“Common Mistakes That Drive Customers Away” from the Online Market World, Day Two

Filed Under Effective Communications, Conference, e-commerce, UI Design | 1 Comment

Day Two for the e-commerce conference brought new ideas (from starting my own online business after watching all those people making a living while selling anything!) to confirming new directions that I would like to take in my career: CRM and web analytics that affect conversion rates (multivariate testing and behavioral targeting). Social media, viral marketing and online advertising became close chapters: I can still do that, I get it and know it well, but passion is moved to something new and more challenging - database marketing and behavioral targeting. At the same time, user experience design concepts still get mixed into the equation as they affect the entire consumer experience and the bottom line.

To that extent, one of the most interesting sessions today was on “Most Common Mistakes That Drive Customers Away” with Thanh Nguyen from Business OnLine, Jeff Shulman with (X+1) and Mark Wachen with Optimost sharing simple nuggets that are worth keeping in mind while optimizing your online communications or sales process. So, the most common mistakes include:

1. Mismatched Offer - when a user comes back in a week and sees the same offer for a lesser price? Ha? It does happen very often and can turn off your customers in seconds.
2. Mismatched Content - happens when “cookies” get on the way and mixed up, or randomly - an example of this can bring a scenario of a college student that stays up all night and frequents MySpace while he is presented with an offer for a Mercedes. Very mismatched content!
3. Multiple Choice - too many choices make it difficult for users to make a choice - a book was referenced in the speech by Jeff “The Paradox of Choice” - that provides a good overview on buyer’s behavior and how people make their decisions.
4. Promoting Benefits That Are Not Benefits - happens all the time. As an example, in the final action step when you ask your visitor share his/her email address and add a “no-spam” disclaimer - it can only hurt you as people start thinking about it. Studies show that if you do not mention too much info or negative info, your conversion rate is much higher - as it makes sense. Do not clutter the user’s mind when there are already ready to take an action with extra info.
5. Continuing To Sell When The Sale Is Made - can prevent your customers to take the final step - as an example, removing FAQ info that was placed together with an offer - increased the conversation rate again - too much info (TMI) - something most of use marketers suffer from.
6. Asking A Lot Of Unnecessary Questions - making your users fill out long forms - turns everyone off - minimize your forms to 3-5 questions.
7. Treating Customers Equally - Segmenting by search keywords does bring more qualified traffic that converts into dollars as opposing to throwing out the same copy to the entire audience.
8. Not Allowing Your Users To Check Out Fast And Easy - according to the studies that a user experience analyst, Thanh Nguyen, conducted, people get frustrated when a bunch of forms or barriers are presented before they can enjoy a product or complete a purchase. ” I do not want to fill out forms to buy a purse. They do not ask me to do that at the counter”, - says right away what your users want.
9. Not Giving Clear Indications For The Shopping Process - makes your customers wonder “How long is it going to take?” - and the way to avoid this pitfall is to offer a visual path to your users, as an example, see the checkout path that Amazon cart has that starts with a “sign-in”, continues to “shipping”, “gift wrap” and finishes with “place an order”.
10. Not Capitalizing On Abandoned Carts - represents a lost opportunity that is not utilized by some online merchants. How many times did I go through the process and did not complete the shopping? Sometimes, I lost the card - as the merchant provided me with no history or some indicator where it was, or sometimes I got distracted. By providing the history, save the cart option and reminding via email with a discount offer can significantly recover the abandoned customer.
11. Not Cross-Selling By Displaying Products Without Recommendations - “Imagine four products displayed and 6 out of 6 visitors did not click through?” - no case studies or testimonials are used - and your users do not trust online content but other users. Make your users recommend and cross-sell for you. Use the user’s browsing history from items searched to tasks accomplished during the session, connect him/her to other users who did the same and purchased - and recommended your product - cross-sell.

To sum it up, it seems like keeping the sales process easy, straight-forward and consistent brings the best results: higher conversion rates, user satisfaction and referred business.

The Future of E-Commerce According to the Experts

Filed Under Conference, Digital Marketing, e-commerce | Leave a Comment

Day One of the Online Market World Conference was opened up with a starter session that covered the upcoming trends in the e-commerce industry. I thought it was rather “short and sweet” in content and delivered a good overview that is worth sharing. According to Joe Chung (Allurent), Doug Mack (Adobe) and Michael Hines (Jones Apparel Group) there are a number of trends in the evolving e-business:

1) Rich media meets rich applications - the user experience becomes very engaging, interactive and “seamless” thanks to the latest and greatest in the web development apps that leverage the graphic user interface. Examples include Gucci watch and Teamwork Athletic Apparel sites that bring authentic interactive brand experiences right at your computer.
2) Increasing community involvement - plays a major role in creating relationships, brand recognition and promotion from the mere transactions. If they (transactions) were good, easy experiences - they become stories that people pass along and eventually translate into more revenue.
3) Back to the desktop - lots of $$ is invested into the desktop shopping platforms, “browser-free” online shopping - imagine that!
4) Content as the Interface - plays a great role in the new way e-commerce sites get content and “inventory” - see Zillow’s site where users can post their house info (pictures, videos, etc) on sale in 60 seconds and watch the bids come.
5) Online shopping to be successful must be: enticing + engaging + executional + pervasive + mobile.

It is interesting to see how the same principles and concepts are applied throughout various industries and disciplines: I see the basics of the social media concepts, user experience design, permission marketing, branding and CRM - all work in tandem to accomplish a simple goal. You hear all the time the same fundamentals: ease of use, emotion, relevance, experience, engagement = all in various combinations bring you to success, as they are the same needs expressed by the sophisticated consumer, online shopper, primarily the US-based individual. As Joe Chung says, “extensive increases in the software development are very well offset by increasing customer expectations”, - so viva the online shopper - as there will always be plenty of work for all of us in web applications and services development as well as online marketing!

Online Market World Conference 2007: My Top E-Commerce Sessions to Attend

Filed Under Conference, Online Marketing, e-commerce | 1 Comment

I am back to San Francisco, the city that still (and always) enjoys the sunshine, attending the Online Market World Conference, a full-blown event to cover the entire e-commerce lifecycle. It was almost surreal this morning to come from the yellow-and-orange-and-wet Seattle, into a sunny caught-in-the-summer-weather of San Fran - felt like I escaped from the seasons! For the rest of the week, I am looking forward to learning more about the latest and greatest in the e-business and meeting the folks in the industry that did that (eBay, PayPal, Forrester Research are among the biggest players).

So far, at a glance, the “must attend” sessions for me are:

(1) Driving Customer Acquisition and Conversion Through Word-of-Mouth Marketing (will cover the best known cases of integrating product reviews and social media).
(2) and How Analytics Affects Planning Processes (this session claims to reveal how to deploy analytics to affect the planning processes across the organization, in other words being more intelligent about your decisions).
(3) then later in the day, I am looking forward to learn how to Improve Customer Acquisition Through Analytics, through analyzing existing customer behavior and going beyond - understanding new customers. See the magic in numbers!
(4) Customer Lifetime Value - What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You - sounds rather appealing with its promise to share the methods of utilizing business intelligence to fine-tune customer retention strategies.
(5) Understanding the Business Customer - claims to cover the dos and don’ts strategies while working with B2B audience.
(6) of course, I could not let the session on Improving Commerce Site Effectiveness Through Analytics and Multivariate Testing go without my notice - revisiting the tactics of driving online sales is the knowledge that is worth hanging onto by any marketer these days.
(7) The Future of Online Advertising - should be a good recap on whatever happened to online advertising (how it evolved and where it is heading towards) within the last year that we missed while paying attention to everything else!
(8) Common Mistakes That Drive Customers Away - is a great session that will help to get back to reality and understand the buyer decision process and why it stops at some points.
(9) and finally, International Payment Options and Optimization - seems to be rather hot - as it spills the beans on the remaining international payment challenges and what the industry is doing about it.

These top 9 are my picks to engage into. Let’s see which one of them makes the deepest impression.

BTW, if you cannot attend and still want to get a piece of the informational pie, check out a free report on e-commerce trends 2007/2008 provided on the event site. Obviously, you will have to share some info to get it, but should be worthwhile.

Come to Portland to Attend InVerge 2007 - The 1st Interactive Convergence Conference

Filed Under Conference, Interactive Marketing, Digital Marketing | Leave a Comment

Inverge 2007? Portland, OR? Next week, Thursday and Friday of September 6-7, a new conference is launched by one of the internet industry evangelists - Steve Gehlen. Inspired by the ideas of Convergence Culture and Wikinomics, “Inverge”, “invergence” is a newly coined term that took its roots from the concept of convergence of digital marketing and human interaction. In other words, it represents “interactive convergence”, thus “invergence”.

Why attend InVerge 2007? Inverge 2007 is a multi-disciplinary interactive marketing conference, happening in the Pearl District of Portland, OR (which has the best restaurants in the city on every corner, charming with its urban style and bringing lively crowds of urban professionals to mingle). Join your fellow marketers and advertisers for a 2 day experience of sharing ideas and expertise. Check the list of the attendees and plan your networking opportunities. Review the event schedule and choose the topics you would like to brush up on. Browse through the speakers bios and see who you would like to connect to.

Myself, I think I would definitely check out the panel on a new Nike ZOOM footwear interactive television campaign featuring panelists from Nike, Wieden+Kennedy and Ensequence with Stephanie Otto moderating the session.

The main presenters featured:
- Joshua Green, Research Manager, Convergence Culture Consortium, MIT talking about Convergence Culture and New Media Logics
- Jeff Yapp, Executive Vice President, MTV Networks
- Chris Van Dyke, President & CEO, Nau (see recent Fast Company feature) highlighting his groundbreaking “webfront” concept that integrates the best of e-commerce with traditional bricks and mortar shopping and Nau’s digitally centric approach to storytelling and brand building.
- Slate Olson, Senior Brand Connections Manager, Nike
- Renny Gleeson, Global Director of Digital Strategies, Wieden+Kennedy
- Lori H. Schwartz, SVP & Director, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab, Interpublic Group
- Catherine Ogilvie, EVP & General Manager of the San Francisco Office, Edelman sharing her insights on brand development and who actually does contribute to its value
- Stephanie Otto, CEO / Principal, Brainstorm Communications, Inc. (interactive TV pioneer)
- Dalen Harrison, CEO, Ensequence (interactive TV platform) talking about interactive TV and its future
- Adam Richardson, Strategy Director, frog design sharing his insights on product management and its shaping into managing complex systems
- Ken Papagan, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Rentrak talking about the need for behavioral measurement of media consumption by platform
- Jason Stoddard (Managing Partner) and Ken Brady (VP, Asia), Centric, Agency of Change
- Marcelino Alvarez, Senior Interactive Producer, Wieden+Kennedy (panel)
- Bill Barnett, General Manager, Entertainment Media Works expressing his insights on how to squeeze your advertising budget
- Mark Deuze, Professor, Journalism and New Media, Leiden University (The Netherlands) sharing his thoughts on consumer generated media
- Aimee Viles, Director of Creative Services, Ensequence (panel)

The best part - the conference was timed to coincide with a number of cultural events happening in Portland during the same week to make it a fully enjoyable experience of professional networking and cultural exploration. A paid Full Conference Pass to Inverge 2007 provides you with a full access to MusicFestNW and vouchers to 3 Time-Based Art Festival events, while the First Thursday Gallery Walk is complimentary already!

To register, visit InVerge 2007 site. Have Fun! I know I will.

Want to Get Fresh Ideas and Mingle with Exciting Folks? Attend Internet Strategy Forum: Executive Summit Event 2007

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End of June…Feels like everybody went on vacation…so steady…even my Blog Reader is not as full with marketing articles and posts! However, there is no excuse to get into the steady easy “summertime” coma! Get out and meet new people in the industry! Get excited with the new ideas: attend a conference!

Internet Strategy Forum, Portland Chapter, is hosting a conference that should shake things up at the minimum: I know I am looking forward to it!

The sessions showcase industry experts sharing their experience and knowledge on internet marketing:

- Cammie Dunaway, Chief Marketing Officer, Yahoo!, Inc. talking about “Building Brands in a Web 2.0 World”

- Tim Kopp, Chief Marketing Officer, WebTrends, covering the topic on how to “Turn Customer Insight into a Strategic Advantage”

- Mark Colombo, VP Electronic Channels and Strategic Marketing, FedEx, sharing how FedEx sees its online strategy as a logical extension of its corporate values, and how the company’s early adoption of social networking tools like RSS, internal blogs and wikis, gadgets and other tools is helping it connect employees and customers

- Robert Scoble, VP Media Development, PodTech.net, co-author of Naked Conversations, exclaiming that ” It’s a Google World (and Facebook too!)”

- Rey Ramsey, CEO, One Economy Corp., talking about “Digital Inclusion 2.0: New Dynamics, New Solutions” and how social media can include adoption by low-income people, as the opportunities to reach an often overlooked, underserved market.

- Erik Kokkonen, VP, Global Publishing Services, CNET, contemplating on the trends of web2.0 and its adoption

- Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., sharing on “How the Internet changed the old marketing rules”

- Bryan Rhoads, Sr. Internet Strategist, Social Media, Intel,
- Mark Erickson, Sr. Computer Scientist, Adobe
- Mary Alice Colvin, Senior Marketing Consultant, Allyis, all three sharing their web2.0 implementation insights

To learn more and register for the event, click here.

Finally, there is a Digital Reception Party on Day 1 (July 19, 2007) worth attending to get more social interaction and ideas’ sharing! I know I will attend it! :)

P.S. View the interview with the event chief - Steven Gehlen to get more sizzle on the upcoming experiences!

Added on July 1, 2007: More coverage on the event, see the article at Portland Business Journal

Relevancy Marketing, Takeaways from the Marketing Profs B2B MKTG Virtual Conference

Filed Under Effective Communications, Conference, B2B Marketing | 1 Comment

It was quite a convenient experience to attend a virtual conference set up by Marketing Profs on B2B Marketing Wednesday this week. At the same time, the most valuable parts of the arrangement is the ability to download presentations right away and the ability to listen the recorded sessions afterwards! Great value! Saves time, provides flexibility and shares content freely at no charge. More about a similar positive “user experience”, check Jeremiah’s post.

The session on B2B Marketing by Google’s folks: Benjamin Chung and Mark Martel was of most interest. The term of Relevancy Marketing peaked my attention. The idea is simple of putting your ads and products in the right context -where your users are and where their behavior illustrated obvious interest in those products. Sometimes, Relevancy Marketing is called Contextual Marketing that has a power of effective influence over one billion people online today. Its key benefits are: being transparent and flexible for adjustments in real-time. Also, online sources of information become very influential today for B2B segments. Niche content grows significantly attracting the involved end-users. Hence, B2B advertisers move online as well. The top three tips to remember are:

1) To focus on the customer
2) To profit from fragmentation
3) To measure, learn and optimize.

(See the link below to access the details and narration for the session.)

According to eMarketers’ article on “The Behaviorally Targeted Ad Audience” :

In a May 2007 consumer study by JupiterResearch and AOL, revealed:

1. 74% of frequent ad viewers stated they would pay more attention to a contextual ad vs. 89% who would pay more attention to behavioral ads

2. 63% of online consumers say they pay more attention to ads that fit their specific interests vs. 49% who pay more attention to ads that are directly related to their current online activity; that data could be interpreted as more attention for contextual (specific interests) than behavioral (current online activity)

3. 67% of online shoppers — defined as those who research and/or purchase online — notice behaviorally targeted ads vs. 53% who notice contextual targeted ads

Personalize the content, do you “research” or use your research and I will spare a minute to pay attention. Relevancy marketing translates into more effective marketing communications and eventually a greater awareness about the product offerings by the target audience.

Other sessions at the virtual conference included:

- Keynote: B2B Marketers Need An Interactive Makeover by Laura Ramos
- Customer Reference Programs and the Social Media Revolution by Bill Lee and Jeremiah Owyang
- Email Marketer Seeks Customer for Long-Term Relationship by Brian Ellefritz and Scott Barnett
- Is Thing On? Social Media for B2B Marketers by Greg Verdino
- Using Sustainable Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Growing B2B Business by Greg Spangler

P.S. Here is the link to the recorded sessions - check them out - time well spent.

Why We Marketers Should Adopt Another Segmentation Tool - Personas from User Experience Design

Filed Under Cool Ideas, Effective Communications, Conference, Segmenting and Profiling | Leave a Comment

The best discovery from last week was stumbling upon Steve Mudler’s session at Webvisions on personas . It almost feels like the more I learn, the more is out there still awaiting for discovery. Two weeks ago, I was rambling on the database marketing and its behavioristic approach to segmenting. I was thrilled and motivated to learn as much as I can about it. Last week, my attention radar caught the concept from the user design (scenario design) field - creating “personas” to segment potential customers and be able to communicate better with them, while resonating with their specific challenges. “Personas”, as a market segmentation tool does bring: focus, empathy, consensus, better designs and communications.

If I narrow down to the two major benefits of this technique, I would mention its flexibility and applicability to real life situations we marketers face and its fundamental psychological truth about discrepancies of people’s words and actions.

The greatest part about creating “personas” is that it allows segmenting your market while you engage into the limited market research initiatives. Let’s face it - most of the time, we (marketers) have limited budget and resources (people and time) and there is so much that we could do but we cannot afford….How do you find out what your potential customers will want and to what they would respond to if you only have 4 weeks, 4 people and no budget? You can only interview a small number of people, you can do so much as opposing to engaging in the ideal long and steady market research process that we learnt from the books or that is feasible if a specialized agency does it for us for a good sum.

Well, we have “personas”! Steve Mudler actually shares his expertise on it in his book ” The User is Always Right”, As an example, creating personas becomes a good segmentation alternative in the real life situation where you are developing a channel for a newly developed product or a “newly-is-still-in-development- product-that-is-has-to-sell-in-6-months”. There are three primary approaches, based on the type of research, scope and analysis performed:

• Qualitative personas (based on interviews, as an example)
• Qualitative personas with quantitative validation (interviews and surveys)
• Quantitative personas (surveys, data from the CRM systems, etc.)

Thus, it allows you to apply this technique to any scope of research that you are doing. Flexibility makes it a good model.

Another useful disclaimer that all of us - marketers performing research should always keep in mind is that what people say is not what they necessarily do. What they say is important as it reflects their goals and attitudes as well as perceptions and aspirations of being seen in a certain light. What people do is just as important, since actual behavior can reveal more about people than what they say. Behavior reveals patterns around which you can design your product or communication strategy. Again, the perfect combination of promise and action, if those are consistent – you got your answer and you are on the right track, if those are conflicting, you have to test your hypothesis again or change it completely.

Web 2.0 Expo, Day 2 and Day 3, Experience Takeaways

Filed Under Creative Marketing, Web Technology, Effective Communications, CRM, Conference | 2 Comments

It took me 2 days to get into my normal routine after such a whirlpool of knowledge sharing and social networking using traditional and web technology methods. Instead, I am still catching up with all the people I met. However, I thought I would quickly put my notes in this post. So what happened within those 2 days and what and who inspired my curious mind?

I. Behavioral Targeting, a session led by Basem Nayfeh, explored the world of web analytics and database marketing that allows to target your customers based on their behavior. It is not a new technique, but I was happy to see how pronounced the topic becomes. The complexity and at the same time, the solutions it brings are worth exploring by every marketer in any given organization. It allows to make a pause and ask a question where consumer attention is and follow it. Paying attention to customer steps on your page or online allows to be an effective marketer. An interesting fact that 60 % of content is posted by someone “we know”, “you know”, exemplifies well that our social behavior does not change dramatically on the web. Behavioral segmenting is intelligent segmenting and qualifying people based on their actions: (searches made, product interests, articles they read, navigation, geography, keywords, workplace attributes). Behavior is captured and targeted message is delivered, new knowledge about your product is discovered, etc.

II. Web Analytics and Internet Marketing Solutions session by Akin Arikan touched upon similar topic. He also shared a free whitepaper that illustrates well the major points on how to optimize your online marketing campaigns. The Web Analytics Recipe Cards provides an overview on how to maximize the number of qualified leads captured online, maximize online and offline revenue and increase brand awareness. Another document that is worth reading, shared by Unica, summarizes how today’s marketers can anticipate, understand, help their companies profit from the web transformation.

III. Social media discussions were quite popular and interactive. I am “delegating” this topic to Jeremiah and Mario, as lots of coverage can be found at their prominent blogs: Marketing Nirvana and Web Strategist.

IV. The best part of the entire event for me was meeting a number of brilliant people. The social aspect of the conference attendance left the most satisfaction. People who make a difference in this industry being in either big or small companies is the biggest asset of web.2.0 revolution and evolution. I had a lot of fun meeting people at the expo, at the after event parties and during live upstreaming opportunity with Podtech. The combination of knowledge and social capital gained definitely exceeds the projected ROI. Web 2.0 expo 2007 is money and time well spend.

V. (Added on April 29, 2007)
And I also wanted to express my joy and thanks to Marcelo Paiva who volunteered to help me fix my style sheet issue when I discovered it at the event. I still cannot help but smile every time I see my new blog design! People would point me out that due to some coding my blog content would show up crookedly in Firefox. This was rather embarrassing since most of the web 2.0 crowd uses Firefox and while sharing and introducing myself I had to make a disclaimer. Not any more! Social media got another outcome of connecting people that might never be due to geographies and other restrictions. If it were not for Jeremiah’s live blogging and video casting at the event, I would never have a chance to get fast help and collaboration right away. Moreover, we used Skype to do virtual collaboration and remote desktop access tool VNC to fix the problem! This was a very empowering experience, collaboration on the user level where you get the same results as if you work in big corporations with virtual teams, but here you use basic web 2.0 tools that enable individuals!
Marcelo also created my new logo, which I find rather a perfect fit. Talking about branding on one’s feet and Skype!
Finally, we discovered similarities in professional interests (user design, marketing, CRM, segmentation) that allowed both of us developing another value-add professional connection, which we completed via registering it at LinkedIn. :)

Web 2.0 Expo Day 1, Knowledge Nuggets and More Inspiring People

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Day 1 was so good: the energy of people I met and the knowledge I got kept me so invigorated and excited throughout 18 hours of stimulation.  Before the next wave of events hits my “ship”, I wanted to set in stone the nuggets for Day 1 at web 2.0 expo.

I. Web Technology

Google Analytics and all the magic you can do with this free tool was shared by Brett Crosby. Get your web metrics into the order, get your data and make your site more effective, analyze your marketing campaigns ROI.(Example: Paris Hilton Commercial, was produced normally in a ad agency, but distributed through the web (YouTube). The effect is beyond what a TV ad of the same caliber can do. Due to the viral effect, people actually went online themselves (control of content/infomation consumption) and watched it on average of 6 times. Where else do you get such coverage, reach and ROI? It was cheap to place on the web!) The package is free, delivers on the promise and can make a difference in your web communications. Spend a few minutes and learn more how you can optimize your web site. You do not need to be a statistician to get the maximum benefit. (I am going to deploy it for my blog and once I have enough experience I will share my recommendations).

  1. Google Analytics = track your traffic and ROI on marketing campaigns
  2. Google Webmaster Tools = know your audience and optimize your site
  3. Google News = free way to make images searchable
  4. Google Maps
  5. Google Earth
  6. Google Catalogs = upload your catalogs, get the content out, make it discoverable
  7. Google Website Optimizer = great tool to track PPC, does not hurt organic search (was considered during the development stage), you can even start your free multivariate testing to learn more what your audience is doing on your site and how to make them do what you want them to do!

II. More Web Analytics

Avinesh Kaushik shared his insights on how you can test the effectiveness of your site, optimize your conversion rate based on real feedback from your customers! I must confess, it was the best session so far, as much as, Avinash promised at the start. Using Multivariate Testing, marketers and web strategists can expose their customers to variations of web site design (multiple pages produced automatically by a tool) and get feedback (behavioral feedback!) on what works and what does not to arrive at the site that generates sales or delivers what you want your audience to do on this site. Most companies do not know why their customers come to the site. Avinesh’s golden rule is testing, testing, and more testing. One cannot get the same information on what works through the traditional focus groups, surveys and interviews of the customer base. “Customers yell out problems and do not provide solutions”. At the same time, our bosses think that they represent the customers and know how the site should look like to deliver the best and their decision influences the final product that might not be user-friendly at all. Even if it does, it could be not as optimal in delivering to the bottom line. Even the userbility testing is not as effective. “They way we do userbility is isolating a sample of people in a room, putting a bunch of devices on them and ask them to act normal. People do not act normal in such conditions and they would be extra cautious, biased or wierd.” You can get the basic ballpark, (maybe, maybe not) on your testing. With multivariate analysis you are measuring the entire consumer experience, even when they are shopping on your site in their pijamas. Little Ajax script is all you need to get your testing set up. It creates variations of your site for further testing. You can test all the ideas you have, not just 2-3.

Avinesh is planning to publish a book in the near future, called “Web Analytics, An Hour A Day” (which I will definetely read!). You can even pre-order it at Amazon.com. All the proceeds (100%) will go to local charities.

III. Great ideas from the Keynote

Keynote was very well put together and this video called Digital Ethnography by Michael Wesch launched the discussion. I could not help but share this video, it illustartes so well the evolution of the web and though, I am not a geek, it stimulates my mind and heart. 

There was lots of fun speeches at the keynote and Richard MacManus covers it well on his blog.

My favorites were 3 launch pad ideas:

Spock.com = allows you perform human search! You can now get the full scoop! (My KGB roots make me so excited about this one! :))

Npower.com = finally, a web 2.0 application for intraverts! and people who care a lot about personal growth, allows to measure your actions towards your goals, incorporates training and coaching knowledge with a web 2.0 capabilities of interactivity and user content generation. Unfortunately, I have no URL for it to share.

IV. Social Mingle Afterwards

It was a lot of fun to explore web 2.0 social mingle scene and parties afterwards. The best part is to meet the personalities and simply personable people to close the day. Special thanks to Jeremiah, other Podtech crew and Mario for being hospitable hosts! Anytime, you are in Portland, OR, please let me know and I will show the city at its best and I am very good at it!

    Content Disclaimer

      Everything posted on this blog is a product of my own thoughts, ideas, reflections based on the professional interests. It is based on the public information, works of the colleagues and fellow researchers that are cited respectfully and my opinions as an industry professional.