operation, and get the link to their website if you want more information. There’s been a few instances of entire billboard displays being a QR code. This approach will work while the idea is new and still clever, but will probably fade as they become more common place.

Also, Campbell-Ewald, the winning agency of the Time Magazine ‘Selling Detroit’ contest, used a QR code in their ad, which will now appear for free in Time Magazine. Their forward thinking likely played a huge role in their winning of the contest and $1,000,000 in free advertising space.

Where else would I like to see this done? How about in news papers? AnnArbor.com is changing the way we see and react to the news, so where could they go next? How could a newspaper use QR codes?

Google is doing some cool things with how we view news. One of my favorite things they’re currently working on is called Living Stories (livingstories.googlelabs.com ). If AnnArbor.com had the QR code on the hard copy of all stories that are still in progress (Iraq/Afghanistan Wars, Local Elections,Healthcare Reform, Haiti Earthquake, Flu Season Information, Frequent Bloggers, etc..), it would allow you to read the article, and if you wanted, you could catch up on the entire backstory.

More than this, lets say you’re reading a hard copy of the newspaper and find an interesting article a friend of yours might enjoy.   Scanning the article code could take you directly to the online copy of the article, which you could then forward to a friend. This would also make it much easier to share via Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc. These are the kinds of things that will change the way people interact with newspapers, and what may actually save these dinosaurs from extinction.

Where else could these be used? How about in lines at amusement parks? Building a christmas list or wedding registry? Viewing movie previews after seeing a poster or article about it. There seems to be an endless list of how and where these can be used.

Have you seen a clever use of these lately? How do you think they will be leveraged in the near future?

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.

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!

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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Two months ago, Google Analytics Motion Charts were hot. Now, they’re not, at least if we trust the amount of traffic coming to this blog looking for information on the charts and the amount of new content being produced around this feature. Is this a natural consequence of time since the feature was released, or is there something about the Motion Charts that make them less-than-user friendly? Did Google possibly goof?

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Have you ever wanted to be systematic about testing different versions of a popular page on your site, but felt overwhelmed by questions of how long a test should last, which traffic channels should be sent to the pages being tested, and how certain your results are? Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash is the most comprehensive book available on test design, analysis, and the finer points of both.

The book’s clarity is its strongest feature. The risks, advantages, and disadvantages of A/B versus multivariate tests are explicitly defined, and examples that put success in terms of revenue are used throughout the book.

Another memorable aspect is Tim’s observation that both the visits to the site, and the element variations being tested on a page (for example, the font, or a graphic, or any other aspect of the page design) are are independent of one another in effects. This is something we’ve discussed here at Pure Visibility on multiple analytics projects. For example, you may have a page for which you are testing two background colors, and two very different button designs. It may be very well be the case that the color and the button design displayed effect each other, either positively (increasing the conversion rate) or negatively (canceling each other’s positive effects). In this simple scenario, it is relatively easy to add tests for each pairwise combination of elements, to determine the truly winning “recipe”. However, in a more complex test, separate tests of each combination increase the time and data needed for the test. Sometimes, independence must be assumed to some degree. Kudos to Tim for addressing this in a book anyone with basic stats knowledge can understand.