The top UK supermarket ASDA (formerly part of the wal-mart family) has gone public with some great results of a multivariate test. For the full gen, see Internet Retailing magazine’s coverage here, there are a few excerpts below for your edificaiton.

A multivariate test to the ASDA homepage saw bounce rate reduce by 19% so that’s a bag-load more visitors going deep into the site and shopping in one of the ASDA brands (groceries, finance, whitegoods appear to be the major ones). There’s no comment on the impact on conversions at the end of the funnel but Chris Dalrymple of ASDA is very positive about the result in the quote:

“By making small and subtle changes to our website we have already seen that this can have a huge impact on our customers’ ability to find what they’re looking for. This is a level of detail that we’ve never previously had access to whereas now we can use Maxymiser’s analysis tool to look at changes that we know drive conversion uplift. ”

It’s great to see multivaraite testing getting some coverage in the vertical press over here in europe. So many of them have been blind to its impact to date even though vendors including Omniture and Optimost have been plugging away and publishing some great results. Perhaps the press are so used to amazing stories of uplift that they are already jaded when they hear of this new multivariate testing thing?

There is also apparently a case study pdf of the results on the Maxymiser website but I have to rush so will leave you to locate that!

A pub conversation with a client after work earlier this week ended up on the topic of what the benefits of multivariable testing are for the end customer / website visitor / user. As marketers we sometimes unwittingly find ourselves using phrases such as ‘effectively exploit all inbound traffic’. The term sounds quite harsh when you read that as a consumer and we should perhaps be more careful to stress the point that multivariable testing has benefits for the customer too.

This was only a conversation over a few beers but we came up with quite a few very good reasons as to why multivariable testing is good for the consumer, here’s a quick list of them:

• User experience is improved – as consumers we arrive at sites aiming to do something, if we can do that more effectively because the marketing team have optimised the experience based on live visitor feedback then that’s a good thing to my mind.
• The marketer has made the site more efficient at converting traffic, hence he doesn’t need to spend as much on acquiring you as a customer and hence he is a leaner operation and perhaps pricing might fall? (I’m stretching there but perhaps I’ll get away with it!)
• The pace of innovation is sped up – by using multivariable testing to measure changes against a baseline (control) marketers can remove the element of risk inherent in making changes without any means of measuring their real-time impact on conversion.

There are probably more but that’s a good start, I might edit this post to add more as I think of them. So there we have it, multivariate testing also holds benefits for consumers – most notably that online experience is improved.

PS – happy thanksgiving to our readers in the USA!

How can you make SEO work? By expanding webpages with external urls. For example, we put the following URLS in a sitemap. No doubt, it will be indexed. You can check it later on in Google.

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/cursus-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/dimona-vliegen-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/dimona-vliegles.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/dimona-vliegtuig.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/kosten-vliegbrevet.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/kosten-vliegopleiding.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/lelystad-brevet-halen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/lelystad-smb.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/lelystad-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/lelystad-vliegtuig.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/leren-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/lessen-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/luchtdoop.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/medische-keuring-vliegbrevet.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/medische-keuring.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/meteorologie-lelystad-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/opleiding-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/piloot.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/prijs-vliegbrevet.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/privevlieger-worden.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/proefles-lelystad-airport.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/proefles-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/proefles-vliegveld-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/proefles.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rondvlucht-flevoland.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rondvlucht-flevopolder.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rondvlucht-vliegveld-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rondvlucht.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rondvluchten.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rpl-vliegbrevet.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/rpl.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/theorie-vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vfr-vliegen-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegbrevet-halen-kosten.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegbrevet-halen-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegbrevet-ppl.htm

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegbrevet.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegclub.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegles-dimona.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegles-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegles.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vlieglessen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegopleiding-nederland.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegopleiding-ppl.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegopleiding.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegopleidingen.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegschool-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegschool.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegtheorie.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/vliegtuig-vliegen-lelystad.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/wat-kost-een-vliegbrevet.html

http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/zelf-vliegen.html

Generating traffic is necessary to promote products and boost sales. But how you do that? So many sites offer you ’scams’ which seem to give your site a boost with only a little investment. Let me tell you: you can drive traffic free. This by use of SEO techniques that are fully legal.

The webpages below are an example of a similar technique. If you have questions, comment!

Why do you need to post your sitemap? Google has a sitemap structure which complies with the expectations of GoogleBot. It is important to keep that structure throughout your sitemaps. You can read more about it in Google Help!

http://www.w2support.nl/adwords/sitemap.php
http://www.w2support.nl/marketing/sitemap.php
http://www.w2support.nl/analytics/sitemap.php

These sitemaps are great examples. Take a look and learn.

Cheers!

Finally got the new laptop today. The old one, a Gateway I got in December of ‘04, was really showing its age in terms of speed and a weird, green vertical raster line that I KNEW was bad news. I did some research and got a good deal on an HP from OfficeMax.

And here’s the thing about OfficeMax: rather than THANK you for spending $700, they make you feel like CRAP for not spending $750 to get the warranty! “Hey, man…if you drop it on the way out to the car, or get hit by a truck, don’t think you can bring it back!”  Yeah, I’m sure that when I am pinned under a truck, my laptop would be my chief concern!

You suck, OfficeMax! Great price, though!

In crowded markets, it’s important to position your services and products appropriately. Each of your business stationery – letterhead, envelopes, mailing labels, business cards, invoices, quotations, etc., should have a consistent look.

This is because your brand is essentially your promise to the customer. This tells them what they should expect from your services and products. Your company’s brand is derived from everything you represent: who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Are you the experienced, reliable company in your industry? Or the risk-taking, innovating type? Is your product the high-cost, high-quality option, or the low-cost, high-value option? You can’t be both, and you can’t be all things to all people. Who you are should be based to some extent on who your target customers want and need you to be.

Our design team will work with you through every step of the design process to ensure that your graphics have maximum visual impact, communication, branding and that you are satisfied with the results.

We look after all your printing needs from business cards and other stationery items to postcards, flyers, brochures, presentation folders, as well as posters and banners.

If you want to know how to maximize your branding efforts, give us a call.

http://avenueroadadvertising.com/

From the article here “The difference in speed between OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard is remarkable.  I did two tests in the latest version of Final Cut Studio’s (3) Compressor.  I took a 33-second clip NTSC (720 x 480, 29.97 frames per second/fps) and converted it to a similar .m2t (MPEG-2 Transport Stream), which I have to convert video clips to at work.  The results:

• With Mac OS X Leopard: 26 seconds
• With Snow Leopard: 18 seconds”

The importance of landingpages cannot be underestimated. This company knows all about it. They even offer advise.
http://www.w2support.nl.

Sometimes I think the web is a crazy thing. Why? Because with the techniques you can easily increase audience, but also hits. This is just great.

http://www.boekmijnvakantie.com/boeken/sitemap.html
http://www.boekmijnvakantie.com/reizen/sitemap.html
http://www.boekmijnvakantie.com

These links are examples of driving traffic to webpages. You should take a look at this concept.

Cheers!

OBJECTIVE

Versatile expertise will be achieved by turning lifelong hobbies into a profession. I have achieved deep knowledge on Best Practices, IT Management, Project Management and System Administration tasks as a team leader and part of a team. Having excellent hands on technical skills from wide area of technologies and solutions gives me ability to develop and optimize systems further ahead without overlooking the importance of guidance. I strongly believe customer oriented attitude, sharing vital knowledge, standards and teamwork is the key to success without forgetting creativity and hard work.

I have lived through IT as Cost Center turning towards Service Center; my next step is to turn IT into a Profit Center. My goal is to find a challenging position where I could fully utilize my extensive knowledge, excellent skills, deep passion and unique view of IT systems.

KEY SKILLS

– Analytical thinking
– Development
– IT Infrastructure Management
– Optimization
– People Skills
– Project Management
– Security
– System Administration
– Team Oriented
– Technical hands on skills
– User Support (1st, 2nd and 3rd level)

CONTACT DETAILS

– mobile +41 79 757 95 65
– telephone (home) +41 55 442 01 24
– email samuli.hiltunen@gmail.com
– http:// www.skodillac.com

Backlinking is very important. It adds value to the PageRank of a webpage. You have internal linking, but also external linking. To improve external linking, for ex. you can add a link like http://smb-dimona.com/NL/vliegen/sitemap.html. This makes an extra external link.

You can also do internal linking, this means you can use anchor tags to create a site structure on your own domain.

Have fun!

Search engines are the most valuable discovery of this century acting as a bridge between millions of web pages & web users. It is impossible to imagine web world without search engines. Millions of web pages will be converted in to a chaotic disordered jungle without search engines. Useful web-sites may be hidden from the users & what information received will be of no use. Search engines work non stop to gather valuable information underlying in the million of web pages scattered on the net.
Search Engine: Various Aspects

Visitors Point of View (Trying to Find Better Results)
Users enter the specific search query in the search box provided by search engines. Search engines perform their search & display all the relevant results found in the search engine directories.

People often categories crawler based search engines & human powered directories as search engines but both are different.

Web-sites Understanding of Search Engines (To Provide Better Results)
Web-sites always require to be included in results of the search engines & get listed in the top 20 results by the search engines. Automated search engine spiders crawls the net by links. If a web-site qualifies on the positive search engine parameters it will indexed by thesearch engines.

How Search Engines Work?

Search engines have positive algorithms for indexing web pages & displaying web results. The process followed by the search engines is astoundingly complicated & detailed. In raw terms search engines follow the following six different steps to display search results queried by you:

• User types the search term or query to the search box.
• Search engine program crawl through the millions of available web pages to find the search query matching.
• The results are ranked in order of the relevancy
Search engines primarily collect metadata about the group of items under consideration thorough indexing. Indexed pages require stored pages by thesearch engines to calculate the item relevance. Today search engines popularity graph has hiked in a way that they are responding to tens of millions of queries per day if they are indexing hundred out of millions of pages.
Today users requirement have also been changed. Querying a single search engine is not for today’s web savvies. Searchboth.com presents a single platform to search all the top search engines on a single screen. Google & Yahoo are on default setting but user can get results from any search engines listed on the web-site.

Posted by John Moody

Fund Services Ltd of the United Kingdom elected to engage Asset Arena Investment Accounting (InvestOne Edition). As a start-up Dublin-based Third Party Fund Administrator, Centaur specializes in the administration of complex portfolios.

Centaur specializes in the administration of complex portfolios.

The selection process had very aggressive timelines with a shortlist followed by a more detailed comparison of the final two vendors – Sungard And Advent. They chose InvestOne over Geneva because of the ability to effectively handle both traditional and alternative portfolios and the level of trust that they had in the SunGard staff to deliver a solution.

This latest win is representative of SunGard’s growing success in the U.K., where relationships and a high level of trust has been steadily accumulating over the years.

This approach continues to pay dividends through SunGard’s acquisition of new clients, new sales to existing clients and an abiding insight into the current and future business issues faced by InvestOne clients and their peer group face.

As well-known to the InvestOne team as the InvestOne team is to them, key Centaur personnel, Ronan Daley, Eric Bertrand and Karen Malone, all hail from Citi Alternative Administration Services.

They are currently in the middle of their implementation with a view to running the funds in parallel during November and December, before being included in the official books and records in the New Year.

Posted by Mike Melles

the Transfer Agency industry continually confronts changes in regulatory requirements; still, the new, upcoming Cost Basis reporting standards represent the most significant change faced by the industry in many years.

New legislation passed by the U.S. Congress signifi-cantly expands the requirements for asset managers to provide cost basis information to investors.

New legislation passed by the U.S. Congress significantly expands the requirements for asset managers to provide cost basis information to investors. The goal is to enable investors to select their preferred cost basis calculation method tailored to their best tax treatment.

Faced with the new Cost Basis reporting challenge, the Asset Arena Transfer Agency (AATA) group assessed the impact of the legislation and determined that the effort to upgrade our system to support the planned initiative would be daunting.

That led us to seek out alternative approaches. With relief and satisfaction, we discovered a Cost Basis engine within SunGard’s Wealth Management product suite that covered much of our new, expanded reporting needs.

This product build-out will enable AATA to not only complete the mandates within the deadlines set by Congress, but also place our cost basis product far ahead of most competitive cost basis products.

Together, AATA and Wealth Management will continue to work collaboratively, sharing information as we design solutions that take full advantage of SunGard’s valuable service assets.

IAM’s new STS team is located in Pune and consists of our two User Experience Architects, Shalaka Barwe and Anniket Pandit. This team will report to the Technology Office within the IAM Segment.

This team will be available for work across all products within the segment.

The Usability Team’s primary focus will be to provide user interface expertise and standardization across the IAM segment; including:

• Defining detailed user interface requirements (business, functional, and end-user) for projects / products
• Driving creation of work models, user profiles and usability objectives aligned with business goals
• Producing and evaluating functional designs for projects to ensure user interface design requirements are captured
• Leading and developing user interface architectures and prototypes incorporating user interface design standards and visual designs for projects
• Planning/conducting structured user interface design reviews
• Documenting user interface design standards

This team will be available for work across all products within the segment. If you have a usability need and would like to discuss how you might access this new team, please contact the Technology Office, either through Jeff Richards in North America or Nils Winkler in Europe.

Posted by Anne Kermarrec

DekaBank, the German Savings Bank Finance Group’s central asset manager, has implemented SunGard’s Asset Arena Client Portal and Compliance solution to provide back-office support for all its pre-trade, post-trade and post-NAV compliance requirements.

For DekaBank, it’s a proven way to increase trans-parency.

With Asset Arena Client Portal and Compliance, DekaBank obtains a standardized and flexible compliance solution that can help support its future growth plans. This service offering will help DekaBank to control and manage growing volumes of compliance data, while adapting to a widening range of regulatory issues.

DekaBank had most recently expanded its use of SunGard’s Martini Securities Finance solution last March to include support for principal lending and collateral management.

This DekaBank move is a win/win for all concerned. For DekaBank, it’s a proven way to increase transparency. For SunGard, it is another demonstration that Client Portal can be used with other SunGard solutions to facilitate reporting solutions for our clients.

Installed in October, this customized SunGard solution has a go-live date scheduled for the end of the year.

For more information, please contact Dominique Tomassoni / Stéphane Loubere at: Dominique.tomassoni@sungard.com Stephane.loubere@sungard.com