With most modern analytics packages the conversion rate can be calculated within the system fairly easily if you’ve set up the appropriate goals and tracking.
Conversions are any event which you consider to be a goal of the website.
For most e-commerce sites, this will be a sale. For other sites the outcome the site needs may be to get the visitors’ email address, for the user to leave a comment, download a file or to click a particular link.
There are two calculations commonly used to calculate the conversion rate. One is to take the total unique visitors over a period and divide by the number of conversions.
Sometimes a small month-on-month change in the conversion rate will seem disappointing given the gains that are often spoken about in conversion rate optimisation of 50 or more percent.
Not every site can be increased by large amounts straight away, but even a one or two percent change every month can add up to a significant difference to your company. Continue Reading »
BackTweets is a very useful service that searches for a URL in the major URL shortening services on Twitter.
Their bookmarklet takes over the current window and away from the content you want to search twitter for. My version below will open a search in a new window or tab preserving the original page. Continue Reading »
I had a hosting client call me recently telling me the site wasn’t working in Chrome. I duly checked and saw a warning given that the site contained links to malware.
Initially I thought that the WordPress install had been compromised in some manner, but I knew that the code base was the latest as I use a cron job based on this update WordPress script and the plugins were minimal and again up to date. Continue Reading »
I’ve worked in banking, as a COBOL programmer, an assembler programmer, music retail, games development and web development.
I was born in Neath, Wales of an Irish father & Welsh mother.
I wrote the official solution to the games Abe’s Oddysee and Quake amongst others.
Sergeant Bilko (The Phil Silvers Show) is probably the best American comedy ever. I would slap Steve Martin with a wet fish until his nose bled for the travesty of his movie remake.
I am (or at least was) a Reverend Doctor. (Internet style). No, I can’t marry you - at least not to another person.
I don’t drive and I sold my motorbike years ago after nearly killing myself when drifting in thought as I rode the thing into on coming traffic.
I spend a good proportion of each day making random bass noises.
Occasionally I hear of sites being penalised by Google and quickly dropping out of the SERPs. This can often be the result of spammy links being injected into the site’s template.
Often the links are hidden from everyone apart from the search engine spiders, so a quick normal visual check won’t reveal the problem.
In those cases a site search at Google for the domain name + a spammy term can show the infected articles.
The following bookmarklet will take the domain you are currently visiting and search Google for site:domain and add four common spam terms. Each Google search is opened in a new window giving you the original site plus four new tabs for each of the searches.
To install the bookmarklet, just drag the button below to the bookmarks bar in your browser. To use, click it when you are visiting a domain you want to check for spam. It’s that easy!
Online Sales
