All visitors are not the same, they can come in through different marketing channels, enter your site at different pages and view different parts of your site. One of the great things about the Web and the tools that we have, is that you can not only know that your visitors are doing different things, you can measure and then act on it. TV for example has to rely on sampled, panel services (i.e. Nielsen) where you might make an estimation about the different groups of people that saw your ad. On the Web, we know what visitors viewed and exactly who viewed it! If you have a robust analytics solution,...

Most of the blogs and literature that you will see on the Web about site optimization is going to be about e-commerce Web sites. The reason? Anyone can understand your results when you say you’ve increased conversion rate by 20%, thereby seeing an incremental lift in revenue of $100,000 over the next 30 days. The case for optimization here is pretty obvious. This doesn’t mean that content sites and publishers that aren’t selling a product on their site should not be optimizing their sites. One common excuse on the part of a lot of content and publisher sites is that they are not...

Reading a recent blog post from Jeffery Eisenberg (Realistic Expectations For Conversion Rate Optimization) made me once again think about how a lot of companies fail to really commit to testing and site optimization once they purchase a tool (Test&Target, SiteSpect, Optimpost, Goolgle Web Site Optimizer, etc.). Right now, I see site optimization where I saw Web analytics about 5 years ago in terms of tools and commitment. A few years ago, businesses were ready to go out and buy the biggest and best Web analytics solution out there, without having any kind of dedicated resources to leverage...

Creating a hypothesis should be one of the first things that you do when you start running A/B and multivariate tests on your Web site. Just because you have the keys to an optimization tool (even a free one like Google Web Site Optimizer), you should NOT be starting out saying, “hey, let’s see if changing this button from ‘Add To Cart’ to ‘Buy Now’ works better!” It’s vital to understand that you need to start with a hypothesis and then set clear goals before you start testing. Setting a hypothesis is not a difficult thing to do, and it will help...

Followup to “Pages Aren’t Worth Anything” from Jason Egan on Vimeo. This is my first attempt at a video post here, so this might be a little rough. They should get better though! Summary: Pages aren’t worth anything, but what you’re selling is. Testing and optimization should replace analytics in determining how effective a page is at conversion. You should me optimizing and measuring the worth of your marketing accumen as opposed to some HTML. Look at a page or site this way. It is a marketing and sales tool. How good is it at marketing and selling? How good are...

I’m sure that some of you will disagree with the title of this post as soon as you see it, but hear me out (read me out?). Wether you are in publishing/content or straight up e-commerce, your pages are not making money inherently. Many executives and busines owners always have one of the two following question: “How much revenue has this page made?” “How well is this page converting?” To preface the rest of this post and explain the title of this post, I am going to say that pages do not make money, and they do not convert. Crazy, I know. But, what does make you...