Biznology

I once read about a railroad company that found that most accidents involved the caboose, so they decided to leave off the caboose from then on, for safety reasons.
I was reminded of that story when reading Avinash Kaushik’s great post today on the uselessness of the “top exit page” report. I’ve had the same thought myself many times (like whenever someone shows me that report), but I never bothered to write a blog entry about it. Avinash is right on all counts. He says that when you have a very well-structured experience (your customer dropped an item in the cart and fainted dead away before the confirmation page), then you want to use multivariate testing to fix the pages where they exit. But 98% of your visitors exit and fixing most exit pages will just make them exit somewhere else—fixing that page is like leaving off the caboose. If the caboose wasn’t the last car of the train, then another one would be.

Rich Skrenta did some quick calculations based on search referrals from a few large sites—his research shows Google’s real market share might be as high as 70%. Ironically, yesterday was the day that Nielsen/NetRatings clocked in with its numbers, with Google still listed as barely below 50%. What gives?

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I’ve written before about multivariate testing, the best way of optimizing your Web site to drive conversions. I was lucky today to speak with the president of ReallyGreatRate.com, Matt Schaub, who told me his story of how he’s improved his Web marketing through multivariate testing. If you’re not using this technique, read on to find out how it works.

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If you’re interested in Web metrics and you don’t read Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor, you don’t know what you’re missing. Many top bloggers do short posts several times a day, but Avinash prefers longer pieces written less frequently. If you try him out, I think you’ll like his style, too. Sometimes he does interviews with folks in the industry—today’s is with me. So I hope you check out Ten Minutes with Mike Moran. Thanks, Avinash.

So here’s an odd form of Internet marketing. Bloggers have started a game of tag, where they name five things about themselves that few people know and then tag five other bloggers to do the same. I got tagged by Marshall Sponder, so here goes. It feels like a chain letter, but, gee, all the kids are doing it.

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