Where is the focus?

People ask me to share my sources of inspiration for online strategy and conversion. My list of sources is growing fast. I keep it up-to-date using my Twitter Favorites and Delicious.com. This post reveals some of my sources for inspiration. Don't hesitate to help me gather more inspirational articles. Just drop me a tweet (@wsluimer) or leave a comment.

When I talk to website owners or their webmaster, most of them use Google Analytics (GA) for analysing traffic and conversion rates. Some of them use Google Adwords for targeted advertising on Google's search result pages. However, most of the times they don't know about Google's Webmaster Tools at all. Do you?

First, let me get this out: Captcha is bad for conversion!

Many website administrators seem to be afraid of spam e-mails. And I agree, it's pretty annoying sometimes. But please try a new spam filter before adding Captcha to your webforms. While Captcha prevents the form to be submitted by spambots it also adds a huge usability issue. Although users seem to experience no technical issues, I think they shouldn't have to put up with the extra effort to fill it out.

With the addition of realtime statistics by Google Analytics it’s now possible to do fast A/B testing. This is very interesting for two types of advertising: TV commercials and email advertising.

TV commercials reach a large audience for a short period of time. The larger chunk of visitors referenced by the commercial will visit your website immediately or directly after the the commercial has ended. Within seconds you have enough information to make a decision. The webpage or content which converts best is now displayed to all remaining visitors.

Multichannel marketing is about spreading the marketing budget out more than one channel. That’s no real insight, I know. But do you now which of these channels generate the highest conversion rates?

Because you can only spend your marketing budget once, you need to gather information on the success of each channel. You can use analytics software for your online channels and organize customer panels or polls to collect all this information from your offline channels.

Dit jaar kreeg ik de kans om aanwezig te zijn bij het e-business evenement van Emerce in de Van Nelle fabriek, Emerce Eday 2011. Vooraf had ik niet de tijd om te kijken bij welke bijeenkomsten ik aanwezig wilde zijn. Om een goede keuze te maken heb ik me daarom voornamelijk laten inspireren door keynote spreker Gian Fulgoni (ComScore).

One of your online ambitions is probably getting a bigger audience for your products or services. Besides some technical improvements you should pay attention to link building and keyword optimization. Both Google and website owners lean heavily on relevant content. Website owners will only put up a link to your website if your content is relevant. Your web pages receive a higher rank from Google when the subject of your pages is relevant.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve written a series of blog posts about optimizing ROI on online activities. In my latest post I wrote about the importance of optimizing your Search Engine Results and Google Adwords with the purpose higher conversion rates in Google.

So, your Search Engine Optimization campaign worked great. Your website is ranked in the top 5 on the right keywords. Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for all these new visitors to buy your products online, right? Uhm, no…

When your webpages are relevant to Google, it doesn’t mean your visitors think they are relevant too. Sure Google tries hard to act like normal visitors, especially with their latest “panda” update. But they cannot reproduce the emotionally driven decision of a visitor who has to pick the most relevant search result from the top 10 served by Google.

Nowadays I often talk to people about website performance. Are their business goals being met or even accelerated through the use of their website? All too many times they start telling me about their latest Search Engine Optimization campaign. But that’s not exactly what I asked for.

Although Search Engine Optimization is great to reach a bigger audience, it does not affect conversion rates. Sure, their website pops up more often in the Google result pages. But did “searchers” convert to visitors? And if so, did visitors convert to customers?