Web Optimization News & Articles

SeeWhy Inc (news, site), providers of an interesting little tracking/Web analytics tool that attempts to convert website abandoners, recently announced a new CEO. The newly appointed Scott G. Silk will be in charge of SeeWhy’s daily operations as well as shaping the overall vision and direction for the new team.

SeeWhy also reportedly plans to expand its focus beyond research and development by beefing up its sales and marketing sectors. Luckily, prior to SeeWhy, Silk was president and CEO of Action Engine Corp. where he established the company’s mobile application platform and oversaw their eventual sale to Mobui Corp. His expectations of his new job seem pretty positive as well:

“SeeWhy is in the right place at the right time with best-in-class technology,” he said. “In a down economy, everybody’s focused on cost-effective revenue generation. We deliver a compelling ROI in a SaaS delivery model. Considering that up to 70 percent of ecommerce customers abandon a session before they buy, our software can basically double a company’s online sales—without any capital expenditure. With more and more business being done over the web, my job is to exploit our unfair advantage in web conversion.”

With 20+ years of experience leading technology companies under Silk's belt, it looks like SeeWhy is in good hands, but will abandonment tracking really be the next big thing? As we reported earlier, there's a lot of uncertainty around the new tactic. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The public website or intranet that keeps screaming for attention with useless images and vain content will get little from the impatient and sceptical customer.

The demand for good web design is increasing, revealed a recent Webcopyplus online poll. Almost 25% of web users indicated “poor visual presentation” as the number one element that drives them away from websites.

Only 6.6% of web users who participated in a similar 2007 online poll indicated ‘poor visual presentation” as the main reason to abandon a website. That equates to a 267% increase during the two-year period.

In an age when computers can crunch numbers and do analysis on a vast scale, the deep flaws in our intuition and gut instinct are becoming more and more apparent.

Great websites help you complete simple, common tasks in a fast, efficient manner. They are boring to design and manage.

So, web analytics has been a hot topic since, well, ever. The benefits yielded from knowing customer behavior patterns have been--and continue to be--quite clear.

The value formula is simple. If website owners and giant advertisers can track tidbits of information as detailed as which DOM nodes a mouse hovers over and as broad as which sites you like to visit, targeted marketing (and sales) effectiveness improves for those who know how to intelligently act on the data.

A related road less traveled is one paved by the staggering amount of people that abandon websites before doing much of anything. But here to prove that paying attention to the negative stats can be just as rewarding is a company called SeeWhy. Their new analytics tool, Abandonment Tracker, recently caught our eye.

Having enormous quantities of people visit gargantuan numbers of pages on your website is the only metric that matters. (Santa Claus is a woman who lives in the Bahamas.)

As the media loses readers and profits it becomes increasingly shrill. But is the public becoming more and more immune to the hyperventilating message?

It’s the Web, right? So it’s supposed to be sticky. Fortunately, there are simple ways to ensure visitors “stick around” your website.

Governments around the world are doing everything they can to rename swine flu. They will not succeed and will end up misinforming the public.

Most web content is overwritten; too much content, too much context, not nearly enough focus on the action. Unfortunately, we're taught to write this way.

Combining web content management and SEO is a smart move in our estimation. Companies like Lyris, Pixelsilk and MOGI have their eyes on this ball.

Now it's Preation's turn. Preation is a sister company of iContact, the email marketing folks. Last October they launched the Eden Platform. It does content management and it enables marketers. Let's take a peek.

The biggest challenge a website manager has is to understand how humans work, not how content management software or search engines work.

It's vital to get the first couple of words exactly right when writing effective web headings and links.

This is the age of evidence and fact-based decision-making. Gut instinct and feelings need to be kept firmly in check.