Michael Whitaker's web analytics blog

No hiding on the Internet

Slightly off topic, but I couldn't help being affected by Michael Arrington's riff on Sprint: "Sprint Sucks And Their New Website Is Stupid". The Techcrunch blog has hundreds of thousands of readers and Michael has a huge influence in and around Silicon Valley. Talk about the power a single person can have...How much money will Sprint lose as a result of this blog post?

Just goes to show that you cannot hide anymore on the Internet with "smart" marketing or dodgy fine print. You either have a good product and customer service, or you don't. With the power of blogging, forums, review engines and social networking, the "truth" will come out.

Welcome to....

On the Internet ideas are quickly spread and adopted. Somebody comes up with something new and then others follow, and whatever that "something new" was becomes part of conventional wisdom, rarely to be challenged again.

For instance, why would you nowadays write something like "Welcome to my online store" or "Welcome to the customer service department"? To write "Welcome to..." seems so outdated and is just irrelevant to site visitors. And of course it might be taking the place of another much more relevant keyword. I chalk this down to conventional wisdom, i.e. that this sort of writing goes unchallenged.

"Welcome to..." also implies the notion of "site" vs "page". It's about pages, folks, not sites. The major search engines index pages not sites. Many visitors may only visit one page on your site, and leave if they don't like what they see; they don't care about your site, just whether this one page answers their questions or not.

Google has about 32,900 Yahoo! Store pages indexed with "Welcome to" in it.

Pimp my site...

Had the pleasure of seeing Rob Snell in action at SES last week. Apparently Rob was pulled in at the last moment to participate in the "Pimp my site" session as the site being pimped out was a Yahoo! Store. He looked very comfortable in this role, despite (or perhaps because of!) his attire...Bottom line is that he did a great job plugging the Yahoo! Store platform to a big audience.






Shirley and Danny Sullivan next to Rob.

Cheers,
Michael

Web Analytics E-Book Download - Free From WebSideStory

I was going to comment on a free e-book you get from Web Side Story, but I got stuck on the landing page because it looks like search engine spam to me. Take a look at this link:

Web Analytics E-Book Download - Free From WebSideStory.

Notice the gray footer text? Apart from being hardly legible it contains 50 links, which have been disguised as not being links with the use of CSS. Furthermore, some of those links are wrapped inside H1 and H2 tags, again using CSS to change the appearance. Another give-away is that the whole footer is inside a <div id="SEO"> tag. So the person who put up this page is pretty much saying that this footer was written for search engines, and not for actual readers.

If this is acceptable I will gladly stand corrected...

Free Google Analytics for your Yahoo Store

Now there is absolutely no reason not to do web traffic analysis with the launch of the free Google Analytics service. Note that you don't have to be an Adwords customers to use the service. Even better for Yahoo Store merchants, the tracking code can be installed in a matter of minutes. After you sign up for the service you will see some very simple Javascript code. Copy and paste this code into the Head Tags variable in the Variables page of the Store Editor. The tracking code will automatically be put on all pages. Finally, check back in a day or so in your Google Analytics account for data to start coming in.

It seems that you can also do conversion tracking for your Google Adwords campaigns. I have also read that you will soon be able to do Yahoo Search Marketing (a.k.a Overture) tracking.

E-commerce ideas for the holiday season

37signals.com has put up a list of suggestions to get your Yahoo Store ready for the holiday online shopping season. Although most of the examples refer to big-budget national retailers, it should be possible to implement many of those techniques without too much technical skill. Of course you still have to find the time to take a look at your Yahoo Store and find ways to improve it.

http://www.37signals.com/holiday/index.html

Seeing what other Yahoo Stores are up to

Marketing Sherpa has a case study about Yahoo Store merchant ylighting.com. In particular, check out their first checkout page; I like their use of trust-building policies and logos.