OK, we've got a winner!

Truth be told we only had one entry for our Google Analytics Success Stories Holiday contest, but it's really great and very deserving of the $400 gift certificate for a beautiful handcrafted Jewelry Chest.

Dustin Sparks was the lucky one, and did get his gift certificate in time for the holidays. This is being posted after the fact due to a pretty annoying server issue, that is now past us (finally!).

Anyway, here it is, enjoy:

As the CEO of DDA Digital LLC, the Parent company of www.SecretDivorce.com I set out to accomplish the goal of increasing sales/conversion on our site. We have a very solid product and great Search Engine presence; we just weren't getting the sales we believed that they were capable of. In order to increase anything I had to find quickly & accurately identify what was working as well as what was "broken" in order to tune what worked & eliminate what was not accomplishing any of the sites goals.

To do this I had to establish a baseline of data for things like traffic source, homepage abandonment rate, top content, top paths etc. Google Analytics was not only KEY to establishing this baseline it was as easy to install as falling off of a chair.

Continue reading "ROI Revolution "Success Stories" Contest Winning Entry" »

This week is the last Search Engine Strategies conference (Chicago, IL) for 2006.

Google Analytics' Paul Botto just presented on the highlights of Google Analytics and also snuck in a sound bite about the Google Website Optimizer BETA.

Here's a brief on his talk today from the seroundtable site:

It's (i.e. Google Analytics) a free hosted web analytics service, 80+ reports.

It is for all types of sites, e-commerce, lead generation and brand awareness.

It's more than a technical to now a web marketing tool. You can track all marketing efforts, not just Google stuff.

You can also identify problem areas on your site. Funnel visualization reports and product merchandising.

You can also analyze the results across two data ranges, to see if you improved or not.

Analytics is integrated with AdWords, automatically.

You can compare organic versus paid keywords.

I will be attending the full day training this Friday at SES Chicago on Paid Search Advertising. Please drop me a line if you will be there Friday as well and perhaps we can find Andy and Ben for a free beer!