Blog

We manage 100’s of web sites these days. Our team has the unique privilege to study web stats from many different industries over long periods of time and note trends. Here are a few of my observations from 2008:

A majority of our clients web traffic comes from search activity. Google is by far the biggest. […]

Ecommerce sales are up big time for Amazon. They shipped 6.3 million units on Dec 15th alone.
Read the story here. 
Ian Hartten
Toledo.com

It is Friday Dec 26th and I am just starting to look at numbers for the ecommerce sales figures for 2008 holiday season. They look better the we originally projected. About 10-12 days ago we were 10% under last years numbers for the companies I track closely. That was depressing. I firmly believe that an […]

We picked up another ecommerce job… to create a quick system that will allow the Toledo Zoo to sell tickets online for a very large event coming up. We will be putting 5 different sets of tickets online, and promoting our “Top 5 Toledo Events you Can’t Miss.” They will also be promoting the event […]

Just reading some stats about online marketing and SEO.. I started thinking about the market, and how many companies are out there actively optimizing their sites for good SEO. Some of the numbers from Marketing Sherpa’s reports reflect that 74% of the market does their own SEO - same as last years numbers. This means […]

I look at a large number of web sites everyday that sell. I get email from people asking me to review their site and reply back to them. There are a few things that I run through my mind right off the bat.
Here are the Top 5 questions you need to answer before a visitor […]

For those of you that are in the gift world your ROI is probably pretty good right now for your keyword PPC buys. Conversions and ROI is up and customer acquisition costs are as low as 7% for some of our clients. That means for every $70.00 they spend in Adword buys they are […]

I got a call today from a women who wanted to build a ecommerce site and has been interviewing us. She is selling what I would consider a commodity - clothing related apparel. Has a good chance to make money. Well known brands etc.
She asked me this, “Ian, I am really considering this, but I […]

We had a customer of one of our online ecommerce stores call us recently and ask us about the security of the web site. They started the conversation off with, “your site is not secure so I am calling in my order”.
Well the sites are all secure. In fact much more secure then most of […]

Today I saw that a client had changed the name of a few of his files. I know that these files had a high page rank and got a lot of traffic. When he updated the site he changed the names in a efforts to make them easier to find when updating them. He did […]