Do you know what attracts your readers? What headlines they respond to most? Do they respond to pictures? Do they know what your offer is?

No doubt we all agree that testing is a good thing to do. We can see clearly if our ideas are working or not. But a lot of testing is, quite frankly, tedious.

Measuring user behavior patterns and visitor paths is, in most cases, worthwhile, but there is always a trade-off in terms of the time it takes to setup and run such testing verses the reward for doing so.

Here are a few cheap and cheerful testing ideas that don’t take a lot of time, but can improve your site performance significantly.

1. Write Your Copy, Then Leave It Alone For A Day

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of your copy is to simply leave it until tomorrow before you hit publish.

It can be very hard to read your own copy objectively, especially as you’re writing it. It is often laced with emotion, and the impulsive desire to just finish the damn thing and get it out there.

By leaving it until the next day before you hit publish, you force yourself to re-read your copy in a more objective light. You allow yourself a mental separation between your writer and editor brain function.

Get the full story at seobook.com

A study by PayPal and comScore found 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks.

Most importantly from the merchants’ point of view, the average cost of abandoned goods in those shopping carts was $109.

In the same study, 46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges were a “very important reason” for emptying carts.

Other reasons for abandonment included:

• Wanted to comparison shop: 37%
• Lack of money: 36%
• Wanted to look for a coupon: 27%
• Wanted to shop offline: 26%
• Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24%
• Item unavailable at checkout: 23%
• Couldn’t find customer support: 22%
• Security concerns: 21%

Get the full story at emarketer.com

CNN’s online news site recently posted a poll that asked, “Are you tired of social networking?” When I had checked their results, it showed that 74% chose “YES.”

Yet according to Inside Twitter by Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Harshdeep Singh, after analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, 72.5% of all users joined during the first five months of 2009. 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update per day. Twitter is not the sole means of social networking of course, but this is one small example of conflicting reports regarding the Internet and human behavior. While not everyone is comfortable online, as a world civilization we’re adapting to the changes Internet technology is making in our lives.

What might this mean for online marketing and user experience web design? Should social networking development cycles be investigating usability? Might they also be considering the impact of social media web sites on human behavior and society?

The CNN poll was inspired by a piece they ran called Do You Suffer From Internet Fatigue?, which focused on a PEW study called The Mobile Difference. Pew found that only 7% of people use the Internet as their primary means of social communication. Yet, some of them feel guilty if they can’t keep with all the various forms of the social Internet.

Get the full story at searchengineland.com

Click fraud costs advertisers millions of dollars each year. No one is certain of the exact size and scope of the issue. Google and Yahoo have vastly different perspectives on the problem.

Click fraud costs advertisers millions of dollars each year. Though no one is certain of the exact size and scope of the issue, The New York Times recently reported that search giants Google and Yahoo have vastly different perspectives on the problem — and, therefore, different estimations of how much of a problem for marketers it actually is.

Here’s what we do know: In the new economy of desperation, click auditing firms are proliferating. The claim that fraudsters are becoming more and more desperate may or not be valid, but at least one thing is certain: Click fraud is not just a search advertising problem anymore.

Past and present
Fraud is a difficult word in that it implies that a crime has occurred. The generic label of “click fraud” is associated with any type of click that’s invalid, but as measurement of online traffic has matured, the concept of a click that is not accurately delivered is not the catch-all label it once was.

Get the full story at imediaconnection.com

There are many great stories from the first half of 2009. Here are a handful of the most important developments, and how they have affected the interactive industry.

Brands have been forced to sharpen their pencils, get more creative, and engage with their consumers to a greater degree than we’ve ever seen. These new engagement touch points have created new consumer expectations of brands.

Some brands have done a stellar job, while others have not met the expectations of their audience. In both cases, the interactive landscape has become a constant learning opportunity.

There are many great stories from the first half of 2009. Here are a handful of the most important developments, and how they have affected the interactive industry.

Twitter hits the tipping point

When Twitter first launched in mid 2007, it was virtually unknown. The early adopters consisted of techies and a handful of us marketing technology geeks. As the service started to build, the light turned on for many of us. We started to see the potential for corporate and personal brands to leverage this powerful tool. Twitter brought the “always on” communication possibilities to a whole new level.

Get the full story at imediaconnection.com

As the recession keeps depressing, luxury brands are experiencing a wake-up call from this nasty cycle and from chastened luxury buyers.

For the first time, it seems, even brands that have succeeded by pursuing strategies of “great product plus major investments in image advertising” are forced to re-think this approach and many are exploring tactics more like the American packaged goods approach.

“Aspirational” or “symbolic” buyers, with household incomes of $250,000 to $500,000, are gone. And, the definition of luxury is radically changing. True luxury will continue to be distinguished by its inherent value, or by what Stanley Marcus called, “the impact of the hand” (the best the mind of man can imagine and the hand of man create).

Also, more than ever, great experiences will rate high on the value scale: rare experiences, sensually orchestrated, producing memories so precious they are actually luxury products. These include ‘time out’ vacations, exotic travel, sensual comforts, etc.

Get the full story at chiefmarketer.com

Retailers did everything possible to attract buyers over the holidays. From educational sessions to discounts and coupons, and special offers, retailers used their ingenuity and marketing smarts to make the best of a dismal season.

Nonetheless, numbers were down and every indicator pointed toward an even gloomier 2009. Perhaps the very profile of the retail environment has shifted as consumers settle in for what may be a protracted economic change.

Don’t Take Your Foot off the Gas

No matter how tired you are or how discouraged you might feel, it’s time to keep your chin up and continue marketing to your customers. A reduction in marketing efforts is not an option. Marketing keeps you in front of current customers, enlightens prospects, and positions you well for when the economy recovers. Those who stop marketing often find themselves losing precious momentum and having to make up ground in the long run.

Get the full story at marketingprofs.com

Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. More than one-half of marketers with budgets over $1 million agreed.

The next-most-effective conversion tactic for smaller marketers was e-mail and e-newsletters, followed by pay-per-click and search ads, behavioral targeting and page sponsorships.

For larger marketers, the list of effective online tactics was nearly the same, except search and e-mail were flipped. Pay-per-impression ads were also more effective for larger marketers (presumably because they have the funds to experiment in an expensive medium).

Get the full story at emarketer.com

Funny, clever and sassy updates and tweets stand out because they are the exception. Boring, vapid or just TMI — too much information — updates often dominate in cyberspace.

There’s no doubt that social-media networks are fantastic communication machines. They allow people to feel connected to a virtual community, make new friends and keep old ones, learn things they didn’t know. They encourage people to write more (that can’t be bad) and write well and concisely (which is hard, trust us). They are a new form of entertainment (and marketing) that can occupy people for hours in any given day.

“Great blogging is great writing, and it turns out great Twittering is great writing — it’s the haiku form of blogging,” says Debbie Weil, a consultant on social media and author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

But the art of the status update is not much of an art form for millions of people on Facebook, where users can post details of what they’re doing for all their friends to see, or on Twitter, where people post tweets about what they’re doing that potentially every user can see.

Get the full story at usatoday.com

Retailers routinely post customers’ product reviews online, hoping that favorable comments will boost sales. But there’s a more powerful influence on shoppers that retailers have yet to harness: the advice of friends.

Many retail sites have email-a-friend features, which make it easy to ask friends what they think of a product by sending them a link to the page it’s on. But that approach has one big drawback: Shoppers are unlikely to get immediate feedback while they’re still at a retailer’s site, so their decisions may be delayed, putting sales at risk. Some retailers have also tried unsuccessfully to launch their own social networks.

Now, retailers are exploring ways to link their sites to social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, among others. The biggest networking sites have developed tools that make it possible for a member shopping on a retailer’s site to get immediate feedback in the form of any reviews friends have left there, as well as a history of friends’ purchases on the site.

Meanwhile, networking sites and third parties have created tools that allow shoppers on a retailer’s site to post information and opinions about products on a number of social networks, or to chat on the retailer’s site with any friends who happen to be available. And some retailers are making software code available that anyone can use to develop applications that link the retailers’ sites to social networks.

Get the full story at online.wsj.com