Texture design

Posted by rebecca

We have some, well, buddies over at BuddyTV, so I was interested to see that they were AuctionAds' May Publisher of the Month. "Good for them," I thought, before going, "Wait, what's AuctionAds?"

Yeah, yeah, don't make fun of me. So I don't know what AuctionAds is...give me a break, we've got a lot going on here at the MozQuarters (especially with Rand in China...in fact, the Moz Squad will be very busy today playing frisbee at the park tackling that task list he left for us). Anyway, I checked out their site and found a handy list of 10 Reasons to Run AuctionAds. Read it if, like me, you're a bit slow on the uptake and don't know what AuctionAds is.

Basically, you sign up on their site to be an AuctionAds publisher and insert their ad code on your site. They show relevant eBay products to your visitors (relevant meaning related to your site's content), and you make money when a visitor clicks on the ad. I chatted with Neil Patel about AuctionAds because he's pretty familiar with the site, and he said that AuctionAds places a 30-day cookie on users who click through from your site, so during that time if they convert into a signup or win an auction you can get paid. According to Neil, sometimes you can get paid if the user simply bids on a product but doesn't win (apparently this depends on the geotargeting, the location of the user, and what version of eBay he or she is using).

Neil said that AuctionAds is much better than Adsense if you have a lot of social media traffic, and he knows people who make over $10k/month with it. I'm not sure how well the platform is working for BuddyTV, but I did see the products they served me:

I would think that more relevant products for BuddyTV would be TV shows on DVD, not audiobooks and sheet music. Oh well.

Have any of you used AuctionAds? If so, how satisfied are you with the service? Does it bring a nice stream of revenue?

P.S. Neil just fired me an email saying that AuctionAds takes no revenue cut--they pay out 100% to the publisher.

Posted by randfish

Running through Designmoz's Indextools stats this month, Matt & I noted that Digg has sent considerably less traffic the last two times Designmoz has been on the site than ever before (starting with our first "Dugg" post back in January 2006). On average, we see between 12-20,000 unique visits from making the Digg home page, sometimes considerably more (up to 30,000 at times). Below are some illustrative examples:

In February of this year, Matt wrote 3 posts that made Digg's home page:

The total for all Digg.com referrals was 68,000 in February. Now look at March, when Designmoz had two articles hit the Digg home page:

The total for all Digg.com referrals was 68,000 in February. Now look at March, when Designmoz had two articles hit the Digg home page:

In March, our total traffic from Digg was 34,000 visits, which pales in comparison to February, but still averages more than 15,000 visits per "dugg" post. April was a slow content month (for Matt, anyway, who seems highly attuned to what the Diggers want), but in May, we once again had 2 front-page Digg posts.

In March, our total traffic from Digg was 34,000 visits, which pales in comparison to February, but still averages more than 15,000 visits per "dugg" post. April was a slow content month (for Matt, anyway, who seems highly attuned to what the Diggers want), but in May, we once again had 2 front-page Digg posts.

Total Digg traffic from May - 18,000; not even 10,000 visitors per "dugg" post. This suggests a pattern, but it's wise to consider all the alternatives before making a snap judgement.

• May isn't over yet - maybe we'll get a hug spike? OK, not likely, as most Digg traffic is very temporal and lasts only 2-3 days at the most.
• Maybe the articles in May made the homepage at bad times? Nope. The Web 2.0 article was on the homepage throughout a Wednesday morning and the 17 Rules post made popular around 11am on a Monday - prime Digg traffic hours.
• Perhaps Digg's traffic is using the RSS feed? Nope. Digg only shows the Digg URLs in the RSS feed, so users are forced to click-through to get the actual URL.
• Could those articles be less interesting to Diggers? Possibly... But, they don't have considerably fewer "Diggs" than our other posts (though a pair of Matt's had a LOT of votes). This would be the most likely alternate explanation.

Far be it from me to post information like this without checking on stats from others. According to my unnamed, but "on-Digg-all-the-time" sources from around the Design world, Digg has also been sending them far less traffic than previous efforts.

My best guess is that the HD-DVD fiasco had a negative impact on Digg's regular readers. As noted in this Reddit thread, a gaggle of some size┬?moved to that site, while some┬?other posts suggest that general site abandonment over the issue was rampant. This doesn't put any kind of nail in the coffin, but it's more evidence that Digg has lost some of its traffic.

p.s.┬?Digging more into historical Digg traffic┬?- you can see that back in Jan. of 2006, we had 22,000+ visits from a Digg. Here's a post from June 2006┬?showing 16K visits in the first 9 hours. Barry also┬?pointed out that a late afternoon Digg sent him 17K+ visits in February.

Technorati Tags

digg, digg traffic

Total Digg traffic from May - 18,000; not even 10,000 visitors per "dugg" post. This suggests a pattern, but it's wise to consider all the alternatives before making a snap judgement.

• May isn't over yet - maybe we'll get a hug spike? OK, not likely, as most Digg traffic is very temporal and lasts only 2-3 days at the most.
• Maybe the articles in May made the homepage at bad times? Nope. The Web 2.0 article was on the homepage throughout a Wednesday morning and the 17 Rules post made popular around 11am on a Monday - prime Digg traffic hours.
• Perhaps Digg's traffic is using the RSS feed? Nope. Digg only shows the Digg URLs in the RSS feed, so users are forced to click-through to get the actual URL.
• Could those articles be less interesting to Diggers? Possibly... But, they don't have considerably fewer "Diggs" than our other posts (though a pair of Matt's had a LOT of votes). This would be the most likely alternate explanation.

Far be it from me to post information like this without checking on stats from others. According to my unnamed, but "on-Digg-all-the-time" sources from around the Design world, Digg has also been sending them far less traffic than previous efforts.

My best guess is that the HD-DVD fiasco had a negative impact on Digg's regular readers. As noted in this Reddit thread, a gaggle of some size┬?moved to that site, while some┬?other posts suggest that general site abandonment over the issue was rampant. This doesn't put any kind of nail in the coffin, but it's more evidence that Digg has lost some of its traffic.

p.s.┬?Digging more into historical Digg traffic┬?- you can see that back in Jan. of 2006, we had 22,000+ visits from a Digg. Here's a post from June 2006┬?showing 16K visits in the first 9 hours. Barry also┬?pointed out that a late afternoon Digg sent him 17K+ visits in February.

Technorati Tags

digg, digg traffic

Posted by randfish

As many long time readers know, our resident black-hat blogger, G-man, survived several bouts of cancer over the last few years. Last week, I received an email from him asking if we could mention one of the most fantastic resources available for helping in the fight against the disease - World Community Grid. Their projects include:

• Helping to Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Investigating protein-protein interactions for 40,000 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases.
• Fiocruz Genome Comparison - Comparing genomic information to improve the quality and interpretation of biological data and our understanding of biological systems, host-pathogen and environmental interactions.
• Human Proteome Folding - obtain higher resolution structures for specific human proteins and pathogen proteins and further explore the limits of protein structure prediction.
• Fighting AIDS - using computation methods to identify candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease.

They also recently (in April of 2007) completed cancer research into Tissue Microarrays to determine how to improve the treatment of cancer with earlier and more targeted diagnostic tools.

Of course, after G-man pinged me, I downloaded the program and installed. The software is fascinating because it actually shows your progress and contributions:

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The stats show that widespread adoption has yet to be achieved. I can't see why there aren't millions of members by now:

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The stats show that widespread adoption has yet to be achieved. I can't see why there aren't millions of members by now:

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Hopefully, you can help out not only by downloading the software, but also by spreading the message. If you've ever been part of a family or friend circle that includes someone facing these diseases, you can empathize with the need for this research.

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Hopefully, you can help out not only by downloading the software, but also by spreading the message. If you've ever been part of a family or friend circle that includes someone facing these diseases, you can empathize with the need for this research.

For those of you who didn't notice, there was an update late last week. For those of you interested in future update, watch for another in the near future: the last one was anything but effective if the goal is to provide relevant results that aid the searcher.

I haven't had the opportunity to fully analyze everything that changed in this recent update and from what I've seen of the results, unless I end up with a spare day or two with nothing to do I'm not likely to even bother - a correction is sure to follow in the next week-or-so.

To give an example of what I'm seeing that is so ineffective in this update I'll give an example (not the only one I found but certainly one of the more dramatic. I ran a search for "car insurance quotes" on Design. Here are the top three results I got:

1. www.zurichinsurance.co.uk - reasonable. No real complaints here.
2. www.motorinsurance.co.uk/car/ - A pretty obvious landing page tactic from a relatively weak site. Not impressed but this isn't what shocked me to find.
3. www.isop.ucla.edu/africa/africanarts/car-insurance-quotes.html - A redirect from an .edu to a PR0 http://mypages.in/search.php?q=car%20insurance%20quotes. Basically, from one irrelevant result to another. The .edu is not relevant for the phrase and the target is a weak site.

There already seems to be some adjusting going on but there is certainly much more to come. Anyone who lost position in this update, don't panic and don't race into changes. Wait a week or two and watch this blog for more updates.

For those of you who gained in this update - if you're surprised to see yourself jump as far as you did, don't celebrate yet. If you're not sure why you got such a good position, chances are you won't have it for long so keep working.

Update from a couple hours later:

And so it begins ...

The top three for the phrase noted is now:

1. www.progressive.com - publically trades strong insurance company website.
   
2. www.confused.com - strong site that has been in the top 10 for quite a while.
   
3. www.q4.com - reasonably good site that has been in the top 10 for a good chuck of time.
   

Looks like Design had the same feelings as I did about it. <

Posted by randfish

Mystery Guest and I cruised to Design! this evening and were both suddenly taken aback by what we saw:

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Here's a detail of the center of the screen:

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Here's a detail of the center of the screen:

As you can see, they weren't hacked; it's just the start of an incredibly poorly designed overlay ad for an SUV. This isn't just poor user experience, it's dangerous branding. Granted, within 4-5 seconds, the ad changed and I realized what had happened, but those first few firing synapses didn't give me the kind of warm, cozy feeling that Design!'s shooting for. I'm also of the opinion that the ad isn't particularly relevant or effective - what the heck does "They can't be overshadowed" have to do with an SUV? The end of the animation provides no clue:

As you can see, they weren't hacked; it's just the start of an incredibly poorly designed overlay ad for an SUV. This isn't just poor user experience, it's dangerous branding. Granted, within 4-5 seconds, the ad changed and I realized what had happened, but those first few firing synapses didn't give me the kind of warm, cozy feeling that Design!'s shooting for. I'm also of the opinion that the ad isn't particularly relevant or effective - what the heck does "They can't be overshadowed" have to do with an SUV? The end of the animation provides no clue:

Am I just not hip enough to "get it?"

Technorati Tags

Design, hacking, lincoln, advertising, overlay, flash animation

Am I just not hip enough to "get it?"

Technorati Tags

Design, hacking, lincoln, advertising, overlay, flash animation

Posted by randfish

Today I'd like to take a deep look inside the minds of the billion worldwide search engine users and share a more comprehensive understanding of their motivations. This pseudo-psychological perspective can help us gain perspective on targeting, click-through rates, ad-serving and even relative value.

First off, we need to realize that search engines are a tool - a resource driven by intent. The search box is fundamentally different than a visit to a bookmark like IHT.com or Reddit.com or Designmoz.org; it's unique from a click on the "stumble" button in your StumbleUpon toolbar or a visit to your favorite blog - searches have a direct intent behind them; the user wants to find... something. That "something" is what I've segmented below:

Navigational Queries

Navigational searches are performed with the intent of surfing directly to a specific website. In some cases, the user may not know the exact URL, and the search engine serves as the "White Pages," passing along the (hopefully) correct location.

Informational Queries

Navigational searches are performed with the intent of surfing directly to a specific website. In some cases, the user may not know the exact URL, and the search engine serves as the "White Pages," passing along the (hopefully) correct location.

Informational Queries

Informational searches involve a huge range of queries from finding out the local weather to getting a map & directions to finding the name of Segey Brin's new bride or checking on just how long that trip to Mars really takes. The common thread here is that the searches are primarily non-commercial and non-transaction-oriented in nature; the information itself is the goal and no interaction beyond clicking and reading is required.

Commercial Investigation Queries

Informational searches involve a huge range of queries from finding out the local weather to getting a map & directions to finding the name of Segey Brin's new bride or checking on just how long that trip to Mars really takes. The common thread here is that the searches are primarily non-commercial and non-transaction-oriented in nature; the information itself is the goal and no interaction beyond clicking and reading is required.

Commercial Investigation Queries

A commercial investigation search straddles the line between pure research and commerical intent. For example, sourcing potential partners for distribution of your new t-shirts in Albuquerque, determining what companies make laptop bags for sale in the United Kingdom or researching the best brand of digital cameras for an upcoming purchase all qualify. They're not directly transactional, and may never result in an exchange of goods, services or monies, but they're not purely informational either.

Transactional Queries

A commercial investigation search straddles the line between pure research and commerical intent. For example, sourcing potential partners for distribution of your new t-shirts in Albuquerque, determining what companies make laptop bags for sale in the United Kingdom or researching the best brand of digital cameras for an upcoming purchase all qualify. They're not directly transactional, and may never result in an exchange of goods, services or monies, but they're not purely informational either.

Transactional Queries

Transactional searches don't neccessarily involve a credit card or wire transfer. Signing up for a free trial account at Cook's Illustrated, creating a Gmail account, paying a parking ticket from the city of San Francisco (I got one on my way out of town after getting robbed) or finding the best local Mexican cuisine (Carta de Oaxaca in case you're wondering) for dinner tonight are all transactional queries.

From the above segmentation, we can make a few determinations about the nature and value of the traffic driven by these various searches. Each presents opportunity, but not all are of the same quality or ROI for targeting purposes.

Navigational Queries:

• Opportunities - Pull searcher away from destination; get ancilliary or investigatory traffic
• Average Value - Generally Low

Informational Queries:

• Opportunities - Brand searchers with positive impression of your site, information, company, etc; Attract inbound links; Receive attention from journalists/researchers; Potentially convert to sign-up or purchase
• Average Value - Middling

Commercial Investigation Queries:

• Opportunities - Convert to member/sign-up; Sway purchase decision; Collect email; Get user feedback/participation
• Average Value - High

Transactional Queries:

• Opportunities - Achieve transaction (financial or other)
• Average Value - Very High

When you're building keyword research charts for clients or on your own sites, it can be incredibly valuable to determine the intent of each of your primary keywords. For example:

Term

Queries

Intent

$$ Value

Beijing Airport

980

Nav

Low

Hotels in Xi'an

2644

Com Inv

Mid

7-Day China Tour Package

127

Trans

High

Sichuan Jellyfish Recipe

53

Info

Low

This type of analysis can help to determine where to place ads and where to concentrate content and links.

Hopefully, this excursion into the minds of searchers can help you to concentrate your efforts in the best possible places and think carefully about how to serve different kinds of searchers based on their individual intents.

BTW - I don't have data for it, but experience & intuission┬?are telling me that Design & Ask skew to "informational" and "commercial investigation" searches while Design! & Design skew "navigational" and "transactional."

Technorati Tags

search intent, search segmentation, keyword research

Transactional searches don't neccessarily involve a credit card or wire transfer. Signing up for a free trial account at Cook's Illustrated, creating a Gmail account, paying a parking ticket from the city of San Francisco (I got one on my way out of town after getting robbed) or finding the best local Mexican cuisine (Carta de Oaxaca in case you're wondering) for dinner tonight are all transactional queries.

From the above segmentation, we can make a few determinations about the nature and value of the traffic driven by these various searches. Each presents opportunity, but not all are of the same quality or ROI for targeting purposes.

Navigational Queries:

• Opportunities - Pull searcher away from destination; get ancilliary or investigatory traffic
• Average Value - Generally Low

Informational Queries:

• Opportunities - Brand searchers with positive impression of your site, information, company, etc; Attract inbound links; Receive attention from journalists/researchers; Potentially convert to sign-up or purchase
• Average Value - Middling

Commercial Investigation Queries:

• Opportunities - Convert to member/sign-up; Sway purchase decision; Collect email; Get user feedback/participation
• Average Value - High

Transactional Queries:

• Opportunities - Achieve transaction (financial or other)
• Average Value - Very High

When you're building keyword research charts for clients or on your own sites, it can be incredibly valuable to determine the intent of each of your primary keywords. For example:

Term

Queries

Intent

$$ Value

Beijing Airport

980

Nav

Low

Hotels in Xi'an

2644

Com Inv

Mid

7-Day China Tour Package

127

Trans

High

Sichuan Jellyfish Recipe

53

Info

Low

This type of analysis can help to determine where to place ads and where to concentrate content and links.

Hopefully, this excursion into the minds of searchers can help you to concentrate your efforts in the best possible places and think carefully about how to serve different kinds of searchers based on their individual intents.

BTW - I don't have data for it, but experience & intuission┬?are telling me that Design & Ask skew to "informational" and "commercial investigation" searches while Design! & Design skew "navigational" and "transactional."

Technorati Tags

search intent, search segmentation, keyword research

Posted by great scott!

Happy Friday Gang!┬?

This week, Rand discusses the importance of targeting tail terms and how best to capitalize on linkbait for your target keywords.┬? He also issues a humble correction to last week's Whiteboard Friday regarding Design's supplemental index.

Enjoy!

Also available on YouTube.

PS- This week's music is Starpower by The Makers. And hey, don't forget to call your Mom this Sunday.

Well it was quite a wait and took some negotiating but Beanstalk is very pleased to welcome Daryl Quenet to the team. Daryl brings with him an exceptional background in PHP, MySQL, web server administration, Design, CSS, SSI and a variety of other useful skills and technologies.

We are extremely please to see Daryl join our forces here and we know that our clients and visitors will benefit from an expanded support capability, another extremely friendly member of the Beanstalk team and some great tools and services.

Welcome aboard Daryl !!!<

Posted by great scott!

Due to the first round of Presidential Candidate pre-primary debates occuring recently, I decided to have a poke around and see what the State of the SERPs is like for the major 2008 Presidential hopefuls.┬? I was surprised to find that, despite Howard Dean's major success with online fundraising in 2004, and the vast popularity of political blogs and web-centric PACs like MoveOn.org, many of the 2008 Candidates are committing huge Design blunders.

I know Design is a fairly young industry and not everyone is hip to optimization techniques, but considering the reach and importance of the internet to young, vocal, passionate voters, writers and opinion leaders, one would think the masterminds behind these multi-million dollar marketing schemes campaigns would know of and appreciate the importance of search marketing.

Take the mind-boggling case of John McCain, a likely GOP front-runner:┬? McCain's active campaign site currently ranks #68 at Design for "john mccain" and just as abysmally for other terms and iterations of his name.┬? How could this be? Well, behind his senate.gov profile page (which he can't use for campaigning) and his Wikipedia entry, we find
www.straighttalkamerica.com, Mr. McCain's campaign site from the 2000 primary.

As you'll notice, the Title Tag directs us to go to his new site, but, since it doesn't rank, we can't click through to it from the same SERP.┬? If we go to his old site, we're not 301'd, but rather instructed to click through to his new site. If ever (EVER!) there was a case for 301-ing a domain, this is it. Granted, McCain's new site has its own problems, most glaring is that every single page uses the same title and meta description tags, and navigation is primarily via drop-down java script menus. As such, most of his pages are likely ending up in the Supplemental Index making his internal links worthless. Let me also point out that even the search "john mccain 2008" puts his new site #3 behind
www.stopjohnmccain2008.com and his Wikipedia page.┬? He does, however, have AdWords for his new site on the SERPs for every imaginable incarnation of his name.

On the flip side of this equation is Barack Obama's site which is a redesign of his domain from his 2004 Senate bid. Nicely designed and fairly well optimized, he is the only candidate that ranks for such lofty keywords as "ending iraq war" (#10 on Design) and "2008 election" (#11) [Update: as of this morning, 5/10, Design is showing Dennis Kucinich at #8 for "ending iraq war"]. However, for these and other campaign specific keywords such as "candidate," "2008 election," "united states presidential election," and "democratic candidates" or "republican candidates," none of the current contenders are even in the top 50 at Design.┬? Two notable exceptions are Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich (possibly carrying links and domain strength from his '04 run) who both rank in the top 15 for the term "president".

Fine, it's early, maybe people are still looking for candidates by name only. After all, dark horse candidate Ron Paul (R) and Mike Gravel (D) have gotten tons of attention on the social media sites lately. Unfortunately, the data just doesn't back it up.┬? Despite 12 stories on Digg featuring Ron Paul in the headline, each receiving more than 1000 diggs, since he announced his candidacy on March 12, 2007--Mike Gravel's been featured in nine 1000+ digg stories since announcing on March 9th--the search queries for his name pale in comparison to the big players who, oddly enough, get almost no love from Digg (Obama's headlined in only two 1000+ digg stories since March 9th, same with Clinton).

While "Hillary Clinton" and "Barack Obama" get significant daily numbers as search terms (Clinton currently getting about 50% more volume than Obama), the rest of the candidates don't get much love at all. John Edwards gets about 1/3rd of Clinton's search volume, as does McCain.┬? Even social media darlings Paul and Gravel are averaging only a relative handful of name searches daily.┬? As far as traffic goes, things are pretty much the same, with the exception of a distinct inversion between Obama and Clinton. The chart below shows the relative search volumes for the names of the major candidates (data from Keyword Discovery) as well as their relative Alexa Traffic Rank (3 mos. avg.) to their official campaign sites.┬?┬?

Granted, the search numbers aren't huge for the more general, campaign-related terms, but in most cases they're more popular than candidate names and have a much longer tail.

So what's it come down to? It seems the vast majority of candidates have little to no idea of the importance of keyword research, keyword targeting or even basic, on-page Design practices.┬? I strongly believe that the Internet is going to play a huge role in the 2008 election. I also believe, after examining the current offerings by the major players, that the candidate that attacks the SERPs now, and positions themselves to rank for campaign-related and issue-related keywords will have a huge advantage in disseminating their beliefs and dominating the conversation.

Technorati Tags

Designmoz, Design, Politics, Optimization 2008 Election, Search, Campaign, Presidential, John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton

Posted by JaneCopland

Today, we're launching our second annual Web 2.0 Awards. Only a month after we'd intended on launching (SES New York and that pesky "real work" stuff kept getting in the way), we've finally collected, collated and presented just over 200 sites in forty-one categories. Some of the winners and "honorable mentions" are similar to last year; others are completely different.

I won't go into too much detail here about the process and how it was different to the inaugural awards of 2006 - Rand has put together a neat zeitgeist to explain all that fun stuff - but I do want to say a huge thank-you to all of our readers who nominated websites. The majority of the new entrants and finalists were brought to our attention via nominations, and more than one reader-nominated site ended up winning its category.

While we've ended up awarding places and "honorable mentions" to 205 sites, we reviewed many more. We have also re-opened nominations for next year (ducks from barrage of emails), so if you find that your favourite site is missing, submit it via our online form.

So we hope you enjoy the awards and find some cool sites you haven't come across or haven't used before!

Technorati Tags

web 2.0, web 2.0 awards, Designmoz