Digital Marketing Insights

When thinking about content and online marketing, it's easy to think, "Oh, that's just about the words." But while killer copy is awesome, don't forget about other types of content, like video, that ...

Google, in partnership with Sterling Brands and Ipsos, recently conducted a study to understand how U.S. consumers interact with media in their day-to-day lives. Not surprisingly, the majority of the ...

Call me a skeptic. While I’ve been an early adopter of many Internet marketing tools, I’ve deliberately approached social media with skepticism. It’s not that it’s not cool, but I’ve asked many ...

When I opened Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox newsletter yesterday, it only confirmed what we’ve been noticing now for a year. Screen sizes are getting larger. And yet, an increasing number of smaller ...

Business online has changed from five years ago. Website visits used to be the only way to measure online interaction with your brand. Today, we have social networks, externally-hosted blogs and ...

A few months ago, I received a direct message on Twitter from Richmond-based non-profit Virginia Blood Services. They were looking for "influential" social media participants to get the message out ...

I've written quite a bit about conversion rates on this blog, but the fact is that most people that visit an e-commerce web site have no intention of buying. They are window shopping. Optimizing your ...

Many companies are focused on growing their e-mail list, and rightfully so. But if you could improve the return on investment of your e-mail marketing program by pruning your list, would you?

Having worked on a ton of content-rich sites my entire career, including managing design for an over 750,000-page behemoth early in my career, I've learned a lot about how to approach planning large ...

Whether you're looking for a job, seeking a promotion at work, running for political office, joining a civic group, owning a business or just being a neighbor, people are Googling your name. There's ...

Despite the economic slowdown, e-commerce and online business has remained strong. This prompted an article in the E-commerce Times this morning asking if this is just a fluke and if the e-commerce ...

I was reading Seth Godin's blog post a few days ago about "the magic of low-hanging fruit" and was reminded of the power of fixing low-hanging fruit when redesigning your web site.

Time and time again, I've seen that truly successful people (and companies) pay attention to the "little things." This post is about one of those little things -- specifically e-mail signatures.

There's been a lot of convincing research released in the past few months around customer ratings and reviews. Clearly, web site customers find ratings and reviews useful and not only rely on them to ...

The Get Elastic blog has published a good blog post on the size of add to cart and call-to-action buttons. Their advice in this article not only applies to product pages on ecommerce sites, but also ...

I've pointed out some flaws on Verizon Wireless' web site before, and I recently found yet another example of a flaw on the Verizon Wireless web site that could have been prevented with proper ...

If your company uses its web site as a marketing tool or sales tool, you can't afford not to test new things. One powerful technique to help your company make huge site improvements with a relatively ...

Newspapers, who have recently struggled to retain advertising revenue, are getting a boost from an unlikely source: Google.

With tools like Facebook Messenger, text messaging, etc., e-mail marketers face increasing challenges in trying to reach younger audiences.

If your company is new to Google Adwords advertising and you're trying to go it alone, chances are you're looking for ways to maximize your ad spend. Rather than broadcasting your ad to the largest ...

From my experience as an web consultant, I can tell you that page design is critical. Online retailers often test multiple variations of page templates to measure effectiveness. In doing so, there's ...

When discussing PPC with prospective client, I often get the question of can I just "set it and forget it"? The "set it and forget it" method of pay per click management is when you would set up a ...

There's a good article over at the Ecommerce Times called "Minding the Gap Between Click and Conversion" discusses the concept of "post-click marketing" and offers up some ways to solve the mystery ...

I received this from a reader a week or so ago:

Almost every site that sells something online could use improvement in their conversion rates. Prospective ecommerce clients frequently ask what causes poor conversion rates, thinking that a broken ...

I wanted to post a follow-up to yesterday's post regarding shopping cart abandonment rate to provide a real-life example of why shopping cart abandonment matters.

An article from Kevin Hillstrom called "Shopping Cart Abandonment" recently asked the question, "Is there anything wrong with a sixty percent shopping cart abandonment rate?"

If you think AJAX is a brand of abrasive household cleaner, you're right. It's also a powerful web development technology that can significantly improve user interfaces. With shopping cart ...

Why in the world would you hire a design consultant to redesign your website? One of the blog readers recently sent me a question similar to this one, and I think it's worth a response.

Today's Ecommerce Times has a good article on small businesses called "Can a Small Biz Make it Online?". It's certainly worth a read if you operate a small business on the web.