ROI = Return On Infographics

Infographics about infographics are always fun.  Return on Infographics by Bit Rebels and NowSourcing takes a look at some of Bit Rebels’ own data from releasing infographics as part of their marketing.

The impact of an infographic can be measured on many levels, which makes it all just a little bit more complex and complicated to present. With the help of NowSourcing, we have been able to produce an infographic that will compare the traffic and social action impact of an infographic post with a traditional post that does not involve an infographic. It’s through social media analytics that a clear image slowly emerges to tell a story that for some has just been a question without an answer.

They’re pretty clear about this, but remember that this design is completely based on internal data from Bit Rebels.  It may be a good indicator of infographics in general, but we don’t know for sure.

Bit Rebels has shared some fantastic data from their internal tracking, which will be of interest to the you, the readers of Cool Infographics.  However, the design makes a few mistakes, and we’re all here to learn how to make infographics designs better.

• One of my pet peeves, the design messed up the size of the circles in the comparison table.  Based on the full-size infographic they released at 975 pixels wide, the smaller circle for 243 Actions is about 55 pixels in diameter.  Doing the match for the area of a circle, the diameter of the larger circle for 1,091 Actions should be about 117 pixels wide.  In the design, it’s actually about 256 pixels wide!  So instead of visually showing a shape roughly 4x larger, it’s actually showing a circle about 22x larger!  This is a “false visualization” and mis-represents the data.
• Are these comparison data points an average or a total of the 500 posts?
• How many infographic posts are compared to how many traditional posts?
• Love the use of the actual logos from the social networks in the comparison table, and they should have continued that with the rest of the design instead of just text later in the design.
• The blue bars behind the higher comparison value look like bar charts, but obviously don’t match the data.  They just fit the text, and have no visual relevance to the data.  An indicator icon or highlighting the entire column width would have been better than the bars.
• Are the Top 6 Social Networks in rank order?  LinkedIN is the top social network for infographics???
• The circles near the end of the design are also incorrect.  Instead of showing a 10x comparison to match the dollar values, the circles show an over 100x comparison!

Found on WebProNews, MediaBitro’s AllTwitter, and Visual.ly.  Thanks to everyone that also submitted it and tweeted links to it!

The Massive Challenge of Search Engine Complexity

Courtesy Stone Temple Consulting

The complexity of generating Search results online is HUGE.  The What’s So Hard About Search? infographic from SEO expert Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting takes a look at the massive numbers involved with indexing and searching the Web.

Building a search engine is a very complex task. I often find myself trying to justify to people why it is that search engines can’t understand their site. They seem fixated on believing that a search engine should understand it if a human can understand it. The short answer is that with an infinite amount of time the search engine could, but the scale of the Internet makes it oh so VERY hard.

The infographic below tries to give you some sense of the scale of the problem. Please note that a few numbers are hard to truly pin down, but I pulled them from the best sources I could. For example, no one really knows how many pages there are on the web, though Majestic SEO is aware of 3.7 trillion (the number I used) or the average web page size.

Regardless, the message is the same either way. The web is a really complex place!

Designed by InfoNewt, the design gathers data from a number of different sources to put together the picture of complexity.  Combining the number of web pages, the average number of links on each web page, the amount of data online and the number of searches every minute, you begin to understand the scale of the challenge search engines face.

This design takes a different approach by citing each data source along with it’s visualization instead of gathering them all at the bottom.  I think it works well with this many different data sources, and is easier for the readers to understand where each part of the data comes from.  All of the key elements are included at the bottom: copyright, brand logo and the URL to the infographic landing page so readers can always find the original (even when blogs repost it without linking or using the embed code).

I just have to say “Cheers!” to the developer teams that tackle this problem every day.  The scope of this challenge will only get bigger in the future!

Thanks to Eric and the team at Stone Temple for being great to work with!

Tablet Adoption at Work

The State of Tablet Adoption at Work is a new infographic from VentureBeat.com.  It’s interesting that the infographic itself was sponsored by Lenovo and Qualcomm, but included as part of a VentureBeat article.  You can find the original version here at TabletsAtWork.com

Since the debut of Apple’s iPad in Jan. 2010, the integration of tablet devices into our lives and work has progressed rapidly — so fast that it’s sometimes hard to put in perspective how quickly got here.  The exclusively obtained infographic below breaks down how far workforce adoption of tablet technology has come — and where it’s headed. (The graphic was sponsored by Lenovo and Qualcomm.)

I love the clean, professional design look.  I really like the color scheme and the mixed bag of visualization styles; grid of icons, treemap, stacked bar, line chart, etc.

Only a couple of design issues about this one I would improve.

• I’m willing to let 16 tablet icons represent 16.1 Million tablets shipped in 2010 (rounding), but why only 144 tablets shown to represent 147.2 Million?  That was just the designer wanting a clean, square visual that breaks the actual data visualization.
• The line chart showing 134% increase in shipments powered by Android and Windows is way out of scale.  It’s visualizing something close to a 900% increase.
• At the bottom there should be a copyright statement and the URL to the original infographic landing page so people can find the full high-resolution version.

Found on the Inside Flipboard feed in Flipboard for iPad.

App Store Wars infographic

The App Store Wars infographic comes to us from WebpageFX.com and shows us a comparison between smartphone app stores available today.

We compared the Apple App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World, and the Nokia, Palm and Windows Phone 7 application directories. Statistics include OS distribution, percentage of paid vs. free apps in each directory, average apps downloaded by device, average app cost, and total 2010 revenue from all apps sold.

A couple things I like and don’t like about thius design.  Of course, I like the Star Wars reference in the design, and the timeline is simple and easy to comprehend. 

I like the appropriate phone icons lined up to show the Smartphone Distribution, but it’s hard for the reader to understand when you line them up 18 across.  We all think in base-10, so they should be 10 across, or even 20 if you want to make it that wide.  Not 18.

I do think they missed a number of opportunities to visualize the comparisons when they only used numbers.  Big numbers don’t qualify as a data visualization in a good infographic.  How many apps used per phone?  Average price paid per app on each phone platform?  The total 2010 Mobile App Revunue comparisons to provide scale are lost without visualizations.

Thanks to Trevin for sending in the link.  Also found on MacTrast!

Google in 2011: Courtroom & Boardroom

Google in 2011: Courtroom & Boardroom is a new infographic from Search Influence.  At it’s heart, this is a timeline history of acquisition and courtroom events through the first nine months of 2011, but there is a lot going on here.

Events are laid out in a psuedo-calendar format for each month, flagged by country and shaded to indicate win or loss.  The change in stock price is also shown for the actual day of each event, but even though this implies the event’s impact to stock price, there are always many more factors driving price changes.  Events are connected by colored lines to indicate on-going events and the related division of Google’s business.

I hope they keep evolving this design.  In it’s current state, it’s a little hard to follow, but I love the multiple layers of data represented.  This design could evolve to be more easily readable, and even be applied to other companies as well.

Thanks to Matt for sending in the link!

The 20 Most Expensive AdWords on Google

Where’s Google Making Its Money? is a great example of using data that your company has to showcase your services.  This one is from WordStream, and they analyzed their own keyword database to find the most expensive keywords from AdWords over a 90-day period.

From WordStream:

On the heels of Google’s blow-out Q2 2011 earnings announcement last week, we wanted to find out the most expensive keywords - what keywords demand the highest costs per click and are most competitive in terms of high search volume. Since the vast majority of Google’s profits come from AdWords advertising, these high CPC keyword categories are responsible for a large part of Google’s profits.

From TechCrunch:

WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.

And of course, they made an infographic based on the results of their research

Found on Chart Porn and The Big Picture.

Humor: Corporate Organizational Charts

From Bonkers World, Organizational Charts is a very funny look at the corporate cultures and structures for some very high-profile tech companies using hand-drawn organization charts as the visual language.

Found on Daring Fireball.

Google's Collateral Damage

Another cool flowchart-style infographic by Jess Bachman for SEOBook.com.  Google’s Collateral Damage visualizes how Google’s evolving search algorithm is impacting the Web.

Google’s PageRank worked well until people realized what drove search & how to optimize for it. But the web moves much faster than the colleges do. A million spam pages are created every hour! Thus Google’s relevancy algorithms have grown in complexity over the years.

Google Data Viz Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes

Google has partnered with Eyebeam to sponsor the Data Viz Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes using data provided by WhatWePayFor.com.  I really like the data viz styles used as a font, similar to the Goole Doodles.

Every year, Americans fill out income tax forms and make a payment to the IRS. It’s an important civic duty, but it is also a lot of money. Where does it all go? Using data provided by WhatWePayFor.com, we challenge you to create a data visualization that will make it easier for U.S. citizens to understand how the government spends our tax money.

The Prize: $10,000 in prizes with $5,000 for the top entry.  Winning entries will featured on the DataVizChallenge.org website, the Official Google Blog, Eyebeam.org and Fast Company’s design blog, Co.Design.

The Deadline: Submit your entries by midnight of March 27, 2011. Finalists will be announced the week of April 11, and winners will be publicly announced on Tax Day (April 18, 2011). 

Participants must be residents of the U.S., which is an issue for many would-be designers.

Found on Infographics News, VizWorld and Infosthetics

Google's Periodic Table of APIs & Developer Tools

From the Google Code site, the Periodic Table of Google APIs & Developer Tools is a cool layout of the tools available.  It’s actually well designed table, so each element is clickable, and takes you to the information page about that particular API.

They’re color-coded by category, but many of them belong to multiple categories.  For example, the Google Analytics is part of Data APIs, Ads and Tools.  If you mouse over the category names at the top, all of the members of that category are highlighted below.

Found on Twitter through @illuminantceo