What does an urchin and website analytics have in common?
No idea.

As (currently) the only Urchin Authorized Consultants in Canada, we’re frequently asked about the difference between Google Analytics and Google Urchin. When people call they seem to think about the relationship as a standard freemium model, with Google Analytics being a limited “demo” and Urchin being the “premium” product.

This is not the case.

Google Analytics (GA) IS the full fledged product, the difference lies in Urchin’s role as an in-house analytics tool with log file analysis. Urchin is a hybrid solution that can use both javascript tagging and server log files, adding richer details to its reporting, and it stores all information on your servers—great for companies who can’t risk allowing information into the hands of outside sources, while GA is an externally hosted solution, withoutlog analysis, but with additional features. One is not necessarily a better version of the other, instead they serve two different roles.

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New improved baitless trap: Lower maintenance!

We recently concluded some interesting A/B/n tests for an online driving school's landing page. I thought I'd share the results, as it's a great example of the distinction between usable design and persuasive design.

We restricted our test to the main content area of the page, shown below:

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The new NFL season just started and it’s time to enjoy the game and cheer on your favorite teams. And for us it is time to take a look at the e-commerce website of The National Football League - http://www.nflshop.com/.

This website had sales of $90M in 2007 according to Internet Retailer and, unlike most of our SEO Mistakes picks, no brick and mortar stores. We can assume that any increase in the website’s traffic would generate significant additional revenue for them.

Search engine traffic is coming to this site from both paid and natural search sources, so let’s take a look at the website’s SEO to find some missed opportunities to improve on-page optimization and bring more traffic/revenue:

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Solutions for the Metrically Challenged

So you’ve finally decided to publish a newsletter or regularly send updates about the latest and greatest deals on your ecommerce site. You’ve got your list built out and your email design is looking fantastic. From here on out it should be a cakewalk, right? Well I hate to break it to you but your work has just begun. For your email campaign to reach it’s true potential you’ll need to be constantly tweaking and improving it. This is definitely not a set and forget project!

For you to get the best ROI out of your mailing you’re going to need to pay special attention to a few important metrics and make constant tweaks till you see those numbers improve.

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Don't know if its IMA and a bunch of different conference occurring right now, energy from recent internet marketing related news, or the planets aligning in perfect symmetry with the alien pyramids on Mars (ok, probably not the latter) but this has been a huge week for SEO and internet marketing related blog posts.

This week we have Google tracking you more than ever, SEO on your phone, Google and social search, audience segmentation models, net neutrality and more…

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It's nice to see our friends at GWO are listening. Just in the past week or two, they've made three notable improvements.

1. Experimenter Notes

The Settings page now includes a text field in which you can add your own annotations. This is very handy for quickly jotting down hypotheses, noting external factors that might affect an ongoing test, or debriefing a completed experiment. It's also an easy way for team members to keep each other apprised as to where a project stands. It's especially handy for those of us who usually have several experiments running at the same time.

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SEO requires a solid foundation

Websites get outdated, need a face lift or are in need of new features every few years. This is a natural progression for companies wanting to give their clients a quality user experience. Where companies get into trouble is that with all of the thought and effort being placed into design and functionality there is too often little thought placed into SEO. Not thinking about how search engine friendly your website is until after it’s been built could cost you plenty of cash in the long run.

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often the most effective action is to pass it along

So following on the heels… or perhaps in the footprints of last month's "Exact Target Social sharing: Augmenting email with social media", I'm going to go over replicating some of the "share this" functionality in Exact Target through alternative sources. This first part is going to be fairly basic, adding your standard set of social sharing buttons into an email, and using them to submit an HTML version of your email.

Things you will need:

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Is it Monday again already? I swear I was writing one of these just last week (astute readers, will note that I wasn't. We didn't have a roundup last week thanks to a holiday and absurdly busy schedule on my part). Time flies when you're having fun. Or when you're under the gun.

This week we have beginners guides for PPC and local web marketing, tracking zero results in GA, and how to judge the value of a link.

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Who gets credit for the Goal

You're getting AdWords traffic. You're sure that some of those visitors are converting. But Google Analytics is not giving your Campaigns the credit they are due. Could Sub-domain tracking be the problem?

All sub-domain tracking problems lead to _setDomainName() and _initData(). _initData()? Just when you thought it was deprecated, dropped, kaput, gone and forgotten !!!

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