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In a recent article over at Adotas, they take a hard look at how changes in algorithms at Google can have a painful impact on sites that depend on the giant search engine for organic search results. And if you think this applies just to…

Sounds a little scary. The point is that any online sales page, or sequence of pages, includes some friction. That is to say, there are elements on every page that will slow down your visitors, make them pause, or maybe even result in a…

If you sell a product online, you already know how shoppers can check out your prices and the quality of your customer service through sites like PriceGrabber, Shopzilla and Google Product Search. But if you think it’s tough having your…

The short answer appears to be -- Yes. In a recent set of tests, in which we distributed 28 short, entertaining video clips through YouTube and Google Video, we converted almost 1.5% of viewers into subscribers. That may not sound like a…

That is to say, if you create a video clip to run on TV, will it be received just as well on the web or on a mobile device? Marketers everywhere might hope that the answer to this question is yes. It would certainly cut down on budgets…

Web page designers and writers often struggle between loading a page with plenty of information and choices, or keeping it clean and simple. Which approach works best and gives you the best conversion rates and highest revenues? Should…

This is a big question with serious implications for online retailers in the months before the holiday buying season. A recent article at Clickz throws some light on this topic. Here is an excerpt: The study looks at traffic and…

If you sell products online and are looking for information on which products to feature on the home page of your own site, spend some time on Amazon.com. Amazon is becoming a remarkable and free research resource for other online…

Most marketers understand the importance of online testing. But how can one best convince senior management? While online marketers in large and medium-sized companies and organizations know from case studies and other published data that…

A recent article in BrandWeek goes over some research from Jupiter Research in which the data suggests that people have a very low level of trust in information they find in blogs, forums and social networks. This comes as something of a…

We published a brief on this topic back in 2004 and decided it was time to run a new series of tests to find out what kind of ROI you can expect to achieve with the smaller PPC engines. That is to say, not Google, Yahoo Search Marketing or…

Here's a test of your online marketing skills… The topic of our free webinar this Wednesday is “Optimizing Free Trial Offers”. We thought it might be interesting to give you a preview of two of the pages. One page is before optimization,…

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Lee Gomes describes his search through 2.27 gigabytes of search data from AOL. According to his research, the single word which appeared most frequently in searches on AOL over the period covered…

If you work in the online world you can hardly have missed all the latest talk about using video and video clips to promote products and services. Suddenly, video clips are the way to go. And every marketer’s dream appears to be based on…

One of the students from our Online Split-Testing Certification Program recently asked us for some clarification on the meaning of the term, Selection Effect. If this sounds like a bit of a gray area to you as well, here is the answer we…

We are working right now on our next free teleconference call, scheduled for August 9th at 4:00PM EST. We’ll be presenting a merchandising calendar for the last five months of this year, with particular emphasis on the last eight weeks…

During our teleconference call on Wednesday we were talking about how it is becoming harder to maintain a strong ROI with many PPC campaigns. Increased competition is perhaps the major factor in reducing the profitability of campaigns which…

If your company or organization has a large list of email subscribers, you may find yourself struggling to create email and newsletter content that is compelling for each and every reader. Big lists tend to include groups who have varying…

As always, while we prepare for each teleconference call we end up digging deeper and deeper, whatever the topic. In the case of tomorrow’s topic on the relative ROIs of PPC advertising and affiliate marketing, we have been learning a…

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal it is said... “Most people now search for Web sites using a descriptive word or phrase, or else are introduced to a site by a friend or colleague who emails the URL. So, domains don't need to…