Group items tagged

Regular expressions rear their ugly head in more and more places. Google Analytics is just one.

For me the regular expression showed up in the excellent Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. I needed to redirect a URL that had parameters, like this:

http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

To do this, I could not use a regular redirect, as everything after the ? would be stripped away. I needed to use a Regular Expression Redirect. However, this sort of thing -- using query parameters -- wasn't covered in any of the Yoast documentation.

This article gave me the hint I needed, and the technique that ended up working. To summarize, I used the following regular expression to match my URL with the parameters:

^\/conversion-upside-report($|\/.*$)

The parentheses save the matching contents into a variable, which I can access using $1 in the new URL, like this:

resources/conversion-rate-optimization-calculator/upside-report/$1

It worked great. Give it a try: http://conversionsciences.com/conversion-upside-report/?t=10000&v=344&x=250

Thanks to Himanshu.

 @Avinash Kaushik has a unique ability to make analytics human. I don't share many analytics posts with you, as I don't want to scare you off. But I fear I may be underestimating you.

Here are ten very good ways to get to know your visitors through Google Analytics. I believe you will be energized and excited if you open these reports in your own Google Analytics account.

This is a great way to start appreciating your visitors in ways that will make your site more successful.

@neilpatel collects some of the most interesting eye-tracking images available and provides seven insights that can help you design your pages and choose images. We have done our own eye-tracking study of business video and you can get the full report now. The report offers similar conclusions for the use of video in a landing page. It includes over 30 minutes of embedded video that you can watch yourself.

Neil's conclusions include:Be careful you you use [images of] peopleThat people love media (especially on search results pages)That men and women look at images differentlyThat simple images can be more effectiveThe power of the left side of the pageThe power of facesThat people love hand-written notes (my favorite)Enjoy the images he provides.

In the case of paid search, the biggest barrier cited by 41% of company respondents was a lack of internal resources, followed by poorly converting websites (30%). Agency respondents had a different view on the issue though, with 49% blaming lack of budget, and 44% poorly converting websites.

My partner is fond of saying that the best judge of your marketing is your accountant. This is relatively easy to do online, to measure your marketing results all the way to revenue. Plus the learnings can be tried in other parts of the marketing portfolio.

Marketing is always trying to get a seat at the executive table. This report shows why CMOs continue to struggle.

If you're a frequent reader of our blogs, you won't be surprised by this report from Custora stating that email is a more effective marketing channel than social networks.

In fact, I say in my book that email is the biggest social network on the planet. Business people plan their days by their inbox. They program audible notifications when new items come into their inbox. It's not smart, but it's true.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should send self-promotional crap. That won't work in email, mail or social media. But certainly don't eliminate email from your marketing mix.

If all problems are opportunities, then error messages and error pages are generally missed opportunities. Marketing should be policing the errors reported on their website, messages that are usually written by a techie in IT. John Ekman give us five steps toward writing error messages that say "Yes!" instead of making the visitor feel like an idiot.

While we never do tests to achieve social virality, I think we can learn something from how people interact with images on social networks.

Don't take the results of this report as meaning that you should make the images on your website animated or vertical or eliminated. You may find the exact opposite for more engaged audiences.

Instead, add this bit of information to your knowledge base when testing social campaigns. You may want to test image orientation, brightness or animation.

But always test to the bottom line.

The analytics at one of our clients indicated that some 40% of the visitors did not have Javascript enabled. This was a shock, and something we hadn't seen before. We needed a way to verify that the analytics was reporting accurately.

Our development team found this interesting approach to setting up a test of how Javascript is used by your audience.

Most interesting part of this article, is the way that people make up stories about why they do what they do. This is why self-reported data is always we use it for qualitative research, that is but never to find answers to questions. Humans are very good at making up stories about why they do, and these stories are usually lies.

Whenever someone writes an article about Conversion Consultants (like us), we are always nervous that we might cross some of these lines.

We know that we have made these mistakes in the past.

The issue is exacerbated when the author is someone like Amy Africa, who has the experience and likes to tell things like they are. Her middle name could be "Frank".

I'm happy to report that we have evolved beyond these "lies" and firmly embrace the matching truths.

If you are looking for someone to guide your optimization efforts, have a conversion with a Conversion Scientist.

When we dig into a site's analytics, we try a number of different approaches to the data. Sometimes interesting things pop out, and sometimes the data looks "as expected."

This is an analysis we are going to start adding to our analysis: Heatmap of Conversions by Hour of Day. We will modify it for our ecommerce clients (as we track Revenue per Visit, or RPV).

You might try this and see if there is an interesting pattern in your data.

The greatest threat to the accuracy of your analytics data is inconsistent implementation. Too often, Javascript "Tags" are left off of some pages, put on some pages twice or simply implemented wrong. And, as your site changes, more inconsistencies are created.

This affects more than just analytics tools. Advertising networks, ratings and review systems, user feedback systems and more rely on properly implemented javascript tags.

The promise of "Tag Managers" is that you can put one set of code on all of your pages, and then control, monitor and edit the javascript for all of these tags in one place, using rules to determine which tags get placed on which pages. It's another way for marketing to monitor the implementation of online systems without being beholden to IT.

Yay!

So, how are the biggest ecommerce companies using Tag Managers? Here's your answer.

 @trackur takes a bold position to take for a social media tool. Spoiler alert: the one metric they suggest you obsess over if Conversion.
You see, conversions is why your business is, well, in business. We couldn't agree more.

Whitepapers are great lead generators