Using Link Placement Analysis to Maximize Profits
by Craig Desorcy
Published on this site: June 10th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
Let us assume for a moment that your web site is a store. Not a
piece of virtual property, but a real one. Standing behind the counter,
you notice where customers flow as they travel around your carefully
constructed displays.
Taking note of this behavior, you decide to put the latest special
offers along the most visited path through the store. Each offer,
of course, placed strategically alongside competing products.
Then, you sit back and watch, as visitors decide to stop and stare
at the displays, ignore them and walk off, or pick up a product
and put it in their basket.
Very quickly, you learn which offers work, which do not, and which
never even get seen.
Now translate this into the virtual world. Your customers navigate
by clicking on links. So, the question is, do you know the links
being clicked? If not, you will miss out on sales, and hence profits.
One of the most innovative schemes to date has to be the Google
AdSense project. It works so well because the adverts presented
match the surrounding content.
Trapping which adverts are clicked, and which are not, will put
you in a position to optimize the presentation so that you maximize
the click-through ratio of each AdSense block.
This works in so many different ways that you could be multiplying
your sales by simply reusing the same techniques and wording presented
by AdSense in the rest of your site.
Links serve two purposes; providing navigation to areas of
interest within the site, and pulling potential customers
in so that they take the plunge and purchase, sign-up for,
or merely show interest in, your offer of the day. Since you
can't actually see your customers, however, and follow them
around; you need another method by which you can gauge the
success of your link placement strategy and link phrase content.
Measuring the success of certain areas and navigation paths will
lead you to choose to make certain items more prominent or even
remove areas which take time to update, but hold little interest
to visitors.
All serious webmasters should take the time to build up a spreadsheet
of where customers have been active, and where they have 'clicked
out' of the site, so that the placement of links and their phrasing
can be adjusted properly.
Specialist tools are much more effective, chiefly by cutting the
amount of time spent analyzing logs leaving more time for the creation
of new sites, and business relationships to present on them.
After all, as Bill Gates himself points out, the Internet is the
embodiment of 'Business @ the Speed of Thought.
To improve your link Placement today Please go to:
http://www.my-clickspy.com
Craig Desorcy is an Internet enthusiast who Lives and works
in Japan, spending most of his free time on the internet running
his blog and websites of interest. Email: Craig(at)gmail.com
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