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A blog about cooking, baking, and eating. because these are some things i love.

My colleague, Tai Dang, and I were lucky to attend the eMetrics: Marketing Optimization Summit last week in Toronto. It was great! Thanks for sending us MediaTrust! We ended up taking a workshop on Web Analytics for Site Optimization given by Jim Novo from the Web Analytics Association.

If you get the opportunity to hear Jim Novo speak, go for it! I highly recommend attending his workshops or seminars. He is a deep well of knowledge, when it comes to Web Analytics. I guess he’s picked up a couple of tips over his career that spans 25 years! He’s a great speaker because he makes all of these complex and confusing concepts easy to understand… which is great for the creative type of guy that I am… sometimes the technical stuff is over my head!

Jim Novo:

• Former VP Programming & Marketing at The Home Shopping Network
• Co-author of “The Common Sense Guide to e-Metrics”
• Author of “Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data Into Profits With a Spreadsheet”
• Co-Chair, Education Committee, WAA
• WAA Managing Director of Education

At my company MediaTrust, we are constantly trying learn new ways to optimize websites and landing pages to improve conversion rates for our affiliates. I’m hoping to apply the things I’ve learned at the workshop, to the campaigns I’m working on at MediaTrust. This is a brief overview of some of the things I learned:

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. -WAA

Build sites with web analytics in mind

Don’t waste time and money retro-fitting your website. Make sure you design your site with the latest technologies that support analytics. For example, if your website is a Wordpress blog, upgrade to the current version so you can take advantage of widgets and plugins. There is a free widget for Google Analytics! Awesome! Personally, I try to avoid designing Flash sites because setting up analytics on them is too complicated. You can use flash elements in your site, but an entire Flash site is bad for web analytics.

Quality Traffic

Quality website visitors are more likely to be interested in your product or service and have a high chance of converting into an acquisition or sale. If you have a solid source for internet traffic, you will spend less time waiting for you analytics experiment to end. Quality traffic will convert more often and it will be easier to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Sites that have both quantity and quality traffic will collect data quickly and they get you to your next analytics milestone sooner.

How much traffic? A/B Split Test or Multi-Variate Experiment?

Not only do you need quality traffic, you also need a lot of it! Google says it needs at least 500 visitors per week for an A/B Split Test and at least 1000 visitors per week for a Multi-Variate Experiment. The reason for this is because, essentially, A/B Split Test is only 2 versions of the page… Multi-Variate Experiments make more versions from the combinations of the specific areas you defined. For example, if you mark off and test 4 areas, and each area has 3 variations… 4×3=12 pages. You will need more visitors for Multi-Variate Experiments to acquire enough data and really tell which combination is performing the best. If you take the Multivariate route, I reccomend keeping the number of testing areas and variations low. The more areas, variations and combinations you have, the longer your experiment will take. As they say, “Time is money”, so keep your experiments quick.

Define your page or site’s goal

With landing page design, usually the goal is to get the user to convert. In affiliate marketing, conversion is when the user clicks and navigates themselves to the end of your process or basically does what you want them to do. For example, in a shopping cart site, you want the user to purchase the product. Once you define your site’s goal, you will probably realize that it’s too difficult for the user to use your site and reach the end of the process (the goal). Focus on the user’s experience. Try going through your site as if you are the user.

“Humans track information like animals follow a scent”

The users of your site are trying to get information or accomplish a goal. They are looking for a trail of links and buttons to click, so they can find what they want. Jim Novo calls this a scent trail. If the scent is strong, users will follow it until they arrive at your goal. If the trail is weak, they will either abandon your process (go back to the home page), or abandon the site (totally leave). Make the scent trail to your goals strong!

If you need help finding quality traffic and/or quantity traffic, contact The Advaliant Affiliate Network. Advaliant specializes in affiliate marketing and can help you develop your site into an optimized marketing campaign.

Here are some of my design ideas for the Lunchmeat album cover.

Details Enhancer

Tone Compressor

I use Photomatix to create the HDR images in my blog. I use the Details Enhancer most of the time. The other option you can use is the Tone Compressor. I was wondering what the difference was between the two… so I decided to process the same picture twice, trying out both options.

You can easily see the difference between Details Enhancer and Tone Compressor by looking at images above. The Details Enhancer produces a much more dramatic effect than Tone Compressor. However I think the Tone Compressor look more realistic.

I found a thread on Flickr group where some people are discussing the differences:

dddphoto says:

The Tone Compressor acts like a global contrast adjustment whereas the Details Enhancer acts like a local contrast adjustment. You can get much more “natural” looking images using the Tone Compressor, however you don’t get the range in shadow/highlights that Details Enhancer gives.

I use both as the image dictates. It is very easy to go back and forth in Photomatix as it is just a tab at the top of the Tone Mapping area. Just give it a try and see what you think.

shaporama says:

I use the Tone Compressor when I am trying to retain deep shadows, its sometimes difficult to get that look with the Details Enhancer

I found this mural around the dockyard area in Bermuda. There are about 100 murals left by the crews of naval ships that have docked in Bermuda. I heard they may paint over them soon, so I frantically took pictures of most of them.

“Tatars sometimes spelled Tartars, are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group mainly inhabiting Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. They collectively numbered more than five million in the late 20th century.”