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…

Today, marks the release of my great friend, Mitch Joel’s, book Six Pixels of Separation. You may have never heard of Mitch, I promise you that you will. In Canada, Mitch Joel is considered an Internet Marketing Rock Star. It is well deserved nick name, especially if you have ever seen him present on stage. Mitch has an extremely popular marketing blog, podcast and soon to be best selling book…

True “interaction” happens when request and response of pages happen in sub-second speed.  So just because people have cable and dsl connections doesn’t mean you should fill your pages with bloated code and heavy images.

In fact, the natural advantage of fast loading pages is one reason Google patented the sparse design of their home page.  They know that simplicity, speed and relevance rule the web experience, and that every millisecond counts…

Want to get some great information from the comfort of your desk?

Join me on September 16th, at 12pm EDT / 9am PDT for the“Recession Marketing: From Pre-click to Post-click” webinar. I’ll be joined for this free webinar by Pay Per Click marketing expert and Founder and President of ClickEquations Craig Danuloff and David Brussin, personalization guru and Co-founder and CEO of Monetate…

The seconds pass by in your visitor’s mind as they arrive to your website. If they don’t bounce immediately because of poorly targeted marketing efforts and sucky landing pages, you’ll still be lucky if they’ll stick around for the next 2 minutes. It’s like every visitor to your website has a timer in her head and if she can’t complete her task in the allotted time, she is out of there…

Social marketing is a shiny new toy and almost everyone is wising up and getting involved, as they should. In fact, a rumor is spreading that the new Mac OS, Snow Leopard, is integrating Facebook addresses directly into its own address book app. There’s no question that social applications are becoming central to our online lives, and soon social apps will be a central part of the very operating systems we use…

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…

Anyone can sell nutritional supplements, and many do. However, what would you think would happen to a company that stripped everything away to focus on selling magnesium supplements?

Magnesium — not something you hear about everyday, huh? It’s not really the product with the most “sex appeal.” As Patrick Sullivan, co-founder of Jigsaw Health which focuses on selling these wonderful magnesium supplements, explains:

“Magnesium is involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body…

I love Nikon. My dad had a Nikon. I bought my first Nikon SLR (an F3) when I was in college and a couple of years ago my wife brought me into the digital DSLR world by buying me a Nikon D60 for Father’s day.  So it pains me to see a company I love make such critical mistakes.

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry.  Like most people, I typically just delete promotional emails, but I decided to hold on to this one, considering the headline said “My Picturetown – 20GB for just a few cents a day!”

You can see the full email by clicking the picture below…

As I was preparing for my SES Extreme Makeover session, analyzing the lucky businesses that were chosen for a free makeover, I became fascinated with a particular e-commerce site.

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer…

Your objective: Stand out, differentiate yourself from your direct and indirect competitors.

Your challenge: You launch a great concept of a campaign, or on your website and weeks or months later you see something similar your competitor is now doing.

Your exercise: Go through all your current campaigns, website and landing pages that use stock images, and make sure your competitors aren’t using anything similar…

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…

In a few weeks, I’ll be headed to San Jose to the Search Engine Strategies conference. The post title is the same as one of the sessions I’ll be present. It was a session I am most looking forward to as I’ll be speaking with my good friends and web analytics luminaries Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik. Each of us are promising at least 3 actionable takeways from the session. Here is my first one:

To do web analytics correctly you have to make a to-do list regularly…

What will you do to be prepared for it?

This is not the Emergency Christmas described by John Stewart from the Daily Show. However, with the pressure of the economy people will probably be spending more time planning, considering, saving and looking for amazing deals sooner rather than later in the year. What are you going to DO NOW to make sure you get their limited attention and dollars? Will your business and website be optimized for this interesting holiday season?

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
You’re Welcome - Fixing the Economy

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow’s OnTarget software-as-service…

We marketers are very busy people. In today’s challenging economy, with its rapid digital pace and customers empowered like never before, the demands are never-ending. So, we love things that make our job easier. Or at least appear to.

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management…

I’ve been curious about what kind of effect the economy is having on how companies use Web analytics. Econsultancy just released its “Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2009.” This is its second annual report, and the results are fascinating.

First, the pleasantries:

• “Companies are focusing on analytics which help them improve their customer acquisition and customer retention…

Today I’d like to give you 2 exercises that will help your visitors get a better sense of why they should be doing business with you.

1. TweetVP - In 140 characters or less, tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different than your competitor? This is like writing your Unique Value Proposition or Unique Campaign Proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter…

SEO Blogger Lisa Barone recently posted “Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals” and for many who do not follow the industry so closely, the main point of this post may be missed. What is the point?

Don’t do Search Engine Optimization!

At SMX last week Google’s Matt Cutts, basically explained that “Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects…

1. What is the best way to generate sales online? A Forbes study shows that 48% of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. It’s always easier to start when visitors have some level of intent.

2. Search drives more sales, but shoppers are thinking longer before buying.

3. Does Google Analytics overstate the value of search? Econsultancy research shows that it might…

Conversion rate = The number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have taken that action.

When you break that sentence down, you start to understand how to optimize your conversion rate.

Step 1 - Let’s understand “number of people“

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before?

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do some of those people come from organic search? paid search? emails? affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? Yahoo!? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occuring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of fireworks; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers: etc…

Sometimes you never know.

While cleaning the last remnants of unsolicited and undesirable e-mail from my inbox a few days ago, I had two interesting thoughts. First, spam can actually be good for something. And second, inspiration does indeed strike in uncanny places.

The thoughts started while deleting spam e-mail number 12,874. It was targeting the otherwise happy man who only needs a little help in the sack, offering him the solution in a little blue pill…

Here are the top 10 converting websites for April 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 42.8
2. Vitacost.com 28.9
3. Office Depot 25.0
4. MetroStyle 24.5
5. Woman Within 23.0
6. Schwan’s 21…

Yesterday, Jeff Sexton blogged about the importance of watching your cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) trends. One of the best ways to get a handle on optimizing these key performance indicators is to get a better sense of your traffic mix.

Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point…

1. Econsultancy shares how the Verified by Visa program may be a conversion killer.

2. Dr. Ralph Wilson interviews my good friend Avinash at the eMetrics summit about Useful Key Performance indicators for small business. Ralph also did a few interviews with me. Here is the first one on “The Winning Edge“:

3. Mars Chocolates is being punished for a bad ‘Fling’ - first when people search for the website they end up sending people to a porn site…

“Talk to the dog in the language of the dog about what matters to the dog.” Roy H Williams

This past month, I shared my 10 step process for optimizing copy for websites or landing pages on my Market Motive training call. I was able to convince my friends at Market Motive to let me share the full presentation video with you (normally they only share the first few chapters unless you are a paid member)…

According to a recent study, Marketers are more likely to “monitor” than act on or react to Internet data. While 79% of businesses reported capturing Internet traffic information, only 30% of them actually modified their Websites as a result of traffic analysis. It makes me wonder if this move to be accountable by marketers is only important to them when they are measuring vanity metrics versus actionable metrics…

We’re packing the bags and creating new presentations. We’ll be at at several conferences in the near future and hope to meet you at one of them.

It’s a good thing there are two of us because on June 8th-9th you can meet me at Search Engine Strategies in Toronto and on June 9th, you can meet Jeffrey at the Yale Club in New York City, where he will be the keynote speaker at the OMMA Metrics and Measurement conference…

In our last post, we looked at LandsEnd product page and showed you how we would change the flow of the page to maximize conversions. Today we’ll look at a scenario for LandsEnd, that starts at a pay per click ad for “Polo Shirts” and ends up in the cart.

Our search on Google started with the term “polo shirts” but provided us with an ad for “Polo Shirts for Man…