I had the opportunity to listen to a Clicktracks webinar yesterday that discussed using Clicktracks to quantify your search engine optimization efforts. It was a rather enlightening presentation.

The presenter argued that “average time on site” is a good measurement of your search engine optimization efforts. It goes to figure that if your web page shows up in a search for a particular topic and the searcher spends a good amount of time on your site after clicking your result, your SEO efforts for that term have been successful.

You can improve your web site’s optimization and usability by writing content that is focused, helpful and on-topic. If you’re paying for search engine ads, write well-targeted ads, click the user to a relevant landing page and they’ll engage with your site.

So what’s a good “average time on site” benchmark? The presenter said that it’s impossible to come up with one benchmark, and that it’s difficult to compare sites. The best practice is to compare “average time on site” for all of the keywords that generate traffic to your site. The longer the average time on site for a keyword, the better the keyword is at captivating the web user. For those keywords with a low average time on site relative to other keywords, opportunities exist to further optimize pages for those terms.

The seminar presenter also confirmed that businesses should pay for advertising on terms they also optimize for. I’ve always agreed that this is a best practice, and you can read why in my post called “The search engine marketing mix: paid search versus SEO.”

During the presentation, one astute attendee asked the presenter why they would use Clicktracks when Google Analytics was free. The presenter explained that Google Analytics uses Javascript to capture information while Clicktracks Pro Server Edition uses the server’s raw logfiles, and this type of data can only be retrieved through logfiles. I later confirmed this through a Google Analytics message board.

Full disclosure: I used Clicktracks Hosted for approximately 6 months until Google Analytics was released. I endorse Clicktracks as the best paid web analytics service but I personally use Google Analytics for my business purposes.

Good friends Cristina and Jennifer just launched Nap Mats and More, a web site that sells cute mats for kids to take naps on, no matter where they are. While I can’t take credit for the great site design, I helped Cristina and Jennifer with some suggestions to make the site more effective and the search engine optimization for the site. I’m also running a paid search engine advertising campaign for them. You can read their write-up about the experience at their blog.

Stuntdubl has a mention today of a great article on how to launch a blog. The article lists 21 tips for launching a successful blog and is a great primer for new bloggers. Lots of companies launch blogs thinking that it will instantly get them ranked highly on search engines, but this article brings to light the work required to run a successful blog.

My best advice for budding bloggers is to pick a topic you’re passionate about and just write. Offer good, authoritative content that others find useful. If your content is good enough, others will find you.

Internet Retailer reported today on a blogworthy e-mail marketing study recently conducted by Silverpop. The study reported the following findings:

• Branding in the subject line of your e-mail marketing campaigns produced an increase of 32% – 60% in clickthrough rates. By “branding,” I assume the study refers to the web site name or company name.
• Lifestyle photography–people enjoying products–raised clickthrough rates for B2C campaigns by about 1%, while B2B marketers saw a decrease of about a percent.
• The “newsletter” e-mail marketing format yields better clickthrough rates than the “postcard” design. The clickthrough rates of the “newsletter” design were about a percent higher than the postcard design.
• Be careful not to include too many links in your e-mail campaigns. Clickthrough rates drop off after between 6-10 links per email.
• Interestingly enough, dollar-off promotions performed 45% better than percent-off promotions. For instance, consumers responded better to promotions that demonstrated savings in dollars, even for low-cost products.

These findings are interesting test variables for your upcoming e-mail campaigns.

There’s an interview over at the EE Times web site that made me take notice. The interview is with a Stanford engineering professor, and you wouldn’t think that it would relate to web design. It does.

In the interview, the professor discusses a change in design methodology from “design” to “design thinking.” It seems like just semantics, but the professor discusses a fundamental shift from simply designing in a vacuum to taking a more human-centered approach.

What exactly is human-centered design in its most practical form?

“One of our teams went out with firefighters. They recognized that one of their biggest problems was not just the range of their radios, but scoping out information about a burning building. The team came back with ideas for sensor mesh networks, so a firefighter could effectively throw a bunch of marbles into an environment and they would report back the heat and other factors.

To do that kind of work, you need to follow the firefighters from the moment they come to the station to their trip to the emergency site and back. You look at the whole life cycle of the experience and anywhere along the way you might find an insight that would drive your design.”

This philosophy has been in practice in the web design field for years now. Web usability experts have been teaching and preaching this for years, and many of the best web designers already embrace this philosophy. Most companies (clients), on the other hand, aren’t there yet, and therein lies the challenge to both web designers and companies wanting better results from the web. While web customer research may drive project costs up, the return on a company’s investment comes when they see better results from their web site than they would have otherwise seen. In addition, since user research informed the design of a optimally usable web site, companies don’t need to incur the cost to fix usability problems with their site after the new site is live.

Consider this when you’re starting your next design project. Weigh the benefits of doing it right the first time versus the cost of user research.

The folks at the Yahoo! Publisher Network today published an interesting article about Publishing with the User in Mind. The article discusses the necessity of knowing your customer… and also knowing that you are not your customer.

In other words, pay careful attention to who your users are and their characteristics. The article discusses a practice that I’ve used for many years — creating personas. By defining who your customers are and putting a name, face and story to them, your design team or design consultant can design a better site.

Let me illustrate. I was recently hired to redesign a sales process for a client. During an initial meeting with the client, she shared the landing page creative for her campaign and a sample from a competitors’ campaign. One thing we both noticed is that her campaign, while cleanly designed was too “pretty.” Most of her customers were male, and we concluded that a less pastel, more masculine design was needed. Indeed, that more masculine page performed better. Had the first design consultant known this, that consultant would probably have produced a more effective landing page.

The morale of the story? Don’t be shy about telling your web design team who your customers are. Web designers are creative folks, and if you can communicate who your customers are, a designer can create a persona that can be used to make decisions about design, how you market your product or service online and more.

At one of my past employers, we created three personas for typical users of the web site. We first learned a lot about our customers through usability testing and focus groups. We also observed customers in our stores. After we had a good picture of who our customers were, we created three personas that defined the different segments of people we typically marketed to. When the design team went about designing a landing page for a promotion, we always asked questions like

• What would excite Robert [our persona] about these products and how can we use this to our advantage?
• What information would Robert require in order to get him to purchase?
• How can we effectively communicate to Robert how this product would benefit his quality of life?

“Robert” became a real person to us, and we would refer to our personas as real people as if they would be shopping our web site that day. Personas helped us make critical decisions and helped us grow our internet business.

If you’re a designer, ask the client who their customers are, and if you’re a client, be sure to let your design/marketing consultant know who your customer segments are so they can build a more effective solution.