James, what are people doing to track consumers who exit off their site without doing anything? I have heard of the Exit Butler, but how exactly can one track when and why a consumer gets off their site? This would help immensely for creating a better motivating user experience. also, why can't i seem to find a good Green chili recipie?

Hey April!

I can't help you on the Green Chili thing...but I would say that having Google Analytics or a similar analytics program on your site is a good way to see where your top exit points are. I know using Google Analytics you can see the number of exits off of a given page.

There are limitations to this though. If you think about it, if you are driving traffic to your site to send it on to an affiliate partner, you will probably only have a one page visit and then the person will go off to your affiliate partner. When this happens, you still have an "exit" from your page, but it is the kind of exit you want. I guess you could subtract hits to an affiliate’s page from your total exits and figure out your "bad exits" that way.

Just an idea...I am unfamiliar with Exit Butler.

Holy cow! I just went to Exit Butler and checked it out...I beg you NOT to use it.

It looks like Exit Butler is a pop-up that comes up when someone is leaving your web page – which, to me, is about as annoying as one of those bizarre mortgage banner ads you see all over the web.

In general, pop-ups are a bad thing. Users don't appreciate them and they are considered spam by most people. That is why most web browsers come pre-installed with pop-up blockers these days. Putting pop-ups on your site makes you look like an amateur, and when people are looking for a product like insurance, looking amateur is the last thing you want to do.

Also, impeding someone’s navigation on the internet is a bad thing, and people are becoming pretty savvy when it comes to the different tricks people use to keep them on a site. If you think that “kindly suggesting” a place for your users to go using Exit Butler is a good thing you are thinking in a very Web circa-1999 way.

If someone is leaving your site it is because they don’t want to be there. This is because they didn’t find what they are looking for. If you really want to prevent exits, why don’t you give people what they want? And if you don’t know what they want, it’s time to find out.

Check out the End User Manifesto for a good guide to how to treat your visitors.

Hi James,

Here are my personal "hot topics" for 2007:

• We all build or maintain websites, but how do we build them? What are the latest or most popular tools for rapid website development? Is serious content management spreading - Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, Plone, WebGUI etc? (By the way, don't miss www.cmsmatrix.org if you're interested in this.)
• What are the trends for layout - still three columns everywhere? Are the blog/graphics designer kind of layouts (15pt Georgia with double line spacing on light beige) spreading? Or will website designers exploit wide-screen displays by moving to 8-column layouts?
• Should you support anything but Windows with Internet Explorer? How about mobile devices, is anyone except me trying to make their site support browsing with cell phones? What "edge" is best for now?
• How can you add interactivity to a website? I added a simple feedback form to my contact page because I was only getting spam in my "helpdesk" e-mail inbox anyway - and ended up getting several messages every day that I never got before. Should every page provide feedback possibilities? What kinds of interactivity can have the biggest impact on the user experience?
• Should a web page focus on one single message (e.g. life insurance), or should you expose other things that may have general appeal to any visitor - dating, poker, get-rich-quick, shopping etc - to get any kind of clickthrough?
• Are people really hosting their sites where they should? According to www.hostingspeeds.com, nearly all the world's fastest web hosting companies live in Canada and Benelux - why? Why is it faster to host an Australian website in Canada than in Australia? Having spent several hours at that site, I decided to move my US site out of the US...
• Are affiliates tracking enough information about our visitors? Are we using this information in the right ways?
• Click fraud - how much do you get, how can you avoid it? Are people still paying for content advertising/AdSense, and are any advertisers making any money?
• How can affiliates add value - an insurance broker's wish list...

Sorry, too long again! All the best for the new year,

Magnus

Sorry, I forgot to make the links absolute, is there a way to add "http://" to them? And they really should open in a new window...

(All the links are fixed now...thanks for letting me know)

WOW Magnus! Good to see someone's wheels are turning after New Year's Eve! Many great topics/questions/ideas there. I am going to keep the list close at hand and see what I can do to explore them.

Also, if you want to share your findings Magnus, let me know and we can put up a guest post from you. :)

One thing I would say is you want to be careful about hosting sites out of the US if you are trying to do well in the natural results. I recall some discussion at a Search Engine Strategies conference (2 years ago?) that made the point that a site hosted in Canada would have a better chance of ranking well on Google Canada than Google.com. Things may have changed, but I would stick to a US host for SEO purposes.

Thanks again for the great list!

Hi James,

The geographical factor in search rankings is very interesting. But I have never heard the speculation that there could be a connection to the server's IP address, and I got really curious about it (What? I'm losing business again?).

I've worked in several multinational companies with servers all around the world. When you access Ericsson.com for example, you actually access a server here in Sweden. If there is a geo factor in search engines, it must be of great concern to them.

I've also worked for IBM. If the IP address did matter, I'm pretty sure you'd find ibm.com running in the US, but ibm.se running here in Sweden. Do a DNS query and you'll find that they don't. They run on the same server, where you'll also find all the other national sites like ibm.de, ibm.it and ibm.jp.

When you think about it, there is absolutely no sense in changing the ranking depending on a server's IP address. The most important thing for a search engine is relevancy. Just looking at the IP address doesn't give you much of a clue. Anybody can host a site in Canada, but do they really do business there?

A Google search contains a parameter called "gl" - for "geographical location" I guess.

I did a an "advanced search" in Google, requesting 100 results per page for "home insurance" - there are over two hundred million pages matching that query - without setting the gl parameter. Then I opened a new window, copied the address field and added "&gl=ca" at the end, in theory getting the same search results as if I were in Canada.

All the 100 search results were in exactly the same order for both searches.

There is also a parameter called "hl" - "home language"? - and since that would be set to "sv" for me being Swedish, I changed that to "en" for both searches. OOPS - everything changed. The Canadian list was full of Canadian insurance companies.

Then I set one window to hl=it and the other to hl=de (for Italian and German), and then there were other differences in the ranking - even though all the pages were still in English.

So what did we learn? Well, that it certainly seems to matter if your domain name end with "ca" if your gl "geo location" parameter does. But we've also seen that the rankings are different depending on the browser's home language. The algorithm for geo search is probably VERY complicated.

And we still don't know it the IP address matters (and I doubt it). Your turn to do some testing?

Magnus

WOW! Magnus you are the man. I wouldn’t even really know where to start testing - especially after your in-depth analysis. I’m feeling so humbled right now :)

From all you have said and shown, it does seem pretty doubtful that IP would play much of a role in ranking in specific geographic markets. However, if it is a minor factor, it wouldn't hurt to have your site hosted where Google wants it to be hosted.

While the IBM example is a good one, I would expect IBM to dominate based off of its content and links...with minor factors not really being important enough to make much of a difference. For those with smaller, affiliate type sites, having all of the minor factors properly optimized could make enough of a difference in ranking to move someone up a few notches in the rankings.