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I’ve been involved in a great conversation with John Quarto-vonTivadar over at Future Now about the best place to put calls to action.

It started after John saw online retailer Crutchfield had put all of its shopping cart call to action buttons on the far left of the screen.

It's a lively discussion.  To read more or join in the discussion, follow the links.

The Popcorn Factory does. Or at 29.5% it’s close enough. Recent figures from Nielsen Net Ratings continue to show that a handful of sites are way ahead of the rest of the ecommerce world in terms of conversion rates.

The Popcorn Factory - 29.50%
L.L. Bean - 23.60%
Abebooks - 20.60%
Amazon - 17.60%
Hollister Co - 17.60%
Lands End - 17.20%
Coldwater Creek - 17.10%
Gymboree - 16.00%

Some of these sites such as Land’s End, LL Bean, QVC have consistently been among the leaders for a long time. What’s interesting is that some were also leaders in the field of traditional direct catalogue marketing long before they went online.

Obviously they know something about how to sell, and how to transfer that expertise to the online world. Yes Virginia, the old rules still apply.

What’s more these results are now starting to get close to the bricks and mortar average of 50%, so it shows that great sales results can be achieved online.

To find out how The Popcorn Factory is doing it, and what you can learn from these sites read my analysis here.

I recently came across a DoubleClick report entitled: Video Ad Benchmarks: Average Campaign Performance Metrics, which enthused about how video ads were 5 times more effective than graphic ads.

“Big deal,” I thought. Traditional graphic ads, banner ads etc have a click thru rate barely above zero, so 5 times zero is still nothing.

My assessment was confirmed later in the report where it stated: “…the click-rate for plain GIF or JPG image ads based on DoubleClick data is approximately 0.1%”