A good friend of mine runs a company called Health Formula.  They sell health and wellness supplements.  I visited him today to compare notes and ended up gathering some great ideas.  Here are some of them:

1. Start tracking your payment errors.  Whenever someone hits the submit button at a Health Formula site, all the messages back and forth from the payment gateway are recorded and logged.  Normally, you’d expect to get a successful transaction.  However, a certain percentage result in errors.  Health Formula analyzes all the errors to try and correct them.  They’ve discovered some gateway problems and other situations where they were able to intervene and fix.  If you have control over your shopping cart, I’d recommend this approach.
2. Use Test Director to QC your website.  This is especially important if you control your own shopping cart and make changes.  This neat tool, recently purchased by HP, lets you run hundreds of orders through your system automatically.  You can test for as many scenarios that you can think of.  It’s a very cool tool.
3. Use Subversion to track your version changes.  Subversion is an awesome open source program that runs on a server and provides version control.  It integrates easily into both Windows and Linux environments and I think there is even a plug in for Macro Media.

I love talking to other professionals in our industry.  You never know what you’ll learn.

A friend of mine is starting a business where he’ll be displaying his products at trade shows.  I’ve often attended and displayed at trade shows and have wondered how to capture the metrics I need to determine if the show or our approach was a success.

You hear the neighbors complain about traffic and what a bad show it is - but is it really?  How do you compare a good show to a bad show?  Obviously, if you had a lot of sales or good leads, it’s a good show.  But could you have done better?

In the online world, we are blessed with reams of data.  We know how many folks are visiting our site, when are our busy times, how many are engaged with the site and how many convert.  However, in the physical world, we don’t have these luxuries.  This makes it hard to compare different shows and different booth workers.

What if we had a way to simply gather traffic and engagement at a trade show?  I think I have a way to do it, but I can’t figure out how to implement my idea.  Here’s what I propose; I would like to have a cell phone sniffer that counts the number of unique cell phones walking by my booth and also the length of time each phone spends at my booth.  I realize that not everyone carries a phone (similar to how not everyone has JavaScript or cookies enabled) and not all cell phones use the same carrier (similar to the different browsers we see) but at least, we could use the numbers for trends.

Could you imagine how useful this would be?  Then you could measure your conversion rate and compare different shows and periods of time.  Anyone know where I could find this system?

I got an e-mail today from Sitelab listing the top 10 reasons to redesign your company website.  In reading this e-mail, I thought to myself how overwhelming this process seams.  Here you are with dozens of priorities you’re responsible for and then someone suggests a redesign.  Yuck.

The idea is that once you’ve fixed your site, everything will be OK.  But it doesn’t really work that way, does it?  A site redesign is usually a major undertaking.  Often, it is so overwhelming that it never gets done or it is not fully implemented.  Is there a better way?

You bet there is.  The Japanese call it Kaizen.  Tony Robbins calls it CANI - Continuous and Never ending Improvement.  I just call it continuous improvement.  It works like this.  You simply make improvements to your website on a continuous basis.  Nothing dramatic, really.  Just make small improvements on a daily basis.  There’s a great book out there called “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” written by Avinash Kaushik — perhaps you’ve heard of it.  Basically, the book details small steps you can take every day to improve your website. 

Here are some of my suggestions for using analytics to make small changes to your website:

• Look at your top keywords.  Are all of them being advertised with PPC?
• What are your worst PPC campaigns?  Do they need negative keywords or alternate ads?
• Are you advertising all your top pages?
• Click map study.  Can you re-arrange your navigation to be better matched with actual clicks?
• Study your popular pages.  Are they optimized?
• Meta tag study.  Do all pages have proper meta tags?  Any duplicates?
• Tagging Study.  Have all pages been properly tagged?
• Referrers Study.  Who are our top referrers?  Can you do better?  Who are the new referrers?  Can you advertise on them?
• Advertising Study.  How are your ads doing.  Find new places to advertise.
• Product feed study
• Best performing vs. worst performing pages.  Both bounce rate and exits on path.
• Shopping cart analysis.  Fallout.
• Affiliate study
• 404 errors review

What are some of the small things you do for your website?  I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Lately, we’ve been going nuts with a problem some of our visitors are having.  They keep complaining to us that our site is unbearably slow.  Here’s the problem.  When we check it out, it’s just fine.  It’s not the fastest site on the planet, but certainly not the slowest either.  So what’s causing the problem?  One clue we have is that the only customers who are complaining use IE6.  Unfortunately, that’s all we know.

So how do we figure out the problem?  Who do you call when your website is having technical problems?  When you dial website 911, who picks up the phone?  For us, the question is a mystery.  We’ve tried posting requests for help at E-lance and Guru.com.  Unfortunately, the responses are confusing and do not inspire us.

We’ve asked friends and colleagues to help as well.  Can analytics help us?  We’ve looked at our stats and found that, yes, IE6 users are less engaged in our website.  But it doesn’t tell us the problem.

One interesting tool we’ve found is Yslow.  This program analyzes your website and tells you where you need to reduce your JavaScript, or DNS calls and offers several suggestions.  Yslow works with Firefox only.  If our problem was with Firefox, we’d have it figured out in no time.

So what do you do when you have these problems?  I’m all ears.