Recently, I wrote a blog post about looking at the data in your analytics to understand not only what is happening in the most important areas of your site, but also why these things are happening.  I chose to focus on “Search” as the traffic source and used that as my main example when beginning to look at your data. The following was a question that a reader left as a comment on the post;

“If I’m doing affiliate marketing and notice…

...continue to read "How To Assess Why Some Affiliates Outperform Others"

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?"

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"

Given that my chosen profession is a Persuasion Analyst, you would expect that I’m a bit of a data-geek, and that staring at web analytics screens and Excel spreadsheets is my idea of fun.  Guilty as charged.

Ultimately, seeing our clients get positive results is what gets me out of bed in the morning.  Once in a while, I get to see a conversion rate trend line that takes a sudden turn for the better, and heads up towards the…

...continue to read "Un-sexy Trend Lines Turn This Analyst On"

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"

Increasingly more people are joining the optimization crowd. Savvy marketers need to do more with less budget. Others just want to beat their competitors. No matter the motivation, optimizing your conversion rate is a no-brainer.

What seems more difficult is deciding where and what to optimize. All of us have our plates full already. Adding optimization to the heap seems uncomfortable, even painful.

It doesn’t have to be.

It may not be easy, but very little that is worthwhile ever is.

When no clear starting line…

...continue to read "What Is Your True Conversion Rate?"

I love Nikon. My dad had a Nikon. I bought my first Nikon SLR (an F3) when I was in college and a couple of years ago my wife brought me into the digital DSLR world by buying me a Nikon D60 for Father’s day.  So it pains me to see a company I love make such critical mistakes.

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry.  Like most people, I typically just delete promotional…

...continue to read "Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus"

As I was preparing for my SES Extreme Makeover session, analyzing the lucky businesses that were chosen for a free makeover, I became fascinated with a particular e-commerce site.

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer.

Clearly, this company was dedicated to continual improvement and working hard to improve its conversion rate. The analytics…

...continue to read "When Landing Page Optimization Isn’t Enough"

Last week, my team of analysts and I were discussing a client that wasn’t getting the types of results we had expected. This particular client was implementing changes well and clearly should have seen the conversion rate needle move based on those efforts. Instead, the numbers were flat. Something was clearly wrong.

We began to dig deeper. We learned that the client, an online software service, was pushing current customers through a key selling page we were optimizing. Because these customers…

...continue to read "Segment Your Way Out of Sadness"