Getting my hands dirty
I have been at Connected for over 16 months. Throughout this time I have heard the term Big.TOE mentioned several times and never understood it. When I first got here I didn’t understand anything, and when I would request explanations on this interestingly named… thing, I would be told it means “Business Intelligence Group Theory [...]
Google Analytics is not for marketers
Back in 2005 Google acquired a great little analytics company, Urchin and shortly afterwards shook up the web analysis world by offering the previously chargeable product for free. It’s progress over the last 5 years has been one of Google’s great success stories and around half of the respectable commercial sites in the world use [...]
First time, last time, every-time
Measuring how visitors come to your site and convert is a critical part of understanding the factors that drive success. Traditional methods (such as Google Analytics) uses last touch or last visit to measure how a conversion took place but this is only part of the story. It is possible to hack most of the [...]
Look at me
Testing the efficacy of web-forms and landing pages is so ingrained in what we do that frequently we overlook old learnings when new projects along. Recently we were contracted to build a specific landing page/micro-site campaign for a client and the agency usefully provided a number of images (of people) to be included on the [...]
Farming in a virtual future
Image via Wikipedia China is seeing the rise of online “Gold Farming” This is the practice of hiring a group of mainly poor kids to ply their way through the myriad of online games (Everquake, World of Warcraft et al) collecting things of value to other gamers such as gold, potions, weapons etc. These items [...]
5 tips for producing killer landing pages
How many times have I seen posts titled along these lines in the last few months? Too bloody many! All of them purport to offer the answer to the holy grail of advertising landing page design. Most of the advice is re-regurgitated, old, unproven and bloody obvious if you have more than an ounce of [...]
Client-side analytics. Problem No: 221
As highlighted in this e-Consultancy post, Google is considering letting web-site visitors opt-out of their free Google Analytics application. On the face of it, Google seems to being a “good boy” and trying to re-acquire it’s much vaunted “do no evil” motto. However, for a good number of years a great deal of agencies, traffic [...]
Using journey management as a change tool
Early adopters of visitor journey management have very successfully applied it in a commercial context where organisations have a defined sales cycle and use the methodology to serve the most appropriate message, content and actions to visitors at given stages of the cycle. There are, however, some exciting ideas of how journey management can be used in less commercially-minded organisations or for internal processes…
Evolution of VITES™
Now on it’s 3rd major release (v2.4), VITES™ started in 2001 as a simple end-to-end visitor tracking system, built when a client was trying to understand where their online marketing spend was going. The original system was just called End-to-End Tracker and worked by stamping the visitors PC with a unique code and their source when they arrived at the site for the first time, and then spewing this information out whenever the visitor sent information to the client.
The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment….
Next Generation Web Platform
We are all different. No two groups of people have the same aims, thinking, attention span, decision process, fears or barriers to interaction. On-the-ball organisations are starting to realise a new approach and methodology is required in order to better manage visitors and to out-think their competitors…
