The Pre-Commerce Blog

Conversion Rates & Times

50% of users who are going to buy something from you do it within 28 minutes, according to research completed on one-million Google Adwords/Yahoo Search clicks. The other half of the conversions take some time - another 40% happen within 9 days, another 5% in days 10-12, and it takes a month before the last 5% of conversions even start to occur.

This useful information comes from Dr. Alan Rimm-Kaufman via Jacob Nielson's useit.com. 85% of the participants were consumer sites, 15% B2B. The article is worth a read, and includes some recommendations on how to use this data to make some smart changes to your site.

If You Can't Google It, It Really Shouldn't Exist

Another step in the Googlization of the world is announced:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

All The Way To New Orleans

As if anyone needed to be asked or reminded, here's our suggestion to donate to the Red Cross.

As a little bonus, here's are some thoughts on New Orleans from Bob Dylan via his book Chronicles:

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they’re a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek , Roman, sepulchres - palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of men and women who have sinned and who’ve died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here.

….
New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there’s a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can’t see it, but you know it’s here.

….
Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou Temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain.

(via RightWingBob)

Update: Nice article about what's special about New Orleans