As a consultant, it’s important for me to be friendly and familiar with several vendors in any category, from advertising to graphic design to people who optimize databases for profile search. Lately I have been interviewing usability testing companies for a variety of clients.

All clients are not in the same place at the same time. Startups need best practices and a cheap solution. A site with 50,000 users is at a different place, and so is a site with 200,000 daily logins. One shop will not fit all of the requirements, timeline and working style of all clients. I’m akin to a general contractor in these situations. I work with dating sites to figure out what they need, then I go out and find the vendors that match their particular requirements.

Things get really interesting when talking with user experience companies. Some take a project, run with it, and deliver the results. Nobody really knows why a certain design was delivered, it’s just “the right way to do it.” This works for some clients, who just want to see the needle move in a positive direction, regardless of how it happens.

Others are more data-driven. Their bookshelves, like mine, are filled with books like Always Be testing, Web Analytics and Call to Action. Multivariate testing, A/B testing and lots of other tests and procedures and metrics are used to optimize the user experience and get visitors to turn into members and members to extend their memberships or go for an up-sell.

Today I read a fascinating article at GigaOM called Hacking Traction: The Dark Side of Marketing Optimization.

Misunderstanding the objective of traction, a number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have mastered the art of driving millions of people to a site or application regardless of whether the product solves a real problem or not. At best, this approach skews the data used to discover if a product is getting the kind of usage that would indicate there’s a big enough market for it. At worst, it’s spam.

Hackers hack everything, not just code

That things would go down this path should have been obvious. I’m not sure who kicked off this hacking traction phenomenon, but a small group of extremely bright entrepreneurs now use a very sophisticated form of multivariate testing. For example, they simultaneously test an extremely large number of variables on a registration page in order to maximize registration (the copy, size, color, font and placement of data fields; the format and text of buttons; the flow of pages), then do the same thing on the “invite friends” page (the text of the body and subject of the invite email), and so on.

This method takes advantage of latent human behaviors to drive registrations and visits — and in terms of those goals, it’s unbelievably effective. While this knowledge is still relatively well guarded, it is slowly making its way through Silicon Valley.

This is how dating sites seemingly come from nowhere to to top of the charts. There are many tricks to be learned ranging from adding yellow coloring near signup forms to disingenuous interstitial landing pages created by affiliates leading to unrelated dating sites.

Landing page optimization is the next big arena of exploration for dating sites. As GigaOM states, this is a black art. To me, it’s the logical progression of SEO. Landing page optimization firms, like SEO companies, have been around for years, but have you noticed the plethora of SEO firms that have sprouted up recently? It’s like they just learned that Google rank relies heavily on inbound links.

It’s amazing the stuff that passes for a home page these days. Big co’s like Match and eHarmony and OKCupid test things each and every day, but the majority of dating sites have a “set it and forget it” mentality. They are glad their site is up and running they often don’t want to try anything new, in fear of their house of cards coming down at the slightest touch.

Nothing could be farther from reality. A dating site and it’s marketing campaign need constant attention, tweaks and testing. The companies that figure this out can make millions, the rest toil along in relative obscurity. What kind of dating site do you want to be?

User experience/testing/analytics is incredibly rich area of focus and I’m enjoying absorbing as much as possible right now. I’m not a user experience expert, although I make it my business to understand at a fairly deep level what all of my vendors are capable of, what they are good at and most importantly, what they don’t do as well as they should. Maybe in a few months I’ll understand 10% behind the principles of what they do and what works for dating sites.

ClickTale is a company I came across recently. Their service enables you to see where people hover their mouse over your pages. On signup forms and landing pages this is absolutely amazing to see. I’m starting to get comfortable with the service, running it on this blog and looking forward to seeing the results of the analysis. Click their ad in the sidebar to and see for yourself, it’s fascinating and actionable stuff and you can start learning how users navigate your site immediately.

I’m going to start doing some tests here, because I have years of Google Analytics data that I want to comb through and identify trends in search terms and the most (and least) popular areas of the site. I’d like by this autumn for the blog to greet you and configure itself based on your preferences. Personalized content is key and it all begins with knowing what people are doing (or not doing) on your site.

Dating site owners: How important is usability testing to the success of your site? Is it something you live and breath by, or do you rely on intuition, waving rubber chickens over the servers, or something in between? If you regularly run user testing labs, what do you measure and what are you finding?

Something tells me usability testing is going to get a boost once companies like ClickTale figure out how to create services that automate the process and tie into solution providers, which is a missing link right now. Otherwise this knowledge stays up in the expensive seats and most companies are left to their own devices, guesstimating instead of acting on concrete metrics and research. Google has done a lot of the hard work but it’s still far too difficult for most companies to implement understand and act on without expensive consultants (think SEO firms).

Hopefully this will change over time and someday dating site will judged by their effectiveness and efficiency and customer satisfaction instead of who can afford the most junk social networking and questionable affiliate traffic.

Related posts:

1. Smaller Niche Social Sites Gaining Traction
2. Match.com test marketing $29.00 price
3. Fund this Documentary on Love Hacking

This is for Skout: Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech. Please integrate into Skout mobile, thanks.

Yahoo has launched the Friends On Fire Facebook application. FOF is based on and built by the Fire Eagle team, Yahoo’s location-based service.

Foursquare Seeks to Turn Nightlife Into a Game: google acquired Dodgeball, asphyxiated it, and now the founder has left to create Foursquare, a free mobile application that aims to turn nightlife into a game, complete with points and awards. Feels like a repeat of Dodgeball with points for participation. IPhone app doesn’t let me log in and my image thumbnail doesn’t show up. Perhaps out of the gate a little to quickly.

Sponsor Post: Dating Ad Network interview with Bluepont, a mobile location-based services for finding interesting people nearby.

Alltop has been nice enough to feature this blog in their Dating section.

I removed the Classifieds page. Inspired several conversations but companies and buyers want to stay under the radar. Fair enough.

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise writes Yahoo! Mail More than One Third of Yahoo! Traffic. Looks at this list of top-ten Yahoo domains. Where is Personals?

FacebookConnect on iPhone, finally!

Checking out the Facebook Pages. I set up a page for this blog, time to do something with it.

I had a great conversation with Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith. Make sure to subscribe to his blog. Recent posts about the new Facebook home page update and virtual economy analytics. Facebook is not a web page and analytics are evolving to adapt to the new engagement models. Make sure you are at least aware of metrics such as ARPI (Average Revenue per Item), $ / DAU, Stagnation Ratio by Cohort, Change in Account Velocity, Time to Spend / Payment Source and Implied Exchange Rates.

Andrew Chen: App monetization: Gambit launches, funnel metrics, and ARPU vs “CPM”.

Read about Cloudera, which led me to the Hive project, which is a data warehousing layer that works in conjunction with Hadoop and that Facebook uses to do data analysis on its many petabytes of information stored in its user data warehouse. Eharmony uses Hadoop to run scoring algorithms against its pool of users to match potential mates. If this sort of thing interests you, Online Dating is All About The Data goes into more detail.

If you were at the final iDate panel, you of course will remember the robots.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Links for March-23-2009
2. Online Dating Insider Links for February 3, 2009
3. Online Dating Insider Links for 1-14-2009

IntroAnalytics is a startup that will be at iDate. The company was founded by Nick Tsinonis and Gavin Potter. Nick is business partners with Amanda Tsinonis, who is a shareholder in yesnomayB.

IntroAnalytics has developed a unique recommendation engine for people introductions that can easily be integrated into your website. Our algorithms are based on a combination of mathematics and psychology to accurately identify who will want to date or meet whom.

The company has garnered high praise from WIRED, the New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Seth Godin.

CEO Gavin Potter was mentioned in the NYT article on the Netflix recommendation engine I wrote about recently.

He’s a 48-year-old Englishman, a retired management consultant with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s in operations research. He has worked for Shell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. In 2006, he left his job at IBM to explore the idea of starting a PhD in machine learning, a field in which he has no formal training.

The technology has been applied to yesnomayB.com. At iDate, IntroAnalytics will have a demo to show how a computer can predict who you will like and whether you would be a good match for someone else. I can’t wait to see how it works.

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Hot on the heels of the Google Analytics upgrade, Tech Crunch says Omniture Brings Real-Time Analytics To iPhone Applications. Tracking users is absolutely essential for dating sites and it’s great to see tracking extend to the “third screen” (after TV and PC). Speaking of iPhones, a new iPhone dating application is currently being reviewed by Apple for inclusion in the App store. I’ll have a preview soon, as long as non-disclosure agreements don’t get in the way.

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If your dating site or social network uses Google Analytics, you should upgrade your site with their latest code to take advantage of the new tracking features. It’s being slowly rolled out, you might want to log into GA and make sure you’re signed up for the feature.

We are happy to let you know that the Event Tracking feature is now available in all profiles for the following Google Analytics Account ID: NNNNN. Please note that you are receiving this email update because you are an ‘Admin’ or designated contact for the account listed above.

When you log in to these profiles, you will see a new set of reports called “Event Tracking” under the Content section. As posted on ourblog, this is a limited release currently available only to select profiles.

Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc. We recently made tracking Adobe Flash even easier with the release of a new Flash Tracking client library. It allows for much simpler tracking of Flash content with drag and drop functionality and an open source framework.

To use Event Tracking, you will need to upgrade your site to use the new ga.js javascript. Detailed instructions on how to set up Event Tracking on your site are available on our CodeSite.

To find your ga.js code snippet, edit the settings for your profile and click the “Check Status” link on the upper right corner of the page. You can now track interactions beyond just pageviews.

I’m off to upgrade all of my blogs with the new code. My January project is to consolidate all of my blogs into one WordPress install. Ongoing blog and plugin upgrades, while getting easier, are still a duplication of effort as I I have standardized my templates and plugins, which are the same for every blog I run.

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TNS acquired web analytics firm Compete for $75 Million – $150 Million.

Tracking service Compete has been acquired by TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres plc) out of London. Initial acquisition price is $75 million with an additional $75 million paid out over 2008-2010 based on meeting certain revenue targets. Compete had raised $43M since 2000.

Congrats to Boston-based Compete, members of which I have met at Betahouse parties. I ventured out to the tech+libations event in Cambridge last night where I ran into someone from Compete, who assured me they will remain autonomous while enjoying the benefits of having access to more resources.

Compete and Quantcast are great resources for website popularity and demographic information.

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