The Science of First Impressions. Split second judgments and what you can do about it. A paper published by Behaviour & Information Technology states that it takes about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, which determines they’ll stay or leave. Google Research shows that users prefer website designs that look simple and familiar (meaning, the design looks similar to other websites in your industry). The Missouri University of Science and Technology [PDF] determined that it generally takes about 2.6 seconds for one’s eyes to land on the area of a website that influences their first impression most. They discovered that the better the first impression, the longer participants stayed on the website. Intent is at the heart of conversions People visit websites with intent, and having an understanding of what this intent is can bring valuable information to your marketi...
Web Analytics. As legal marketing agency in Calgary, AB - we often get asked by our clients about the accuracy of traffic analytics. While this article was written back in 2008 - it is still valid today. It's one thing to collect website metrics, but making heads or tails of it it is another matter all together. There are a few web stat programs out there to decipher server logfiles in a somewhat coherent fashion, but they all output metrics in a different way. Understanding the differences can be very useful - notably when your boss is asking you for specifics on the company traffic report. How do you interpret the information and what do all the discrepancies mean? How do these programs read logfiles? There are some great 'free' open source server tools out there to help us wade through data to extract measurable results. I'll go over what I know about how logfiles are interpreted and i'll briefly cover 3 popular logfile statistic programs - Webalizer, AWSt...