At StomperNet, where I serve as staff and faculty, we're giving away Stomping the Search Engines 2, a rewrite of the original empire launching STSE from Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins.

Shown at right is Page 2 of Eyes That Buy from The Net EffectVolume 1, Issue 1

Check out the video for some of StomperNet's success stories -- it's amazing. These guys launched their internet business training program after creating successful online e-commerce sites, and have become a juggernaut of internet business success -- see the StomperNet Universe of freely available content.

So you can get an 8 hour DVD course if you take us up on the ask to you try a subscription to our new print publication, "The Net Effect" (and pay shipping & handling).

Here's a snapshot of a moment from the video where my article in the first issue of the Net Effect is featured:

The first page is full of an explanation of how humans interact through vision with web pages, while page 2 focuses on take-aways. You see 3 of about 7 tips here.

1. Use color smartly. A single item varying in color is processed by hardware early in the processing flow, or pre-attentively, and creates visual popout, drawing the eye.
2. Chunk with implied boundaries: Forget horizontal rule (HR) tags, they're useless to the peripheral vision. Use implied borders and Gestalt principles visual completion.
3. Break the Grid: Symmetry is pleasing to humans, and a well balanced page communicates ease of use to the user, but you can break this symmetry very strategically to call attention to a location.

So, you can get the first issue and a full course on SEO from some of the best over on this salesletter. (Yes, somehow the sales letter genre manages to break many of the rules of web design, but it is chunked!)

Internet Retailer is running a story based upon a case study from our video hosting & creation vendor SilverDock.

This result is actually several months old and was included in Marketing "Sherpa's 2008 Wisdom Report":

We tested product videos on our top 10 revenue generating products. After several rounds of iteration improving the load experience, we settled on a 3 level test: no video, autoplay, and click to play.

Both video conditions resulted in conversion gains, but the click to play was dramatically superior. In addition to a 35% increase in conversion for the products with videos, the transaction funnel became much straighter. In other words, users who chose to click to play a video and then added it to cart were much more likely to complete the checkout.

Wedding related shopping is kind of a bellwether for purchasing processes that have to be perfect and are conducted socially. Product videos enhanced the sales of our best product spectacularly, reducing the chance of erroneous add to carts and increasing buyer motivation.

Time to go put some video on your site!

Summer time is here and blogging time is at a minimum. The arrival of grand theft auto 4 at my house hasn't helped.

There's a cybercafe in the game and a mockup computer interface. It suffers from extreme usability issues. Here's an anti-pattern: The non-clickable border...

This is especially common in pagination hyperlinks, where a box is often implied but may not be hot. You want to make sure that the area surrounding the text in your buttons or pagination is also clickable.

TheRarestWords.com is a impressive little web hack with a nice global and enthusiast artisan. The application attempts to identify the rarest words on the page.

Why would you care? First, understanding where you veer from the mainstream is quite interesting. It's a great way to find mis-spellings, people's names, and other less pedestrian rareties.

An Aside: Language is thought to be infinitely generative. Perhaps ever human utters a huge number of completely unique statements, ignoring person and location names to give the computation a fighting chance. Hard to say... likely a typical long tail situation, maybe with a little more tail.

Secondly, word usage scarcity is a rich source of information in a language which overpopulates words with different meanings and requires surrounding sequences to constrain meaning. Information retrieval (IR) mechanisms have a hard time really capitalizing on word sequence and co-occurence proximity at full web scale, if anywhere. Statistical word counts tend to win out in evaluation.

The buzzword in IR is TFIDF, or term frequency inverse document frequency. This is a method for giving more importance to the less common words in a document that match the query. Mid-range frequency words get discounted, but they're likely key terms, if the page is truly relevant, and often repeated.

Rarest Words at AlwaysBeTesting alwaysbetesting.com - the rarest words from url. via kwout

Moving beyond term frequencies gets you to n-grams and the requirement to recognize frequencies of multi-word segments. Here, basic part of speech tagging and related tech can really help reduce the problem set -- or you can go the hard way and simply embody part of speech tagging by crunching huge quantities of a language's text. Google has published a database of n-grams, 1,024,908,267,229 of them in fact spanning 13,588,391 unique words with frequencies over 200. They don't report how big of a web crawl generated this database.

In fact, TFIDF is hard to do at scale, per long time hacker buddy Vi.c. At play dataset size, it's grad school work -- given a really sharp Prof.

Think about "jade apple tree". Jade is going to be truly rare. If you do n-grams, you can detect that "apple tree" is a common two word pattern and give credit for the co-occurrences' infrequency. I'll return to the impact of the degree of common use of a word in search at the end.

The tool exposes your most unique word uses and your uses of very common words that don't quite approach the stop word list level.

TechCrunch brought the rarest words.com to my attention. I ran it on my analytics & e-commerce focused blog, alwaysBetesting.com. It returned an interesting set of related blog suggestions based upon rarest words. The author is quite humble on the feature, but it's an interesting hack!

alwaysbetesting.com - the rarest words from url. via kwout

• LukeW's Functioning Form shares a focus on eye-tracking and user experience in online transaction while ROI Revolution focuses on Google Analytics and transaction modeling.
• Things get interesting with Bill Rempel.com -- numbers junkie in stock trading.
• A social software site and a beyond blogging site all make sense and are perphaps something of a random sample given theRarestWord's partial database of word frequencies.
• Blog conversation is exposed in the link to my fellow StomperNet Faculty Dan Thies' blog.

Some of the other suggestions were a bit more offkilter. Perhaps due to a bit of a word fetish, I turned up a few oddball matches. Rare words on my site include deliberative, sxsw, subjective, onerous, and quantifying. Some of the common words are lack, cool, level, solution, opinion, and quick.

A categorization feature produces somethings that don't quite look like categories, but are sensical none the less: Use Cases,Web Designing, Understanding, Designer, Internet Business, Toolbox, Marketing Strategies, Tasks, Evaluate, Recommend, Tool Box, and Requirements.

Hat's off to the craft Russian coder on a hobby project!

Is TheRarestWords an SEO Tool?

If you're truly advanced in targeting content to user needs and variations in expression in a way to maximize your coverage of the query tail, then this type of analysis is quite productive for SEO. For most folks aiming at SEO, the fact that less frequent words are less frequent means that you don't really care. You'll likely be amazed at the mid-frequency queries you match at just by occupying your niche and doing the basic practices well.

I've even considered a similar app but the ROI for most site owners is in good, accessible markup and solid off-site promotion strategies. As it happens, we at StomperNet just released a SEO evaluation tool along the lines of existing predecessors but free (with email subscription) and including numerous instruction videos on corrective actions. Check out Stomper Site Seer if you're really aiming for traffic.

The beta of Open Office 3 is a big step for Mac users, removing the need for X11 or the aging NeoOffice port. I tried out the spreadsheet app for some basic data crunching tasks.

I was pleased with the design of the charting workflow. Click through to Flickr for the 4 image sequence. On casual inspection, it seemed a bit easier to work with than the multi-path 2003 Excel or the new 07 Excel.

There are also new charting features for regression plotting and custom error bars.

Check out a quick Jing screencast of running a "data pilot" (akin to pivot tables) on some recent eyetracking data. Alternatively, check out this howto blog post on the Open Office blog.

While I had to read docs to figure out how to do a pivot table, check out this neat menu explorer help function!

While I opened a simple .xlsx file succesfully, Infoworld tried more complex files and found support in need of more work. I did notice that OO won't save to .xslx, though it opened several simple files fine.

Will OO v3 be a credible alternative to MS Office? Depends on the task -- but it looks to do a decent job an analyst's basic requirements.

We launched the Stomper Scrutinizer within the video series called Going Natural 2 back in December, and now it's time for GN3.

The first video in the series showcases Dan Thies talking about his strategies for AdWords. Most notable is his description of how to do split testing with AdWords for fractions of traffic. In essence, if you want to dedicate 10% of traffic to a new ad, you create 10 variants of which 9 are identical. This also provides an "A-A" test that can help you understand variability in your data. Watch the video.

There's a bonus video, new excerpts from the Going Natural 1 Series, along with a downloadable version of my video on understanding vision and web design called Click Fu.

One of the challenges with the current complex site designs is that multiple links to the same destination tend to appear on the same page.

This does not allow you to understand how your allocation of real estate is being used without resorting to really fancy analytics packages.

To solve this problem I developed a script that upon every click, walks up the document object model (DOM) looking for a an attribute on an HTML tag of ui.

If it finds one before it hits the BODY tag, then it adds a parameter to the link called ui with the value of that attribute, allowing you to understand which links on a page are being used. Shown below is a report from Google Analytics for this site showing how people arrive at my bio page:


If you visit my bio from the About menu at the top of my blog, it adds ui=nav.

I've licensed the script under the MPL and you're welcome to use it on your site, providing you share any enhancements. Grab it at http://alwaysbetesting.com/abtest/includes/logger.js.

All you have to do is include the script on your page and add ui=element_name attributes to key HTML elements that make up your site structure.

Because this happens with Javascript, and only when the user clicks, there's no danger of creating duplicate content for the search engine spiders. Alas, that means it doesn't fix typical analytics overlay views either for duplicate links, but you can typically see the source element in your path reports.

What do they have in common? Even with the recent opening of Google Website Optimizer, much like the iPhone, you still have to hack GWO to get maximum value out of your testing. While I am grateful for improved support for factorial analyses and more help content, it would have been so easy to do better.

Here's the problem: Google Website Optimizer restricts your understanding of the effects of your experiment to a single outcome variable, like a conversion.

While getting consensus on a single overall evaluation criteria (OEC) is critical to successful ongoing testing and iteration in a business organization, you also want to use tests to improve the product teams understanding of the customer, products, the website experience, and their interactions.

Without the ability to go deeper to explain why an experimental condition drove the most conversions, you're simply playing roulette with your pixels, not building a better tuned product team.

So, yes, also like the iPhone, this limitation reduces the need for complex skills like statistical significance testing. (Not exposing a command line in the iPhone eliminates the challenge of unix).

There is a solution for those who aren't afraid of the truth... A set of enterprising analyst / coders have reverse engineered the GWO cookie and demonstrated how to port the values back over to Google Analytics. ROI Revolution shows how extract the GWO condition. While he shows integrating it with synthetic page tracker calls, I'd recommend using the "user defined" segmentation values via utmSetVar (old school) or pageTracker._setVar (new school ga.js).

Find more GWO power user tricks in my delicious feed gwo.

Another little known gem in Google Analytics is the Time to Purchase and Visits to Purchase.

For MyWeddingFavors, where the purchase is an exceptionally meaningful one for our customers, some 40% of our sales happen on subsequent visits:
.

Careful though! Looking into Days to Purchase, we see only 25% of sales happen on a different day than the introduction to the customer.

So many (15%) of our shopping experiences are stretched out over a day, while only 25% happen on a subsequent day visit. Understanding this pattern has some serious implications for design, business strategy, and e-commerce feature set.

A question on LinkedIn, now closed, asked "what are some hard to find but useful reports in GA?" While clicks to task completion is far from the ultimate metric, Google Analytics does suffer from some slightly onerous depth issues for specific data points.

We do a lot of split testing with Google Analytics by defining custom segments and serving each segment a different UI. One issue with understanding the impact of new features, particularly for sites with lots of repeat visitors (e.g. content / blog sites vs ecommerce), is the novelty effect. New features, or even simple changes in layout, can have a short term halo as users notice and engage with the changed content.

Google Analytics does allow you to look at your user defined segments for new and repeat visitors, but it does require a few clicks. Follow along with the picture:

Starting in the visitors submenu (1), the New & Returning report allows you to drill into New users (2). The segment drop down has lots of useful pivots, including "user defined" (3).

Picture #4 shows the results for new users of a split test that moved an mailing list subscribe box from left to right. The magnitude of the effect diminished over time as we tested this. However, by drilling into only new users, we see the original effect size. Looking at all users, the effect is smaller, and looking at returning users, the effect is smaller still.

Dealing with the halo effect is one of the reservations that was expressed during "AB Testing: Designer Friend or Foe" at SXSW. Splitting users into new and returning is one of the easiest strategies for seeing through this confound.