During last years web analytics conference in London, eMetrics 2010, keynote speaker Jim Sterne proclaimed that a web analytics professional potentially could become what the CFO is to the CEO: a trusted advisor with unique insight to business performance giving the management a solid foundation for them to base their decisions on.

The concept is spot on – with more and more companies and organizations directing more of their efforts, resources and focus on the performance in the web channel, they will be looking for answers on their performance. Or, as modern business people would put it, their Return on Investment.

We’ve recently been involved with a project for a large banking customer who wants to improve the customer satisfaction and loyalty by adding personalization to their site. Here are some of our key takeaways from participating in the requirement phase for such a project.

Ever wondered why your conversion rate is low? In this post you’ll find the 12 most typical problems that holds the conversion rate back and pro tips on how you can overcome them

With all the buzz going on about Search Engine Optimization, very few people consider that in order to actually optimize a site for search engines the site needs to be search engine compliant and free from penalizing factors.

Whether you’re creating a site from scratch or want to make sure your site gets the ranking it deserves, here’s a basic search engine compliance checklist which will help you get started.

Google is particularly interested in separating mobile content from normal web content in order to help mobile users find relevant content for their context in the Google Mobile Web Search.  With help from Google Webmaster Tools you can make your mobile content available in Google Mobile Web Search. Here’s how you do it.

This is a series of posts describing how you create personas, how you use them and how they help you achieve your goals. In this post I’ll give you a brief introduction on what personas actually are, what they’re made up of and why you should make them.

Traditional web analytics gives an excellent overview on what’s going on at your web site. With KPIs correctly set up, you’ll get pretty good answers on how well your site is performing within a certain set of criteria.

Still, no matter how good you are setting up and tracking your KPIs, the most important question remains unanswered: Why is this happening?

Website evaluation is an not easy task – I know, because I’ve been at both sides of the table, both as a web designer presenting my work for a client, and at the client side evaluating a website design from another designer.

While web design evaluation and website evaluation can be two very different things, I’ve made a short list over things to look for which should come handy whether you’re designing websites yourself, or if you want to learn what to look for when paying for one.

A couple of years back I attended a course arranged by Humanfactors Int. in London called “User-centered analysis and conceptual design”. Besides learning design strategy, user profiles, data gathering and information architecture, a key topic in this course was using active listening to get the right answers.

Our teacher, none other than the infamous John Sorflaten, taught us how actively participating in the listening process ensures that both you and the crowd understands what’s being said.

Our webshop is doing ok. However, to reach our sales goals this year we have to drastically improve our conversion rate by making more customers out of the users in our webshop. What we’re looking for is at least a 0.5% increase, and while that may not sound like much, we have some steep cliffs to climb before the numbers start nudging in the right direction.

In order to know what kind of questions to ask our customers, we created a set of scenarios imagining why a user would not convert into a paying customer.