More than a year and a half ago, my CLM colleague Sandra Niehaus and I attended the Second Annual Persuasive Technology conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, hosted by BJ Fogg and his team at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.

At that time, I had only a rudimentary idea about what Persuasive Technology was and what its applicability to our company and my work might be.

Fortunately, I have a boss (and good friend) who encourages us CLM-ers to explore avenues that may not initially seem to be related to online marketing because of the opportunities such varied experiences and perspectives can offer.

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This post is a continuation of a topic I began a few weeks back, about the cumulative impact that small, often overlooked interactions can have on the relationship between a company and their audience.

Earlier I discussed Thank You pages (see Optimizing the Thank You Page). Today I’ll briefly discuss error messages, cover some optimization basics, and examine two examples.

It’s True - Error Messages Always Come at a Bad Time

There’s a short story behind this saying. Once I was reviewing a potential client’s site with a colleague, and we triggered an error message while trying to use the product search functionality.

“Wow,” I commented. “Good-bye to that sale - that is not a good time to have an error message come up.” My colleague, who’s a bit of a smartass and hence shall remain nameless, smiled and replied, “You know, error messages always come at a bad time.”

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I’m sure most of you know that Google Analytics (GA) Content reports display pageviews and unique pageviews, along with other metrics.

Did you know, however, that you can create and track virtual pageviews? You can create a virtual pageview anywhere that you can call a javascript method. This virtual pageview will show up everywhere in the Content reports section that a ‘real’ pageview will.

This means you can track clicks on Flash movies, different CSS layers, pdfs, images, docs…the list goes on.

I am going to give three examples of how you can use virtual pageviews to help increase and track conversions, but first I’ll demonstrate how to set them up.

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This is a follow-up to a post I wrote last April - Why the Google / DoubleClick Deal is Brilliant - when Google announced they were buying DoubleClick. I made a number of predictions at the time and thought it would be interesting to see how I fared. Turns out I did pretty well overall, although the jury’s still out on a few predictions.

I’ve given myself a grade for each of these predictions. Self-grading seems unfair, so let me know if you disagree with my grading scheme.

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