At around 1:20pm, while presenting at the “Survival of the Fittest 2.0″ session at Search Engine Strategies last Tuesday, I get the text message from my wife “I am in labor.” At 11:32 pm Matthew David Eisenberg joined our family. Baby and mom are doing well. My daughter and other son are enamored with our new addition.

Driving home that night from the hospital brought memories of my Mom and Dad and their great words of wisdom around parenting. “Your job…

...continue to read "You’ll Screw Up!"

One of the things that makes being a Persuasion Analyst at FutureNow fun is watching clients –> partners –> friends grow as an organization.  Many start off skeptical about the process of site optimization, or unrealistic about what can be gained in a given time frame.  But after working through some of the challenges, it’s great to see them thinking about their sites and their businesses in completely different (read: better) ways, and subscribing to a culture of continuous…

...continue to read "The Development of an Optimization Culture"

It’s a “crime against humanity” proclaimed my Analytics Evangelist friend, Avinash Kaushik, at the eMetrics Summit. I’ve heard Avinash use this somewhat dramatic expression several times before in relation to web analytics. That is why I’m going to take the equally dramatic liberty of explaining “The 7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics”:

According to my friend, Stéphane Hamel the developer behind WASP, a FireFox plugin for detecting and reviewing web analytics implementations, nearly 100% of implementations are setup…

...continue to read "7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics"

As part of the research for our latest book, Always Be Testing, I had the pleasure to chat with several people about testing and how testing lives in their corporate culture. This one, with Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google, blogger at Occam’s Razor and author of the incredibly popular Web Analytics an Hour a Day is not to be missed. Take some time to listen to my interview with Avinash.

Click here to listen to Bryan Eisenberg chat with Avinash Kaushik

(To download…

...continue to read "Avinash Kaushik & Bryan Eisenberg Discuss Testing"

How much are you investing in analytics? My friend Mel Carson is asking on the Microsoft AdCenter Analytics blog.

In the UK last week Brand Republic reported that UK spend on search engine marketing would reach £2.75bn this year.

However, just a tiny fraction of that cash – £330m – was spent on the art of SEO or search engine optimisation. The lion’s share of web site owner’s budget went on paid search solutions like Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter.

SEO is an essential…

...continue to read "Speed! Why Optimization Should Be Sexy"

Join Dr. Ralph Wilson, Jim Sterne and I, as we explain in this 7 minute video what “continuous incremental improvement” means and how to get started with it.

What obstacles do you face in getting your organization to adopt a continuous optimization process? Do they need to see more success stories like these?

Editors Note: If you want to learn more about marketing optimization and meet Ralph, Jim and Bryan, register for the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC, October 20-23rd.…

...continue to read "What is Continuous Improvement?"

...continue to read "Web Analytics is Like Eating an Artichoke…"

I was having a conversation with the experience team at a major “entertainment” company after my presentation at the Internet Retailer conference a few weeks back. We were discussing ways they could get started on Personas, and how to overcome the challenges they’d faced thus far. Given that this dialog took place just off-stage, we had no expectation of privacy. Then again, I had no expectation that well over 100 retailers would be so interested in this conversation as well. It…

...continue to read "2 Ways to Get Started With Personas (Part 1)"

Eric Peterson recently revised Avinash’s 10/90 rule of web analytics to the 10/20/70 Rule for Achievable Web Analytics Success. I agree with both that the key to value and success in web analytics is actually taking action on the data. You don’t get ROI for web analytics by just distributing reports; you actually have to do something with the data

Most people will agree that you need three things to extract value from web analytics:

1. You must have clean, not accurate (that…

...continue to read "Web Marketing and Analytics: Process, Talent & Tools"

Even though your site might not seem broken because you’re making sales or getting leads, trust me: it’s broken.

I don’t mean to discourage you but, rather, to help you understand that as long as you aren’t converting 100% of your visitors, there’s room for ongoing improvement and room to make more money or generate more leads.

No one has a perfect sales process online that is mapped out to every individual, idiosyncratic buying process of every potential customer. You can’t just fix…

...continue to read "You’ll Never Be Done Fixing Your Site"