• Bing’s Twitter Search & Google’s Defensive PR:
  On the heels of Bing’s Twitter Search announcement, Google’s PR team put their Annie Oakley shades on and announced some upcoming social media moves of their own.

• Google Analytics’ New Features:
  There are some fantastic features in GA’s latest release including customized alerts, threshold goals (i…

A lot of companies agree that they have problems with their category pages. Coming into the Holiday Season, it’s incredibly important to think of those things that will help the visitor move through her buying process easily, and improving the customer experience on category pages can have a real impact.  Optimizing category pages can prevent “pogo sticking” behavior, reduce bounce rates, and improve overall conversion…

As we’ve previously posted, one of our aims is to improve display advertising on the web. Three simple principles guide our approach: simplify the system for buying and selling display ads; deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure; open up the ecosystem by making it accessible to more participants.So how can you better measure the impact of your display ad campaign? At the moment, you can measure how many clicks your display ads achieve, measure conversions that result from those clicks, compare results with industry benchmark data, and use “View-through conversion reporting” to measure visits to your website from users who saw your display ad in the past…

Lots of our clients and prospects are asking questions along the lines of: I want to optimize before the Holiday rush, but I don’t want to introduce too much change at such a critical time.

A valid question/concern, to be sure.  Our answer is, of course, “It depends.”  However, here are a few approaches that we’ve seen work:

Extreme Effort Until a Certain Date

Look at your previous year’s analytics and the upward trend of conversions closer to the holidays…

Why are some of your visitors hesitating when they get to their shopping cart? What barriers are they running into that stop them from taking action on your site? What are you doing at these points to try and close the sale once you’ve identified that the visitor is hesitating?

I’ve been shopping online a little much this month. I got a new painting for my home office, I bought fabulous athletic sunglasses, and a pair of gorgeous above the knee boots…

We’re pleased to announce that our Dublin-based AdSense team has just released a new webinar schedule. Over the coming months, we look forward to helping you discover how to take advantage of the full potential of your site. Choose from a range of topics, including optimisation, AdSense for search, Analytics, and Google Ad Manager, and see how you can make the most out of AdSense.During each of these webinars, an AdSense specialist will guide you through a presentation and will be available afterward to take questions related to the topic…

Last week Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, hosted a Think2010 webinar on “Using Data to Better Connect with Your Customers.” He discussed how to find and use data from Google tools such as Trends for Websites, Insights for Search, Ad Planner and the Search Based Keyword Tool. You can use the data to focus on your most relevant audiences, maximize your return-on-investment, and drive your businesses forward — now and as you charge forward into 2010…

Your visitors are empowered with the ability to access information with the click of a button. You can’t pull a blind-fold over their eyes or manipulate them into anything. They’ll find out the truth with or without you being upfront about what that truth looks like. Being transparent means that you’re being vulnerable, exposing all your wrinkles, scars and bumps, but it also means you’re fully disclosing what makes you better and different…

OK, Grok faithful, we all know that the Holiday Season is coming fast. Last year was “make or break” for a lot of eTailers, and this season will be critical for many more.

The ones who make it through will be those who are passionate about the customer experience, AND who are able to prioritize their work between now and the “Holiday Crunch” so that the hours expended actually impact the number of sales they make…

I saw something today that disturbed me a bit (see pic). What you see is a free icon set I found with the standard 30, 60 and 90-Day Money Back Guarantee emblazoned in gold. I’ve been seeing similar graphics on websites more and more lately.  We’re partly at fault because FutureNow helps businesses of all sizes by recommending design elements like these be put on their “to-do list…

Have you ever wondered why ballet dancers look so elegant when they move? For the longest time, I always assumed it was because they were, well, ballet dancers (I know, that’s circular reasoning) — but really meaning “just born graceful, a natural dancer”.  Do you think so, too?

As a swing dancer, I noticed that whenever someone new showed up at the Gotham Swing Club dances you could spot right away if she had a ballet background…

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Stomper 999 Stompernet

I just received quite a shocking email that Stompernet have added Infusionsoft as the 11th tool to their arsenal of internet marketing tools.

For me it is a bit of a dilemma, as I have quite a love hate opinion about Infusionsoft

On the plus side

I love marketing tools that help magnify your ability to make money from existing leads and Infusionsoft is one of the best tools for tracking and segmenting email marketing campaigns (within affordable limits for most online marketers)

On the negative

• The affiliate module sucks, although a lot of the blame can be squarely placed on custom integrations that break the affiliate tracking…

Justin Cutroni wrote a great post a while back on Tracking Zero Result Searches in Google Analytics. Tracking zero result searches on your website (corporate site, e-commerce website or your blog) is vital to get a glimpse of what your visitors are looking for but can’t find on your website.

Beneath you will find more info the updated Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress and a guide on setting up zero result search tracking on your blog, but first we’ll go in depth with the marketing and usability perspective of tracking those failed searches…

Nothing is more frustrating then making me jump through hoops to give you my money. I go to Warren Miller annually to get psyched for the upcoming ski season. Make fun of me if you wish, but it’s tradition ok?!

Anyway, I just went to warrenmiller.com and found out that I could buy tickets for one of the Utah shows directly at Abravanel Hall’s box office web site, so I went here:

http://www…

If you’re looking for some help with your online advertising for Q4 or 2010, consider attending one of our in-person full-day seminars about AdWords, Analytics or Website Optimizer.In the coming months we’ll be offering Seminars for Success in the following cities:AdWords 101: Beginner and 201: IntermediateOctober 5-6: New York City AreaOctober 26-27: Chicago, ILNovember 2-3: Berkeley, CANovember 16-17: Charlotte, NCDecember 7-8: Scottsdale, AZAdwords 301:Advanced Account Optimization and AdWords 302: Advanced Conversion OptimizationOctober 13-14: Dallax, TXOctober 20-21: Seattle, WANovember 3-4: Los Angeles, CAAnalytics: Introduction and Analytics: AdvancedOctober 8-9: New York City, NYOctober 22-23: Melbourne, AustraliaOctober 28-29: Chicago, ILNovember 4-5: Berkeley, CANovember 18-19: Seattle, WADecember 9-10: Scottsdale, AZDecember 9-10: Charlotte, NCWebsite OptimizerOctober 30: Chicago, ILDecember 11: Scottsdale, AZFor more information about Seminars for Success, including registration details, course outlines, and past attendees’ comments, please visit http://www…

Seth’s blog post on “Things to ask before you redo your website” is a must read for everyone involved in online marketing.   Seriously.  If you haven’t seen it yet, go read it now.

What I love most about this list is the way it segregates into sub-components or elaborations on Future Now’s  three questions that are the basis of Persuasion Architecture:

1) Who is coming to the site?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

3) What action do we want them to take, and how do we ensure this matches up with what they are trying to accomplish?  In other words, what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

Separating out Seth’s List

Here’s how I see Seth’s list falling into those categories:

1) Who is coming to the site?

• Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
• Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
• What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
• Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

• “If it’s the boss [that we are trying to please], what does she want?”
• “Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?

3) What action do we want them to take…what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

• What is the goal of the site?
• In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
• Are we trying to close sales?
• Are we telling a story?
• Are we earning permission to follow up?
• Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
• Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
• Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
• Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
• Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
• Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
• Do we want people to call us?
• How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?

Operational [and larger] Questions

Yet, while Seth’s persuasive questions are covered within these three categories, there’s a pile of operational questions left over:

• How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?
• Who needs to update this site? How often?
• How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
• How much money do we have to spend? How much time?

In other words, what will this cost us? A question that opens the door for much larger debate of, do we really need to incur this cost in the first place?  What makes us think we need a redesign?

And that gets us to the question that our own Jeffrey Eisenberg tackled within his free report 7 Big Questions of Highly Effective Online Marketing…

When you think of improving your web site’s conversion rate, you probably think of increasing sales or leads online. The “clicks’ are the actions you are tracking as conversions for your web site.

One of my clients from over a year ago, was successfully implementing our recommendations. He was seeing increases in his conversion rate, measuring success in “clicks”, or more orders being completed online…

Today, Ralph Wilson’s internet marketing resource, Web Marketing Today, posted Part 1 in a two-part video interview with our Bryan about concrete ways to improve product pages for higher conversions.  In it, Bryan explains how FutureNow took on the product page design of eCommerce heavyweight Land’s End, and shows how you can use layout changes to test the buying path on your own product pages…

Yes, books with a s. : )

It is with immense excitement that I am sharing the news that I have just finished writing my second book!

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability & The Science of Customer Centricity

It is a long title ain’t it? The good news is we are going to refer to it simply as Web Analytics 2.0.

In this post I wanted to share thoughts about the book, the process of writing it (and doing three rounds of edits!) and outcomes…

Hop into the YouTube analytics suite Insight and you’ll notice YouTube has added some new features to the platform. Obvious additions are pretty new color charts allowing us  to view discovery of videos over time. Being able to monitor view-count over the lifespan of a video and tracking the sources of those views is nothing new to Insight. However merging these two measurements is…

Increasingly more people are joining the optimization crowd. Savvy marketers need to do more with less budget. Others just want to beat their competitors. No matter the motivation, optimizing your conversion rate is a no-brainer.

What seems more difficult is deciding where and what to optimize. All of us have our plates full already. Adding optimization to the heap seems uncomfortable, even painful…

Here are the top 10 converting websites for July 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. Schwan’s 35.2
2. Keurig 31.3
3. ProFlowers 26.0
4. Vitacost22.5
5. Blair 22.4
6. DrsFosterSmith.com 22…

In my travels around the world the most frequently asked question is: “What’s your favorite web analytics report? “

A close second is: “How can I improve my web pages with high bounce / low conversion rates?”

Or “I have done all I can and I don’t know how else to improve my webpage, ideas?”

If you think about it for a moment it is not a very hard question…

When you think of a cherry picker, do you conjure up images of someone who only picks the easiest or ripest fruit? Or does it perhaps have some artisanal connotation, waiting until only the proper time before action is taken?   Is that how you go about optimizing your web site?

Or are you a lettuce picker? The sort of person that toils for long hours in the field and accomplishes a long day’s back-breaking labor of work that most white collar business execs would consider a less-than-optimal career…

For today’s Inside AdWords post we have a note from our Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian. Hal and his team spend most of their time studying the AdWords auction and finding ways to make it more efficient. Today he’d like to share some research that he and his team have done on conversion rates by ad position:Advertisers often ask us how conversion rates vary with position. Everyone is aware that higher positions tend to get more clicks and therefore more conversions in total…

Interviewing candidates for a “data job” (analysts, marketers, ppc specialist) can be surprisingly depressing.

Sometimes they can be unqualified.

Usually they are “qualified”. The depression comes from this singular flaw: The candidate’s education is limited by the companies they work/worked at.

All I know is ecommerce because that is all my company does…

Twitter went down this morning. Bryan got more productive

Imagine all the social networks failing at once. What would you do differently with your time if you weren’t spending time on social networking? Would it be more or less productive?

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow’s OnTarget software-as-service. Will help you increase your leads and sales today…

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successful as possible through tools such as Analytics and Website Optimizer. – Ed.If you’re an old-school AdWords advertiser, you may remember that you originally set bids based on ad impressions (cost-per-impression, or CPM). Later, AdWords transitioned to a new model where bids were set based on ad clicks (cost-per-click, or CPC)…

Here are the top 10 converting websites for June 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. ProFlowers 24.0
2. Vitacost 23.3
3. 1800Flowers 19.5
4. Roamans19.2
5. Office Depot 18.5
6. Blair 17.3
7…

Last week, my team of analysts and I were discussing a client that wasn’t getting the types of results we had expected. This particular client was implementing changes well and clearly should have seen the conversion rate needle move based on those efforts. Instead, the numbers were flat. Something was clearly wrong.

We began to dig deeper. We learned that the client, an online software service, was pushing current customers through a key selling page we were optimizing…