Why?

You have a blog because you want to sharing something to create a discussion between others. Unless you have private blog, which would just be a journal that is accidentally online, then you actually want people to see what’s happening on your site.

Here are a few reasons why you should make heat maps and real time analytics a part of your blog:

1. You will be able to see what people are reading

2. See if your visitors are scrolling down your site, or dropping off before the last post is even finished

3. To make sure that your social media badges are getting clicked, if not maybe try a new location

4. Check your banner ads to see if your engagement isn’t getting stolen

5. See what kind of visitors you are getting and where (which sites) they are coming from

6. Be able to see which links are getting the most traffic

7. How your site is getting navigated through

8. Which posts are getting the most engagement

9. Define, tweek, expand upon, or eliminate certain topics that are not getting read

10. Be sure that your comments and discussion area is located where it will actually getting utilized

There are definitely more than 10 reasons you should be using real time analytics on your site, but these are a few that I think are the most useful. Remember, all of these are instant. Don’t wait 48 hours, like most data gathering tools take. Get these valuable statistics immediately and optimize at that moment. These visitors are on your site to get to know you. Your readership will appreciate the time you are taking to get to know them and this is without even asking. You will just know. Intuitive software is just grand like that.

What is A/B testing in the first place?

It is really as simple as it sounds: testing A and testing B, simultaneously. You would start by creating two versions of the same element and defining a metric that could measure success. In ‘let’s make your website awesome’ terms, you create two versions of your site, then split the traffic between the two and measure their performance based on the things that you care about on the site.

Because everyone has time to do that right? Wrong.

Website heatmaps let you consistently define the trouble areas of your site and instantly see how a change you made is performing. They are one of the most accurate, and surprisingly simple, ways to see how your users are navigating through and interacting with your site.

Depending on which map you are looking at, the images that you will see will reflect:

• Where people are not focusing. Are the even looking at your headline?
• Which CTAs are being clicked. Are they in the right spot?
• Scrolling behavior. Make sure your entire site is actually getting seen
• Placement of purchase buttons
• Engagement with images. Are they being looked at, clicked on, ignored? Time for a change?
• How much are they clicking on objects, links, text

From there, you can instantly and clearly see the on-page problem areas and places through your site that maybe just need a little TLC. The hard work is done for you. Using our real-time traffic meter and data filled dashboard as well, will give you a ton of simple site analytics that overlay on your site—you don’t have to navigate away to find necessary metrics.

All of you site analytics are in front of you, just begging you to optimize them. That is the great thing about real-time analytics—they are instant, immediate, accurate and ready at a moments notice.

These days, we don’t have the time or patience to sit through a month long A/B test that leaves you without results. I’m suggesting that before you put yourself and your site through a rigorous ordeal, try a simpler solution.

By: http://www.pleated-jeans.com/

]]> http://www.seevolution.com/blog/what-would-you-do-if-your-internet-went-down/feed/ 0 http://www.seevolution.com/blog/the-golden-ticket-high-quality-content/ http://www.seevolution.com/blog/the-golden-ticket-high-quality-content/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:10:43 +0000 Ashley Novack http://www.seevolution.com/blog/?p=2319 Filling your site with high quality, well-written content  is invaluable. Professional writing will not only increase your business’ credibility, it will also create a solid all-around foundation for your website.

Expanding on this point, the article, “Coming Soon from Google: High Quality is Now Even more Vital to Rankings,” discusses the importance of great quality content on a website now and, especially, for the future. Creating a website has now become the easy part; stocking it full of original content throughout an interactive interface for your users is the challenge. This quality content will create a better overall customer experience that will give them incentive and, ultimately, convince them to be a part your business in any number of facets.

With the help of product, marketing and SEO strategist, AJ Kohn, website content is put in a spotlight. He, among other experts in the field, have learned that how your visitors interact with the quality information on your website is incomparable. Real-time analytics allows you to test the usability of your site and heatmaps let you see where and how they are interacting with your site. Use these to your advantage; they are there to help you. Mouse movement heatmaps, for example, are a great way to see where you visitors are focusing and what is keeping their attention. You have all the tool to consistently monitor how your site’s content is being received. Take some time when you get a chance and audit your site. Go through your content and make sure that you are giving people valuable and honest information, versus a slew of keywords and general titles.

The article also talked about Google Authorship. If you or whomever is doing the writing for your site has not done this yet, they should. It basically tells Google to organize the articles that you are writing and make them more accessible for people. Ideally, if someone is reading one thing you wrote, Google would automatically give them easy access to everything else you have written. By registering your email (whichever one you are doing the bulk of your writing from) with Google, your authorship will be tracked and the more quality content you produce your author rank will increase. First of all, this will let the all powerful search engine know that you are serious about creating great material and second, boost your search traffic. Again, this is the ideal situation at the moment, but in the future will be how Google will inevitably  function. It is smart now, but they are constantly updating their algorithms to be smarter and more intuitive for their customers. Google has no desire to point their users in the direction of a poor quality site with content of no value. Although they are not there yet, Google will eventually be able to give an intrinsic value to written material on sites and define how searchable your site is accordingly.

Marketing and SEO aside, with all the information we are given today, it would be a wise decision to invest in professional and relative content development. Whether it is a team of technical writers or one creative soul, save your business the time and resources by creating high quality material right now. When search engines and other tools catch up, you will be first in line.

First and foremost, SeeVolution is a tool that was developed to make your life easier. There are enough things in your life that stress you out and we do not want your website to be one of them. Regardless of your business, a website serves as a way to engage with people. Whether you want them to buy your homemade mugs, read about what you ate for breakfast yesterday and how that made you feel, or purchase a year subscription to Rolling Stone, all of these situations need people to interact onsite to make the site successful.

We are offering you an intuitive tool into these users minds. With real-time analytics, you can see how you users are navigating through your site and behaving on each page. You want to know this because when you do, you can customize your site to exactly what your visitors want. When they get what they want, you will get what you want. We’ve all heard it before—it’s a win-win. Using behavioral analytics should be one of the things that you don’t think twice about getting, like getting dessert after dinner or watching football on Sunday.

To get your optimization fire started, here are 20 fact-astic things about SeeVolution. These are just a few suggestions and ways to get you started. Remember, for a limited time, we are still offering to do this for you. When you sign up, we want to give you a free homepage analysis with one of our analytics wizards.

1. With SeeVolution, you never have to navigate away to get all of your site’s real-time analytics

2. Everything (transparent heatmaps, traffic monitor, dashboard, and toolbar) is overlaid on your site

3. See what people are actually clicking. This means they want something to happen and you should make that happen.

4. Find out where and how these users are getting to your site.

5. See essential traffic trends.

6. Check out a simple and clear breakdown of your users.

7. Discover what people actually care about, and what they don’t.

8. Find out which buttons and CTAs are actually working.

9. With scroll heatmaps, find out if you are putting your purchase or social media buttons too low on your landing page.

10. Mouse movement heatmaps have an 80% coorelation between eye movements and the movements of a mouse. Is your entire site being seen?

11. Get more eyes on important elements of your site with any of our heatmaps.

12. Create an awesome user experience with a consistent and organized site..

13. Find out what the most clicked thing is on your site. It could be that blank space next to the link to your blog. Fix that.

14. We compliment Google Analytics. Use them together to get the most out of your optimizing experience.

15. Make sure that your banner is not taking people’s attention off important parts of your site.

16. Easily access simplified site number and traffic sources, while you heatmap.

17. Increase your traffic yourself. Don’t waste time with third parties.

18.  Know how your site is trending all the time.

19. Optimize the placement of social media badges. Make it easy to be your friend.

20. Stop stressing, your analytic overlays are recorded and available to you at anytime.

Tomorrow begins the second of three 2012 presidential debates. Unlike the 1st and the upcoming 3rd on October 22nd, this debate will be held in a ‘town meeting’ style, which will allow citizens—or undecided voters chosen by the Gallup Organization—two minutes each to ask the candidates questions about foreign and domestic policies.

This debate allows the public—namely those who have not made up their minds—to interact with these politicians and show America that their voice is heard, literally.

Once it starts, the debate will be live on TV, online, on Twitter, on Facebook and literally everywhere else. The internet will be blowing up with how everyone watching feels, what they think, where they stand on the issues and what they are currently eating for dinner.

Website heatmaps offer webmasters a chance to get inside their users heads and see how they are interacting with a site.

As the owner of both candidate’s websites, I would be more than interested to see how people who are currently watching the debate, or even that night, are interacting on my site. I would want to see what stories they are clicking on and what topics they were actually reading about. Yes, people will tell you what they think. What about the states that as a whole are undecided and voters who skirt both party lines? They can’t truly tell you what they think because they are still making up their minds. Heatmaps will let me see what these people are thinking and how they are engaging without them having to say anything.

Since this debate is all about the undecided, it is the perfect time to use a new awesome technology to gain some insight into the swing vote. All of your other data will still be there and available. Heatmaps would give a fresh approach to getting to know voters and an intuitive way of connecting with them.

Let’s talk help desks.

Staying organized and having a clean, reliable avenue of communication to your customers is necessary. Help desk software is a customer support tool that tracks customer requests allowing for immediate response times, usually, through a variety of platforms. As a young company, great customer relationships should be fostered. They need to know they can rely on you and trust in your service. An intuitive help desk can do all of this.

Researching every help desk that you find on the first page of Google will take you forever—trust me. Most of them are generic and don’t really have all the features that small businesses need to become titans of industry. These are a few companies (in no particular order) that I think are great for start ups and will make your life easier.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-based help desk software that currently services 20,000 businesses worldwide. You can easily manage all of your customer’s needs from you phone, iPad, computer or any other device. Their service is deeply integrated allowing for communication through Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Zendesk also offers personalized apps that make it even smoother experience. The service is developed to fit the needs of small businesses and large enterprises at a variety of price plans, which makes it easy for a growing company to stick with an established provider for a good amount of time.

Freshdesk

Giving Zendesk a run for their money, Freshdesk is even more tailored to meeting small business needs by offering qualified customers a ‘Future Fund’, which given businesses up to 1 year of free support. They also provide discounts and other customized pricing offers to other larger companies. Aiming to please, they allow customers who are not satisfied with their service to export all of their data at any time. Freshdesk also recently introduced personalized game mechanics into their system, making a customer tracking an engaging game like experience fully loaded with points and levels. Clearly innovative, this options should definitely be considered.

Desk

Also a cloud-based service, Desk offers totally specialized features that allow for totally business streamlining. They systematically monitor and anticipate support requirements and offers 24/7 support to their customers. Their super intuitive interface provides complete customization at affordable prices that start up can appreciate. Like the others, they also offer full social integration and applications to help you along the way. You can be assured that you will be taking customer interaction to a high level.

All of these companies are great options and offer helpful features to get your business on the right track to superior customer service. Browse around these sites. They all have great resources and tours that will help you in your help desk quest.

We know what it’s like to be a start up. We want to give our customers all of our knowledge and insights that we have collected on our way. If you have any questions about tools or resources feel free to ask. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks to come!

Advice is a funny thing. On one hand,  you seek out fantastic knowledge snippets with the hope that they will somehow change your life. On the other, you are consistently fighting off droves of personal opinions daily. A good way to decipher the good from the unnecessary advice is simply by heeding the kind that resonates with you. It is true that knowledge is a powerful thing, so listen to what others have to offer, but stick to your guns when actually utilizing that information.

An article from BusinessInsider.com offers up the best advice that top executives in the US have ever received. Most the advice that these success stories received was centered around trusting yourself and being true to your own originality. With anything you ever do in life there is always going to be people who tell you that you will not make it and how much you can’t do it. All of the people quoted in the article were confident that if they stuck with what they believed in, while taking the advise that resonated with them from trusted people, they would achieve what they wanted.

I asked SeeVolution’s CEO, Sohrob Farudi, what the best advice he has received was to date. He said,

“Although this is a quote, it sums up the way I was raised and the way I try to live my life. ‘In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.’  By David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.”

Anything can be inspiring and give you the push you need to get over that hurdle. Learn from people and their experience—they will surprise you!

Your first Google Analytics experience can be a rough one. After you install it on your site, you will start to see a slow eruption of data just coming out of the wood work. Graphs, tables and numbers aplenty will then be available for your viewing pleasure. Analyzing this data can get confusing and irritating if are not quite sure where to begin.

Enter SeeVolution.

Our software was created to be used in sync with Google Analytics as a visual compliment to the data that they give you.

Heat maps allow you to see the ‘hotspots’ of data on an overlaid, transparent map. These visual sets of behavioral analytics give you immediate, real-time results that can then be used with other analytics that only offer stagnant data. Once you shine some light on how your site analytics actually look, you can start to improve and optimize entirely.

Using one statistical source will only restrict your site and make optimization a slower and more difficult process. When all of this awesome, easy-to-use data is literally right in front of you, why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of every once of it?

Bottom line, you want high conversion rates, more traffic and your users enjoy interacting with your site. Let us help your site succeed  with ever opportunity. Before you know it, that little start-up site of yours will be grown up and established, all it needs is a push.