I keep getting interrupted before I can get this really important note out:

Tanya Vaughan reported on her visit to PubCon this year.  Since I mentioned it earlier, I thought you might enjoy the other half of the story.

I haven’t heard of anyone else attending (from around town anyway); we would all love to hear if you attended any of the “big” conferences this year and what you thought….

As for people outside of Boise, here are two additional reports on PubCon:

• Matt Cutts – Keynote Speaker, Google Guy, and a presence inseparable from search engine optimization
• Rand Fishkin – SEOMoz, Brilliant Search Guy, and links to lots of cool PubCon resources

Not a comprehensive list by any stretch, but these are the “better” of the MANY I read so you won’t have to.

Oh, Merry Christmas!

Here as an obvious statement — The web data you pay attention to should link to business strategies.  While the statement is obvious the application can actually be quite challenging.  I intend to explore the entire process (yes, it is a cyclical process, not a single event) of linking data to strategies and vice versa through this blog — but not today.  Today I just want to hit a few of the assumptions required before you can do ANYTHING with this simple concept.

First, you have need to know your business strategies.  That should be obvious, but quite honestly, it is the most overlooked step in the entire process.  Lots of people jump into web analytics excited about knowing where their visitors come from and how long they are on the site with no thought about whether it even matters to their business. (more…)

Well, we have been pretty busy with monthly reports, and some exciting Google Analytics setup stuff.  Of particular note, MetaGeek recently migrated their website to a new platform, and earlier today they decided that the transition warranted an upgrade to the new ga.js, rather than the old urchin.js.  We are pretty excited because we have only “played” with it so far.  Luckily, the guys and gals at MetaGeek are on the bleeding edge of technology and they aren’t afraid of the word beta.

So, enough of the fun stuff….  We are in a transitionary state now (new name, new partners, new products, and other new stuff), and the change just can’t come fast enough.  So, we have been grappling with one of the hardest things in our industry (IMHO) — Pricing.

Pricing several of the services we offer is akin to hitting a moving target, and what works this time may not be applicable next time, but in fairness to our clients (and potential clients) we are working on a solid pricing strategy.  Today’s discussion was particularly about Paid Search Marketing.  Check out our paid search marketing page to see what we came up with after years of practice and and weeks of discussion.

There are several models out there, and we picked the one that is most inline with our philosophy that data-driven decisions are the best way to make good decisions.  So, here is a little about the major pay-per-click models out there, pros and cons, and why we chose the one we did. (more…)