Marketing Tool Review: Crazy Egg

When I first started blogging I came across an analytics tool called Crazy Egg. I saw that it was free and decided to take it on a test drive. It has been almost 2 months now and I have to say that its a pretty neat tool and has some cool features - however because of its simplicity I would not use it as my lone solution for analytics.

Crazy Egg is marketed primarily as a testing tool. This can be misleading for those looking for a real testing solution ala Offermatica or Website Optimizer (Google's free tool). If you are looking for a way to do complex multivariate splits do not turn here - it does not handle content serving.

What Crazy Egg does allow you to do is to set up simple tests within the application where a specified number of visitors are tracked per page. Once that number of visitors is reached the test completes and stats are recorded for the test. The next step is to make a change to the page and run another test - typically with the same visitor count. This is supposed to provide insight as to what is working and what you may wish to change.

So if you want to conduct some simple(and manual) tests this tool will work fine.

Crazy Eggs biggest asset is that it is simple to follow for those who do better understanding visually (I am one of them). Crazy Egg has some unique features... the one that I found to be the most interesting is the heat map. It tracks where in a web page user clicks are being recorded and visually displays the results over the web page itself. This is rather interesting data and could be used to better understand your visitor behavior.

The biggest drawback for me is that you cannot use this tool with a true testing application. If you are using Google Website Optimizer doing concurrent split/multivariate tests then Crazy Egg is not useful. Crazy Egg does its tracking at the page level which gets muddy because it shares split level traffic and inconsistent page elements.

But I still like to use Crazy Egg in addition to other testing and analytics tools because of some of its unique features. And if you are new and interested in web page testing then this tool is a great place to start... it is both easy to implement and simple to understand.

Grade: B

Have your own thoughts or experiences with Crazy Egg? Share them!

Mr. Marketing - Add him to your calendar

Sometimes its the simplest of posts that inspire me to write. This post from Duct Tape Marketing is a great example...

"Many small business owners could benefit from using a marketing calendar as their primary marketing planning tool. The idea is to keep doing something related to marketing, according to plan, month in and month out."

This is simple but extremely important advice - particularly for small businesses who have little to no marketing department. A common mistake made by small businesses is to overcompensate for a lack of marketing strategy by throwing money at something new and seeing if if it sticks. Instead - put that money into a long term approach and make marketing an investment. Start building sound marketing strategies now (no matter how small). You will have a much better chance for success than chasing the next big thing.

It is important to have regularly scheduled meetings with Mr. Marketing - he is an important client that can bring in alot of revenue for your company...add him to your calendar!

10 Best Analytics Blogs

Here they are from Avinash.

Normally I would make a crack when someone creates a top ten list where they put themselves at the #1 spot...but hey, the guy is an analytics guru!

# 1: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
# 2: Web Metrics Guru by Marshall Sponder
# 3: Google Analytics Blog by Jeff Gills
# 4: Web Analytics World by Manoj Jasra
# 5: Eric T. Peterson’s Analytics Weblog by Eric Peterson
# 6: Increasing your website’s conversion rate by Robbin Steif
# 7: Unofficial Google Analytics Blog by Michael Harrison
# 8: Lies, Damned Lies… by Ian Thomas
# 9: WebAnalytics.be Blog by Aurélie Pols
# 10: Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising by Anil Batra

Have fun!

Catching your competition with their pants down

Imagine if you knew when a major competitor came to your site and what pages they were spending all of their time on? Wouldn't it be great if you could catch the bastards spying on you?

I read a great post from the WebAnalytics.be blog that did a simple walk-through on how to do some pretty cool competitive analysis using Google Analytics.

This is a great idea if you are worried that you might have competition lurking in the weeds. Once you know a competitor (or multiple competitors) are eyeballing a particular product - you can begin asking yourself why. You may find that you can turn the insight into a competitive advantage...

Who doesnt like catching the competition with their pants down?

Targeted bigotry from adsense?

I was shocked when I went to my blog tonight and saw this adsense ad combo on my top banner...



I clicked the link to see what nonsense was being linked to from my site and I was taken to an online quiz to assess your gayness or stupidity.

I have to say that I was personally offended by the ad appearing on my website especially the two of them together which implies that being gay is indeed stupid. While I do not plan to bring my personal politics into this blog I will state for the record that I am adamantly opposed to stereotypes and bigotry of all kinds and apologize to anyone who took offense as I did.

I will be notifying Google to see what they have to say about this kind of "targeted messaging" appearing on a small business marketing blog ...

(If you have any advice on how to protect my site from this crap I would appreciate your comments.)

Does Google have a bias against small business?

If you arent new to search optimization then you know all about the fear that search engine companies instill in marketers. The dreaded banning from Google or Yahoo because they caught you using "black hat" methods to get your page top listings.

We have all been warned against hiding text with background colors, spamming alt tags, using hidden css, multiple re-directs, link farms, cloaking, ect. These methods are unethical and have no place in fair competition for search traffic. You should be able to build a great website using white hat methods and compete on a level playing field with the big guys.

But I have found that this is not always true.

I had a client that was aggressive in their pursuit of SEO and I was actively engaged in competitive analysis for over a year against the companies top fifteen competitors. My client was considered an SMB and many of its competitors were large business or enterprise. These were also the search placement kings of our space.

I spent alot of time researching those who ranked higher than my client and noticed a peculiar phenomenon - a couple of them were blatantly using many of the black hat methods that I mentioned above.

And here were some of the big dogs doing it and getting away with it!

So I decided to do what anyone who is playing hardball does - I brought it to the attention of Google (or tattled on them, however you want to look at it).

But after multiple emails reporting the abuse I received no response. It has been over 2 years now and they still rank supreme.

Now I understand that these large enterprise companies have more inbound links, have brand recognition, tons more traffic, and probably deserve to place higher for many legitimate reasons. But the fact that they engage in black hat SEO was not enough to get them banned from the search engines - and that is a double standard.

The question was asked at the Search Engine Strategies Conference a couple years ago to the Google and Yahoo speakers - and they politely declined to comment on "specific algorithm questions". I think that the simple answer is one of self interest - the removal of these companies from their listings would reduce the search engine's relevance which trumps everything the company might be doing that is unethical.

But you the small business owner - do not qualify.

Simple tool to improve your SEO

There are alot of tools out there to help you with SEO. Some of the best tools are extensions for Firefox. You can see some of them here. They are a must have in any optimizers arsenal.

But a cool SEO tool I have used previously is SEO Doc by Instant Position.

This is a great little tool especially if you are new to search optimization and need some guidance when getting started in SEO. It evaluates everything for you based on what keywords you want to target - and lets you know in simple terms how well you score on individual areas of search optimization (meta, title tags, keyword frequency, inbound link popularity, body content, ect.)

I have used SEO Doc to do search optimization for clients and had great results. It helped me target the keyword phrases that I wanted to use for my most important pages and proved extremely helpful in helping me get them to the top of the search listings in all of the major search engines.

But that doesnt mean that I used it once and then sat back and waited for the results to come in. I still had to research and tweak my keyword content even after getting optimized in SEO Doc. This is true of any SEO tool, even the more costly tools like Web Position. Search optimization is an ongoing process - but very worthwhile once you are successful. SEO Doc is great tool to propel you in the right direction if you arent sure how to get started.

A members costs very little at $80 a year and you can get a feel for how it works by testing out the simplified free version. You can also sign up for a free one day trial if you want to see how the full version works - which I definitely suggest. By doing so you will gain access to a plethora of other online marketing tools in addition to SEO Doc.

Take a test drive and let me know your thoughts!

Quit making me wait!

I was reading an article over at Grok that reminded me that in one of my earlier articles I said that I was going to go explain my feelings about flash...

Don't mistake me when I say that I don't hate all things flash...I believe that there is a time and place for such indulgence. But what absolutely drives me nuts is when it gets in the way of me doing what I came to do in the first place. If I was intending to play an flash game or sit through an online demonstration it would be a different story. But thats rarely what I go online to do.

What ultimately pisses me off the most are loading sequences. I hate them. It reminds me of when I was 5 years old and my dad would grab me by the back of my shirt in mid stride to keep me from wandering off. I hated that feeling of not being able to get to where I wanted to go and being brought to an abrupt stop...every time I get to one of these loading sequences it feel that tug on the back of my shirt.

And those sequences are everywhere. Sometimes I get to a site and five things begin loading...and firing off individually when they are finished loading. Then I have five areas all animating and screaming at me for attention...argh! I just wanted to order a sub!

There are a multitude of reasons to not use flash from a technical standpoint of which I wont really bore you with all of them here - but I am inclined mention a few...

The largest reason are search engines. If you trap your content in flash don't expect them to index it...flash is a black hole when it comes to searchable content. But even if they ultimately figure out a way around search issues I still don't see it taking over the web. Tracking visitor behavior is still wishy washy not to mention that people are just much more knowledgeable (and therefore comfortable) with markup than flash. HTML is also free - Adobe Flash is $700.

Another issue for me is the tendancy for designers to go way overboard with animation. This degrades usability the more of it there is. If I were to give the flash website designer some advice - it would be to make their websites like regular HTML websites. Sound silly? Well, maybe making a website entirely in flash is just that. The truth is that people are used to the web behaving and functioning in a certain way- they expect immediate gratification. I dont care how pretty the transition from one page to the next is - show me the damn page already!

Thats not to say that flash sites arent beautiful. And there is alot more free reign with design when it comes to flash - you arent held up by browser variances or the limitations of markup. For certain instances flash makes complete sense to use as a delivery method - such as movie or gaming sites. (But even then I could get easily annoyed...)

Understand that I'm not speaking as a hater. I know flash well and have been using it for years and continue to develop with it...but it is increasingly rare, and when I do its sparingly. It has its place.

All I can do is plead with the flash junkies out there to quit endulging themselves and consider their audience before succumbing to the temptation to animate...

Because no one wants you grabbing on the back of their shirt!

Smart approach to dashboards

I have another post that has inspired me so I want to be sure to share it. Its a great article about how to approach dashboards. It's a great follow up to one of my previous posts.

What is addressed very eloquently is a 5 step approach to creating dashboards that are actionable.

1. Benchmark & Segment
2. Isolate Your Critical Few Metrics
3. Don’t Stop at Metrics—Include Insights
4. The Power of a Single Page
5. Churn (and stay relevant)

You can read the full article at Occam's Razor here.

Throwing in the towel on PPC

I have seen a growing number of businesses drastically cutting or eliminating their search engine spending. This is mostly due to low conversion rates and the rising cost of keyword phrases...so marketers are looking into alternative ways to spend their advertising budgets.

This is ridiculous to me.

You cant blame anyone for a lack of conversion - this responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of the marketer. A poorly converting site will always be a poorly converting site.

I have heard the argument made about lead quality from Google going down as a retort. This is factually wrong since Google is spending all of its time making the results even more relevant. To single out Google or any search engine as becoming poor in lead quality is a cop out - the searchers habits didn't change overnight...it is more likely that the competition is heating up and why keyword phrases are getting more expensive.

Unfortunately alot of marketers have grown to view Google as a cash cow, and hold it to a different standard. The fact remains that Google provides a huge amount of traffic and for anyone to ignore it as a viable marketing channel is looking for the next cash cow instead of putting sound marketing practices into place.

What if you treated all marketing tactics that way? You would soon quit marketing all together.

The smart marketer will always be looking into ways to improve the channel. They will test combinations of ads, landing page layouts, keywords, messaging, offers, and audience segments. They will always be looking for ways to increase response while reducing the bottom line.

So if you find that you are contemplating getting out of search marketing - you might want to think twice about throwing in the towel. There are over a hundred million searches performed every day...do you want to give them all to your competition?

Great article from B2B Magazine Online

There was a great article posted by B2B that does an outstanding job of discussing Web 2.0 and I wanted to share it here. If you have time check it out - its a very good article.

Happy Marketing!

Is All Email Marketing Spam?

This guy seems to think so...

My first reaction was to get defensive and debunk everything he said - I come from an email marketing background so we're a little edgy about being called spammers. But I realized that this guys opinion is really just like alot of people's opinion of email marketing - he believes that everything he receives is junk.

So the second half of his rant makes sense about building trust economies and speaking to customers as individuals. Email as come a long way - but alot companies are still catching up with using email correctly. For a smart marketer this is the opportunity.

Unfortunately the comment that all email is spam is just not true. If you do email correctly and build out your opt in email customer database you should have no problem segmenting your audience and providing extremely relevant information to them. Email is just another way for a company to connect with its customer...its how you talk to them thats important.

He speaks about social networks as the future of online marketing, but when I sign up for Myspace the first friend I have is some jackass I never met before who founded the company - not to mention the daily social network spam from random bands, porn sites, and teenagers trying to build their friend empire online.

I agree however, that if approached correctly social media can be a great medium to market to individuals. Again, its just another channel to facilitate communication and its how you talk to each other that is important. You would apply that logic to every customer interaction whether it be in the store, on the phone, through email, or online.

I guess since this guy is in the search marketing business he has no vested interest in promoting email. The unfortunate thing is that this guy is a marketer and should know better than to spread misinformation... it does a disservice to his credibility and his company.

The plain truth is that email marketing works - otherwise companies wouldn't do it.

Landing Pages That Work

I have created a lot of landing pages since I joined the internet marketing community. I was trying to keep track for awhile and eventually gave up - my last count was somewhere around 5 hundred individual landing pages that I designed, maintained, and tested. ..all for various employers, companies, and clients.

The reason that these pages were so important was because they were the gateway from all of our internet marketing efforts. If you clicked on a banner, search listing, affiliate link, press release, or anything else we used for online promotion - you were taken to a unique landing page. We even tracked print response by driving activity online. There was no campaign we ran that did not have its own landing page to test and measure its success.

So at this point I can say that I am somewhat knowledgeable about landing pages. Lets have some fun and check out two LED sign manufacturers that use pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic.

Here were the top two listings...

LED Signs by BigBrite
Free Shipping, Low Price Guarantee
Order Signs Online or Call
BigBrite.com

Watchfire Digital Outdoor
LED billboards designed and
manufactured to last. Free paper.
www.WatchfireDigitalOutdoor.com

(I removed the google tracking so it wont charge them if you click)

There are obvious differences. Lets start with BigBrite.

The first problem is that BigBrite pushes everyone to the homepage. While there are instances where this may be suitable in this one it is not. None of the information from the ad is reinforced on the homepage where there is no coherent message other than to BUY NOW!

If you aren't ready to purchase - then what? I guess you can aimlessly navigate around the site to find what you are looking for but my guess is that you would most likely leave before you found it.

Lets contrast that with Watchfire.

This is a landing page that reinforces the message from the ad - encouraging those visitors to sign up for the white paper. They aren't trying to sell you a sign right away - instead they want to help you inform yourself on making the decision - and open the line of communication. They realize that you aren't going to pick up the phone right now and tell them to "Sign me up! And while your at it heres my credit card info!" Their interest is to persuade you over time to make the purchase. (BTW, these signs are NOT cheap)

Watchfire also minimizes noise on the landing page by removing all navigation and links. While they do not intend for you to buy today they still need to capture some return from your visit so they are not taking any chances. You can only take the action they intend. This is a fair trade since they are not bombarding you with anything you didn't already expect from the ad.

When thinking about landing pages keep in mind that most of the traffic coming to your site are first-time visitors, all coming at different stages of the buying process. Very few are looking for the immediate purchase so understanding that most likely wont sell to them on this visit will probably drastically change your approach. If you look at this as more of an opportunity to begin a relationship with your customer you will most likely see more long term rewards with a more responsive customer when you go to re-sell, up sell, or cross sell.

3 blogs I visit every day...and you should too

I was told once that there are “no new ideas, only new ways of presenting old ones". And the more I surf around the more that holds true...especially with blogging.

That doesn't discourage me because I take away much more from individual perspectives and experiences, as do most bloggers. I actually love the smaller blogs that are "finding their voice" much as I am doing here...they have some great perspectives that you wont find anywhere else.

But that being said, there are 3 that I visit every day - and you should too. These are the best blogs on marketing and provide plenty of info for the small business marketer.

1.GrokDotCom
If you are serious about web analytics (and you should be...) this is one of the best blogs on the internet. This is the home of Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg - they are web analytics gurus and founders of the Web Analytics Association. I also highly recommend their book "Call to Action" it is a must read. If you visit this site only once in awhile you will come away a 10x smarter marketer.

2.SEO Moz
I am a junkie for all things search marketing and read many blogs on the topic - but this one is the standard bearer. If you are looking for ways to increase search traffic there are few things that these folks haven't tried and have all documented them here. If this isn't in your reader...it should be.

3.Marketing Sherpa
This is where serious marketers go. This blog is filled with success stories, case studies, whitepapers, manuals, surveys, studies, and analysis on every marketing topic and tactic that ever existed. Smart people learn from successful people - and this is where they go.

Honorable mention:

Forrester
I almost included it and made this a top 4 list - but decided against it. Some of us only have so much time in the day. So if your finding that you have a little extra time to devote swing by here for some of the best insight on marketing trends and analysis.

Google Website Optimizer Open to Everyone!

I have been testing this tool for a few months now and I am excited about its release to the public!

This finally brings sophisticated split and multivariate testing to the small business marketers that don't have the budget for an expensive tool like Offermatica. The beauty once again is that Google provides it for free.

My personal experience with it has been great.

The power of Website Optimizer tool is evident. It is very easy to set up simple test right away - it took me 30 minutes to get my first one set up. You can test simple page elements or entirely different layouts - the choices are entirely up to you. All that is required is a little knowledge of html and what makes sense to test. Everything is available to you - long term and short term tests, A/B splits, or large multivariate tests.

Once note: Some people may run into issues if they are running a fairly sophisticated content management system or don't have access to the back end. However this shouldn't hinder using it for landing pages unless they are tied to your CMS as well. Landing pages are arguably the most important pages of your site so it makes sense to begin there. Detach them and begin testing!

And for most websites the implementation will be simple across all of their web pages.

What is cool is that combined with Google Analytics, this is extremely powerful. Now you not only have a place to measure traffic in aggregate, but a easier way to do testing. No more having multiple landing pages to keep track of - just set up your tests and the data comes pouring in.

You will still need to know what to do with that data, however. Check out this post for a little help.

So with the launch of this new product you no longer have to spend thousands of dollars to compete. The playing field is leveling and the small business marketer can rejoice. Now its time to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with testing and analytics!