Ladies! It’s time to speak out about our frustrating online shopping experiences. How many times do you arrive at a clothing web site looking for a fabulous pair of jeans or a pair of yoga pants that really fit, go through the actions of shopping, but don’t enjoy your shopping experience at all?  It happens to me so often that it’s worth writing about my exciting discovery of lululemon.com.

I have worked with many clients who sell women’s apparel and…

...continue to read "A Women’s Clothing Website that Actually Speaks to Women"

Many Grok readers have been curious about our online marketing optimization services and what kind of process to expect when working with us.  I’ll use some work we’ve done with a client to show you some basic things you should be looking at when optimizing and testing your site. A client of ours, Universal Accounting, offers successful bookkeeping courses to those who are looking to start their own accounting and bookkeeping businesses.

We started by looking at this client’s traffic sources and…

...continue to read "Getting Started With Conversion Rate Optimization: Our Way"

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m passionate about my job.  I get to be an investigative reporter, go undercover by transforming myself to think like various different personas to analyze my client’s online performance, and help them make changes that ultimately lead to higher sales and/or leads. That doesn’t seem like a “job,” right? I feel like I’m solving mysteries every day for my clients, and uncovering tremendous opportunities at the same time.  I think I should get…

...continue to read "What Makes a Product Review Great? 7 Tips That Count"

My best girlfriend, Brittany was searching online for an apartment in Salt Lake City last week. She told me about her frustrating experience with Rent.com. I want to share her experience with you, to show you what NOT do on your site. This is a perfect example of a reputable company, getting a boat load of qualified traffic, who may be losing out on a lot of leads because some visitors are hesitant to enter personal information, as the first…

...continue to read "Avoid Asking for the Lead Too Early"

I have a friend who is responsible for gathering & reporting all the stats for his company.  In speaking with him, I found it interesting when he said “although stats are vital for reporting, they sometimes don’t tell the full story of what really is going on.”

Numbers don’t report the in-between stages of the sales process, they’re only black and white, yes or no, conversion or no conversion.  Numbers do an excellent job of showing trends and forecasting,…

...continue to read "Your Visitors Are Individuals So Treat Them That Way"

In my last post, I wrote about treating your various sources of traffic differently from one another.  Track the individual conversion rates of your CPC, organic/SEO, email, etc. so you can prioritize the opportunities you have to optimize your web site’s performance.  That is just the first step, though.  Next, you need to separate each traffic source into segments based on the various campaigns or marketing efforts in each traffic source.

Let me use an example. There is…

...continue to read "Shopping Cart Optimization: Take This Step Today"

Do you look at the average bounce rate of your web site and come to any conclusions about your performance based on this single number? Probably not, right? I mean, it’s possible that this might set off some red flags, and drive you towards finding out what the bounce rates are for your list of top landing pages. That at least gives you a bit more insight into WHERE some of the problems might exist on your site. It may also drive…

...continue to read "Every Source Of Traffic Is Different. Treat It That Way"

We all know from experience that it’s difficult to get ahead in the online world without spending on marketing in one way or another.  Since it’s hard to be the expert at everything in the online marketing industry, outsourcing expertise ends up being the most efficient strategy. Now, you just need to balance your limited budget so that you spend your marketing dollars in a way that realizes the highest return on your investments (ROI).

These are some of the questions…

...continue to read "Where to Spend Your Marketing Dollars in 2010"

Recently, I wrote a blog post about looking at the data in your analytics to understand not only what is happening in the most important areas of your site, but also why these things are happening.  I chose to focus on “Search” as the traffic source and used that as my main example when beginning to look at your data. The following was a question that a reader left as a comment on the post;

“If I’m doing affiliate marketing and notice…

...continue to read "How To Assess Why Some Affiliates Outperform Others"

Henry Ford perfected the assembly line concept in the automobile industry many years ago, and it has been utilized successfully in many industries since. Before Ford implemented the highly successful assembly line, instead of focusing on what each skilled worker specialized in and passing the car down the line to the next worker, the skilled workers crafted cars one at a time together as a team. Ford’s introduction of the assembly line resulted in the development of affordable cars (decreased…

...continue to read "Who’s Working Your Website Assembly Line?"