Attracting visitors to your site is similar to the dating scene and wooing your prospective partner. And, like in courting, there are some hard-fast rules of engagement for attracting your prospect.

1. Look Nice – You want to put your best face forward. Your homepage is often the first thing that your visitor sees when they visit your site, so make sure that it is aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye. Remember, for a vast majority of sites, the homepage has…

...continue to read "5 Ways to Court Your Visitor"

I’ve written about this before, but new reports keep reinforcing the point that most organizations don’t know what to make of their Web Analytics, meaning they can’t take action to improve their site based on the information they have.  And while the best bet in these situations is simply to hire an expert guide, that may not be an option for you (or maybe you’re just a hard-core DIY-er when it comes to website improvement).  If that’s the case, here…

...continue to read "Make Your Web Analytics Actionable in 5 DIY Steps"

Readers of this blog, and especially those involved in testing, know that conversion rate optimization is the goal we’re after.  It’s a great feeling to know that a test you worked on increased conversion, especially when it’s a “Home Run.”

We define Home Runs as triple-digit increases in conversion rate.  When we help our clients hit home runs, we ring the bell and celebrate.

But one of the dangers of early testing efforts is the problem that some baseball players…

...continue to read "Don’t Dismiss the Base Hits"

“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"

Having a recognized brand buys you a lot of forgiveness with potential customers. But, regardless of your brand’s position, time is money when it comes to online conversion, and homepage design & usability play a big role.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group’s Larry Becker writes about a recent study suggesting that:

. . .high growth companies are not evaluating and improving their home page designs in a systematic way. By comparing the home pages of the Fortune 30 against Inc Magazine’s fastest growing companies, researchers from…

...continue to read "Established Brands Beat Newcomers With Usability"

Okay… So, the methodical types have called me out on my last post. While I explained the “Piss-Off Factor,” I didn’t explain how to measure it. Although “measure” was indeed in the title, I didn’t mean it in the web analytics sense; rather, I was hoping to get people thinking about the customer experience as a whole. More to the point, that what we can’t measure is sometimes more important than what we can.

For instance, my example that although a “live chat”…

...continue to read "Measuring the “Piss-Off Factor” — Part II"