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 [...]

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 [...]

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 used [...]

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 are not [...]

The following is Part IV of E-commerce & Web Analytics:
Part I: Visitor Targeting & Acquisition
Part II: Landing Page Effectiveness
Part III: Cross Selling & Checkout Optimization
Analyzing & Segmenting Data
A successful E-commerce website is a dynamic virtual marketplace. It should change over time, evolving to serve its visitors better by using their input to [...]

The following is Part III of Ecommerce & Web Analytics:
Part I: Visitor Targeting & Acquisition
Part II: Landing Page Effectiveness
Optimizing Checkout & Cross Selling
Once the visitor has been acquired, and the landing page leads to the visitor placing an item in a cart, the next step of the conversion funnel is checkout and cross selling. [...]