Every website owner wants to know how visitors behave on their website, but how do you get all that information and how can you improve your pages with it?
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can give you some good information about previous pages and the most popular links, but to show interactions in detail, additional tools are often useful. It’s these specialist tools that I focus on this review.
For more background on applying heatmaps to improve sites, see these two tutorials:
Using Heatmaps to Optimize your Site (Referral Candy - shows examples Click, Scroll and Mouse movement heatmaps)
Using Clickmaps to Understand your viewers - a nice summary of why and how to use heatmaps
There are various ways to collect more information about the behaviour of visitors on your website.…
Does your site pass the 2,4,6,8 second rule?
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Benchmark
We’ve shown through several recent posts that speed matters if you want to maximise conversion. The Walmart example in our previous post showed how conversion rate drops dramatically below 4 seconds, so this is a good rule of thumb in evaluations.
Today, Google has released a new compilation that helps companies compare their performance to this.
It has 3 different benchmarks:
This supports the data from our previous post - suggesting that desktop sites need to render in less than 4 seconds:
Google notes that you can check out the site speed reports in Google Analytics to see how you compare. Remember that averages across the whole site can be deceptive…
Practical ideas for converting more visitors to subscribers
Bloggers use it, online retailers use it, and social media marketers practically make their living from it.
And email marketers?
Maybe they should use it more.
To quote the ultimate authority on human behavior (er, Wikipedia):
"When a person is in a situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave, they will often look to others for cues concerning the correct behaviour"
This is the concept of social proof. It underpins the use of such elements as bestseller lists, product ratings and those blog feed & Twitter icons that give prominence to the number of existing feed subscriptions and Twitter followers.
All serve to convince or reassure the observer that "buying that product" or "following that Twitter account" is worth doing. Social proof (or the lack of it) is why we tend to avoid restaurants that are empty.
So might you use the concept when growing your…
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29 Mar 2012
Of the sixteen tools reviewed which two work best?
This article explains why we believe you’d benefit from using these services for feeding back on web page designs. You'll find you can use them for everything from campaign landing pages to new home page designs.
Every week, our consultants meet to discuss the work they’ve created for clients. The process is fascinating. One consultant presents his or her work—a wireframe, a design, or maybe the client’s existing control—and the other consultants suggest how to improve it. This process allows us to draw upon our team’s wide-ranging experience.
We use collaborative feedback software to keep track of the suggestions made. Here’s how it works:
Consultants upload an image into the software. (It’s all web hosted, so it’s really simple to do.)
The consultants choose whom they’d like to invite to comment on the image.
Those invited annotate the image with their suggestions and comments.
Here's an example…
Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary
Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features
Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote.
August 2012 update
At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's
The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…
New data shows how slow is too slow
Conversion rate optimisation specialists have been recently shared two new pieces of research which show that page load speed should be a concern for all. I thought I'd summarise them here as a reminder that speed matters!
The first shows data shared by Walmart shows how their conversion rate varies as page load times increases. You can see there is a dramatic decline in conversion as page load times increases to 4 seconds:
Secondly Tagman published research that showed a similar pattern, except with specific conversion rates.
How can we review and improve our site performance?
Google has been releasing tools for to help you with your website loading speed for some time now but what is classed as a fast website and does it…
It's not all about you, you, you
Marketing offers, hooks, lead generation or calls-to-action, whatever language you use, are fundamentally not about you. Although there is a LOT of discussion of page layout and call-to-action testing, for me this is the biggest block to get over. What I've observed in many companies is a tendency to lean towards what are most often disguised sales promotion tactics (often believed to be marketing offers) that are only designed to entice transaction with buyers today.
Marketing offers on the other hand are designed to data capture in order the marketer earns permission to sell at the right time tomorrow, next month or even next year for large ticket items.
Three key differences between sales promotion and marketing offers
Sales promotion is about you incentivising me to buy something from you as soon as possible - they're effective…
10 tactics for effective Facebook pages you can implement by 30th March
Value/Importance: [rating=10]
Recommended link: Facebook’s Pages intro
With just one month before switchover to a completely new page layout for companies on Facebook, we’ve rated the impact as 10 out of 5, although that depends on how important Facebook is for your business...
If you’re short on time, I recommend you go straight for the new Facebook pages FAQ for a succinct summary. What Facebook won’t tell you are the marketing tactics that you lose and gain through the new update, that’s what we’ll summarise here, using examples to illustrate the new features.
With an update to a web service, you usually start by looking at what’s new, but with Facebook’s new business pages, what’s most striking is what’s missing since…
There are many excellent social media blogs providing great content to keep you up-to-date with the latest social media marketing trends and advice.
SocialMediaExaminer is one of these sources of great information. So its no surprise they have 47,513 followers on Twitter and 76,391 people have liked them on Facebook, however they have a secret weapon.
In fact this same secret weapon is used by the top 7 of the top ten best Social Media experts as judged by SocialMediaExaminer themselves that they picked from over 600 nominations.
So, what is the secret weapon? Email communications! Whilst their Twitter and Facebook stats are impressive, their email following is bigger at 129,329 people.
They are so keen to have you as a subscriber that the email sign up gets the prime real estate on their home page.
…
A call-to-action at the wrong time in the wrong place?
How do you feel when a pushy shop assistant approaches you the minute you enter a shop?
When an email consisting of nothing but a hard-sell call-to-action lands in your customer's inbox, this probably makes them feel the same way.
“Register Now”
I recently received an email to promote an industry event out of the blue:
The “Register Now” link took me to a landing page that contained little information besides ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’.
On the basis of this scant information I had a choice - register or leave the page. As I had never heard of the brand or event, I left.
Give email recipients compelling timely reasons to respond
Using "Learn More" instead of "Register Now" might have encouraged me to spend some time checking out the company, perhaps ending in a conversion after all.
A landing page featuring in-depth information,…
