Archive for April, 2009
What is funnel leakage, how to reduce it and why should you care?
April 2nd, 2009 | Author: Paul Maine
If you are interested in improving the conversion rates for your shopping cart read on.
A goal funnel can be thought of similar to a funnel you might use to pour gasoline into your lawn mower. The analogy to the shopping cart is visitors enter the large end of the funnel and you hope they will exit out the other end of the funnel by making a purchase. If we record all of the visitors that enter the funnel and those that exit the funnel at the other end – we can calculate a conversion rate. Every visitor that entered the funnel but did not make a purchase can be thought of as funnel leakage. You ideally want to establish baseline measurements prior to making changes to your shopping cart. Next, you make the changes and then observe the results.
Google Analytics provides for the creation of goals and also provides for Funnel Visualization. The following graphic depicts a real goal funnel. The example goal funnel begins when a customer adds an item to their shopping cart, the next step in the funnel is when they depress the checkout button. The final step is the customer receiving a thank you page after a success sale.
The question of the day is – how can we reduce funnel leakage? Amazon.com is one of the worlds most successful ecommerce sites and so there is value in observing what they have done to reduce funnel leakage. Upon examination, Amazon removes virtually all other links that could distract a potential buyer as they complete the purchase process.
Mainstream IT has developed a custom module for the Lite Commerce shopping cart that removes all of the distracting links once the checkout process is initiated.
How do you reduce funnel leakage on your shopping cart?
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Cloud Computing – The Tarzan PHP Toolkit
April 1st, 2009 | Author: Paul Maine
If you are interested in a PHP toolkit to build web applications that communicates with Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) read on.
There is a great deal of discussion these days related to cloud computing. Amazons cloud computing environment is one of the more mature offerings available at this time.
The Tarzan PHP toolkit is designed to communicate with Amazon’s web services. There are alternative PHP packages that can communicate with AWS. At the time of this writing I believe that Tarzan offers the most complete PHP implementation. Tarzan is free, open-source software with a BSD license.
The following Amazon Web Services are supported by Tarzan:
S3: Simple Storage Service
Cloudfront: Content Delivery Network
SIMPLEDB
SQS: Simple Queue Service
EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud
AAWS: Amazon Associates Web Service
The latest version of Tarzan is version 2.0.3 and was released on 28 February 2009.
You can learn more about Tarzan by visiting the following link:
What toolkit do you use to communicate with AWS?