Going anonymous, Pagerank, and Analyzing your Email – The Monday July 18th Roundup

 

Monday again and we’re back in Vancouver after a week of 8 to 6 thinking, 6 to 8 drinking, and more food than I want to ever see again.

This week I tried really hard not to talk about Google+. Instead, we have stories from across the web on anonymizing internet connections, Google Page Rank, remarketing with PPC, and analyzing your email. To read more… well, you know what to do.

Create

• We start the week with some interesting data on alternate platform adoption, looking at the growth in users and various time scales.
• An interesting development this weekend, a group of researchers have developed and released a proof-of-concept for Telex, an IPless anonymizing solution for internet traffic. At his blog, J.Alex Halderman discusses how the system works.

Attract

• Linkbuilder has a post on the every talked about Panda update, this time testing the results of a single keyword (Buy Espresso) and examining how the results measure up.
• Search Engine Round Table says that Google PageRank is losing trust among webmasters. I am surprised it still had much myself. Following up on this conversation, SEO Bullshit posted a rant on why he still cares about [toolbar] PageRank, which in turn lead to a wonderful post from the Google Webmaster Central blog on “graduating to actionable metrics”. Great reads all around.

Analyze

• Avinash is talking about a topic close to my heart: using analytics with your email marketing campaigns. Beyond the basics (because Avinash ALWAYS goes beyond the basics) there are some really great medium level metrics presented here, such his more complex version of bounce rate, or profitability measurements.
• Search Engine Watch has a post on gaining demographic data from your remarketing campaigns. Not perfectly scientific, but their method does lead to some good data, which should let you develop some insights into your visitors.

Optimize

• UXMatters has a post on pairing usability testing with A/B testing, including how to marry user testing and A/B testing at the dev stage.
• The ever cool UX Booth has a post on Effective Minimalism in Experience Design, which attempts to explain the balance between usability and minimal design. Better, though, are its numerous examples of fantastic minimalism combined with lot sof examples of confusing minimalism. The latter of which is something you don’t hear people discussing too much.