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Testing is part science, part art, part perseverence. Here is a comprehensive list of resources for the new and experienced alike.

For those of you who are new to Google for our advertising, analytics or SEO, here's a nice set of tools to help you get better at making money online.

 @KISSmetrics - Google Analytics has become a very important tool in helping us diagnose your site and increase conversions. I'm spending much more of my time showing businesses how to setup Google Analytics to give them amazing insights into their visitors. This list is pretty intense, but if you're getting up the learning curve on GA, it can't be beat.

If there was one thing that defeats your efforts to market with data, it would be lack of resources. Marketing departments are notoriously under-staffed for the workload delegated by executives. It can become overwhelming to imagine doing tests when you're just trying to get communications out the door.

In the interest of helping you find more time and happiness in your work, I offer this excellent list of 26 "time hacks."

Please. Do some split testing with the extra time you find. Your visitors will thank you.

26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I'd Known at 20 from Etienne Garbugli @egarbugli

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.

#120. Conversion Sciences

From writing up test hypotheses to running meaningful A/B tests, Brian Massey delivers a valuable resource for anyone looking to increase their conversion rates.

 @peeplaja - This is about as complete a summary of home page best practices that I've ever seen. Peep could have made this an eBook. There are some great examples, specific recommendations and tons of links to other resources. This ambitious post covers:Map out buyer personasCraft a value propositionBuild a connectionUse proper visualsDefine most wanted actionCreate call to actionWrite user oriented copyAdd trust elementsTest lengthCheck load speed

We focus on conversion marketing because it lets us spend our limited resources on the things that will move our business forward. However, when you first start your conversion optimization process, you are going to have to do MORE work until you get the data on what programs to kill. So, I thought I would pass along some very effective tips that have worked for me to find more time in my already crowded day. Enjoy. 

Email is the biggest social network on the planet. If you find yourself reluctant to tackle this proven cahnnel, here is a one-stop resource for inspiration and instruction.

As I'm putting the final touches on my up-coming book, it is very clear that content is the most important conversion strategy: It influences and enables almost every other strategy.

If you need to get started on content marketing here is a pretty complete list of resources to get you started.

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.

Great source for Web Analytics resources.

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Greatg collection of tools from MarketingExperiments for testing plans.

Now here's a very interesting resource on building Web sites with credibility.

A new tool for our online conversion lab! Facebook is apparently going to give us more insight into the behavior of individuals on our Facebook pages. The more we know about the success of these pages, the better decisions we can make about spending our marketing time and dollars on social media.

Despite all the hype, social networks are not a panacea for businesses, and many are putting too many resources into them without knowing the payoff.

Web Engagement Management (WEM) is a strategy for how an organization brings together its human and technology resources to optimize its digital presence. In the article What is Web Engagement Management (WEM)? we outlined 5 core WEM components. But we just skimmed the surface. Here's more on what we think is at the center of WEM.

One of the advantages of optimizing for conversion is that Google can't take away your revenue arbitrarily.

Normally, we are thinking of SEO when we say this. Panda, Penguin and now Pidgeon are algorithm changes that may have hurt your business.

Now, it appears that Google is messing with paid traffic as well.

Mike Roberts of SpyFu.com has the analysis of an upcoming elimination of "Exact and Phrase Match keyword targeting" by Google.dealing with a 10% loss of revenue is not what I need now or ever. Optimize for conversion, and Google will not be able to reach into your pockets.

You may believe us, but does your boss?

As you know we believe that dedicated landing pages are one of the most powerful ways to increase revenue and leads online. It would be best to have a special landing page for each offer you make in an ad, email or on your site.

But who has time to build all of those pages??

If you knew that more landing pages meant more money, you might be able to get your boss to give you more resources.

This post from Hubspot may have the data you need.

Data science in the season of US poitics. Good resources for mining text for test hypotheses. Good for chat transcripts, phone logs, reviews, etc.