Multi-page Checkout vs. One Page Checkout – Time is money
May 7, 2008
In the e-commerce world, much like any other world, time is money. A great deal of e-commerce sites are built in such a way where you search for a product, click to “proceed to checkout” and then you enter the checkout process where you sometimes have to create a profile before you are able to buy the product you are interested in and then you have to enter your delivery information, what type of shipping you would like and then you credit card you would like to pay with and then lastly process the transaction.
Sounds tiring and I wonder if customers give up at certain points during the checkout. I can personally say that I have decided not to buy a product online before because they made it too hard to buy the product so what makes your customers so different? It’s just a little “food for thought” when you are viewing your sales funnels and cart abandonment rate and wondering why are customers dropping off at certain points in the online sales process. Check out the One Page checkout…
Luc
The Google Sandbox Theory Explored
April 28, 2008
Like with all things Google, the Sandbox theory is one of those theories and every online business owner should know about. I’ve read a number of definitions as to what exactly the Google Sandbox is and have come up with the following…
The Google Sandbox is a place where sites with new registered domains are allowed to “play”, this could also be effected by website domains that change owners. The principle is put in place to protect websites and control spamming websites that abuse search engine optimization techniques to gain a higher rank using either grey or black hat SEO tricks.
If your website falls into the sandbox and the majority of your traffic comes from organic search results, if your website is not spamming or abusing the search engines it will rank high again but it will just take some time. Some things that you can do in the meantime are…
- Improve your website’s search engine friendliness including SEO copywriting, Title Tags, Descriptions and Robots.txt file
- Improve your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing efforts
- Improve your community (Social marketing) efforts
Whether you are a business blogger, e-commerce shop or any other kind of web property owner does not mean that you will be in the Sandbox forever if your website.
Luc
Google, Yahoo! And MSN Webmaster Tools
April 18, 2008
I thought I would write a small article about the tools offered by the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) because a lot of times unless you are directly or indirectly involved in SEO you are not going to take the time to know these and these tools are very useful in telling you what is wrong with your website and also what you can do to improve your website for search engine consumption.
- Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Note: Having an XML sitemap ready to go on your website is a MUST to setting these accounts up and you will need to verify the site when you first submit it to these search engines. All of these are FREE to use but you must register an account to use each of them
Enjoy these tools!
Luc
SEO Analytics - Tracking Search Engine Optimization
April 16, 2008
SEO Analytics is a term that has to first do with the optimization of a website so that search engines can “crawl” the web pages in the website making them “search engine friendly”. Tracking how people come to a website, understanding their behaviours and developing based off of factual results is the main idea behind Analytics.
If you put the two terms together then you get “SEO Analytics” which is the combination of optimizing a website for search engines using both on-page factors and off-page factors combined with reporting of how the optimization is affecting the customers, viewers or whoever makes up your audience that comes to view your website and in turn creating an intelligence about the efforts of SEO and the facts of Analytics.
So what are some ways to track SEO Analytics?
Internal Site Search (aka “Site Search”) – This can show you how your customers search your website once they are on, what they are looking for and how long they spend looking for it. If you’d like to have a look at what kind of metrics are tracked by Internal Site Searches in Google Analytics, feel free to write my article about this.
Referring Sites - Tracking where traffic is being referred from can help you develop new areas of inbound links to your website.
Comparing Natural (Organic) vs. Paid search – This provides you a benchmark to see how your Search Engine Optimization compares to that of your paid efforts.
Keyword Lists – This is helpful because the keywords are provided from search engines like Google or Yahoo! And show you the terms, queries and phrases people use in finding a page on your website.
All of these areas are covered when you install a tool like Google Analytics or Microsoft AdCenter Analytics to track visitors that are coming to your website. They can influence the design, layout and flow of the website and allow you to see opportunities for your business just so long as you are looking for them.
Luc
Google Analytics vs. Microsoft adCenter Analytics - Round 1 - Usability
April 8, 2008
The amount of forensics you can do on your data
Being able to understand the “why” and “how” of observing patterns in data is key to success to performing solid website analysis. I noticed that Google Analytics did a good job when it came to giving me the name of the source, durations and narrowing it down. However Microsoft was limited (even though it’s a Beta version) at best and you really have to dig to find the information you want. Have a look…
I find a lot lacking in the Beta release from Microsoft because Google Analytics is at a point where it is very user-friendly so in my opinion from a usability standpoint Microsoft could learn a ton from Google Analytics in terms of application functionality.
The graphs are too small; the views that are offered lack the thought of the people that will be using it. It wasn’t designed with people in mind. Most times people want more options of analysing and sorting data then just “view contents of the group” or “view segmentation by item = Age, Gender, Occupation or Geographic Location”. In terms of segmenting data for marketing efforts I feel that this is the bare minimum which Google Analytics offers more then vast amounts of information.
Because the term “Web Analytics” is turning into a big keyword for the next version of the web, an internet based on intelligence, intelligent web applications and the people who use them in everyday life, naturally many people believe that you just need to pick a tool, install and configure it and start tracking traffic but if Web Analytics is used wisely it runs deeper then the tools you use and it is a practice of applying tools and knowledge and business smarts to develop your business online.
Luc
