Date Archive: 2007

Kudos to Hotels.com eschewing bad profits and dropping their nuisance fees.

I had the enjoyable chance to interview Steve Spangler about the importance of the customer experience, about company values, and about diet soda geysers.

No matter what size the online retail outfit, error handling should always be clear, easy, and friendly.

This blue line shows the median lift in comp-site sales, this year’s holiday vs. last year. The downward slope of the red line indicates the holiday lift is eroding.

If you aren’t yet using multivariate testing to increase your site conversion, you should.

“Here’s Comes Another Bubble” video and copyright fracas.

Many online retailers are either heading into or just coming out of a site redesign. Often a redesign means all new URLs. Budget the necessary time and effort to keep all your historic URLs working.

In bidding as in newspaper columns, use caution when using averages to characterize highly skewed or highly dispersed distributions.

If our Thanksgiving week numbers are any indication, it also appears that more and more consumers are skirting the brick-and-mortar crowds on Black Friday in favor of making purchases online.

One big reason blogging endures: words matter. Here are 11 reasons why text rocks and its mastery is key to building an effective site.

McLeod: “If you’re one of these people considering giving up on blogging in exchange for paying more attention to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, or whatever they throw at us mere mortals, bear in mind you are giving up on something rather unique and wonderful.”

Some thoughts on migrating our corporate site to Wordpress, along with some code snippets.

We report on our progress porting our site to WordPress.

When Facebook makes big changes that affect their users, do they test first?

I had the enjoyable opportunity to debate the future of pay-per-click with Steve Rubel, Edelman SVP, A-list blogger, and pay-per-click skeptic. Paul Dunay moderated.

From Catalog Success, an article on using free tools to sleuth your online competitors.

We were pleased to see two of our tips selected by Catalog Success for their list of the 50 best multichannel ideas of 2007.

Today’s Washington Post describes backlash against FaceBook’s Beacon advertising feature.

In November 2007, our agency’s clients spent, in aggregate, 35% more on paid search than in October 2007. The proportion of our clients’ aggregate ad spend going to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft stayed essentially flat from October to November: Google reigns at 79.3% share, Yahoo holds at 16.2%, and Microsoft trails at 4.5%.

This was a new one for me: a job seeker running AdWords against a brand name to try get an interview. Ack!

How did we do compared to everybody else? The perennial question is a hard one to answer. Perhaps these benchmarks will help.

Direct marketing testing is both art and science. Here are three situations where “statistically significant” results might not have business significance.

How do you get started marketing your products via paid search? Here are a few high-level strategies to keep in mind when launching a PPC program from scratch.

Running paid search for a political campaign? Here’s our list of best practices for using PPC advertising.

VAT19 offers a specific video for (almost) every product they sell. This SKU-level-video web presentation will become increasing common in many retail categories.