Remember the article we wrote that reviewed those 5 great conversion tracking tools?  We got such great feedback that we just couldn’t resist telling you about a few more.

1. HiConversion.net - HighConversion offers great tools to improve your conversion rate optimization.  It’s great for low traffic sites and small to medium sized enterprises.
2. 4Q from iPerceptions.com – Get great insights from your visitors and understand how visitors got to your site and if they are finding the information they’re looking for.  With the ability to merge your clickstream metrics with your visitors’ intentions and satisfaction ratings you’ll get great new insights that can help to increase your conversion rate.
3. Kampyle.com – This is a great tool for feedback.  The integrated system uses user feedback to help you understand where you can reduce customer attrition, increase conversion rates and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
4. WebsiteOptimization.com – Not sure why your website has a high abandonment rate, or why people aren’t spending much time looking around?  It may be due to a slow website speed.  This tool will tell you how long it takes to download your page elements and where you could save it.
5. Smush.it – If you have a lot of images on your site, consider condensing them with this great tool.  Simply upload your images or paste their URLs in to this tool then download the “smushed” files.  They’ll take up less bandwidth which will decrease user download times.  (Your site should take 10 seconds or less to download for 56k, which is 1 second on DSL).  This is critical for landing pages, home pages, and category pages.  The longer your load time the more likely viewers are to abandon the site before completing your site’s conversion goals.  It also makes it harder for your site to increase its number of returning visitors.
6. Site-Perf.com – This is another great tool to help you understand where you site is performing slowly and negatively effecting usability.  It provides accurate estimates of site loading speed including the full script.
7. YSlow – This plug-in works in FireBug (in your FireFox browser) to analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
8. Feng-gui.com – This is a great tension tool that mimics eye tracking to effectively analyze attention and attraction in visuals.  Understand how visitors see and interact with your website.
9. GrokDotCom.com – This site offers some great resources that will help you design the best website.  Their Battleship Grid article explains that not everything above the fold has equal value and will help you decide the best way toyou’re your screen space.
10. UserTesting.com – This is one of our favorite sites for Usability Testing.  For $39 you get a video of a visitor speaking their thoughts as they use your site and a written summary describing the problems they encountered.
11. WeWeCalculator – Discover what your word choices say about where your website’s focus really is. You’ll get a sense of the impression you are making on your prospects and where you could make improvements to increase leads and sales.

Let us know what you think of these tools and if you have a favorite!

It can be difficult to know and understand exactly where one should begin with conversion rate optimization. The thought of heavy development changes, testing, and huge amount of work can be frightening to the average person. While it is always good to work hard, it is better to be smart about how you work. Conversion rate optimization doesn’t have to take up your entire schedule. Here are five simple conversion rate improvements that anyone can do before the day is done.

1. Get verified and add trust to your site – Users are always scared of the unknown. So it is extremely important to keep users feeling comfortable and safe. One of the best ways to increase trust is to add security buttons to the website, especially during the checkout process. Some security buttons that can be added are hackersafe, paypal, thawte, and verisign.
2. Make your call to action more visible – Visitors are converted when they take action. Whether it is for the user to sign up, contact, or buy, it is extremely important to make the call to action easy to point out. Some easy ways to improve the call to action is to turn a text link into an image or make the call to action button bigger or brighter.
3. Move every step of the buying or checkout process above the webpage fold – One of the most common errors seen on websites is having the checkout process involve scrolling to the very bottom of the webpage. It is a simple task to move or add another buy-now button above the fold of a page.
4. Remove one or more distraction from the checkout process – During the checkout process some people leave half-way through buying a product to look at another page on the website such as the FAQ or shipping details. When streamlining the checkout process it is important to have little to no distractions or links to pages outside the buying course. By removing distractions, the conversion rate can be improved immensely. Have information in a pop-up if it deals with the buying process, such as shipping details. Users should also be wary of long order forms with non-essential fields. Keep those fields to a minimum.
5. When in doubt, get a friend to test the site – It is difficult to know if the webpage is running smoothly and correctly. And there is no way to know what type of information a user will click on or enter in text fields. Information may make sense to the creator but not the average user. The easiest way to test how the site works is to ask a friend that is completely unfamiliar with the website to look at it and buy something. Watch over their shoulder and find out where they get confused.

Let us know what you think of these tips and if you have any of your own!  Be sure to try them out and tell us if they worked for you.

Social media can be a tricky endeavor, and maintaining your accounts is the most important aspect.  But what do you do when someone leaves a negative comment?  Well, the first thing to remember is that often times people are much more brazen when speaking their minds on line because of the anonymity.  So, to help you navigate the sometimes-murky waters of social media, check out these 10 great tips on ways to respond to negative social media.

1.  Don’t take it personally. The number one rule is that, for the most part, no matter what is said you should always respond graciously.  As your mother always said, taking the highroad is your best solution.  Here’s an example:

Negative Tweet: “Just bought coffee at Café XYZ and it was awful, never going back!”

Great response: “@Tweeter so sorry your coffee was disappointing! Please let us make it up to you with a free cup!”

Then send the person a direct message (or email, if you can) with a one-time use coupon code for a free coffee along with a sincere apology.

2. Reach out as yourself, not your company. For serious complaints or really dissatisfied customers, it may be much more beneficial for you to reach out as yourself.  Most people, when they realize they’re dealing with a real person, are much more willing to listen and try again. 

3. Respond Quickly. Everyone needs validation, complaints can be turned around very quickly with a speedy response time.  Reaching out will not only make the person feel understood, nine times out of ten they’ll be happy to give you a second chance.

4. Follow up, privately. If the issue has been resolved, and the complainant has turned around, gently ask them to let people know.  Track the coupon code you gave them (suggestion #1) follow it up with an email asking them to let you know how the experience went.

Here’s an example:

Hi Jane!

We’re so glad to see that you took us up on the free coffee and we sincerely hope you enjoyed it.  Let us know how we did and we hope to see you again soon!

Thanks!

Café XYZ

If the person responds with a positive message think about Tweeting it.  “@Jane, so glad you enjoyed your free cup of coffee and thanks for giving us a second chance! We hope to see you again real soon!”  This way, your other followers can see that the issue was resolved and there are no hard feelings.

5. Know when to leave. You won’t be able to make everyone happy, but the good news is that you don’t have to.  The complainers won’t stick around long, but your loyal customers will, especially if they see that you’ve tried to appease.  So take it all in stride and remember that no one can be loved by everyone!  If you’ve tried to rectify the situation and the complainer just isn’t having it, let it go and move on.

Responding to negative feedback isn’t always easy and it usually isn’t fun either.  But it can have real benefits for your company if the issue is resolved quickly and satisfactorily.  Letting other followers see that you’re happy to apologize and rectify these kinds of situations lets them know that you are loyalty-worth and willing to help when they have issues.

Have you tried any of these suggestions?  Let us know what you think and if you have any tips of your own!

Would you like to improve your website’s conversion rate?  We have gathered a list of our top 15 suggestions to help you get started, with an emphasis on shopping carts, the check out process, and in-site search tools, this is sometimes referred to as conversion rate optimization.  Take a look at these great suggestions and let us know if they work for you!

1. Original Photos – Surprise and delight potential customers by differentiating your offering. Having original photos of real people is a good way to surprise your prospects.
2. Original and Low Budget Videos – Low budget videos with great content are now more compelling than over-produced videos thanks to YouTube.
3. A Unique Guarantee– Play with your guarantee to make it stand out from the competitors’ typical “30-Day Money Back Guarantee,” try a 50-day guarantee. In the end, customers may potentially leave you with pleasantly surprising results.
4. Offer Alternate Ways to Place the Order – It is important to address peoples’ concerns before they even arise. Provide assurance by providing the company’s complete contact information during the checkout process. Some potential customers are still uncomfortable providing credit card information online, it is important to offer a phone number and/or a faxable order form.
5. Include a Progress Indicator on Each Checkout Page – Let customers know where they are in the checkout process and how many steps are left. Allow customers to review what they did during their previous steps and return to their current step without having to fill out the page again.
6. Editing the Shopping Cart Should Be Easy – Customers will appreciate being able to change quantities and delete an item from the shopping cart with ease, in addition to being able to change values such as colors and sizes.
7. Allow Items to Stay in a Cart for at Least 30 Days – Consumers are always searching for deals and comparing products. McAfee conducted a study that revealed that the average time span between a visitor going to a site and actually checking out was 34 hours. It is important to plan for that type of behavior by allowing items to stay in a cart.
8. Suggest Items – If a consumer is viewing a product, have a suggested items box that shows similar items.
9. Provide a Box for Coupon Codes at a Later Point in the Checkout Process – If a prospect has invested time into the checkout process, they are less likely to stop right before checkout in order to look for coupon codes.
10. Offer a Variety of Payment Options – If a customer is not comfortable with the payment options provided they are most likely going leave the site. Assure them that your order process is legitimate by offering such payment options as BillMeLater and PayPal.
11. Add Third-Party Reinforcement Messages – Third parties such as VeriSign, PayPal, Better Business Bureau, and credit card approval logos increase the consumers’ comfort and can greatly boost conversions. A Hacker Safe rating certification has an increased order average of 15.7%!
12. When in Comes to In-Site Search, Make Sure There are No Dead Ends – Never allow your in-site search tool to lead your visitor to a dead end, offer alternatives or close results.
13. Always Conduct Research on Your In-Site Search Tool – Mine through existing search logs for every entry a visitor attempts. This will reveal what visitors are looking for, any misspellings, and what words they are using to describe products.
14. Inspect Your Conversion Paths – Go through every possible path that a visitor may take. (Your Google Analytics provides valuable resources Reverse Funnels).  By doing this you will uncover missing or broken links, if there are too many steps in the process, and which pages in the process have the highest abandonment rate.
15. Know Your USP – Your unique selling point (USP) is what sets you apart from the competition. Make sure that users know what yours is so they know why they should purchase items or services from you.

This fantastic map was created by Flowtown, inspired by XKCD.  It comically shows the relative sizes of social networks according to recent 2010 user data.  The sources for this data were USA Today, Alexa, Compete, and others.

In January of this year we shared some terrific graphs on our Facebook page reporting search trends from 2009 that offered some insights into the minds of average internet surfers.  We reported that Ask.com said that visitors to their site are 3 times more likely to type in search queries in the form of questions.  Question based searches have continued to grow each year. There was an average of 50 million visits per month and one of the top search queries was “What is Twitter?”  (We’re so glad to see that our moms and dads are jumping on the social media band wagon!)  This question ranked number 4 on Ask.com’s top overall questions of 2009.  Which we took to mean that social networking and social media platforms were continuing to grow in popularity, and importance.

In June we asked, Could Facebook Be Bigger Than Google in the new chicken-versus-egg conundrum… social-versus-search.  We reported that Facebook had been pushing hard against the biggest names in web search, including Google, for several months.  Hitwise’s reporte said that Facebook’s overall web traffic was ahead of Google’s for the first time in the U.S. for the week of March 15th, 2010. The market share increased 185% as compared to the same week in 2009 while Google’s traffic increased by only 9% during the same time frame.

Now, Facebook seems to be pretty confident in its own shoes and rather than going after the big players, it would seem that Facebook is taking aim at the smaller guys.  Facebook had confirmed in July that it would be launching a location-based feature in the very near future.  CNET reported that,

“It’s going to take the form of an application programming interface (API) for third-party companies on the Facebook developer platform, integrating existing “check-in” start-ups more deeply into the massive social-networking service and in turn permitting location-aware data to become a part of existing platform applications.”

What this means is that the geolocation feature won’t be an exact replica of any of the existing sites like Foursquare, Brightkite, or Gowalla but it is going to integrate a third party check-in type service to a larger platform that will become part of the site.  Some other fun facts according to Mashable are that:

• Facebook will be partnering with Localeze to create a directory of “places” that will resemble Twitter Places
• Facebook now owns Hot Potato, a check-in service focused around what people are doing
• Facebook offered around $120 million to acquire Foursquare, but walked away from negotiations when Foursquare asked for 25% more.

We’re sure that Facebook and Foursquare will call their imminent relationship mutually beneficial, and it very well may be.  But, we have to ask, do these geolocation sites really have a choice?  Our guess is that Facebook made them an offer they couldn’t refuse and rather than trying to beat Facebook, Foursquare and its competitors will choose to join it.

What do you think will happen?  We love hearing your opinions so leave us a comment and let’s hear it!

A website’s success used to be measured by the number of visitors. However, a marketing campaign cannot be successful if it generates countless visitors and none of them convert visitors to customers.

Conversion tracking is an analytics tool that measures the effectiveness of a source that directs visitors to a website and persuades them to take a desired action. Sources vary from a landing page phrase to a referrer. The desired action of the web site depends on what the creator wants. The action could be the visitor signs up for a newsletter, completes an order, or fills out a form for more information. With conversion tracking tools available we are able to measure that effectiveness of our web sites and campaigns, which is often expressed as a percentage known as a conversion rate.

Here are five useful conversion tracking tools that you should check out.

1. Crazy Egg – This tool will help you improve the design of your site by providing you with a heat map that shows where people are clicking and where they are not. It also provides information such as where people clicked based on the source from which they came. Here is an example of what the heat map looks like.

2. BTBuckets – This is a free segmentation and targeting web application tool that allows web sites to create user clusters based on their behavior. You can then assign different sets of actions for each segment. Below is a screenshot from one of their tutorial videos on youtube.

3. User Testing – Provides a usability testing tool that helps users to understand why viewers are leaving their website. Once a user has signed up, a representative visits and records their experience on the website and provides feedback. Below is a clip of a sample report that was done for Petco.

4. Cross Browser Testing – By using this tool, users are able to have their website tested across different operating systems. Users can also interactively test their ajax, javascript, and flash. A sample report is provided below.

5. Attention Wizard – This tool provides visual attention prediction for a website’s landing pages. Users are able to view their website how customers are viewing it.

Link building has become an extremely important task for online marketers, it is a big part of search engine optimization. The number of links that point to your website, and quality of the site from which they’re coming, all effect how search engines rank your website.  Link building is used to describe the task of building links to a website, meaning increasing the number of links that point to your site.  This does not include internal linking – when one page like “About Us” links back to your home page. The two main reasons as to why building links is so important are:

• Building links helps direct click-through traffic to your website.
• It improves your site’s rankings with search engines and its overall optimization.

Being thrust into the world of link building can be confusing and difficult for many beginners. But, it’s such an important part of your optimization that it’s worth the effort.

Here are 6 tips to get you started:

1. Create new original content for your site and make sure it’s visible and accessible.  Post articles in your blog and link back to them in your newsletter and promote the content through your social media.  The benefit to doing this is that the more your content is out there, the more likely it is that people will link to it, especially if you’re one of the first people to talk about the topic or provide the, hot information.
2. Quality is better than quantity. Be sure to write great content instead of a lot of decent content. Quality articles will gain more links and exposure on good websites. Referral traffic increases when articles are featured on reputable websites.
3. Guest blog on a complementary blog or website. Be sure that the website you guest blog for is relevant to your industry and seen as a credible source. This is a good way to gain quality inbound links and boost brand awareness. If you are able to establish a good partnership you have the potential to build further reciprocal linking.
4. Do not spam. The algorithms of search engines are updated to make sure search results are relevant and to remove spam in their index. Your rankings should remain intact as long as your content is relevant and you avoid spam tactics.
5. Be sure to syndicate your RSS feed and not your article content. Do not publish duplicate content on every website. Keep the original content on your website and ping services to publish your site’s feed such as Twitter, Technorati, and Facebook. By doing this you have the opportunity to gain visitors to your website and give them a chance to share your content via social media.
6. And finally, patience is a virtue.  Create a schedule to check your rankings and progress once a week. Although it is hard not to check them every day, it’s best to limit yourself. There are plenty of other valuable tasks you can accomplish by doing so.

The Canonical Tag—A Useful Tool for Split Testing:

Different from domain canonicalization is the “canonical” tag. Add this one to your SEO tool box as well. For other inside pages that you think may have duplicates, you’ll want to look into the “canonical” tag.  This tag is officially being accepted and understood by all three main engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live/Bing.  This is a tag that goes on the ‘duplicate’ head tag to direct to the ‘actual’ page. It only tells the robots, not website visitors, which URL to index.  Unlike the 301 redirect, the visitors do not get redirected anywhere.  This is a great tool for split testing because visitors don’t see a difference, web analytics software tracks the separate pages but search engines see it as one page.

Read more about this at:

MattCutts.com

SEOmoz.org

Tweet

It used to be that a website’s success was measured by the number of visitors. But a marketing campaign wouldn’t be successful if it generated a huge number of visitors without any conversions. A website’s main goal is: to convert visitors to customers.  How is yours holding up?  The best of the best achieve over a 30% conversion rate.

Conversion tracking is measuring the effectiveness of a source that directs visitors to a website and persuades them to take a desired action. Sources vary from a landing page phrase to a Cross Browser Testing referrer. The desired action of the web site depends on what the creator wants. The action could be a newsletter sign up, order completion, or white paper download. With conversion tracking tools available we are now more easily able to measure that effectiveness of our web sites and campaigns.

Here are 10 great tools you should try:

1. Crazy Egg – This tool will help you improve the design of your site by providing you with a heat map that shows where people are clicking and where they are not. It also provides information such as where people clicked based on the source from which they came. Here is an example of what the heat map looks like.

2. BTBuckets – This is a free segmentation and targeting web application tool that allows web sites to create user clusters based on their behavior. You can then assign different sets of actions for each segment. Below is a screenshot from one of their tutorial videos on youtube.

3. User Testing – Provides a usability testing tool that helps users to understand why viewers are leaving their website. Once a user has signed up, a representative visits and records their experience on the website and provides feedback.

4. Cross Browser Testing – By using this tool, users are able to have their website tested across different operating systems. Users can also interactively test their ajax, javascript, and flash. A sample report is provided below.

5. Attention Wizard – This tool provides visual attention prediction for a website’s landing pages. Users are able to view their website how customers are viewing it.

6. ClickTale.com – This is a very useful tool that allows users to gain a better understand of how their customers are seeing, using, and clicking through the website.  It provides heatmaps, form analytics, attention maps, scroll reach maps, attention maps, and more to help you improve and make your site as user friendly as possible.

7. Split Testing – This free tool is used to better understand how visitors behave when they visit and user’s site. By using Split Testing, users are able to find out what is going wrong and how to fix it. This tool can be used to test anything about a webpage. Below is a screen shot of how split tests are managed.

8. Google Website Optimizer –Google offer a free optimization and testing tool on their website. This allows users to increase their existing websites value and traffic. Use this tool to increase revenue and ROI. Below is a screenshot of Google’s free tool.

9. AWeber – AWeber Communications has a tool starting at $19 a month that provides users with email marketing tools such as email newsletters, autoresponders, and RSS to email. User can also track downloads with email analytics. Below is a screenshot of an example. AWeber offers plenty of other features that are well worth the cost.

10. Free A B Split – This is a simple and free tool to use that will help users enhance the performance of their webpage. Below is what an A B split looks like.

The B Line Marketing team had the opportunity to attend the B2B Search Strategy Summit in San Francisco in June 2010. Ideas and new tools were shared during the conference on a range of topics from improving your social media and increasing branding to generating leads and boosting ROI.

This year’s speakers shared some great tips, here are B Line’s top 5:

1. When asking a potential lead to fill out a form, ask for the least amount of information needed. Do not ask for unnecessary information.
2. Lead nurturing. If a lead calls for more information about your product or service, be sure to give them information they wouldn’t be able to find on Google. Provide in-depth information that is persuasive enough to take them from a lead to a customer.
3. Advertise inside of mobile apps. Remember that ads that have a click-to-call feature are the most successful. However, do not base your entire marketing strategy around mobile since it is still a small and growing market. It is best to use ads in mobile apps as an “awareness” building tool.
4. Seek out online opinion leaders. You know that you have hit the “sweet spot” when you have captured attention. Opinion leaders are an important driving factor.  Who do you turn to when a new Apple product is released?  Unless you’re an early adopter, you won’t be in line on release day, you’ll be waiting to hear reviews about the product.  The link between social and search is influential people.  Reach out to the opinion leaders in your market, ask them to be a guest blogger for your website or offer to write an article for theirs.  Anything you can do to promote cross linking will be well worth the time.
5. Create a search term from scratch. Greg Jarboe, president of SEO-PR, presented the audience with a captivating story of how effective this can be when combined with social media tools such as Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook. Search terms are highly competitive and it can be hard to obtain a high ranking even for long-tailed niche terms. By creating your own search term, you have no competition.

So what do you think?  Give these tips a try and let us know how they work for you!  Have suggestions of your own?  Let’s hear it!