I breezed through a bunch of marketing books this weekend, but the one that really stood out as useful was Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin. If you do marketing in any way, shape or form this book should be on your “to read” list.  It describes how the brain makes decisions and how you can hone your designs and messages to give your organization a competitive advantage.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was having a discussion in a forum the other day when someone mentioned that they were changing some pages on there site with the hope of increasing pageviews.  As Karlyn is known to do with email metrics the web analytics individual that I strive to be went on the defensive, or offensive if you choose.  What do pageviews mean?  Why are more pageviews better?  So if you don’t want to read any more of this post all that you need to know is that PAGEVIEWS IS A WORTHLESS METRIC.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagging and tracking can be an important way to segment and understand user behavior on your website.  Google Analytics offers lots of ways to do this, but finding out how to do it isn’t always so obvious.  Knowing a little bit more about your visitors allows you to make better more informed decisions and ultimately provide a better site to your visitors.  There are multiple ways that you can segment, track, and tag site visitors that are not so obvious “out of the box”. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the first week of school back at Wofford.  Wow, what a busy week but it’s almost over and I’m so glad because a fun weekend is planned.  Atlanta Braves game tonight and Six Flags tomorrow.  I really need a break.  Kind of sad because the school year has just started, but with planning for three conference presentations this fall, already three weeks into my MBA class of the semester and all the other projects I’m working on just seems like I’m working way to much lately!

Read the rest of this entry »

The other week Shelby Thayer wrote an excellent post titled, Instantly Actionable – The 404 Page.  Reading through her post got me thinking this is definitely a Web Standard that every site needs to implement properly, but very few take the time to do it.  Nobody likes to see an ugly “The page cannot be found” error page.  This has to be one of the quickest ways for a visitor to leave a site and has to have a high exit rate on this page, but most people don’t even track this page so they have no way of knowing even this little bit of information.  Just for the record since I started tracking this two weeks ago the exit rate is only 29%.  Not as bad as I would have thought, but definitely higher than the site as a whole.

Read the rest of this entry »

The web design world let out a collective cry yesterday.  To some, it was a squeal of delight.  To others, it was a groan of despair.  At issue was Google’s new brainchild (and latest step towards WORLD DOMINATION), Chrome.  If you have been hiding in a hole since Labor Day, Chrome is Google’s attempt to enter the web browser market by dropping a “lightweight,” WebKit based browser designed to function more efficiently in an increasingly modern web environment (while at the same time trying to drag us kicking and screaming back into the browser wars that defined the late 90s).  They made a bit of a goof in their release cycle, and let the cat out of the bag a bit early the other day (it could have just as easily been planned to stir the pot for the couple days leading up to the Beta release on the 2nd).  Like many things Google related, the idea is quite idealistic, and has a ton of potential.  But just the same, new browsers always pose a number of issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

So many many months ago in what was the third post of this blog I asked the question, Which search engines really matter?  In that post I pulled data from Compete’s monthly post about web search market share that showed Google dominating with almost 69% of the US market.  So fast forward eight months later (can you believe this blog is eight months old!?) and Google is now a dominating 70.4% of the US web search market.  At the time I wanted to see how this national trend held up for Wofford and at the time did some tweaking to Wofford’s search submissions to the other two main search market players, Yahoo and MSN.  Since making these changes I thought they might have an impact on Google’s dominance of searches that return traffic to Wofford’s site (over 80% then). I think to be totally fair before moving forward I need to analyzes what percentage of Wofford’s search traffic is domestic.  Keep in mind this data is only for wofford.edu as pulled from Google Analytics over the last month. Read the rest of this entry »