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"

In a recent comment I received on one of my older blog posts, a reader pointed out that much of the advice I had provided was for people who were just beginning optimization efforts and they (the commenter) wanted something more meaty for themselves to sink their teeth into.  This is not the first time I’ve seen this type of comment on a blog post, and I know that many of the Grok’s readers are DIY-ers who get frustrated…

...continue to read "Your Website is Unique. Don’t Settle for Best Practices."

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"

We get questions all the time from visitors, clients, and blog readers about what to do: How do I improve my conversion rate?  What’s the best analytics program?  Who should I hire to build my new site?  When is the best time to optimize? And much of the inspiration for our blog posts come from these very questions.

Monday, I got a call from my colleague, Marijayne Bushey, who told me about a great question she got via our…

...continue to read "How To Find the Root Causes of Low Conversion Rate"

Yesterday, Brendan Regan and myself were looking into a client’s marketing efforts in Google Analytics and found something extremely disturbing–they were using Google’s AdWords content targeting as their primary means of paid traffic. Nearly half of their traffic was coming through paid search, and of that half, around 80% was content targeting. In comparison to the rest of the site, page visits were down 37%, time on site was down 20%, and their bounce rate was up 40% .  There’s no…

...continue to read "Content Targeting: Helpful Tool or Money Pit?"

In my earlier days with FutureNow, I  was a part of a team that was responsible for transitioning clients from signing the contract to getting work from the analyst. Essentially what I did was “take their temperature” to see what they’ve done so far, what resources they have available internally and externally to implement, and understand what different tools they were already using to aid them in their optimization efforts.

One thing to note is that many, perhaps even most,…

...continue to read "Data Diving – What’s In Your Dumpster?"

Last week, I posted Part 1 of my book review of Steven Wood’s Digital Body Language book.  It covered how the landscape of B2B, complex sales, and marketing has changed because of rapid developments in the Online world, and what the Digital Body Language (DBL) concept is.

In this post, I’ll wrap up by covering some of the benefits you can get if you learn to observe and leverage DBL, as well as some of the author’s ideas about the future of…

...continue to read "B2B Marketing Book Review and Commentary, Part 2"

Perhaps you’re investing in affiliate marketing and have created some really captivating holiday banners for your affiliates, or maybe you’re investing a lot in PPC this holiday season.

Are you simply looking at whether a marketing effort is converting and bringing in sales? Are you ignoring the step-by-step process visitors are going through from the marketing effort, to final conversion point, and making some assumptions for why one marketing effort might be converting more effectively than another?

Don’t just look at conversion…

...continue to read "Increase ROI On Your Marketing Efforts this Holiday Season"

I just finished reading a “prediction” post called 9 Digital Trends for 2010. While some of the predictions were pretty expected (e.g. Facebook will continue to have an impact in 2010), a few of them really made me think.

The #9 prediction was that there would be “more Flash, not less” on websites in 2010.  The authors posit that Flash on websites will experience a resurgence online in 2010 due to increased adoption of broadband, improved track-ability, and new options…

...continue to read "Will You Flash Your Visitors in 2010?"

Because I live in the optimization world, I sometimes assume that certain web site strategies are common sense and obvious. I sometimes forget that the only reason why they are common sense and obvious to me: Because I analyze and optimize web sites all day, every day. That’s a bit of an unfair advantage!

At FutureNow, we work with clients in a variety of industries and business models: e-commerce, lead generation and catalog. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some…

...continue to read "A Clicks-to-Bricks Site Optimization Checklist"