The guys at startup Trulia.com can’t be real happy with this: Yahoo Real Estate Search. Great commentary over at Commerce360 Blog about the likelihood your site may be competing with the “hand that feeds you” sooner than you think.

Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of “The ConversionLab.com,” The worlds first “How to” guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

The Cookie is Dead…

Traditionally, web tracking has been done with a third party cookie. Within the last couple years, third party cookies have come under increasing criticism due to privacy concerns.

Consider the tracking cookies you certainly have on your system. Owners of these cookies can essentially track and archive every site you visit on the web that contains their scripting (if you let them.) Every single move you make is recorded, and stored for eternity. This is kind of scary if you ask me.

Check out our friends at Google for instance. Genius aren’t they? Google is best known for being the king of search. Rightly so. I think they are also the king of the cookie. They have code on many, many, MANY websites that they are using to spy on us, and log every move we make. In fact their analytics program is reportedly used on 400,000 sites now.

It’s no wonder that anti-spyware makers and vendors of internet privacy software have begun a “seek and destroy” campaign against third party cookies. With the resulting war on third party cookies, they no longer represent a viable way to track test results or any results.

Long Live the [1st Party] Cookie!

First party cookies do not suffer the same challenges of being deleted or rejected that the more common third party cookie faces. The reasons are as simple as they are compelling.

The first party cookie can only be viewed by scripts on the domain that set it, making it nearly impossible to track a users movement from one website to the next. This is good for privacy as well as conversion tracking. As users, we get the peace of mind that big brother is not looking down on us. As web experimenters, we get more accurate results.

Long Live [Testing]

It turns out that third party cookies are horrible for testing, because they are deleted so frequently. Depending on what you are testing, this could really throw your stats off.

I recently tested a homepage, all the way to a purchase (not recommended by the way.) A full 50% of users converted latently, many after two weeks. If you were using a third party tracking cookie, that would mean losing 50% of your data. Or even worse. This makes getting a statistically reliable result impossible, especially when the difference between the pages may be as small as .5%.

Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of “The ConversionLab.com,” The worlds first “How to” guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

I am proud to announce the availability of my first book: “The ConversionLab.com: How to Experiment Your Way to Increased Web Sales Using Split Test and Taguchi Optimization.” Whether you are an expert on testing and optimization on your site, or just dipping your toe into the water, this book has something for you. It is now available for instant download at “http://www.theconversionlab.com/.”

But don’t take it from me… here is what Tom Donehower of Blue Lava Group had to say: “Finally—a book that demystifies the complex world of multivariate testing and Taguchi Optimization. Chock full of real world examples, Miller’s book is to the point with deep insight that goes straight to the bottom line. If you’re looking to increase conversion, this one should be on your shelf.”

Here is a summary of what you will find inside this book:

* The most important phase of a test, that doesn’t even involve your website!
* When to use Split Testing and when to use Multivariate tests to get the highest ROI from your activities.
* How to test without affecting your Natural Search Engine rankings.
* 25 Common sources of Experimental Noise that can render your results completely useless.
* Which is better: A script you install on your server, or a hosted service?
* The 7 key categories of page elements that literally define your success
* Why most marketers are incorrect when they optimize by looking only at the conversion rate
* A library of 50 of the most important testable items on any site
* Includes a review of 5 key attributes your testing system should have.
* See 25 real life screen shots taken from actual live websites.

This is a limited release preview edition, so it won’t be available for very long. I suggest you go and get it now!

Since its the end of the year, I thought I would post a review of what I thought were the “best of” blog posts in Optimize It! this year. If you haven’t read these, you should make a point to have a look at them. In no particular order, here are my top 5:

1. New GPS for web design, tells you how to build your site

2. 3 Things that will improve your conversion rate

3. Time your tests to get best results

4. Why testing with Google Adwords yields flawed results

5. What is Taguchi Multivariate Testing

Look forward to more great posts in 2006. I hope to have at least one or two more “best of” type posts before the end of the year!