Bloggers Digest 9/26/08

If you’re new here, welcome! And thanks for subscribing to Get Elastic. Friday is Blogger Digest day where we highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

Thanks to all our awesome blog subscribers, we crossed a major milestone of 5,000 subscribers this week!

This week's roundup covers 2 weeks as Jason and I were gallavanting last Friday with the Zappos crew in Henderson, Nevada. It was an awesome time, such a neat company. We were in the area for Shop.org that week and you can catch up with my posts for the Shop.org blog here. We could really use some discussion around the carousel navigation debate, who's brave?

• The blogosphere was set a-buzz after Google came out to recommend not using rewrite for dynamic URLs. Many webmasters and search professionals were skeptical that it was good advice, and Rand Fishkin presents solid arguments for why you should continue to rewrite long, messy, dynamic URLs (it's not all about search spiders!)

• Mystified about how to create personas for persuasive copywriting? Maybe seeing some examples would help. The persuasion expert, Bryan Eisenberg, shares 2 examples of personas that he might typically use for his clients. Bonus points for the Seinfeld reference.

• Tom Critchlow has a thorough post at SEOMoz called The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers which describes some dreadful SEO mistakes from big-time UK retailers. Useful to all ecommerce marketers - don't make these mistakes!

• For you conspiracy theorists out there, Gab Goldenberg postulates how merchandising would have to adapt to the needs of Google optimization should the Big G eliminate search as an affiliate marketing channel and morph into more of its own comparison shopping marketplace a la Amazon or eBay.

• If Avinash Kaushik was stranded on a desert island and could only track 8 KPI (key performance indicator) metrics, which would they be? Check out Eight Rules for Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators to find out.

• You may have noticed we talk quite a bit about site testing around here, so if you're ready to take the plunge, or still seriously thinking about it, go ahead and bookmark GrokDotCom's exhaustive list of Google Website Optimizer learning resources - a nice mix of text, audio and video content.

• Impressive case study of how Office Depot increased PPC click through rate by 78.5%, conversion by 23.8%, revenue by 196.6% and new buyers by 183%. How? The answer is creatively simple: use review content in PPC ad copy
  • Google Analytics Support Tech Shawn Purtell shares a hack to help Google Analytics and Website Optimizer get along together.
  • A while back we collected a bunch of ecommerce cart buttons, and Pit Stop Media went through and collected checkout buttons from the same retailers, with a nice set of statistics at the end. Nice work!
  • Mitch Joel from Twist Image explains why negative reviews convert more effectively into sales than positive reviews for one simple reason, trust.