Today’s UseIt newsletter by Jakob Nielsen puts the usability of search engines among the leading factors of web usability:
“Search engines are the archetypical embodiment of the mastery ideology. They place users firmly in the driver’s seat and take them where they want to go. You can get anywhere on the Web using a subservient interface [...]
NetImperative, the British e-marketing site, looks at the changes of Blogger, the blog subsidiary of Google and concludes that “Googles contextual ads may not be as useful as its search advertising, if the latest moves by the search giant are anything to go by.”
NetImperative refers to the recent move by Blogger to remove Google’s contextual [...]
Not to be taken as the final word on a new and quickly changing dimension of web marketing, yet informative enough to address the most important questions about behavioral web targeting as known and practiced today, a new report published by eMarketer and titled “What Comes Before Search?” looks at how it works, what is [...]
Direct Marketing News published an article about a survey conducted by The Kelsey Group among 300 small businesses whose customers and suppliers are mostly within 50 miles to gauge their use of the Internet. Two years after a previous such survey when just 35 percent of the small businesses said that the Web was important, [...]
The quarterly trend report on e-commerce published by DoubleClick offers interesting insight into the mind of the e-tail users:
Visitors are looking at more pages per session with an increase of 12%
(9.8 pages in Q2 03 vs. 11.0 in Q2 04), however session length remained
relatively flat (4.78 minutes in Q2 03 vs. 4.82 in Q2 04).
Consumers [...]
When earlier this year The Kelsey Group released the results of a survey on the interest of big-budget marketers in search engine marketing, the main focus was on the growth opportunity: 24% of big-budget marketers indicated that they would be interested in search engine marketing in 2004, twice as many as in 2003.
Now a new [...]
Jim Novo, database marketing and web analytics expert, writes in his “Drilling Down” book about prospective customers who experience friction which prevents them from becoming customers. In the case of a website experience, Jim writes:
“An easy way to measure this want-to-be-customer friction is to look at the visitor conversion rate on your web site. Navigational [...]
A website usually has multiple groups of users whose information needs would depend on how close they are in their progression to the ultimate goal, whether that is making an online purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
Andrew Chak, author of “Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites”, describes four main categories of users:
Browsers
Evaluators
Transactors
Customers
Each one of [...]
I was just invited by Eric T. Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified, to join the Web Analytics discussion group. It is a group of 200 web analytics professionals, including Eric himself, Jim Sterne of eMetrics, John Marshal of ClickTracks, and the list goes on and on. A lot of knowledge is shared and I [...]
A new phone survey conducted by the Pew Internet Project confirms that the search engines are as popular and as important to online users as ever. The summary of the survey complemented by data released by comScore and published on August 12, 2004, indicates that:
More than 107 million Americans — around 84% of Internet users [...]