It is amazing how hard it is to increase conversion when you don't have free reign to make and test lots of changes. Owners of websites that are "doing ok" feel like it's not broke so they only want to fix it slightly. Moving from 1 to 1.1 is a 10% increase and is a major victory with a site like the one I just described.

Even when you can test lots of changes, they don't necessarily pull for you, as Matt Roche wrote in a recent post at the OfferMatica blog.

Just as you point out, it can be daunting to find a change that really has a solid impact on the overall numbers. Most changes have such a small impact that it can be easy to get discouraged. Every little improvement helps, though, and the only way to get those big results is to keep slogging away at it.

Thanks for the reference to the great article!

This is a great blog. I wonder, though, if you could address how to best use Analytics when you have an affiliate site and can't track all the way through the checkout process. I think monitoring conversion is important for affiliates, too, but it's darn hard.

Thanks! Glad you like the blog. It is possible for affiliates to track all the way through the checkout process *providing* affiliates have the ability to add the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code to the entire process (i.e. as in a micro-site of the main merchant's site) or if the merchant has some mechanism in place to pass the successful transaction data to the affiliate (i.e. a redirect back to the affiliate site). Hope that helps!