My presentation, “Fast + Furious: How to Use Internet Marketing to Launch Your Business” highlighted how internet marketing, specifically paid search advertising, web analytics and website testing, can save startup time and money.  Take a look:

Here a list of the free tools I highlighted at the end of the presentation.  Please feel free to download and share!

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Global Entrepreneurship - My Presentation at Princeton

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

• Check out this new link tool - http://tinyurl.com/4swbmo
• Interesting thread on PPC quality score - http://tinyurl.com/3zhlbj
• Geography as a part of AdWords quality score - http://tinyurl.com/4k2zev
• Someone recommended Mercado for site search today - http://www.mercado.com/
• Prep your PPC campaigns for the holidays - http://tinyurl.com/4xuwvo
• Good video on linking - http://vimeo.com/1762989
• Check out this cool custom sticker creator - http://tinyurl.com/49ka77
• I love this post about thinking bigger - http://tinyurl.com/3jkl6c
• Deloitte has a whole series of free management books/soft sales - http://tinyurl.com/4×8t97
• SurveyGizmo is an alternative to SurveyMonkey and has a free option - http://www.surveygizmo.com/
• Google Chrome has an Incognito mode where “all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window” #wa http://tinyurl.com/5bqzfm
• Commerce360 is hiring a Sr. Relationship Manager - http://tinyurl.com/5tmpd3
• The first review of ClickEquations - http://tinyurl.com/6er738
• Did you know there’s a whole bunch of AdWords training videos online? http://tinyurl.com/d6ffg
• Google takes aim at MyBlogLog with Follower - http://tinyurl.com/6ggl5e
• Top 3 Google links get 79% of traffic says a new post by @TheGrok - http://tinyurl.com/5mvkks
• Wow, Google Chrome is fast. I’m tempted to switch from Firefox - www.google.com/chrome
• Want to improve your PPC performance and analysis? Separate out your brand terms - http://tinyurl.com/63gd26
• Need more B-to-B leads? This guide is now on sale for $200 off - http://tinyurl.com/6bez3q
• What does your website look like to a search engine? - http://www.seo-browser.com/
• Important new quality score changes - http://tinyurl.com/5btzda
• Cool feed analysis tool - http://tinyurl.com/3chk6r. You can use it for blog intelligence too if someone has a # of subscriber chiclet
• Heard at #xchange - Intuit is using Magnify360 to customize site content for search visitors - http://magnify360.com/index.

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A Whole Buncha Links from Twitter

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

Visitors are not anonymous.  Yet, most websites present the same experience to everyone.  When you treat everyone the same you leave conversions, and money, on the table.

Referrers (aka referring sites or referring domains) can often give you hints about who your visitors are and what might help them more.  Your web analytics tool or server logs gather referrer information.  Here’s 6 ideas of how you can use this information to personalize the site experience.

1. New Visitors - When I was at X Change, Cisco noted that they include a site section on their homepage to customize content based on referrers.  Their “New to Cisco?” personalized box for new visitors converts at more than double the average rate!  Recognize newbies with orientation messaging.
2. Competitive Comparison - Let’s pretend you’re Dell.  Someone comes to your product page after visiting a review on CNet or Wired.  This is a great opportunity to piggyback off the tone and content of that article to address criticisms or play up noted features.
3. Coupon Sites - Sites like www.RetailMeNot.com cater to a budget (recession?) conscious crowd.  You probably have sale sections, newsletters with coupons or other bargain shopper friendly options.  Try to capture these shoppers with targeted promotions.
4. YouTube - Video lovers may be more responsive to demos, tips, tutorials or user generated content.  If you’ve got it, try targeting these videos with relevant media.
5. Help Forums - Current customers might be looking for support and prospects could be scoping out reviews.  You might be able to steer them to your officially sanctioned support
6. Press Releases - Press releases are likely to pull in reporters and bloggers.  As you see people visit from known press release distributors and major media outlets, offer them additional news content or point to your press room to keep up the momentum.

Have you used referring information to personalize?  What software do you use?  Which segments are best?  Share your questions and tips in the comments section.

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6 Methods to Personalize Your Site Experience By Referrer

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

I hate boring and long presentations that you can’t use. So, mine is almost entirely pictures with examples of ideas to improve ecommerce websites. My advice is to:

1. Slim Down Your Checkout
2. Love Your Landing Pages
3. Juice Your Shipping and Return Policy
4. Answer Questions with Photos
5. Succeed with Site Search

My bonus “half” recommendation, number 5.5, is to test!

If you can’t make it, no worries, my presentation is below. Feel free to download, share and repurpose (just link back). It has a lot of pictures, so I recommend you look at it in full screen mode (that little icon in the lower right that looks like a screen).

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5.5 Ways to Boost Conversion Rate!

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

Most of the traction in multivariate testing is on landing pages, with the rest evenly split between home pages, conversion/purchase pages and product pages.

I’m not terribly surprised because:

1. People who are testing are more likely to have landing pages, which are generally more advanced than a small webmaster has.  Plus, those people are more likely driving acquisition channels to these pages, where conversion makes a big difference in profitability.
2. Testing, like analytics, is best used first where you can follow the money.  Campaign landing pages are often the leakiest part of the bucket.

69% of people think testing is worth it and 22% can’t live without it, which is pretty compelling data.  Of course, you need to translate the value into dollars and cents to your boss…

There’s a good graph in there with ideas of things to test, so download the whitepaper.

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Which Pages Are People Testing?

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

You can get live updates from the ClickEquations twitter account. I may have a few on my twitter account as well.

Also, check out the X Change tweme, marked as #xchange.

Joining me at the conference are:

• Craig Danuloff, ClickEquations
• Jacques Warren, WAO Analytics
• Eric Peterson, Web Analytics Demystified
• Jim Sterne, eMetrics
• Gary Angel, SEMPhonic
• June Dershewitz, SEMPhonic
• Marshall Sponder, WebMetricsGuru
• Judah Phillips, Reed Business
• Bob Page, Yahoo!
• Aaron Gray, WebTrends
• Bill Gassman, Gartner Analyst

Those are just a few of the people at the conference. Leave a comment if you’re there and I missed you.

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Live Web Analytics News from X Change

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

Track iPhone visitors to your site in Google Analytics.

Ever since Apple released the iPhone, mobile internet browsing has never been the same. With the release of the 3G version, which sold over 1 million units in 3 days, it’s only going to grow faster.

I was a total geek and took off half a day just to buy iPhone 3G the day it came out. 2 stores and 4 hours later, I got it and I’ve been obsessed since. That got me thinking–how many people visit my blog on an iPhone?

How Many iPhone Visitors Do You Have?

Answering this question delves into an infrequently used area of analytics–technographics. Technographics are the nitty-gritty about your visitors:

• What kind of browsers do they use?
• What is their screen resolution?
• What operating systems do they use?

It’s actually a great source of information for your designers and developers. They can make more informed design and code decisions.

To find out how many visits you had from iPhone geeks, you need to look at the operating systems.

1. Open Google Analytics, pick the profile you want and time period
2. Click on “Visitors” in the left nav
3. Choose “Browser Setting”
4. Click “Operating Systems”

You’ll then get a report like this:

Visitors -> Browser Setting -> Operating System

Voila, now you know how many iPhone visits you got. But, what did those people do?

Track iPhone Visits to Your Site with Google Analytics

One of the biggest (and most annoying) issues with Google Analytics is that you can’t easily slice all* the data by different segments of your audience–paid search visitors, email campaign respondents, iPhone visits, etc. Instead, you have to setup a separate profile.

Setting up your iPhone profile in GA takes 3 steps:

1. Add Website Profile and Setup Your Basic Administrative Options
2. Copy Your Goals
3. Setup Filters to Capture only iPhone Visits

1. Add Website Profile and Setup Your Basic Administrative Options

• First, click “Add Website Profiles” under the Website Profiles box (to the left of User Manager)
• Click, “
  Add a Profile for an existing domain”
• Pick your domain and give the profile a name like “iPhone Visits”. Hit finish.

Okay, now you have to setup the usual administrative options like any profile. Click the “Edit” link in the Website Profiles box. Fill out the following fields:

1. Profile Name - Give the profile a descriptive name, like “iPhone Visitors” (clever, no?)
2. Website URL - Make sure this matches your other profile and use the http://
3. Default Page - When you type in your domain, where does it send you? If it goes to a page like “index.html” enter it here. If you don’t, then Google Analytics will report it as a different page than the homepage in your Top Content and Top Content by Title reports.
4. Exclude URL Query Parameters - If you’re site uses parameters to distinguish sessions or the like, you can enter them here and they’ll be stripped from reports.
5. E-commerce Website - If you’re an online retailer, select “Yes” and enter the requested data.
6. Site Search - Decide if you want to track your site search (I recommend you do).

Save your changes!

2. Copy Your Goals

Phew, that’s all done. Now you just have to make sure your goals are lined up so you can track iPhone visitors all the way through conversion.

On the Profile Settings page, pick one of your 4 goals (G1 - G4). Click “Edit” in the settings column. You’re now on the goal settings page, which looks like this:

All you need to do is copy all of the settings from the main profile for your website. Make sure you enter everything the same, including all of the steps in the funnel (if applicable).

Save all of your goals.

3. Setup Filters to Capture only iPhone Visits

Almost there! Now we have to setup a filter. Being a non-coder, I was somewhat intimidated by filters at first, but this one is pretty easy.

Go back to the Profile Settings page. In the Filters Applied to Profile box, click “Add Filter” on the top right. First, add any existing filters you’ve applied to your main profile (such as excluding traffic from your office).

Now, let’s create an iPhone specific filter.

1. Select the radio button marked “Add new Filter for Profile”
2. Filter Name - Name it something that’s easy to identify
3. Filter Type - Choose “Custom” form the drop-down
4. Select the “Include” radio button
5. Filter Field - Select “Visitor Operating System Platform”
6. Filter Pattern - Type “iPhone” just like that without quotes
7. Case Sensitive - No

It should look like this:

Make sure you save the changes.

Wrapping Up

Now you just have to wait a bit for it to populate data, which can take from an hour to a day. If you have an iPhone, now’s a good time to do a test visit to your site, so you’ll have some data in there (if you don’t, leave a link in the comments section and I’ll visit).

Now all you have to do is select the iPhone profile when you login. All of the data you see in that profile–visits, conversion rates, top content–is just for iPhone visitors. Pretty nifty, huh?

PS: If you want to improve how your Wordpress blog appears on iPhones, try this plugin.

*Yes, you can get some data like visits, bounce rate and conversion. However, you can’t get top content, cart/form abandonment, etc.

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Track iPhone Visitors to Your Site in Google Analytics

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

On September 6th and 7th, Temple University is hosting a join Search Camp Philly and Pod Camp Philly conference. There is a huge list of great speakers on the agenda.

In fact, I’ll be speaking on Sunday the 7th at 3:00 - 3:45. My session is titled Conversion 101.

Conversion 101: You’ve gotten the visitors to your site, now what?! They’re going to buy right? Not necessarily, in most cases they click away or hit the back button. This session is designed to go over some basic conversion strategies for websites, to increase conversion rates.

Come to my session, Conversion 101 on Sunday, 9/7 at 3:00 - 3:45. It’s at Temple University in the Tuttleman Learning Center.

The best news? The conference is only $21! Registration helps defray the facility costs and any extra money will be donated to charity. Seats are limited, so register today!

You’ll definitely get a tip in my session that earns you your registration money back and then some.

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Coming Soon: Search Camp Philly!

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide

On this week's very special episode of Digital Alex, Alex optimizes your landing page.. with his mind!

I’m out and about on the web. Thanks to Li, Rich and Corry for the opportunity to be a very special guest on their blogs. It’s like an after school special…

Jim Sterne!

I interviewed Jim “The Godfather” Sterne about his upcoming session “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World” at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. I know, I know, 2.0 is a really awfully moniker, but Jim’s got a lot of great thoughts, especially about social media measurement and video analytics, so read up.

The Secret to a Web Analytics Career: Stop Learning Web Analytics

IQ Workforce recruiter Corry Prohens (who is looking for Philly web analytics talent) let me write up a storm on his blog Web Analytics Rock Stars. My topic du jour? Web analytics career advancement.

In my guest post “The Secret to a Web Analytics Career: Stop Learning Web Analytics” I advocate that people who analyze numbers should spend more time learning about the channels their measuring. Radical concept, right? Learn more web analytics career secrets right here.

I have Corry’s contact info if you need a web analytics job in Philly, alex @ alexlcohen . com

Wait, Am I a Web Analytics Guru?

Definitely not. Rich Page kindly interviewed me for his Web Analytics Guru series. I am so not a guru. I’m just a guy with some opinions and a blog. But, I do love to talk and write, so he found my weak spot.

Check out the interview for my thoughts on the Micro-Hoo debacle, the future of web analytics and learn what Avinash told me to do. Check it out right here!

Still reading? I like to guest post or write for lots of sites. If you have a website or newsletter with substantial readership and want some content, drop me a line alex @ alexlcohen . com

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A Very Special Post: Jim Sterne, Career Advancement and Guruocity?

• If you're in B-to-B and need more leads, try the B-to-B Demand Generation Summit
• Need to know the latest and greatest about search engine marketing? Check out the 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide