Industry News

Testimonials can be an effective tool for overcoming friction. However, there are several factors you need to consider if you want the full impact of your testimonials. Placement is one of them.

Here’s an interesting little case study where changing the placement of reader testimonials on an ebook landing page increased downloads by 64.53% Background info

I recently published a free ebook on conversion optimization called 7 Universal Conversion Optimization Principles. I decided to...

How do you convince a bunch of publishers to buy ads on your service? If you’re Google, how about withholding data from those publishers about how people are finding their sites, as a way to drive them into your ad system? I don’t think Google planned for this to happen. But that’s the end result, in what could be called the “Not Provided” scheme. “Dark Google” Nearly Two Years Old

In October 2011 — nearly two years ago now — “Dark Google” was born. Google began holding back information it...

Data telling publishers the top terms being used to find their web sites will be available for up to one year in Google Webmaster Tools, rather than the current 90 days, Google has said.

The news came in response to an article today on Search Engine Land covering a conflict between Google limiting the time period such data was available in Google Webmaster Tools but setting no such limit for publishers who imported that data into Google AdWords accounts.

From that article, Google’s...

What are the top stories being shared on Facebook and Twitter? There’s a new way to get a sense of that. Bing News got a makeover today, including new “Trending” boxes that show news content that’s popular on both of those social networks.

Bing News Now Features Trending Topics From Facebook & Twitter on Marketing Land had the drill-down on the new features, so check it out.

Despite the fact that search history can be so revealing about people’s desires and interests, a new survey of US internet users finds that concern over search privacy — while significant — still ranks far behind other online privacy issues.

The survey by the Pew Research Center covered 1,000 adults in the US, was conducted last month and asked a wide-range of questions about online privacy. You can read it here, and also see our coverage on Marketing Land: Report: Almost 90 Percent...

Stijn Debrouwere’s Cargo cult analytics is a fantastic talk/essay on how we often get obsessed with meaningless data in the name of evidence-based decision-making. I don’t want to ruin it, because it’s one of those rare must-read pieces, but here’s a small taste:

Pageviews is a vanity metric: something that looks really important but that we can’t act on and that tell us nothing about how well we’re actually doing, financially or otherwise. […]

There’s nothing like a dashboard...

I see many threads with complaints, excitement, sadness and fear in the forums. Most have to do with Google rankings. It goes like this... The webmaster says something like, "my rankings and traffic from Google tanked," now I look and I have...

Don Norman points out some of the misconceptions of style in a good piece called Great Design Always Means Great Style. He concludes:

There are many dimensions to great design, but great style is certainly among the most important. Style in appearance, style in behavior, style in the manner of interaction – style in every aspect of the product or service. Great style requires careful deliberate specification and then attention to all the details that result, for everything must be...