A post over at HighRanking's Forum got me thinking. First, let me clarify that once you click on a result in Google or an other search engine, the engine knows nothing more.

Some people think that since you clicked from Google to page A, that Google knows how long you spent there, and if you made a purchase. Actually, my own dad was under the impression that Google knew if someone placed an order on a site if they came from the Google search engine. Sorry dad if your reading this but this really blew my mind.

In general, once you leave a search engine, they no longer know anything about your travels or actions. Now that that is out of the way, lets move on.

So the user gets to your site, you know where they came from and what they are doing on your site. Right? I'll assume you know this information, if not, then get yourself a decent Web analytics package. It is really a shame how ill-informed many of the smaller e-commerce site owners are about their sites traffic and conversion rates. If they tracked their traffic correctly, then making informed decisions on site changes become less guess-work and more metric based decisions. I keep getting to this, so I am sorry. Feel free to read my past entries on analytics.

Oh, and one more note, Scottie is right on.

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