Funnel Reports are a good way to gain traction while competitors spin their wheels in muddy data.

Most web analytics programs give you the option to run a funnel report; a powerful tool, particularly for e-commerce sites, that shows where people are exiting the site’s sales process.

By analyzing the exit rate data in a funnel report, you can focus on optimizing the pages that need it most. First, look for areas with high exit rates. Then, once you have test pages selected,…

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NINE OUT OF TEN PEOPLE WOULD RATHER NOT READ THIS SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS.

That may or may not be true. At the moment, this statement is merely a guess, an assumption — but it’s testable. It’s a hypothesis.

People love to insist that your website is made of magical ones and zeros. “It’s HTML,” they’ll say. “It lives on triple-redundant co-located servers,” they’ll argue. Yet the truth is much simpler, and scarier, than that.

Your website is a tower of assumptions. Everyone’s…

...continue to read "Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis"

You’ll never build a site that’s as good as the one your visitors can build for themselves.

Even people with no sense of aesthetics are brilliant designers. It’s true.

How do you turn every visitor into a Web designer without training them, paying them, or even letting them know what you’re up to? (It’s not as bad as it sounds. Really.)

By conducting A/B and multivariate tests, you empower customers to collectively decide what works best for them. Supply them with different variations…

...continue to read "Let Visitors Design Your Site for You"

If every designer (and the marketers who hire them) read Web Design for ROI, the new book by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus, the Web would be a better and more profitable place.

Sure, the book will show you design techniques that help generate positive ROI, but the best of all is that it’s easy to follow. The authors dissect a website into six common sections — homepage, detail or landing pages, category pages, product pages, forms, and checkout — found…

...continue to read "Ecommerce Marketers and Designers: Read This Book"

The concept isn’t new, but it’s one of the hottest buzzwords in online retail for a reason.

“Cause marketing” is the term being used to describe all manner of cross-promotional efforts between for-profit businesses and non-governmental/non-profit organizations. Typically, it involves a portion of for-profit sales going toward a given cause. Today, more than 1 of every 4 retailers are promoting charities at some level — and the Web seems to be speeding that growth. In 2006, IEG reported that cause marketing sponsorship…

...continue to read "Cause Marketing: Making Money by Giving it Away"

You may have noticed double underlined links on sites that create a pop up advertisement when moused over. These are “in-text” advertisements, and they’re increasingly appearing on content sites to generate additional revenue.

For content providers, the question remains whether additional short-term bursts of ad revenue will be justified against the potential decrease in brand affinity. Since the ads work under the guise of a regular-old hyperlink, some visitors are completely turned off after clicking on them.

From a usability standpoint, they’re a…

...continue to read "The Double-Bottom Line on In-Text Ads"

“Engagement” in the web analytics world is about as emotionally-charged a word as it might be with someone you’ve been dating for a week. At best, it’s a conversation-killer. At worst, it’s a nuclear warhead. Marketing and analytics experts have a hard enough time agreeing on what exactly engagement is, let alone finding the metric(s) to illustrate it.

But this confusion among smart people makes sense when you think about it. When was the last time you had a face-to-face conversation with…

...continue to read "Measuring Visitor Engagement: Tools + Tips"

This week, the Google Website Optimizer team hosted a two-part webinar series on how to use their powerful — and free! — testing software. In addition to the popular A/B and multivariate tests, Google walked attendees through basic testing methods, then went on to some more advanced techniques.

Here’s the “Cliffs Notes” version, in case you couldn’t make it:

A/B Test — Allows you to test different versions of the same page. Let’s say you want to test the homepage. To indicate which version…

...continue to read "Google Website Optimizer: 7 Powerful Tests"

After hitting on Take Rate, Bounce Rate, and Order Acquisition Ratio, it’s time to turn our attention to a metric near and dear to our hearts here at Future Now: Conversion Rate.

The Conversion Rate (CR) tracks how well your website is achieving its main objective. This goal will vary depending on the type of site. An e-commerce site’s main objective, of course, is to get people to buy product. Here’s how a commerce site would calculate conversion:

CR = Number of Sales…

...continue to read "Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: Conversion Rate"

Now that we’ve taken a look at Take Rate and Bounce Rate, it’s time to look at another very important metric: Order Acquisition Ratio. Simply put, this performance indicator is used to measure the effectiveness of your marketing.You’ll need three numbers to calculate your order acquisition ratio:

1.) Visits to your site

2.) Number of orders placed

3.) Total marketing expenditures (which can include fixed costs associated with maintaining the site, but let’s focus primarily on marketing expenses)*

With these variables in mind, we will…

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