1. Use Analytics and Metrics
2. ROI for Targeted Advertising
3. Loyalty Programs
4. Segmentation
5. Invest in Mobile Tactics
6. Build Relationships with Customers
7. Localization
8. Socialize Your Site
9. Manage Your Reputation
10. Gamification

More detalis in this infographic.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

Read more here Gamestop to J.C. Penney Shut Facebook Stores

Here are this steps, according to Avinash:

Step #1: Visit the website. Note objectives, customer experience, suckiness.

Step #2: How good is the acquisition strategy? Traffic Sources Report.

Step #3: How strongly do Visitors orbit the website? Visitor Loyalty & Recency.

Step #4: What can I find that is broken and quickly fixable? Top Landing Pages.

Step #5: What content makes us most money? $Index Value Metric.

Step #6: How Sophisticated Is Their Search Strategy? Keyword Tag Clouds.

Step #7: Are they making money or making noise? Goals & Goal Values.

Step #8: Can the Marketing Budget be optimized? Campaign Conversions/Outcomes.

Step #9: Are we helping the already convinced buyers? Funnel Visualization.

Step #10: What are the unknown unknowns I am blind to? Analytics Intelligence.

Here is the original post, with the detailed steps and many tips.  A must read for everyone!

In fact, there is a missing metric hidden behind this problem. In Analytics you may have more than one goal, let’s say you are monitoring leads, or newsletter subscriptions, beside the e-commerce transactions. So, it would be nice to import them in Google AdWords. The problem in Campaign Reports, the main report used by majority of users, is that you cannot chose what very conversion you want to see there, or maybe split that number into particular conversions you are monitoring.

So, next time you are importing conversions from Google Analytics in Adwords try to be careful and don’t do it without think a little!

Enhancing content

• Scribe SEO – instructs web writers how to tweak their content to get more search engine traffic, all while maintaining quality reader-focused copy
• iflickr – allows to easily download Flickr photos that are licensed under Creative Commons to the local server for attaching to posts
• Photo Dropper – lets you add Creative Commons licensed Photos to Your Posts from Flickr
• WordPress Video Plugin – allows easy video embedding from many sites: Google Video, Yahoo! Video, LiveLeak, Metacafe, dailymotion, Vimeo, Collegehumor, etc
• Insights – mashup of content and images, allows to quickly access and insert information (links, images, videos, maps..) into posts
• Zemanta – recommends content while you write your post

Forms

• cforms – creates contact forms

Meta, Robots, Sitemap

• Page Meta – overrides the page meta title and add in meta descriptions and keywords for pages
• Robots Meta – prevents indexing of your search result pages, login, register and admin pages, etc by adding noindex robots meta tags
• Google XML Sitemaps – generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog

Tracking

• Header-Footer – lets you to add html code (eg. Analytics code) to the header and to the footer
• Google Analytics plugin – the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress: asynchronous tracking, custom variables, Google Analytics API integration, e-commerce integration, event tracking
• Wassup – real time statistics

Performance

• W3 Total Cache – dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site

Spam

• Bad Behavior – complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place

Scraping

• RSS Footer – makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back to your blog

SEO

• HeadSpace2 SEO – all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site
• All in One SEO Pack – automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines
• SEO Smart Links – automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog
• Paginated Comments – breaks down comments into a number of search engine optimized pages

Social media

• AddThis – allows any visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with many popular services
• Wordbook – allows you to cross-post your posts to your Facebook Wall
• Twitme – automatically post your new posts on Twitter

Multiple domains & sites

• ManageWP – manage multiple blogs from one dashboard
• WordPress MU Domain Mapping – allows users of a WordPress MU site or WordPress 3.0 network to map their blog/site to another domain

In order to check if you are among the ones affected, change the URL /admin/login.php to admin/orders.php/login.php. If you can see your order histories, here is the security fix:

• Edit the admin/includes/application_top.php file

• Find the line:

$PHP_SELF = (isset($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']) ? $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] :
$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);

• Depending on your CRE Loaded version, the line above may also look like:

$PHP_SELF = (isset($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['PHP_SELF']) ? $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['PHP_SELF'] : $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['SCRIPT_NAME']);

• Replace it with this:

$PHP_SELF = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];

Done.

PS: CREHelp.com will charge you $40 for this

Social networking is central to women’s Internet experience. Regardless of how much you believe that women are primarily communicators, networkers and facilitators, it’s clear they are embracing social networking in a way that men are not. Furthermore, the rise of social networking has prompted women of all ages to engage in a host of associated online activities, such as photo-sharing, gaming, video viewing and instant messaging. All of these activities have benefited from their linkage with Social Networking sites in terms of their ability to attract new female users.

In the U.S., currently the largest e-commerce market in the world, women are the key drivers of online buying. More women than men transact on the Internet and, collectively, they spend more. And it’s not surprising that women over-index most heavily in the following categories: Fragrances/Cosmetics, E-cards, Flowers, Gifts and Greetings, Pets.

Women are just as likely to manage their money online, and moms and grandmothers have emerged as online gamers along with high school- and college-aged boys. And, engaging in online vices is no longer the exclusive territory of men.

Get the full report here (requires registration).

But, thanks to the guys from GetNetted, there is a magic trick to remove that encrypted links. And you don’t have to be a senior programmer in order to complete this task in less than 3 minutes. So, you can find the tutorial with screenshots and easy to understand instructions here. Or, if you to have the functions.php file encrypted, there is an update here that solves this problem too. And it works!

Here’s the list of the Top 10 converting websites, showing their rank, company name, industry sector and average six-month conversion rate.

1. Schwan’s, Food, 41.7 percent
2. ProFlowers, Flowers and gifts, 26.5 percent
3. Vitacost.com, Health and nutrition, 24.0 percent
4. Woman Within, Catalog /clothing, 22.4 percent
5. Blair, Catalog /clothing, 20.5 percent
6. Lands’ End, Catalog /clothing, 19.5 percent
7. Doctors Foster and Smith, Pet supplies, 18.6 percent
8. Office Depot, Office, 18.4 percent
9. Roaman’s, Catalog /clothing, 18.4 percent
10. QVC, Jewelry +, 18.3 percent

Some key summary statistics:

• 9 have a catalog;
• 9 do not offer free shipping (!!!)
• 8 offer a simple sign up on their home page;
• 4 out of the top 5 force a full registration before a first purchase;
• 9 out of 10 offer a 1-800 number on their home page;
• 10 out of 10 use remarketing (!!!)

It’s a different mindset: To these companies, it’s not about search engine optimization, or page views, and making a sale, but about the second, third, fourth sales to the same customer, driving profitability for their companies. And in the process, they get the highest conversion rates in the industry as their customers come back to buy again, and again, and again.

Read the entire analysis here: first part and second part.

Nearly 30% of back-to-school shoppers said they plan to do at least half of their purchasing online. Product categories that will benefit the most from that trend include electronics, dorm room accessories and kitchen supplies, suggesting that items for the college crowd like computers and furniture will be more likely to be bought online. When it comes to back-to-school shopping overall, however, the picture looks quite different.

Not surprisingly, school supplies lead the way, with 84% of shoppers planning to go online for things like books, notebooks, pens, paper and the like. The next-most-popular categories were clothing, at 70%, followed by shoes, at 58%. After that, there’s a big drop-off to electronics, at only 20%, with bed and bath, dorm room accessories and kitchen supplies all coming in at less than 15%.