Online Conversion

What happens when you answer the question your visitors are really asking? Hipmunk is what happens when your business goals align with your visitors' needs.

Walking into a store qualifies as a conversion. Apparently promotional email still rocks social media.

Great primer on regular expressions for Google Analytics. You don't have to be a programmer to get something from regular expressions.

Great outline of the role design plays in conversion.

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

Nice summary of my ProductCamp Austin presentation.

This is a fabulous way of looking at your Pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend. The concept of a "marketin clearning" price range draws into sharp focus the importance of lowering your acquisition costs to participate in more search traffic and remain profitable.

Of course, the best way to lower your acquisition cost is to increase the conversion rate and average order value of your website. 

"If Ken Kratz had a child build his website without his awareness and did not make changes at the fear of hurting their feelings, then that would be a permissible excuse."

Enough said.

I often say we're living in a golden age of marketing, in which we can find data to answer almost any question we have. And these tools aren't expensive. Every marketer can benefit from these tools with a little curiosity and patience. 

I reviewed 47 wordpress templates for a competition earlier this year. 98% of them used a "flat" design approach. Of course, we're seeing this style of design pervade websites.

Is this a good thing? Nielsen Norman Group says we can use flat designs if we follow some smart guidelines.

We often talk about the power of the thank-you page. Once someone has purchased from you or signed up with you, a psychological effect called "Likeing" takes hold. The person likes you more for no other reason than that they chose you.

So, you must be good.

We recommend that you ask for social shares on the thank you page, ask them to upsell on the thank you page, and sign up for email on the thank you page.

Here is another great thing to ask for: Feedback.

Forbes doesn't mince words when talking about CRO. Author Niel Patel has built several online businesses, including CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics. He would know.

The article starts off with a great insignt: "Conversion optimizaiton works."

We believe that mobile traffic is every bit as important as desktop traffic. Many businesses walk away from their mobile traffic because it doesn't convert well. This is a mistake.

Two points found in this article drive the point home:
App and Mobile Functionality (sucks)Mobile Represents a Different Type of userSpend some time on your mobile site. Don't just create a responsive version of your desktop website.

If I was to rename this article, it would be, "20 Kinds of Best Practices and Why They Won't Work".

It is bad news to rely on best practices that are unsupported by data or testing. This article gives you 20 reasons why.

Here's a nice story about how data can be used to drive design and content decisions. Click tracking (heatmaps), session recording and user polling are all tools we put to good use here in the lab for our clients.

And if you want a fantastic example of using storytelling to educate and entertain, this post is just such a thing.

"Overall, a lenient return policy did indeed correlate with more returns. But, crucially, it was even more strongly correlated with an increase in purchases. In other words, retailers are generally getting a clear sales benefit from giving customers the assurance of a return."

The kind of traffic that comes to a "Click Bait" headline is often not well qualified. People come because of the headline's hook, not because they need a product or service.

Having said that, the psychology of these headlines can be used to draw a more qualified audience to a content piece or landing page. So I offer this little study of click-bait headlines. It's worth the read if only for the dog videos.

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

While Data Scientists are in demand, the ability to manage them to productive ends and incentivize them to drive the company forward are skills that managers will need to develop before they see ROI.

Data scientist agencies, like Conversion Sciences will thrive until internal management gets up to speed on what to do with these new brainiacs.

Keep these things in mind I'd your doing AB tests on SEO traffic. And you should be.