I’m the kind of person who likes to put up a web design, test it, then make improvements. It’s how I make my living as a web site effectiveness consultant. A relatively new tool in the web site usability industry is the eye-tracking study, which is used to understand what on your web site people look at.

Seth Godin recently released a video segment of an eye-tracking study for Squidoo. The study, performed by Etre, reveals that web site users’ eyes bounce all over the screen very rapidly. You may have seen a heatmap before that shows where web site users are looking, but this is the first eye-tracking study I’ve seen that shows in a video the eye patterns of real users. It’s enlightening and fascinating.

You can see the eye-tracking study on Seth’s blog here. If at first your inclination is to stop looking at the video, I suggest watching for a while. You’ll notice that the video is shown one user at a time, and that a user’s eyes literally jump all over the screen quickly.

We can learn from this video just how important color and design can be. Your web designer may feel that a certain design will be effective, but you can never know for sure until it’s tested.

Mr. Godin suggests that a user’s eyes are scanning the screen for anomalies and focus on those. For that reason, a web page design that is a little “off” might be the best design.

To me, that’s an interesting tenet. I’ve often thought that a design that’s a little “off” might be the best, but I haven’t been compelled to try this in any professional endeavors. Professionally, I’ve leaned more toward designing sites with more whitespace so aid users in finding chunks on content. I’d like to test that practice.

For more on eye-tracking studies, Etre has an informative video that explains the process.

Many small business online merchants I’ve talked to are running their web sites on the popular Yahoo! Merchant Services platform. I ran across a service today that could potentially be extremely useful for those Yahoo! Merchant Services store owners that keep a keen eye on their web analytics.

Monitus has two services for Yahoo! Merchant Services store owners that are, in concept, extremely useful. The first is a connector for Google Analytics that allows store owners to track conversions by keyword. Why is this significant? Since I installed Google Analytics on my Yahoo! Merchant Services site many months ago, I’ve been trying to figure out how to track keyword conversion. Keyword conversion is important to understand which words users type into search engines actually result in a sale. Understanding this has some beneficial implications.

Second, Monitus offers a Yahoo! Store cart recovery service. This service allows you to collect information about abandoned shopping carts. Having the email address of a user who abandoned the shopping cart would allow you, the merchant, to send an offer to that customer in hopes that they will return and complete the purchase. This service is a brilliant idea.

I haven’t used Monitus’ services, though I’d like to try them out and implement them on my site. Unfortunately in my case, the Monitus folks have chosen to price this service on a subscription basis. I’d rather purchase the license for the code and extend it to fit my needs, like building an automated email system that emails customers who abandon carts a coupon code.

In any case, if you operate a Yahoo! store, you should watch Monitus. They obviously have a keen understanding of web analytics.

For those ecommerce business managers looking for an ecommerce sales benchmark for 2006, expect to see online sales grow 20%. So says Shop.org’s annual State of Retailing Online study conducted by Forrester Research. Pet supplies and cosmetics are expected to lead ecommerce sales growth in 2006.

Shop.org Executive Director Scott Silverman notes that online sale growth of 30% per year is probably not sustainable and that he expects growth of near 20% per year for the next several years.

The study also found that gift cards and loyalty programs have helped increase sales.

Online sales in 2005 grew at a rate of 25%, so clearly this year’s growth is expected to be less than last year’s. If you’re an online retailer, you can combat this by looking closely at your conversion rate and brainstorming tests to improve it. By improving your conversion rate, you’ll make more money from the traffic you already have. You can also attempt to get more traffic to your site by increasing your ad spend, examining the effectiveness of your paid search advertising, and better optimizing your site for search engines. Of course, if you need assistance with any of this, please contact me.

eROI recently released its first quarter 2006 study on email marketing. The results indicate that Tuesday and Sunday are the best days to send email marketing campaigns.

Typically, mid-week has been the best time to send email marketing campaigns as these days typically have higher open rates and click rates. The weekend typically has been the least desirable time to send email. This study, however, reports that Sundays have the highest clickthrough rates and the second highest open rates. Tuesdays see the highest email volume.

If you are contemplating sending an email campaign on Monday, you should probably wait as Monday has the lowest clickthrough rate of any day.

The following chart (from eROI) shows the data for each day of the week.

New research was published today by the Center for Media Research on the behavior of web searchers. It’s no surprise that a first page search engine ranking can provide your site, and by extension your company, with greater visibility. Your brand equity can also can be boosted by a first-page ranking. Search engine users typically associate a first-page ranking with industry leadership.

The study found that 62% of search engine users click a site listed on the first page of search engine results, and 90% of searchers click on a site listed on the first three pages. This study is a repeat of a 2002 study that found that a lower number of people (48%) clicked on a site on the first page of search engine results and 81% of searchers clicked on a site listed on the first three pages. Clearly, a first-page ranking is becoming more important as people have a tendency to abandon a search sooner than they used to.

If searchers are unsuccessful in finding a suitable result, they either change their search altogether or repeat the search by adding more keywords to refine the search.

For years, companies have been trying to understand the effectiveness of their offline advertising and which campaigns generate web site traffic. I recently saw a good example of an attempt to track offline advertising efforts.

I was listening to a local AM talk radio station when I heard an ad for a “I got rich, you can too” offer. While I wasn’t terribly interested in getting rich using the ad’s method, I did find it interesting that the ad asked the listener to go to a web site to sign up for a free book. The web site was 4freekit.com.

I heard the same ad a few days later on XM satellite radio, but I noticed that the web site address had changed to 3freekit.com. I typed these in and you can see what I got:

• 2freekit.com
• 3freekit.com
• 4freekit.com
• 5freekit.com
• …and so on.

I then realized that the advertiser used a different web site address to track performance of ads on different radio stations. He assigned 2freekit.com to one station, 3freekit.com to another, and so on. By doing this, he can measure web site traffic and begin to understand effectiveness and profitability for each channel.

You can do the same thing, but you don’t need to use different domain names. If you advertise in the offline media, start a spreadsheet in Excel and list the media outlet and a memorable, unique web site address for each. For instance, you might use http://www.yoursite.com/newspaper for the local newspaper and http://www.yoursite.com/radio for the local radio station. By putting landing pages at these locations on your web site, you can use your web analytics software to see how much traffic each page gets. If your web analytics software is powerful enough, you can even measure conversion rates and revenue/leads generated from each page.

Use this tactic to understand the effectiveness and profitability of your offline media spend.