Prusak.com

Serving up my thoughts since 2004

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Domain Names Are Not Case Sensitive (and why a marketer should care)

Just a quick tip for all you Internet Marketers out there:

Domain names are not case sensitive.

Why should you care?

Which of the following is easier to read (and remember)?

www.primeoutlets.com or www.PrimeOutlets.com

so … it makes sense to use a mixture of upper and lower case letters when you’re dealing with multi word domain names.

Even Google Makes Mistakes

I received an email last night to my gmail account (my browser is chrome).
Here is what it looked like:

google-apps-preview

I wanted to learn more, so I tried clicking on a few things, but nothing was clickable.

I then turned on images to see what I was missing and got this version:

google-apps-with-images

See the difference?

The ONLY call to action in the email is the learn more button at the bottom which is an image!

While it might make sense having the call to action being an image if the entire email is an image (which is not always a good idea) having most of the email text and ONLY the call to action be an image is very confusing.

Also, you should always preview your email blasts with images off before sending.

WordPress for the iphone

Wouldn’t it be great if you could write posts on your blog from anywhere, even with no Internet connectivity?

Well I just downloaded the wordpress app for my iPhone and am writing this in the subway 🙂

Hopefully I’ll be writing more posts now.

Site Issues

Just a quick update.

For the past few days, the WP-Supercache plugin was causing site issues.
This has now been resolved.

– Ophir

Google Website Optimizer with forms using POST

One of the limitations of using a standard A/B split test is that it won’t work out of the box if the page you are testing is the “action” page for a form that uses method=POST.

For example, lets say you have a simple form page – form.html that looks something like this:

Address <input type=text name='address'>

You’ve created process_form_2.php to split test against process_form_1.php.

The problem is that when process_form_1.php redirects to process_form_2.php, you will have lost all of your form data since your form uses POST.

There are two solutions for this:

1. Switch from method=POST to method=GET.
If this is an option, it’s probably the easiest solution.

2. Setup the experiment as a multivariate experiment and change the form action line in the HTML.
For example:

<script>utm_section('form action')</script>
</noscript>

and then in the experiment setup, add a variation like this:

<form action='process_form_2.php' method='POST'>

Hope this helps.
Ophir

How expected improvement affects expertiment duration

Someone recently asked on the GWO form:

Why would 10% expected improvement take a lot longer than a 20%?
I would think it is the other way around.

The truth is – the smaller the expected improvement, the longer it takes.
Or, in other words, the bigger the difference in conversion between two variations, the shorter time it will take to see the difference.

Here is an analogy that will hopefully provide an intuitive asnwer.

Lets say I want to test two basketball teams against each other, seeing who’s the better team.
Team A currently wins 20% of the time.

Scenario 1
I want to test if team B is a 100% improvement over team A, which would mean team B wins 40% of the time.
The question is, how many games do they need to play to be 95% sure than group B is indeed better. (95% is the confidence level GWO uses).

Without going into the math, if team B indeed is twice as good as team A, I should know fairly quickly.

Big differences are obvious in a short time.

On the other hand …

Scenario 2
I want to test if team B is just 10% better than team A, which would mean team B wins 22% of the time.
How many games do they need to play to be 95% sure than group B is indeed better.

Again, without going into the math, if team B indeed is just 10% better than team A, they’ll need to play quite a lot of games to be 95% certain that they are indeed 10% better.

Small differences take longer to notice than big differences.

New Job at POP

I have just accepted a full time position at POP.
My title is Search and Analytics Strategist.

I’m really excited about my new job and will soon be sharing some thoughts on where I think Internet development and marketing is going.

Happy New Year!

Just a quick post wishing everyone a Happy New Year.

My first new year’s resolution is to start posting once a week. See you all next week!

– Ophir

Google Analytics Tracking in Flash

Google just announced an official ActionScript 3 library for tracking flash events in Google Analytics.

You can read the whole post here:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/11/want-to-track-adobe-flash-now-you-can.html

I’ve implemented Google Analytics tracking from withing Flash in the past, but it was simply having the Flash call some JavaScript code on the page.

This solution is much more elegant and opens up many new possibilities.

This is also very exciting for Google Website Optimizer users, as it should now be very easy to use an event within a Flash as the conversion event.

Google Analytics Initial Referrer Update

I just posted a solution for capturing the initial referrer on landing pages that use JavaScript to redirect to a different page, and already I’ve found another (and maybe better) solution.

I just read a post by ShoreTel who suggests using initData without the trackPageview call. This will indeed set the GA cookies with the correct initial referrer value and not mess up pageview numbers.

On the landing page that does the JavaScript redirect, copy the original Google Analytics tracking code (something like this):


and change it to this:


Both solutions should work fine!

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