The spending level for Valentine’s Day gifts this year will be slightly lower than last year – $140 to be spent by men (versus $166 in 2008), and $75 (versus $90) to be spent by women, according to the BrandKeys Valentine’s Day Index, writes RetailerDaily.

Mature consumers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, and also gravitate to images that show products and lifestyles,  according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results according to…

...continue to read "TheGrok’s Not-To-Miss Links for the Week 2/8/09"

Don’t miss the 15 year old and still current Calvin & Hobbes on the financial crisis http://bit.ly/RqdH.

Don’t miss my interview with David Szetela on PPC Rockstars today. You’ll hear us discuss the top page and ad elements that every PPC advertiser should test.

What do you think – Is Twitter the Next Second Life? http://tinyurl.com/8nof7j. You may also want to read The State Of The Twittersphere? http://tinyurl.com/6upklq. GigaOm claims Followers Aren’t Really Friends on Twitter. This leads to some of the challenge of…

...continue to read "TheGrok’s Not-To-Miss Links for the Week 12/29/08"

No less of a copywriting authority than Gary Bencivenga has declared credibility as THE most important factor in effective copywriting.  Why else would he call “Yeah, sure” the two most powerful words in advertising?

Once you’ve gained the reader’s interest through relevance, buyer confidence is everything – without it the sale is lost.  That’s why methods of substantiating claims and establishing credibility are frequent topics of mine.

And it’s also why Tom Wanek’s blog is a must read.

No where else will you find such a…

...continue to read "A Blog Worth Following"

1. Site-Perf – get an accurate, realistic, and helpful estimation of your site’s loading speed. The script fully emulates natural browser behavior downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user. A unique feature is that site-perf.com allows to measure packet loss ratio with reasonable precision.

2. Customer Focus Calculator – will analyze the words on your page and determine if your copy is more about yourself or your customer. This tool will measure…

...continue to read "33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better"

Amazon just launched Windowshop.com. When you get there you see a wall of images that you can then scroll across using a mouse or keyboard. By zooming in you get a preview of a particular album or film or book. If you want to purchase it, just click through to the Amazon website.

They advise people to come back every Tuesday to see what is new. I am not sure why they didn’t include a way to subscribe here.

When you go…

...continue to read "Window Shopping the Amazon Way"

Google Analytics provides some great information about what is happening on your website. But what if you want to take it to the next level? Thanks to the many smart people who have created these wonderful hacks and plugins to get you some powerful additions to Google Analytics. Please note most of these need the truly awesome GreaseMonkey FireFox extension.

(*post updated 6/18/09)

1. Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics – it pulls the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content…

...continue to read "The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection"

Have you ever wished you were Bond? James Bond?  Here are 007+007 = fourteen ways to spy on your competitors’ web sites, without breaking any FISA laws.

1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare…

...continue to read "14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition"

I won’t name names, but recently we had a client come back with a new redesign for their website that uses white text on a black background. You might have experienced the same thing at some point. Your team may all agree it looks totally snazzy. But this link is a great illustration of why it’s wrong (please read the entire page until you reach the end, otherwise you won’t get the point).

Your customers’ eyes and your wallet thank you for taking…

...continue to read "Good Eyesight Can Hurt Conversions"

Did you know that there’s a cool tool called Social History that will estimate your gender based on your browser URL history?

My favorite feature of this tool is how it breaks down by percentage how much of each genders’ browsing habits you exhibit, and correlates them to the results you receive. I cleared my browsing history and visited, what I though to be, a range of sites. Here are my results:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 54% Likelihood of you…

...continue to read "Estimating Gender"

You gotta love a contest dedicated to preserving the fine art of crafting so-bad-they’re-good opening lines. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Writing Contest is named after the original author of the line Snoopy made famous: “It was a dark and stormy night,” and continues to inspire the creation of beauties like this year’s winning entry from Garrison Spik:

“Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies…

...continue to read "So-Bad-They’re-Good Opening Lines"