Recently in Analytics & Research Category

Early results from today's CNN.com poll shows that nearly 70% of respondents will not be taking advantage of after holiday sales because they are in a "spending lockdown." While CNN acknowledges the poll is not scientific that's a pretty frightening though... predictions for Black Friday put spend down 1-3% but if 70% of people are truly not spending it's going to be a whole lot worse than that. That is of course until you look at the poll and the options.

As you can see there are 3 choices, yes, just like last year (10%), yes, but cutting back (22%) and no, in a spending lockdown (68%). It's a short poll but even still it's missing at least one very important category "no, I don't do after thanksgiving day sales". Put simply, anyone in the no category either has to skip responding to the poll or select an option which may not describe them. If you wanted to dig a little deeper you'd also realize that there's no segmentation... are the no's unemployed college students? Adults in South Africa? Or your target customer?

Two very simple take-aways here, all data comes with limits and before you read into it, read into how it was gathered and who it is about - data without categorization is really just numbers. At the same time when you're creating your own surveys take the time to give options that cover a spectrum of responses and not just the options you want to categorize by. Having a "other" category almost always makes sense.

Last week I talked about the importance of developing new and unique features to make your forum community stand out above the crowd in order to win & retain visitors. But the story doesn't end with adding features, there's a lot on off the shelf forum software to customize and customize it you must. In the second part of this series I explain a few of the prime areas to change because at the end of the day to win the user over your site needs to get them back.

1-3%, that's the typical first-visit conversion rate most websites see. Whether you're at the high end or the low end or even if you have twice the top rate you're still looking at more than 90% of your visitors not converting. Not converting more than 90% of people who come to your website? That seems bad but if that's all you're looking at that number and that number alone you're kicking yourself in the foot; 90% not converting? Maybe they are, you're missing the customer's goals.

A few minutes ago I finished reading a post by Josh Gordon on The Lunch Pail (operated by interactive agency Knotice). The post is all about the debate over behavioral targeting and data privacy and the recent actions from consumer groups to try and get legislation enacted to limit it. In responding to this post I stated something which I often bring up in conversations - marketing should be behavioral for the customer's sake.

I recently got involved in a couple of discussions on the Site Point Forums about how useful Paid Search (PPC) is in advertising a web business and if it should be trusted at all given click fraud and some of the other concerns that continue to come up. Having worked with search for years and seeing tremendous returns, the answer for me was obvious - of course you should use search. However, in discussing the issue more, I've realized it's really not that simple of a question - search marketing can have great results but it also has requirements to work. So if you aren't running a fortune 500 company with a search agency or web team, should you even bother trying? And if you do decide to get into the mix, what do you need to do?