It has been a while since I have updated things here at Simple Pixel. I have been busy hard at work with my new business, Digital Operative. We are a digital marketing and technology company. We build integrated strategies and execute them. Check out the Digital Operative blog, it is packed with great posts.

I am not sure what is in store for Simple Pixel, but I will be sure to post it here when I figure it out. Hope you enjoyed your stay, thanks for reading.

Everyone has Happy Stores. They are the stores that you connect with in such a way to cause an emotional response. They are the stores that you go to when you are sad, bored, or just need that extra oomph. They, as the name implies, make you happy.

While my wife doesn’t call them Happy Stores, she ultimately made me think of it. She has a few stores that she LOVES. Places that when she is having a bad day she is genuinely happier after visiting. Whole Foods and Nordstroms are the two that come to mind. She will drive 20 minutes out of her way (Ralph’s is across the street) to go to Whole Foods and only come back with a bottle of water and some oranges. It is something about the experience that makes her happy.

The more I thought about it, I realized that I too have my own Happy Stores. Barnes and Nobles and Best Buy are the two that come to mind. But I am sure I have a couple more.

Take a minute and think about it. What are your Happy Stores? Figure it for those off days.

I just launched my mom’s new website, Meryl’s Kitchen. She makes homemade treats that come in a big bundle, perfect for sending to a friend, relative, or co-worker. The bundle of mundle is made fresh for each order. After consuming my weight in mandel bread (a biscotti like cookie), I can attest to the pure deliciousness of the product. Go check out the site and order something!

I have been a Netflix customer for years. As a movie fan, I love what they provide me.

This morning I was curious if Netflix was on Twitter, so I performed a simple search. What I found was someone who registered the Netflix username and is selling it. This is not the first time this has happened. Boing Boing had a similar issue. Apparently this is a violation of Twitter’s TOS and you can you get your brand back.

If you are Netflix or Boing Boing, you are golden, but what about all the small business owners? As Twitter grows and cybersquatters get smarter, this will be harder to do. Go setup your business on Twitter now and stop the madness.

I have a friend, who will remain anonymous, who works at Google as a product manager. He does not work with Google Analytics. One night we had this heated discussion of how Google Analytics played into their advertising and revenue models. He assured me that all these departments were, and would always be, independent. This was the inspiration for ‘Does running Google Analytics affect your SEM?‘

Several months later, Google announces Benchmarking, which allows you to “compare report data against industry verticals and gain broader context for your site.” More importantly, it lets Google use the data from thousands of website to fine tune it’s search and advertising algorithms to maximize profit like any good company should.

But since this feature is for “my benefit”, I decided to take a look.

Since I just moved the analytics for Simple Pixel over to Google Analytics last week, we are looking at a pretty small set of data. Nonetheless, it is obvious to see the value of the report it produced.

Comparison

For comparison, each site is categorized into one of three groups based on the number of visits received: small, medium, and large (outliers are removed). Based on my stellar numbers, and those of the benchmark, I am going to guess I am in ’small.’

In addition to your size classification, you can compare to a particular category, such as ‘Marketing Services.’ Each of these groups has a minimum of 100 websites in it.

Here are my issues with this:

• I have no idea what category I am in, Google doesn’t tell you.
• I have no idea how are they determining which category I am in. Does it analyze my content, keywords, etc? Most websites don’t fit neatly into one category. Shouldn’t I be allowed to tell Google how to categorize my site?
• If I don’t know how I was grouped, then what am I comparing? I have no point of reference.
• What constitutes a ‘medium’ site? 200 visits? 200,000 visits?

Basically all this has told me is that for most sites that are ’small,’ I am getting a lot more traffic than most. Great. That and $1 will get me a soda.

I could go through each section on the benchmark report, but that would be tedious and boring.

So what’s my point? I have a two:

1. This feature, as it stands, it a joke. The only value it provides is to Google.
2. Benchmarking is a great idea and everyone should do it, but set your own benchmarks, don’t let some automated software make some assumptions.

Set benchmarks against your own traffic, using historical data. Look at your own patterns over different time periods and sources of traffic. Here are a few stats that are typically good things to benchmark:

• Visitors - total, unique, returning
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• ROI
• Total page views
• Visits by sources of traffic