Internet Marketing Company

The new search engine from Microsoft looks nice. At least for the front page, which displays a different, nice picture every day.

What is Bing all about?

The home page fails to communicate visitors what the website is all about. While everybody know what Google or Yahoo! do, almost no one knows what the heck is Bing.com. I would have inserted a nice tag line below the logo, something like “Microsoft’s Search Engine” or similar.

How do I perform a search?

There is no “Search” button on this page or the search results page. You should always display a web button properly and label … Read more about Microsoft’s Bing Looks Nice. What About the Usability?

Have you ever wanted to be able to have a collection of “view cart” or “add to cart” buttons and compare them to other buttons, such as “proceed to checkout” buttons? When we design a new website or a new web page for a multivariate test, we like to do our homework before we proceed, and this is how we ended up having a nice collection of buttons, primarily used during the checkout process of e-commerce websites.

What is it intriguing to me is not the design of the buttons it self, but the relationship between the buttons on each … Read more about Scent Trail of View Cart, Add to Cart and Proceed to Checkout Buttons

On previous posts I’ve tried to provide e-commerce designers collections of checkout buttons or progress bars. This time I thought they will find useful to look at the Continue Shopping collection.

102 website have been looked at during the analysis. There was no surprise regarding the name of the button: 85 websites are naming the button “Continue Shopping”. Only a few of them will give a different name like return to shopping or back to shopping.

I’ve looked at some specific elements – what is the button color or where is the arrow (if any) pointing . I … Read more about Collection of Continue Shopping Buttons

Let’s discover the exact keywords searched by your visitors AND the matching type of the triggering keywords!

The problem: the match type of your Adwords keywords is not tracked by default by Adwords or Google Analytics. Let’s you bid on red shoes (broad, phrase and exact match) and someone comes to your website after searching for Vancouver red shoes. The Adwords (or Google Analytics) reports will only display clicks coming from red shoes, without the match type information you need. Was it broad or phrase match that triggered your ads?

The solution: A nice combo of Google Analytics … Read more about Powerful Google Adwords-Analytics Combo

Eye tracking, heat maps and Pamela Anderson. What do they have in common?

Just to spice up your Friday evening, take a look at the picture below, for no more than 5 seconds. Keep in mind what the first spots you looked at. Then, scroll down and see what the computer perceives as “hot spots”.

Pamela Anderson

Now, let’s see which are the hot spots (the heat map of the picture) (thanks to the guys at www.feng-gui.com)

It’s been more than a year since we’ve officially launched Pitstop Media’s website (www.pitstopmedia.com) and it was the time for a design update. For 2009, Pitstop Media’s website resolution will be 1024×768. That’s right, we have redesigned the company’s website to accommodate the market trends, based on our visitors’ screen resolutions (data taken with Google Analytics).

Redesigned Website for Pitstop Media

We are much happier with the new website design and I would like to congratulate everybody … Read more about Our 2009 Resolution

In a previous post – Call to Action: Add to Cart or Buy Now? – I talked about what text you should use on the buttons which start your website’s checkout process. Briefly, you need to display either Buy Now either a Add to Cart, depending on your business objectives.

Lately, I came across one retailer that displays both call to actions, right next to each other. I have no idea how this is performing in terms of conversion, but for users like me, the tactic works just fine. If I want to buy just one product, I would click … Read more about Dynamic Text on Call to Action Buttons

Shopping Cart, Shopping Bag or Basket? How should you name this button/text? The following is an analysis of major etailers and should be used as a guideline only.

The collection (at the bottom of this post) of 109 shopping cart buttons from top etailers revealed the following common elements (green items are to be recommended when designing this section of your pages):

1. The icon you should use is a CART or BAG:

a. 64 out of 109 etailers display the cart symbol – 59%
b. 23 display no symbol at all – 21%
c. 21 display the bag symbol – 19%
d. 1 displayed an arrow … Read more about Shopping Cart Icons Collection

If you do not know where to start improving the conversion rate of your website, here a catch: start by improving your checkout process. Very often, testing and improving this process is the fastest and cheapest approach to optimize your website.

There are various elements and methods to test in the checkout process, but on this post we will focus on a single element: the progess bar.

This is what we mean by the checkout progress bar:

So, you are planning to design a nice checkout button.

Up to recently I thought that a web button is so simple to design that it will take minutes or so. However, after researching a lot on the look and feel of the checkout buttons of 111 most important e-tailers, I realized that what seemed to be simple, was actually not.

I have been able to identify eight design elements just for something as “simple” as a checkout button. There may be other elements I missed; please feel free to comment and add your thoughts.

Based on our previous research, we … Read more about The best CHECKOUT button