Let us assume for a moment that your web site is a store.
Not a piece of virtual property, but a real one. Standing
behind the counter, you notice where customers flow as they
travel around your carefully constructed displays.
Taking note of this behavior, you decide to put the latest
special offers along the most visited path through the
store. Each offer, of course, placed strategically alongside
competing products.
Then, you sit back and watch, as visitors decide to stop and
stare at the displays, ignore them and walk off, or pick up
a product and put it in their basket.
Very quickly, you learn which offers work, which do not, and
which never even get seen.
Now translate this into the virtual world. Your customers
navigate by clicking on links. So, the question is, do you
know the links being clicked? If not, you will miss out on
sales, and hence profits.
One of the most innovative schemes to date has to be the
Google AdSense project. It works so well because the adverts
presented match the surrounding content.
Trapping which adverts are clicked, and which are not, will
put you in a position to optimize the presentation so that
you maximize the click-through ratio of each AdSense block.
This works in so many different ways that you could be
multiplying your sales by simply reusing the same techniques
and wording presented by AdSense in the rest of your site.
Links serve two purposes; providing navigation to areas
of interest within the site, and pulling potential customers
in so that they take the plunge and purchase, sign-up for,
or merely show interest in, your offer of the day.
Since you can't actually see your customers, however, and
follow them around; you need another method by which you can
gauge the success of your link placement strategy and link
phrase content.
Measuring the success of certain areas and navigation paths
will lead you to choose to make certain items more
prominent or even remove areas which take time to update,
but hold little interest to visitors.
All serious webmasters should take the time to build up a
spreadsheet of where customers have been active, and where
they have 'clicked out' of the site, so that the placement
of links and their phrasing can be adjusted properly.
Specialist tools are much more effective, chiefly by
cutting the amount of time spent analyzing logs leaving
more time for the creation of new sites, and business
relationships to present on them.
After all, as Bill Gates himself points out, the Internet
is the embodiment of 'Business @ the Speed of Thought.'
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