A Comprehensive Resource for Beginning or Intermediate Web Test Designer

I have read other Bryan’s books and was glad to notice Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. It provides good fundamentals of web site testing and gives you plenty of ideas what and how to test elements of your web presence. It is well balanced between theory and practical examples. In the last third of the book there is a big collection of ideas for testing, that beginners might get lost and be overwhelmed. Bryan and coauthors do a good job of structuring and guiding, making sure the reader looks into important areas first.

The book has subtitle as “The complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer.” You will learn a great deal of How to use this tool and some more. Highly recommend!

Google Listens to Customers and Significantly Expands its Analytics Capability

For a few past years many internet marketers and web site managers debated between using free Google Analytics and other somewhat expensive commercial products. Of course, small sites went with the free option. That's how Google Analytics gained its over 50% estimated market share (Marketing Sherpa, Search Marketing Benchmark Survey, June 2008). Enterprise niche opted for products that offered flexible segmentation and campaign management integration (WebTrends, Omniture, ClickTracks, CoreMetrics, etc). Many implemented dual option using Google Analytics for general reports of the site or its parts and other visitor behavior analysis software (mostly log based) for segmentation and historical analysis.

With recent major upgrade Google Analytics gives enterprise-level capabilities to each and every user (eventually). More in the feature please read Avinash Kaushik's blog post Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja! I am personally excited about Motion Charts (play feature makes it very appealing to visualize trends over time) and Advanced Segmentation. Later one assists in analysis of segments and comparison. Before this upgrade people used filters extensively to get the same results. It was inconvenient and inflexible because one needed to set up filters ahead of time and they would not apply to historical data. Now you have all the freedom to explore and extract another layer of knowledge from your web site data.

On another note I am a little sad. Two months ago I purchased Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. It is a great book and every serious user of Google Analytics should read it. I was sad that this new upgrade made some parts of the book obsolete. But I am happy that Brian has an opportunity to work on a second addition sooner.

Landing Page Optimization and Design tips from MarketingSherpa

After watching MarketingSherpa’s presentation on findings for Landing Page Optimization, I compiled a list of major points that are relevant for the most of electronic marketing:

• Web marketing is very dynamic environment: no matter what you plan to do – just do something and have a way to tell if it worked or not.
• There is room for small and large tweaks, technology intensive and not
• Relevance and streamlined visitor experience is very important.
• Make easy for people to convert
• On the forms collect only necessary information for that phase – if they become your customers, you will have plenty of chances to add to their profile later
• View your electronic campaign in its entirety from idea to funnel inflow to conversion
• Remove “reset “ button and make your “submit” button relevant to the questions you ask in the form or the next step they go to after pressing it.
• Make buttons larger – it should be obvious to your visitors what you expect from them
• On the landing pages make one or at the most two columns for better eye flow
• Use larger font, black and blue (for links) only, and do not center headlines
• Design for mobile in plain text

Very informative presentation. To access to the presentation and audio file visit Hot Tips to Increase your Landing Page Conversions teleseminar page

New Era of Internet Content We Owe to Customers

I believe we are at the point when Internet in general and electronic marketing in particular go through redesign and rethinking of practices and rules of engagement. Everybody strives to become more customer friendly and reduce waste of customer’s valuable time at the same time increasing value to them. Anybody who misses this point is loosing potential customers at a great rate and more importantly those customers are very unlikely to ever return.
In a world of globalization, customization, and decrease privacy we all become electronic marketers on smaller or larger scale.