One thing about Avinash Kaushik – he writes great posts in his blog Occam’s Razor.  I feel that Avinash has actually done it this time…he’s written "gold" – gave out something that no one has ever said before about conversion rate considerations.

First, Avinash gives a convincing arguement for using Unique Visitors to measure conversions against pageviews or visits.

"Using Unique Visitors is a better read of what is really happening on your website because it accommodates this dance and gives you “credit” for those prior sessions when the dance was on.  More importantly being a practitioner I feel metric definitions should incorporate on the ground reality and using Unique Visitors accommodates that reality. (Matt Belkin, you have read his interview on this blog, has a great alternative point of view on this, click here for that.)"

Avinash has a tip of measuring cycles of time that’s different than what I have heard from anyone else:

"# 6 : Trend over time and don’t forget seasonality. If you have read this blog for any amount of time you know I love two things: trends and segmentation (more on this later). Most definitely trend conversion rate numbers but what is unique about this metric is that more than others it is really impacted by seasonality and so do things like 13 month trends or look at 5 quarters or 8 days. "

Understanding acquistion strategy seems like a tough thing to do fully grasp for some clients.

# 5 : Understand exactly what the acquisition strategy of your website / company is. This is not a report, it is a conversation / investigation with your business partners and it is an extremely important step that any analyst needs complete. Figure out what is your core acquisition strategy and then measure conversion rate for those elements. Is your company heavily into Direct Marketing (email, snail mail etc)? Are you spending excessively on PPC (Pay Per Click)? Or maybe you are about to plunk down a million dollars on a new affiliate marketing strategy or maybe on SEO.

This is fine for  most of my clients – but the large corporations are too complex to brake down like this.

Getting the conversion rate by the top places they get traffic seems like a good thing to do – I’ve never done it that way – but with one client – I can now do it using KeywordMax which makes it pretty easy to get those answers.

# 4 : Conversion rate by top five referring url’s. This sounds really simple and silly but there is usually a disconnect between what the company strategy is and where the traffic really comes from.

But it’s great that Avinash Kaushik also tells you what to avoid doing – and he says to avoid measuring conversion rate by the page or by the link.

"In the click density (site overlay) report some web analytics tools show conversion rate for each link on the page. The hypothesis is that x % of people who clicked on this link purchased. Unless all these links lead to the checkout this is a useless piece of information.

In a multi page complex path web experience simply the fact that someone saw a page or clicked on a link is not enough to attribute any credit that page / link in terms of conversion rate. (If you want to measure value of a page see the approach described in this post and look for the section where we talk about “page influence”.)

Again, I found the best scorecard for segmentation by conversion rate was produced by KeywordMax.  I’m sure the other analytics packages do this too, to some extent, but Keywordmax – that’s it’s speciality.

Also, place conversion rate and revenue next to each other is a great idea and I’ll start doing it more often.

MSN Search  can be used to find topical links to help your site become more popular according to Tony Hill.

1) Start by going to http://search.msn.com.

2) Click on the “+Search Building” right below the search box.
Punch in your keyword , choose “exact match” and be sure to click the “Add to search” button.

3)Click on “Sites/Domain” from left menu and choose to exclude your site
Select “Results ranking” from the left menu. Then choose the “very popular” slider and slide that puppy all the way up.

Then start searching…

I tried this with "craftsman house plan" – I’m familiar with most of the house plans sites and know some of them personally – as well as particular problems with getting good links from other architectural firms (who are competitors).

Here was the command I used:

craftsman house plans -site:www.mascord.com {popl=100}

it seems to me that you don’t really need the search builder – you can just put the keywords and site in there you want to use.

I did find some sites that were new but most were familiar to me and while very on topic – would be next to impossible to get a link from.

But that brings up the issue of finding pages that are great to have a link from but that you’ll never be able to get a link.  One of my former clients is a collection of architects that formed a "consortium" to compete with the bigger sites.   The only problem is they also all competed against each other.  Each of the sites was an excellent source of back links for each other but I was unable to get them to see past their own professional rivalry with each other.

It turns out the best way to get links from the sites you really need them from is to give things away (a 50 dollar Starbucks gift certificate for example – might get you a good link from someone).  It turned out the consortium of architects was totally unimaginative about what they needed. 

I left the consortium to fight it up among themselves, instead, focusing on working with just one architect from the group – the most progressive and open minded one – and also one of the more successful of the group.   It’s no surprise to me that success, brains and insight go together.

Matt Cutts released 3 new Google Videos that explain some basic SEO stuff.

Session 1: Including qualities of a good site.

Session 2: Including some SEO Myths.

Session 3: Should you Optimize for Search Engines or for Users?

I listed to video 2 (above) about common SEO Myths; sounds like Matt is addressing some of my clients, like the one that has 11 million pages and wanted all the pages indexed.

I like the Radio Show format – I kinda think Matt Cutts should produce is own Online Video every week or more often and focus on SEO/SEM issues.