I'm shopping for another new bicycle chain. My wife suspects I buy them based on fashion because I get a new one every season (oh no - that's last season's chain - everyone's riding titanium this season). No, sweet girl of mine, it's not the passing seasons per se that dictate a new chain, it's the stress of being propelled up the Santa Cruz Mountains. This causes the chain to stretch, which in turn causes the gears to wear rapidly because the chain spacing no longer lines up with the gear teeth. I change chain every 1-2000 miles of… Continue reading

10 years ago people needed hyperlinks from page to page because finding stuff was so hard. We needed a human being to tell us where other relevant stuff was, via those handy instructions baked right into the content.

Google then exploited these links as a way of determining which page is most relevant, creating the famous PageRank mechanism.

I'm wondering if people use these in-content hyperlinks less these days. After all, relevant stuff is just a search away. With the advent of browser toolbar search boxes, it's even easier for people to search instead of using hyperlinks.

Will content writers continue to link… Continue reading

If you own a website I'll bet some marketing ding-dong already told you about the importance of the mobile web. In fact I'll bet someone beat you over the head with it. Perhaps someone showed you WAP in 2001 and told you it was the wave of the future. This [WAP] is [WAP] going [WAP] to [WAP] change [WAP] everything [DUCK]. Enough with the [WAP]!! It hurts my head. WAP died and nobody mourns it.… Continue reading

My article encouraging people to avoid buying traffic and instead buy intent generated a fair amount of comments and thinking.

My friend Ralph Wilson just posted an interview we did together that I think does an even better job of clarifying my point.…

Those that know me will recall I periodically rant about bone-headed features in software, especially web analytics tools. One of the things that really makes my blood boil is a funnel report. The user/analyst typically adores this report because it seems to focus all attention on the crucial problem of abandonment, ie I have a form on my website and 97% of people fail to fill out the form having arrived there.

Web analytics vendors in turn have designed their funnel reports to be incredibly pretty, and to highlight this abandonment in bright red with arrows showing the countless visitors who reached sight of the goal but jumped over the precipice instead, to be lost in the seas of competing sites like so many ecommerce lemmings. The WA vendors wisely realise that a demo of a funnel report creates a strong desire to purchase the product. All those abandoning visitors, and finally you get to see why!!! Sign me up!!!… Continue reading

Starting a new venture is exciting and risky, and I find myself wondering exactly what it is that attracts me about the process of building a company from scratch. My experience at ClickTracks was simply wonderful, and I had the chance to work with incredibly bright people. Perhaps most of all I enjoyed talking to customers. Anyone buying a web analytics tool is exactly the sort of person I enjoy spending time with: inquisitive, driven, seeking ways to improve. It's delightful to share insight and explain a few of the things I've learned with such a group.  Market Motive is the… Continue reading