Update August 2011: Have made available publicly, the code for my simple feedback form with Google Analytics integration.

Update November 2010: Made a note about tracking visitor comments in Analytics and how I’m testing it.

Update: Removed “Maybe” response with 0.5 score as Analytics only supports passing integers.

Sometimes your goal is not to optimise for revenue, but for the ability of your website to solve people’s problems. The issue is, there’s no website metric which tells you how much a page fulfills this goal. There’s no “Solve Rate” for your content in Google Analytics.

That is why I built a feedback tool into Google Analytics (OK, OK, I’m no web designer):
Read more →

So, you’ve run a couple of tests and noticed a 30% increase in your conversion rate. Where’s that 30% extra revenue per month? Google Website Optimizer tells you that the test won with 98% “confidence” that it won. Come on!

Believe it or not, there can be a number of things at play here. Let’s take a look at them: Read more →

Displaying experiment data in Google Analytics from Google Website Optimizer is extremely straightforward to do. You might have found my other post on integrating Google Website Optimizer MVT with Google Analytics and were curious as to how you could integrate it with Google Analytics.

The truth is though, this may not be what you anticipated. Read more →

A lot of websites advocate that you MUST TEST EVERYTHING. While this makes a lot of sense, it shouldn’t be followed blindly in all cases. Like many rules such as this, you get the best results when you know when to break them. Here’s why…

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Did you know page load times have been shown to impact conversion rates, revenue and other metrics on your site? Here’s some stats:

• Increasing the size of search results pages from 10 to 30 results increased page load by 500 milliseconds and decreased Google’s revenue by 20%
• Every 100 milliseconds of extra load time impacts Amazon’s revenue by 1%

For more information on how much load times can cost you, read my article over at Experian Hitwise.

Want to measure page load times on your site to see the impact it has on revenue, conversion rates and other metrics? Well I’ve found a way to do it based on a great article from Panalysis, along with my own tweaks (mostly to suit it to my purposes and modify the code for the updated tracking). Read more →

Update 08/08/2010: Improved the link handling & now tracks the post URL in Analytics.

Reading SEOmoz’s blog on the way home from work, I noticed a great little call to action at the bottom of their post that read:

“Did you like this post? Yes / No“

I like this idea of tracking visitor sentiment towards posts, but I think SEOmoz’s version isn’t quite as actionable as it could be. I mean, sure you can see whether or not people liked the blog post from the blog itself, but what if you wanted to delve a little deeper? What if you want to see post ratings aggregated and filtered based on geography, visitor type, conversions, traffic sources, custom variables etc? That could be REALLY powerful - you could find out which posts work for which countries, which posts your visitors didn’t like - so you could improve on it - and so much more actionable stuff like that. Read more →

With a simple browser plugin, you can find out if your competitors are using Google Website Optimizer. But what it can’t do, is show you what they’re testing.

Here, I’m going to show you how you can see exactly what your competitors are testing on their sites.

Sneaky? A little. Smart? Totally.

What you need

Here’s what you’re going to need: Read more →

So, you’ve started to track clicks on your RSS subscribe button and now you want to measure what your RSS subscribers and Twitter followers are doing on your site. Thankfully, it’s very easy to do. You’re going to need the following things:

• A blog
• Google Analytics installed
• RSS subscribers (optional, but recommended :P)
• A Twitter account with followers (optional, but highly recommended) - yes, you can track your link to Twitter too!

Here’s what you need to do:

Read more →

So, you’re about to run a test in Google Website Optimizer and you have to track something crazy like revenue per visitor, ecommerce tracking, multiple goal points and so on… If you’re just running plain old GWO, you can’t track that - Sucks I know, but… Read more →

Making marketing decisions based purely on whether you’ll THINK it’ll work will only get you so far (for several reasons), but most of all, I think Avinash Kaushik sums this up best:

“You and I are poor proxies for the customer. And just because you don’t like something… how should I put it so you’ll understand…. oh let’s try this…. you not liking something is not a statistically significant sample of data!” - From this post.

If that’s not a good reason to start making more data driven decisions - I don’t know what is…