Last year, we questioned whether Thanksgiving is the new Cyber Monday. This year comes word from benchmarking service Coremetrics that Thanksgiving Day online shopping rose by 39 percent over last year, with estimated U.S. sales of $400 million. And according to Internet Retailer, this is the first time Thanksgiving Day sales have beaten Saturday’s sales. [...]

When Progressive Lighting re-launched its eCommerce store, LightsOnline.com, with WebLinc Direct, remarkable signs of success started showing after just the first month: • Online sales doubled • Conversion rates increased nearly twofold • Site traffic increased dramatically Progressive Lighting chose WebLinc because they needed an eCommerce solution that offered the showcase their products require. What [...]

The big news at the beginning of this year’s holiday shopping season is not so much that brick-and-mortar spending is down — we’re all aware of the floundering economy  – it’s that online shopping sales saw a 13.7% increase over last year. And the news for WebLinc clients is even better: Sites that are running [...]

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells the story of men chained to a cave wall while a bright fire burns behind them and illuminates the cave walls. As these men see shadows and hear echoes that are the consequence of the reality they cannot fathom outside the cave, Socrates asks if these men would not perceive [...]

In a recent post on Useit.com, Jakob Nielsen disparages social media outlet Digg as nothing more than an inflation of your bounce rate as its users show up and disappear without delving any deeper into your site. Stan Schroeder of Mashable, social-media’s stalwart defender, quickly rebutted Nielsen’s argument rightly saying that sites like Digg, StumbleUpon [...]

Measuring Landing Page Effectiveness via Google Analytics The importance of landing pages and their roles in SEO & conversion rates is well documented. It is now common practice to design landing pages based on the source & medium of the referral. Clearly then, it is equally important to find a way to measure the effectiveness [...]

Google Analytics Offers Free Benchmarking Service Google has recently announced the addition of analytic benchmarks to their Google Analytics service. This free service will require Google Analytics customers to opt in to “share the account data in an anonymous, aggregated format”. Reporting will be limited in the beta version of this service. Benchmark metrics include: [...]

Landing Page Load Times Effect Google AdWords Quality Score News from Google that web page load times of landing pages will now be a component of your AdWords Quality Score. This information can be found be viewing your Quality Score on an Ad Group or individual keyword level. Landing page: Your landing page is the [...]

SEO & PPC Metrics – Website Page Depth When managing an SEO initiative or PPC campaign, one of the more challenging aspects is measuring the lead quality of the inbound visitors. Most people know how to measure Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), but that should not be the only metric [...]

The following is Part V of E-commerce & Web Analytics: Part I: Visitor Targeting & Acquisition Part II: Landing Page Effectiveness Part III: Cross Selling & Checkout Optimization Part IV: E-commerce Segmenting Modifying & Testing Once data has been gathered, it will need to be analyzed. Analytic programs capture, store and arrange data, but they [...]