Welcome back! I'm excited and honored to announce that I am going to the be author of a new book called 'Website Optimization - An Hour a Day'! Learn More About the Book

There are many great conversion and website optimization related blogs that I read, and I often get asked about my favorites. So I thought why not put together a list of the ones that I recommend you subscribe to right now? Reading these regularly will really help you learn how to optimize your website and its conversion rates.

This list includes some newer blogs, and some oldies but goodies for the newbies out there…. so without further ado, let’s get started:

1. Kiss Metrics Marketing Blog – A fantastic newer really high quality blog that covers all aspects of conversion, optimization and analytics.
2. Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog – This other newer blog is packed with very frequent short and sweet posts about all aspects of online marketing.
3. Wider Funnel Conversion Rate Optimization Blog – Great blog from the very knowledgeable folks at Wider Funnel, all about conversion optimization.
4. Get Elastic Blog – A fantastic blog about ecommerce website optimization, by the very talented (and blogaholic) Linda Bustos.
5. Unbounce Optimization Blog – A great optimization blog from the author of a fantastic optimization tool called Unbounce.
6. Marketing Experiments Blog – The name of this doesn’t do it justice – this is a fantastic website optimization blog by some serious experts.
7. Occams Razor – The pioneering web analytics blog from Avinash Kaushik, still producing excellent articles many years later!
8. Omniture Industry Insights Blog – A great online marketing optimization blog, with great posts from industry experts.
9. Future Now Marketing Optimization Blog – One of the oldest optimization blogs on the block, but still comes up with some good articles.
10. Wingify Conversion Optimization Blog – A great blog from the author of the creator of Visual Website Optimizer.
11. Conversion Voodoo Blog – There are often some great visually appealing optimization case studies found in this blog.
12. ION Interactive Blog – A great website optimization related blog from the experts over at ION interactive.
13. The Daily Egg Blog – Strange name but makes sense when you realize its the conversion blog from the folks behind Crazy Egg.
14. Amy Africa’s QLOG – Amy is a true website optimization genius, and her blog lives up to this with some fantastic articles.
15. Conversion Conference Blog – When one of these fantastic conferences rolls around, there is usually an influx of amazing posts from industry experts.

So there we have my full list of great website optimization blogs! If you have any favorites that I have missed, please comment below and let everyone know! Hope you enjoy….

In my new role working at Adobe as a conversion specialist and while working on my upcoming book, its becoming increasing obvious that many companies lack an effective yet simple approach and strategy for their website testing efforts. Therefore I thought I would do a quick summary post about this to help give your website testing efforts a kick-start.

Therefore, I have come up with a simple and effective 5 step testing approach for you to understand that will help improve your testing results:

1. Create Insights for Testing from Analytics & Feedback Tools. Rather than simply testing random things on your website , or listening to what your HiPPO wants to test, and limiting your chances of good conversion lifts, instead you should ensure that all of your tests are based on insights you have discovered about your website. This will help improve the quality of your tests and increase the chances of you seeing great conversion lifts. These insights should ideally come from findings in your web analytics tool and from feedback you have gathered from your visitors using great tools like UserTesting.com, Loop11.com, UserVoice.com and KissInsights.com.
2. Create a Test Hypothesis. After you have found some kind of insight from your analytics tools and visitor feedback tools, you should then come up with a good test hypothesis based off the insight. This should come in the form of a statement about your website that you then try and prove true or false by testing. This hypothesis would then be used to create your test plans, and after priotization occurs, an actual test. Here are a few examples of test hypothesis:
   a) By adding in website security logos on the shopping cart checkout page, this will reduce visitor purchase anxiety, resulting in higher order completion rate.
   b) By reducing the number of choices on the homepage, you will reduce confusion for what visitors should click on, therefore reducing bounce rate.
3. Create, Implement and Run Test. Next you need to actually create the test and implement it on your website and make sure it works correctly. While creating the test in your website testing tool, in particular you should know which success metrics you will use to help you measure success, and you should also set up visitor segments for your test for you to later analyze. Once you have implemented the test on your website (ideally with the help of a web developer) you should then QA the test to make sure its not breaking anything on your website, and check that the results are coming in to your tool as expected.
4. Analyze Test Results & Launch Winners. This next part is often where sub-par test results get pushed live without proper analysis. When analyzing your results you should in particular make sure you gather enough data (at least 2 weeks of results, and at least 100 conversions for each version being tested) and also make sure the predicted winner has enough statistical confidence from the tool to declare it a winner (at least 90% confidence). If you don’t do this you will risk pushing a version live that isn’t actually the best version, thus reducing your potential converison uplift. You should also not just push one winner live to all your visitors; instead you should segment your test results to find higher conversion lifts for different visitor segments (for example your paid search or first time visitors may convert higher to a particular test version) and push winning versions to each of these visitor segments.
5. Run Test Iterations to Maximize Conversion Lift Impact. This part is sadly often neglected by many online marketers who are testing and optimizing their website. Rather than simply moving on and testing something different, you should also iterate on your last test by learning from the results (even if the test didn’t work well you should be able to draw conclusions to learn from). Doing this test iteration usually results in much higher conversion lifts than your initial tests generate. Many companies don’t do a good job of this so it will be a great source of competitive advantage if you do it well. Here are a few examples of test iterations:
   a) After testing and optimizing your registration flow, test your key entry pages leading to your first registration page.
   b) After testing the color and size of your call to action buttons, you should then test the wording on them too.

This simple approach really can be a game changer for your testing and optimization efforts, particularly if you currently only do random testing or adhoc testing. So before you run your next website test you should try this approach instead, and you should hopefully be pleasantly surprised by the improved results.

Lastly, this topic of testing and optimization strategy is going to be a key part of my upcoming book, where you will learn more detail about this approach and many other website optimization best practices. This book should hopefully be out by spring 2012!

I’m finally able to announce some long anticipated, exciting news! As many of you hopefully knew, I was writing an extensive website optimization ebook called ’30 Days to a Better Converting Website’, and had planned to launch it earlier this summer. However, a publisher heard about this and seemed interested in me turning it into a proper book instead. And after many months of planning, additional writing and discussions, I’m honored to announce that I am going to be the author of ‘Website Optimization: An Hour a Day’!

I’m going to be writing this for Wiley, the same publisher who have an outstanding selection of online marketing books. To write this I’m going to be expanding on the 50,000 words that I had already wrote for my ebook, and turn it into a 300 page book in a similar format to Wiley’s popular  ‘Hour a Day’ online marketing books. I just finally signed the contract earlier today, so am excited to finally officially announce the news. Realistically the book won’t be out until late spring  next year at the earliest though,  given the amount of extra writing and organizing in my spare time that will be needed (there goes my fun time!)

The strangest thing for me is that I’m going to be  following in the footsteps of an amazing author who inspired me to get into web analytics – little did I realize that in 2007 when I first read Avinash Kaushik‘s amazing ‘Web Analytics: An Hour a Day’ book that I would one day have the privilege to be writing a book in the same series!

I’m also going to be looking for some great quotes  from other experts in the website optimization and testing world to go in this book, so if you would like to contribute a quote, please let me know.

You may also be interested to know what is going to happen to the old optimization ebook format that I had come up with. Well, I loved the idea so much and got some great feedback on it, so have decided to turn it into a much shortened, but free email course. Over a 30 day series of emails I will feature a high level overview of what you need to do to optimize your website’s conversion rates. Hopefully I will get some time to write this email series over the next month! Stay tuned for more news…