often the most effective action is to pass it along

Last week we talked about our "tweet this email" button, and I mentioned ExactTarget and their social forward option. This week I played around with it a bit, and it is quite easy to set up, so today I'm going to go over the ins and outs of social forward and give some tips on implementing them into your email.

I should note that this is for Exact Target only, so if you're not using ET you may want to skip it and wait for my next post on how to do most of this without the ET social forward features (warning, it will take much more work).

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Today is BC day! BC's Civic Holiday. That means we're not in the office, folks, but here's a roundup anyhow:

This week we have more Twitter statistics, the role of marketing on the internet, Slate on Facebook design, and Chris Brown viral videos.

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To help get insight into how the chat application is contributing to the bottom line, we recently implemented the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) for one of our clients that uses BoldChat.

After doing a quick bit of research, we found that BoldChat already had a document about this on their site, available here

This gave us a good start, but after reviewing their recommendations there are some key points related to cross-domain tracking that they missed in their instructions. This will result in a variety of problems including:

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Great oaks from little acorns grow

I recently posted on the importance of monetizing the results of GWO experiments. In that example, we increased conversions by 122%. So it wasn't terribly surprising that the annualized revenue lift was estimated in the millions.

In today's example, our experiment showed what appear on the surface to be more middling results: a 10.3% lift. Initially, we were somewhat disappointed with this barely-into-double-digits improvement.

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In the past few weeks, two of our clients have approached us for help integrating their third-party live chat programs into their Google Analytics reports. One client is using BoldChat, the other LivePerson. By reporting on 'chatters', our clients can segment visitors into those who used the chat, and those who didn't. Then, they can compare things like:

• goal conversion rates
• funnel abandonments
• e-commerce reports

Both chat programs provide GA integration out-of-the-box so one would think the integration should be simple. However, after diving into the integration process, we found out both do not implement cross-domain tracking correctly. Because of this, a host of issues are introduced including:

• each visitor who opens the chat window gets counted as a new visitor, resulting in bloated visitor/visits reports
• referral information does not get related to that chat
• chat sessions are not related back to the site visit, thus losing the ability to segment visitors into 'chatters' and 'non-chatters'

Over the next week, we'll be releasing blog posts on how to properly integrate these chat programs into your Google Analytics reports.

First up, BoldChat in "What are the 'chatters' doing on my site?"

Frys.com is the website of Fry's Electronics Inc. They sell electronics, computer hardware, software, home appliances and other items through 34 stores located in nine states. According Wikipedia the company posted sales of $2.35 billion in 2007. For the same period of time website www.frys.com generated about $48.4 million in sales (about 2.06% of total sales). I think this percentage is very low. Let's take a look at the website to find out possible SEO related reasons as to why.

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A couple of months ago you may have noticed—assuming you have signed up for our newsletter—that a "tweet this" button appeared in our email header. Clicking the button results in your browser taking you to Twitter, and auto-filling the message [email title] --The VKI Studios newsletter: http://ow.ly/xxxx @vkistudios

We implemented this two months ago with a rather tedious work around. Fortunately not two weeks after our first send with this new "tweet this" button Exact Target announced social forwarding for email. However, ET doesn't have a twitter option! Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Linkedin and Sharethis, but no Twitter. So for those of you wanting a tweet this button, here is how I went about making one:

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another Monday eh?

Vancouver just got over the apocalypse. Red skies with lightning darting across like some kind of chthonic force was tearing from the earth and rising into the air. Oh, also there were fireworks or something.

This week we have more PNG optimization, telling stories with charts, landing page optimization, and lots of rants.

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I recently booked a flight on Hotwire.com. Overall, the process was impressively user friendly. But there was one thing that kind of irked me: the way they handled their email opt in.

It started when I was entering my contact information. Upon landing on this page, the box beside "Yes! I want to hear about great deals..." was pre-checked, as shown below:

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Previously we reviewed websites of different merchant type companies. Some of them have a chain of retail stores or use catalogs to promote products. Basically, these companies use websites as support tools, working with brick and mortar stores. Usually such websites generate just branded organic traffic in addition to bookmarked/typed-in visitors. There were lots of problems to be found...

This week let's change it around a bit and take a look at company that uses website as a main source of traffic and revenue.

Calendars.com sells all types of calendars and related accessories. According to Internet Retailer this company had more than $18 million in sales in 2007. The company's merchant type is web only. We could assume that their SEO should be way better than companies that focus on off-line channels (retail stores, catalogs, etc).

Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong: this website has many SEO related problems. Some of them are listed below.

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