The @KISSmetrics Blog

41 Resources for Getting Started with Facebook Connect

Admin — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:49:01 +0000

By now, you’ve probably heard of Facebook Connect… The main advantage of leveraging Facebook Connect is that it is a good way to increase your traffic and engagement.

Whether you have already leveraged it or not, here are 41 resources that will help you on your way.

For Beginners

If you aren’t familiar with Facebook Connect, don’t worry because the resources bell should get you on track to becoming an expert. Just be careful though because reading isn’t enough, you have to actually dabble with it if you truly want to understand Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect - Facebook’s page that explains the basics and advantages of Connect.
Facebook Connect: how to and why - Robert Scoble breaks down the how and why.
Why your website should be using Facebook Connect to attract visitors - a look at the traffic side of Connect.
Facebook Connect 5 Things You Wish You Had Known Before You Started - go through this presentation before you start.
10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect - unqiue examples of companies using it.
10 More Great Implementations of Facebook Connect - more unqiue examples…
What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites - although this is an older article, it’s still a good read.
Why Facebook Connect Matters & Why It Will Win - here’s another old article that’s worth reading.
Facebook Connect tutorial - a good tutorial for beginners.
Facebook Connect Wizard - 3 easy steps to integration.

Tools for the Average Joe

If you aren’t a developer, don’t worry. You can still install Facebook Connect on your website. Through the following plugins and tutorials, it should be easy as pie. All you need is FTP access to your server.

WordPress Plugin - if you want to use it one your blog, this plugin should make life a lot easier.
Faux Facebook Connect Plugin Allows Facebook Users to Comment on WPMU Blogs - a must read for WordPress MU users.
Facebook Connects with Movable Type - you don’t have to have a WordPress blog to use it.
Facebook Connect Plugin for Drupal Launches - and if you don’t have a Movable Type blog, there is hope for you too.
Facebook Connect Plugin Directory - a one stop shop for your plugin needs.
HOW TO: Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes - if you have a blog and 8 minutes to spare, you should check this out.
How to add Facebook Connect to your website using the PHP API - step by step instruction for PHP users.
16 Best Facebook Connect Plugins for Your Blog, Forum, Wiki, or CMS - there are way too many plugins for you to test out.
Facebook Connect Magento Module - if you are running Magento, you probably want to buy this module.

iPhone

If you’re into creating iPhone apps, here are some resources that are worth your time. Not only will they teach you how to implement Connect with your iPhone app, but they should also help spur some creativity that will help you create a better app.

Facebook Connect Wiki for iPhone - this is a good place to start if you have iPhone apps.
iPhone Implementation - here is a quick video of how you can implement it on the iPhone.
5 Great Examples of Facebook Connect on the iPhone - examples of iPhone apps leveraging Facebook Connect.
10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect - 10 more iPhone apps that are worth checking out.
Marketing In Code, Part 1: Using Facebook Connect For iPhone To Increase App Visibility/Discoverability - a quick guide to increasing your discoverability.
Facebook Connect Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPhone - good news for iPhone developers, Facebook has released a SDK for iPhone that allows you to hook up your native iPhone applications with Facebook Connect and take advantage of the vast facebook userbase.
Facebook Connect for iPhone: Great, or Yet Another Privacy Threat? - with new technology comes more privacy issues.
Facebook Connect expands beyond iPhone to mobile web - there’s more to the mobile web than just the iPhone.

General News

News, news, and news! You can never get enough of it because the more up-to-date you are, the better you’ll be able to leverage Facebook Connect. Whether it’s old or new, here is some news that you should be familiar with.

Facebook Connect Growth and How it Pertains to New Privacy Policy - Brian Solis analyzes their new privacy policy.
60 Million Users a Month - during La Web, Facebook released some data on how many users were using Connect.
Connect Sites - here is a list of sites using connect and they are sorted by popularity.
Facebook Connect + Facebook Ads = A Social Ad Network - what Facebook maybe doing in the near future.
Facebook Connect: One Year Later - over 80,000 websites and applications are using it.
Is Facebook Connect good for business? - if you own a business, you should watch this video.
Facebook Connect Live Sites - a thorough list of companies using Connect.
Facebook Connect: More Important Than SEO? - SEO isn’t the only form of traffic acquisition out there.

Resources For Developers and Designers

Whether you are running into problems or you’re looking for some jazzy buttons for your website, the following resources should help you. Just make sure you take the time and fully utilize the resources below because there are a ton of hidden jems instead them.

Connect Forum - if you can’t find answers to your Connect questions, go there.
Facebook Connect Login Buttons - button options for your website.
How to Setup Facebook Connect for Your Custom Domain - a quick tutorial with pictures.
Facebook Connect: A Feature Walkthrough - in you want to learn the ins and outs, here is a feature guide.
Facebook Connect Logout - here is how you can add a logout button.
Dealing with multiple login systems (Facebook Connect, Google Account, and others) - an easy solution for multiple logins.

Communicating color efficiently - red & green

imain — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:58:03 +0000

Red and green; society & nature have wired these two colors so deeply into our subconsciousness that no other two colors share such a connection of opposing meanings as these two.

One of the most obvious examples of this connection is a color code used worldwide in standard traffic lights. We all know what these colors mean and we know how to react to them. However, the connection and meaning is not always as clearly defined as a set of traffic lights.

In this post we will explore the evolution of red and green in today’s web and best practices of their use.

Outlined in this table are some possibilities that evoke meaning just by using the color in the correct situation.

Green	Red
Accept	Reject
Agree	Disagree
Complete	Incomplete
Yes	No
On	Off
Up	Down
Add	Remove
Good	Bad
High	Low
Succeed	Fail
Opened	Closed
Online	Offline
Save	Cancel
Available	Unavailable
Credit	Debt
Positive	Negative
Like	Dislike

Notice how each definition assigned to green has a clear opposite assigned to red.

We see green as a positive, progressive color, so words like go, yes, good, accept, up, all can be related to the color green. Likewise for red. Stop, no, bad, reject, down, can all be related to red and convey a negative or hazardous type meaning.

A partnership of components

Color alone won’t always help get your meaning across. This is the same with any color but due to red and green having so many similar definitions attached, it’s important to use other components alongside the color to create a distinction and further emphasize the correct meaning.

Symbols are a perfect partner. They are versatile, simple and should be clear and understandable. While color in most circumstances contains more prominence than a typical symbol, using them together simply offers another level of comprehension. This is evident with users who have a disability in viewing colors correctly. Red and green color blindness is the most common form of color blindness at 99% of all color vision deficiencies and roughly 10 million men in America suffer from some degree of identifying red from green or perceiving it differently then the majority of others. This isn’t as widespread in women but it shows you how important it is to efficiently get your meaning across while catering to the maximum amount of user groups.

Let’s look at the two opposing definitions, Add and Remove. This opposite has got to be one of the most widely accepted building-block interactions on the web today. It’s a staple of any good web application, allowing a user to make decisions and choices that influence their tasks as a whole.

Add Examples

Sifter

Wufoo

Remove Examples

Vimeo

Apple iPhone World Clock application

You will quickly notice in these examples, add can mean a lot of different definitions. Start, create, post, and new are all shown above, and that’s just a few. As long as these definitions contain a typical partnership of color and symbol, the naming of the definition can be anything on the green side as long as it still makes sense to the user.
This of course is the same for red and remove. End, delete, disconnect, cancel, they can all be perceived using the same partnerships.

The evolution of red and green

Color techniques are starting to get quite smart now users are getting better at assimilating the meanings behind them.

Text Links

By coloring text links accordingly at the early stages, designers and developers could offer more meaning to what would just be a standard link. This helped visually show importance over surrounding links and elements.

Flickr

Twitter

Basecamp

To-Do Lists 2

Alerts

Another fundamental asset to show visual importance is the use of responding to a user’s action. By providing a colored response the user can quickly get feedback on their action and determine how to proceed. These are commonly block elements at the top of the page with a sentence explaining the outcome of the action. However more recently with the Ajax movement we are starting to see these alerts move inline and around the corresponding element to provide a faster response.

Facebook Alert

Popscreen Alert

Skype Alert

Form elements

With the rise of mobile browsing, catering for as many situations is difficult, especially with user input. Accommodating small screens and inadequate control and precision has meant the usual HTML form elements aren’t always feasible.
Another aspect lacking a typical form element is the use of color, especially red and green. As form elements are based on user choice, various definitions with an opposite could result in a colored answer. By integrating an immediate colored response directly into a form element, a user would receive instant feedback and provide the form options a greater meaning.

Facebook chat slider

KISSmetrics checkbox element

Mixed Messages

Although these two colors are so distinct and their meanings well established, we do see cases that don’t always follow the basic principles. Some confusion can be had when an opposing word is used in a non-specific definition. A good example of this is the popular set of actions; download and upload. You will instantly notice the green and red word opposites, you may even have visualized how these elements would have looked in their respected colors. It is also general practice to use arrow symbols to further communicate the meaning, and of course these symbols can be attached to red or green. The problem here is, neither of these actions have an assertion over the other. Although they do different things, they possess equal meaning and that meaning isn’t assigned to a color. If red or green had to be assigned to these definitions, green would be the choice as it conveys to the user an action is required, a movement forward, just like our green signals on traffic lights.

Firefox

Skype

In some environments we can disregard any meaning attached to these colors where we understand the outcome. This may not always be the case for all users, especially new users to that environment but we learn and adapt even when our brain is telling us something else.

Mac OS X dock badges

Best practices

While the most important aspect is getting the meaning across efficiently there are some basic principles that will further help your color use. A valuable practice which helps maintain a quality site-wide style guide is to keep your red and green colors in sync with each other. By only adjusting the hue and maintaining the saturation and brightness your red and green tones will be in harmony with not just each other but your entire style guide.

Another important area to note is there is an additional color in the red/green relationship and that’s a neutral, middle-ground color called grey. In some cases, although a meaning may have a clear opposite, we may not want them to be equal in appearance when displaying both. Where one meaning outweighs the other, grey can replace the secondary color resulting in added significance to the primary color. Dressing down the appearance of the secondary color and reducing the overall appearance is also a useful strategy when placing emphasis on the primary action. This is typically a simple text link where the primary action is a colored button.

Conclusion

Although meanings and color are typically hardwired and set, there is plenty of growth in innovation and improvements with communicating the message efficiently. Especially now we have gone into a compact era with handhelds. We have less room when designing and page elements are tighter so it’s even more important communicating a precise message amongst a sea of others. Forms are changing to reflect instant feedback thanks to Ajax and overall, users aren’t prepared to wait due to web application beta signup trends.

It’s a great time to experiment in the current industry, particularly when it’s based on offering a richer, more efficient experience to the end user.

References

5 Things You Can Learn From Public Stats

Admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:45:23 +0000

Although public stats are known to be a bit inaccurate, it doesn’t mean you should ignore them. Sites like Alexa can still provide you with a lot of valuable information as long as you look at the whole picture. Here are a few things you can learn about your site and your competition through public data:

Traffic Dips
Was there ever a time when your traffic dipped drastically? Sometimes these things are flukes and sometimes they aren’t. A good way find out if it wasn’t a fluke is to check sites like Quantcast.com to see if these traffic dips also hit your competitors.

Industry Performance
If you want to see how you stack up against your competition you can use services like Compete.com that can visually show you a long-term traffic comparison.

Not only does Compete.com show you how many more visitors you need to catch up to your competition, but they also show you, which competitors are declining in growth and where they are getting their traffic from.

Getting Down and Dirty
Some sites, like Gizmodo.com, don’t mind sharing their stats through services like Sitemeter.

If any of your competitors are publicly revealing their Sitemeter stats, I highly recommend that you take the time to analyze their stats. Some of the things that you should analyze are:

Visitors by location – this will show you what regions your competition is getting traffic from and if you should be trying to do the same.
Entry pages – the homepage isn’t always the most popular page. Analyzing your competitor’s entry pages will help you understand what is causing them to receive most of their traffic.
Hourly traffic – if you can spot trends on the times people visit your competitor’s site, this will help you tune your marketing campaigns. For example if you notice the mornings are better than the afternoons, you can run campaigns during the morning and pause them during the afternoon.

Twitter Search
A good way to compare who is getting the most buzz in your industry is to use Twitter’s search feature. Through this feature you can type in your company’s name as well as your competitors and see what people are saying.

On top of this you can go through specific tweets and see if someone is saying anything good or even bad about your competition. This is a great way to build relationships with potential customers.

Trends
Who doesn’t want more traffic? Through Google Trends you can see what’s hot and what’s not. And if you happen to write on something that is hot, your chances of getting more traffic will increase.

In addition to that you can also compare your website’s popularity versus your competitors. You can do this by analyzing what news is causing your competition to grow and what cities your competition is dominating you in.

Conclusion
Although public stats are usually inaccurate if you look at them on a site-by-site basis, they can be very accurate when you use them to analyze a whole industry. So instead of ignoring them, start leveraging them!

How to Analyze Referring Traffic

npatel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:00:57 +0000

Search engine traffic is something you rave about because it usually converts well, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the traffic you get from referring sites. Here are a few things you can analyze to improve your referral traffic.

Pageviews per visitor

Some referring sites will drive more page views per visitor. If your revenue is ad driven, it is really important to increase your page views per visitor. In this case here are a few things you can do:

Look for the referring sites that drive you the most pageviews per visitor.
Analyze why those specific sites drive you more page views per visitor. In most cases those sites drive you more page views per visitor because they tend to be more related to your website.
After you understand why those specific sites drive you more pageviews, consider creating a business relationship with them. There is always more you can do with them.
Lastly, you want to find new sites that haven’t linked to you yet that are relevant to your business. These sites should help increase your average pageviews per visitor.

Bounce rate

If certain referring sites have a high bounce rate, your conversions from these traffic sources are probably going to be really low. One thing you can do is use services like Google Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg to get a better understanding of how visitors from specific traffic sources engage with your website.

One thing you can also try out is to show customized messages to certain referring traffic sources, similar to the screenshot below.

Time on site

Sometimes people just don’t want to spend too much time on your website. Trying to solve this is a very difficult thing to do. If most of your referring traffic sources have a very low time on site, there is probably a lot of room for improvement.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to survey your audience. This way you can find out what they like about your website and what they dislike. Hopefully you will be able to fix the things they dislike and understand their needs better which should help increase the time each visitor spends on your website.

Engagement

In most cases, the best referring traffic sources are the ones who that bring visitors who have a high level of engagement with you site. For each site engagement is going to be different, but for a blog a common engagement metric is the number of comments.

If you look at the screenshot above it shows what referring sites cause visitors to comment on my blog posts. One traffic source that I would have never expected to cause a decent amount of engagement is Twitter. So after finding out how valuable Twitter is, I decided to put Twitter badges on my blog. This has helped increase traffic from Twitter, thus causing more comments on my blog.

You can’t just measure referring sites based on the traffic they drive; you have to look at which sites are causing engagement. So stop measuring vanity metrics and start the measuring actionable metrics.

Percentage of new visitors

Don’t just analyze which traffic sources are sending you traffic, but look at which traffic sources are driving you new visitors. Some sources are going to drive you a lot of traffic, but very few new visitors.

If you want to grow your website you have to get new visitors coming to your website. So instead of just trying to convince related or somewhat competing sites to link to you, go after new sites whose visitors may have never heard of your site.

Low hanging fruit

Instead of sorting referring traffic from high to low, I prefer sorting from low to high. This allows you to see what sites are linking to you, but aren’t driving much traffic.

For example, Huffington Post linked to my website and drove very little traffic. So instead of assuming that the Huffington Post is a useless referring site, I’ll try to get my website on there again because according to Alexa, it is a very popular site. Plus if a website already linked to you once, you have a very high chance of getting a link again.

Geo based traffic

If your business specializes in regional sales, you need to start going after regional traffic. What you will notice is that certain referring sites drive more traffic from specific regions.

Building relationships with sites that concentrate on a specific region is the best way to get more specific geographic based traffic. The easiest way to do this is to get involved in local business events within that region.

Conclusion

Traffic isn’t always about quantity. If you want to grow your website go after quality referring traffic and don’t just worry about your raw visitor count going up.

5 Things You Ought To Learn From Social Networks

npatel — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:37:57 +0000

Most the websites on the web aren’t social networks, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them. Whether you have an ecommerce website or a lead generation website, you can learn a thing or two from social networks. Here are some things I have learned from social sites:

Engagement
Many social networks track how their users interact with each other. Your site probably doesn’t have social features that allow users to message each other, but you still have some sort of user engagement. For example, your website visitors are engaging with you. Track where you users are navigating through your website and see what catches their eyes before they submit contact requests, leave feedback, or leave comments. This will help you understand what areas of your site cause users to engage and what areas don’t.

Viral growth
Social networks grow by users recommending the website to their friends. In most cases the recommendation is done through email or word of mouth. Now you probably can’t track word of mouth growth, but you can track email growth. If you notice that a good portion of your visitors are coming from emails, consider adding recommendation links on your website in which users can recommend your website or service to their friends easily. And ideally if it makes sense for your business, consider using a contact importer.

Addiction
There are certain aspects of social sites that cause tons of pageviews and cause users to come back on a regular basis. Most of these features are social features and they probably won’t work with your website, but what you can do is look for trends on what pages causes user to stick the longest and keep them viewing more pages. For example if you notice that case study pages are popular, then you may want to add more case study pages or other detailed content such as white papers.

Interaction
People tend to come back to social networks because they usually contact users voa email to come back. For example every time something new happens on Facebook, I get an email notification saying something new happened. What you should consider doing is collect emails from your website visitors. You can do this by just adding an email notification box on your website, which will ask people for their emails (you will be amazed at how many users will enter in their email). Anytime you have updates or news to release, you can always send out an email blast to your list.

Everything doesn’t have to be tangible
Virtual gifts have made social networks and applications millions of dollars. It is an easy way for them to monetize their properties and the cost of doing so is relatively low. Consider creating virtual ways to monetize your website and test out what is working for your website and what isn’t. Just because something works for your competitors doesn’t mean it is going to work for you and what doesn’t work for your competitors may work for you. Try not to just go with the standard ways of monetization, think outside the box.

Conclusion
There are a lot of things you can learn from social networks, you just have to get creative and start thinking how the features within social networks can be applied to your online business. More importantly when you are trying out these new features on your website, you need to start tracking the results. Some things will end up working out well for you and other things may not, but if you never try new things and don’t track all of the features on your web application or website, you’ll never know how to improve it.

Have an ecommerce website? Here are 5 things you should be tracking!

npatel — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:26:37 +0000

Pageviews, bounce rates, time on website, and geographic location are great stats to track, in fact you probably already are tracking them. Most analytics solutions track these things and as well as a dozen more stats right out of the box. But if you want actionable data that will help you improve your ecommerce sales, here are 5 things that you have to track:

Learning Search

Unless you are only selling a handful of products, you have a search box on your ecommerce website. Users tend to use the search feature on a lot of websites because it helps them find what they are looking for, a lot faster. Right? In most cases yes, but if you aren’t tracking your search results, you will not know. Here are some things to track:

What queries people are searching for?
Are users clicking on the results or are they not finding what they are looking for?
Which results are the users clicking on? If they tend to not click on the first few results, then your results need to be reorganized.

Luckily you don’t have to build a solution to do this for you. There are already software programs like SLI Systems that do all of this so you don’t have to manually adjust your search results.

Funnels

Most middle tier or advanced analytics solutions, such as Omniture and Google Analytics, already have funnel tracking. Although they have them, the chances are you aren’t using them.

Here are some funnels you should be setting up:

Check out process – track all of the steps users are taking from your website, from adding a product to their cart, to checking out.
Registration process – if you tend to have repeat shoppers you probably have a registration process. Make sure you have a funnel in place on your registration process so you can maximize your new user registrations.

Form Fields

From registration pages to check out pages, the most important pages on your ecommerce website have form fields. You don’t want to track what users are inputting in them, such as credit card data, because that maybe breeching some privacy laws. But what you do want to do is track the drop out rates on your form fields. This will help you figure out how to layout your form fields on the page as well as figure out which fields you really need and which ones you don’t.

Similar to setting a funnel, tracking form fields is all about getting drop out rate information. Software services like Crazy Egg, Click Density, and Click Tale can help you track your form fields.

Repeat Customers

Most analytical solutions tell you how many repeat visitors you have, but they don’t tell you how many repeat customers you have. Make sure you know who is shopping on your website on a regular basis. This way you can analyze how those visitors first came to your website and what you can do to try and get more of those type of visitors.

One other thing that you can do, which has been very effective, is to survey those users. Find out what they like or dislike with your site and improve it based on their feedback. Once they are done with their survey make sure you give them some sort of coupon, such as 5% off their next purchase.

And for the customers that tend to never shop again, consider surveying them as well. Find out why they aren’t coming back to your website and what you can do to change that. Once they are done with the survey offer them a coupon to your website, which should also helps increase your repeat customers.

Groupings

If you have thousands of products on your website, it can get difficult to track which ones are doing well and which ones aren’t. One thing that you should do is group your products together on the backend of your website, so you can get and understanding of what type of products are selling and which ones aren’t.

For example, Zappos sells shoes. So if they want to figure out how to improve their sales they can group their products together based on similarities. If they wanted to compare their sales numbers, they could compare all of their Nike men’s running shoes to Nike men’s basketball shoes. If they see that their basketball shoes are under performing they can try and promote them harder by doing some sort of basketball shoe sale.

To get on a granular level, you can even group men’s shoes by sizes to figure out how different sizes stack up against each other. This will give you an idea of what people order the most and what under performing sizes you may want to run sales for. This way when you have sales, you wouldn’t offer your most popular sizes in them because they tend to sell by themselves.

Conclusion

When you are tracking different actions on your website, concentrate on the ones that can give you actionable data. Tracking time on website doesn’t do much for you because that number Omniture and Google Analytics won’t give you insight on how you can improve it.

For each ecommerce site, there are going to be different things that could be tracked. These are just 5 things that I feel all ecommerce sites should track. What do you think?

Don’t Get Stuck: 5 Ways to Simplify Analytics and Avoid Analysis Paralysis

Admin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:14:23 +0000

Using web analytics sometimes feels like trying to sip from a firehose. There’s so much potentially useful information that it’s tough to decide what you will actually do with it all. At that point, confusion sets in and you are really no better off than if you had no information at all. Presumably this is not what you bargained for when you got into analytics, and these 5 tips will simplify the process for you.

Roll it out little by little
Today’s sophisticated analytics packages allow you to track dozens and sometimes even hundreds of different metrics. While this can be very helpful, it is only frustrating and overwhelming if you are new to analytics. Early on, ignore these advanced tracking options in favor of just a few–say, page views, conversions, and visitor value. These are the numbers that truly matter, and getting a feel for regularly testing them will prepare you to track more metrics in the future.
Focus on dollars, not percentages
It is very easy to get caught up in tracking things that are only indirectly related to your bottom line. Click-through rate (CTR) is a prime example of this. While it is obviously desirable to have a high CTR, it only matters if those hoards of people who click actually buy something, sign up, or otherwise act in the way you are hoping they will. Put another way, a 20% CTR doesn’t matter if your conversions are persistently stagnant. When making analytics-related decisions, place more of your attention on dollars (conversions, Visitor Value) and less on percentages (page view, CTR.).
Rank each metric in terms of importance to your specific goals
It is a mistake to think that masters of web analytics have somehow figured out how to track every single metric with equal effort and stay on top of it all. In fact, the opposite is true. The true analytics pros know which metrics matter to their unique website(s) and relentlessly exclude the others from consideration. For example, if you are running a lead generation website, your important metrics are probably page views and opt-in rate. While others may yield helpful insights, you can safely ignore most of them and bias your time and energy into those relatively few that matter most.

Remember: a jack of all trades is a master of none.
Use an analytics package with visualization
Let’s face it–not everyone is of a mind to crawl over a dense spreadsheet of numbers and draw useful conclusions from them. Luckily, there are packages that visually illustrate your analytics data by laying them over your web pages. Your options include CrazyEgg, ClickTale and UserFly. If you are not a numbers person, these and similar packages will make analytics much simpler!
Look for benchmarks specific to your industry or niche
There is no such thing as a “good” conversion rate, Visitor Value, or any other metric that applies to all markets. Rather, this depends on the industry or niche you are in. For example, Clickz.com and the Fireclicks Index maintain regularly updated charts of optimal CTRs according to industry. Whenever possible, consult these benchmarks and make the goal of your analytics tracking to meet and surpass them.

5 Sources of Inaccuracy in AdWords Testing & Tracking (And how to eliminate them)

Admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:53:34 +0000

“Test, test test!”

It’s the unglamorous advice that no one wants to hear–except the few people who actually do it and seize the fistfuls of cash that lazier advertisers are leaving on the table. Let there be no doubt–sustained, serious testing is what separates the men from the boys in Google AdWords. It is what allows you to move beyond the theories and promises of e-books and instructional PDFs and see the reality of your actual, unique PPC campaigns. It is what guides you in making profitable tweaks and changes. But be careful! If you make any of these 5 mistakes, your test results could be inaccurate and lead you on a wild goose chase away from profitability!

Statistically insignificant split tests
Every AdWords marketer should be familiar with the concept of statistical significance. That is, if you are running 2 ads against each other in order to determine the higher-performing ad, you cannot make your decision after a day or two. Rather, you need to give each ad enough time to run so that when the results emerge, you can confidently say the ad with better stats is truly the better one. Without allowing this time to pass, how can you be sure the apparent “winning” ad is not just a fluke that benefitted from a random spike in clicks? If this sounds puzzling or time-consuming, don’t worry, it’s not.

The free calculator at Vertster.com can determine in seconds whether you have enough campaign history to prove ad A really is outperforming ad B. Use this before making any split testing decisions on your Google ads!
Not tracking profit per impression
RocketClicks co-founder Glenn Livingston was quite possibly the first marketer to realize that profit per impression is the most important AdWords-related metric–not click-thru rate (CTR) or conversion rate, but which ad put the most money in your pocket each time it was displayed. As he notes in his PDF report on the subject [emphasis added]:

“Google has everybody focused on CTR and conversion. But CTR + conversion individually don’t give you the right information to make your critical split testing decision. You might be surprised to note that Google isn’t really pricing their traffic according to CTR, even though that’s how you pay for it. All they have to sell you is space (impressions), so they’re doing the math behind the scenes to figure out how much money they make per impression.”

It should go without saying that this is the number that counts. Fortunately, there’s a free web-based calculator that will let you determine profit per impression without putting together any spreadsheets or formulas. Use it!
Prioritizing CTR above conversion rate
An even deadlier testing sin than not tracking profit per impression is prioritizing CTR above conversion rate in your tests. This is a serious error, because as a PPC marketer you really need to be tracking dollars, not percentages. A high CTR in and of itself does not necessarily mean you are making money. In fact, it could mean you are losing money–after all, a high CTR only proves that lots of people are clicking your ad. If they are also buying your product, this is a good thing. But if they are only clicking your Google ad and leaving, your high CTR represents nothing but wasted money.
Mixing content network traffic with Google traffic

If you want to advertise on Google search results pages as well as the content network (the vast array of blogs and websites running targeted Google ads), you should maintain separate campaigns for this. The reason is that clicks from search engine queries and clicks from website ads are different sources of traffic. People are in a different frame of mind and a different place in the buying process depending on which of these ads they click and arrive at your website from. Therefore, grouping them both into one campaign and showing them identical ads serves only to distort your statistics and make it harder to determine which ads are truly making you the most money. Remedy this by going into your campaign settings and making sure only Google search is checked.

(Note that this is not to say you should ignore the content network. Far from it! We are only advising that you maintain separate campaigns for PPC and content network so that you can accurately measure the results of each of these different traffic sources, rather than muddying the waters by combining them.)
Letting Google “optimize” your ad rotation

In all their benevolent wisdom, Google will, by default, monitor which of your ad(s) get the highest CTR and display those most often. At first glance this sounds helpful–who wouldn’t want to put their best foot forward and show their highest performing ad as much as possible? But this is actually not your goal. As an AdWords marketer doing serious testing, your goal is to continuously beat your winning ad, thereby pushing your CTR, conversion rates and profit per impression ever higher on an ongoing basis. The only way to achieve this is to give all your ads the same amount of exposure and let the best one win. Luckily, this is not at all difficult. Simply visit your campaign settings and check “Rotate: show ads more evenly” instead of “Optimize.”

35 Resources for Getting the Most out of Google Website Optimizer

dcollins — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:09:37 +0000

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that allows you to run various tests on your web products including A/B and Multivariate tests.

For Beginners

If you’re unfamiliar with Google Website Optimizer the following list of resources will help you get started and get up to speed to take advantage of this great tool:

Google Website Optimizer Tour - A brief video introduction to what Google Website Optimizer is and how it works from Google.
A Beginners Guide to Google Website Optimizer - A thorough introduction to Google Website Optimizer.
Top Myths About Google Website Optimizer - Google dispels some of the confusion surrounding Google Website Optimizer
5 Common misconceptions about the Google Website Optimizer - Dispels some of the more common misconception about Gooogle Website Optimizer.
10 Minutes to Testing with the Google Website Optimizer (PDF) - A PDF that lives up to its title.
Google Website Optimizer 101: A Quick-Start Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization - While this page reads like its full of marketing hype it still serves as a good introduction to why you should be testing.
Google Website Optimizer Help Forum - In December 2008 Google launched a Help Forum specifically for Google Website Optimizer where you can ask questions that will be answered by both Google employees as well as general users. This is a great place to go if you’re having trouble with Google Website Optimizer.
Google Website Optimizer YouTube Channel - In February 2009 Google launched the Google Website Optimizer YouTube Channel which serves as a one-stop-shop for videos related to Google Website Optimizer and website testing in general. This is a great place to find both beginner and advanced tutorials.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing allows you test two or more pages against each other to see which one is the most effective at meeting your desired goal. Google Website Optimizer makes it easy to set up A/B tests. The following resources will help you get the most of your A/B tests and Google Website Optimizer:

What is A/B testing? - This video serves as a great introduction to A/B testing using Google Website Optimizer–sort of a “testing for dummies” if you will.
Website Optimizer A/B Experiments in 5 Minutes - This video, directly from Google, shows you how to quickly set up A/B tests using Google Website Optimizer.
Google Website Optimizer A/B Test Tutorial for Content Page - This post demonstrates how to setup a Google Website Optimizer A/B test using the Motivity Ecommerce/CMS platform (one of the few ecommerce/CMS platforms that allow you to add javascript code to their pages).
How to Document an A/B Split Test for Better Conversions - The author briefly discusses the importance of documenting your A/B tests and then provides a visual mind map, “to create better processes in documenting the results of your split testing.”
The ABCs of A/B Testing - This post from the Google AdSense blog walks you through the process of setting up and completing and A/B test.
A/B Testing: Too Little, Too Soon? (PDF) - A fairly in-depth whitepaper from Future Now, Inc. that discusses what A/B testing is, what all the hype is about and how best to utilize A/B testing.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate Testing allows you to create fairly complex tests that compare several different elements on a page. For example, you can create a multivariate test using Google Website Optimizer that compares how effective various headlines, copy and images are at meeting your desired goal. This list of resources will help you get the most out of multivariate testing and Google Website Optimizer:

Start Multivariate Testing: 7 Critical Questions - A set of Q&A regarding how to get started with multivariate testing.
Google Website Optimizer Multivariate Test Tutorial for Ecommerce Product Page - This post demonstrates how to setup a Google Website Optimizer multivariate test using the Motivity Ecommerce/CMS platform (one of the few ecommerce/CMS platforms that allow you to add javascript code to their pages).
Multivariate Experiments with Google Website Optimizer - This video from Google walks you through the details of creating Multivariate tests using Google Website Optimizer.
Multivariate Testing: What is it? - This posts aims to help you understand just what Multivariate Testing is.

Case Studies/Examples

Sometimes the best way to learn about something new is to see some real-world examples of how it works. The following resources provide links to posts that show how people are using Google Website Optimizer:

Google Website Optimizer Test: We Didn’t Implement the Winner - A fairly detailed case study of using Google Website Optimizer and a real-world discussion of why they didn’t decide to use the “winner” of the conversion test.
Website Optimizer: Creating and Launching Experiments - Tom Leung, the Product Manager for Google Website Optimizer, gives users a more advanced overview of Google Website Optimizer. This video compliments the introductory video we linked to above under “For Beginners”.
Google Website Optimizer Tool: I Told You So - SitePoint walks you through their process of A/B testing a banner on their site.
Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise signup page - The 37signals team shares their results from using Google Website Optimizer to test conversion rates for various headlines on their Highrise signup page. This is a great real-word example of how Google Website Optimizer can be used to help you figure out how to increase conversions.
Conversion Rates Up By 500% - A brief overview of one persons tests using Google Website Optimizer that resulted in an increase in conversion rates.
Optimizing Conversions with Website Testing: Google Website Optimizer Integration - A slide presentation (with audio and accompanying transcript) given by both Google and Magento that discusses Magento’s native implementation of Google Website Optimizer. Even if you aren’t using Magento, this presentation contains a lot of great examples of how to use Google Website Optimizer.
How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400% - Conversion Rate Experts breaks down how they increased a company’s conversion rate by 400%.

Tips & Plugins

The following resources will help you discover various tips on using Google Website Optimizer. There is also a link to the Google Website Optimizer plugin for WordPress as well as a link to the book that claims to be “The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer.”

Google Website Optimizer Plugin for WordPress - The title says it all.
Insider Tips for Using Google Website Optimizer - A brief interview with Google Website Optimizer Product Manager, Sandra Cheng. Sandra offers some advice from Google’s experience testing pages as well as some tips for what to test on your pages.
Google Website Optimizer tips from Apogee’s GWO Expert - A video interview (with accompanying text) with Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting at Apogee Search. Alissa offers several tips for and some rules to follow when using Google Website Optimizer.
64 Tips for Getting Started with Google Website Optimzer - While the title suggests that these tips are for beginners, its really a fairly extensive list of suggestions for elements you might want to test on your pages. This list can help you decide what you should optimize.
Website Optimizer Tips for Tracking Complex Conversions - This post demonstrates how to track conversions for videos & demos, link clicks and ajax forms.
What’s New with Google Website Optimizer? - Points out and details some of the new additions and changes that Google Website Optimizer underwent in August 2008.
Top 7 Google Website Optimizer Tips - An excellent list of tips for getting started with Google Website Optimizer.
Google Website Optimizer: 7 Powerful Tests - A brief set of notes from one of Google’s webinars on Google Website Optimizer that describes some of the various tests that are possible with Google Website Optimizer. While brief, this post is great because it take you beyond just A/B and Multivariate tests.
SES Chicago: Lesson in Google Website Optimizer - The video interview isn’t very useful, but the 5 brief tips for getting started with Google Website Optimizer that follow are.

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer - An entire book devoted to using Google Website Optimizer.
Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions - While this book isn’t specific to Google Website Optimizer it is regarded as a highly valuable resource for learning about optimizing landing pages on your websites.

Bonus

The Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer - Shortly after we published this post, Google released The Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer that “covers just about everything you wanted to know about the technical ins and outs of Website Optimizer.” This is definitely a don’t-miss resource for Google Website Optimizer.

7 Form Tactics That Drive Users Crazy

Admin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:59:29 +0000

There is perhaps no greater web annoyance than a poorly constructed form. Whether they’re clumsy, picky, or just plain confusing, too many forms make submitting data a cumbersome chore. The worst forms transcend mere annoyance and actually drive users crazy (or drive them away alltogether.) The sorry state of web forms need not and should not continue, however, it all begins with knowing why so many are so bad in the first place. Here are 7 form tactics to purge from your website ASAP:

Insisting that passwords have certain characteristics
It’s one thing to require that passwords be more than 3 or 4 characters. It’s even okay to reject obvious passwords like “password.” What’s not okay is forcing annoying requirements on your users, such as making them capitalize the first letter or use at least one number in the password. Even worse is when the form does not state these requirements up-front, allowing the user to set what they believe is a fine password and only telling them after the fact that they need caps or numeric characters. While your goal - keeping your users safe - is noble, going about it in this way serves only to annoy and frustrate them as they try to join your website.
Insisting upon perfect formatting
Ever type your birthdate or credit card number into a form, only to be told that you didn’t use dashes or slashes the way the form wants you to? Weren’t you completely annoyed when you had to go back and fix it before going further? Well, guess what - most of your users feel the same way if your form is doing this or similar things to them. There is simply no excuse for this other than laziness on the part of the website owner. Your users are doing you the favor of trusting you with valuable and sometimes sensitive information. The least you can do is let them give it to you in a way that’s convenient for them.
Vague error messages
Nothing is more frustrating than a form that gives you vague error messages. Just because you were a computer science major doesn’t mean your users are, which means most of them wont have the faintest idea what “could not connect to database” or “fatal submission error” means. Sometimes an error truly is technical and can only be expressed as such. However, when possible, you should make the effort to display errors in ways that are meaningful and intelligable to your audience. Otherwise they might just give up and close the form alltogether.
Having to re-enter all your data just because you messed one thing up
It’s bad enough to complete an entire form and have to go back because you left something out. (For example, not including a number in your password!) It’s even worse to have to go back and type everything out all over again, just because of the one thing you missed. Not all forms do this, but the fact that some do is another indicator that improvement is needed.
Poorly coded drop-down menus
Another inexcusable form annoyance is when you click a drop-down menu and it either:
1. Doesn’t drop down, or
2. Does drop down, but wont let you select any of its choices
This, again, is nothing more than laziness from the programming team or web designer. But it’s far from trivial, for if the user literally cannot select anything from the menu, she is stuck with nowhere to go. Nine times out of ten she will simply close the form and forget about it. Clearly, this is not what you want!
Requiring information that has no business being required
Given the choice, most users wont fill in information they don’t want to give out. Webmasters, in turn, seem to have concluded “well, we’ll just require that information by not letting them submit the form without it!” Unfortunately, this is one instance where the intentions fall far short of the results. People don’t suddenly leap to share information they feel you don’t need just because you put a “Required” asterisk next to the box asking for it. Some will, but most will ditch the form or fill it out with bogus information. Neither does you any good.
No clear indication that the information was submitted
It’s best to assure users (particularly if your form is long) that the form they just filled out out was successfully submitted. That said, it’s astounding how many forms simply drop users at a blank webpage or some vague message instead. This creates nervousness and panic in the user who is now unsure of whether you received her data. Rather than risking this perception, take the time to type out a small blurb along the lines of “Thank you! Your information has been sent and received. We’ll be in touch shortly!” This leaves no doubt that the time filling out the form was well-spent.