Car buyers prefer good-looking websites, and are more likely to be satisfied with automotive websites with attractive colors, low visual clutter, well organized content, large fonts and minimal links, according to research by J.D. Power and Associates.

J.D. Power and Associates’ ’2011 Manufacturer Website Evaluation Study’ measured the usefulness of automotive manufacturer websites during the new-vehicle shopping process. In the May 2011 study, 10,400 new-vehicle shoppers were asked evaluate websites in four key areas: appearance, speed, navigation and information/content.

There are only seven (7) metrics that matter for Internet marketers, according to Geoff Ramsey and Vipin Mayar, authors of ‘Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success.’

Geoff Ramsey, CEO and co-founder of eMarketer, and Vipin Mayar, EVP of McCann Worldgroup, reckon Internet marketers need only master these 7 factors for Internet marketing success.

Inspectlet is a new web analytics application that records screen-captures, movies and heatmaps of visitors to your website.

Inspectlet records every mouse movement, click, scrolling, typing, and any other action a visitor performs on your site. Featuring real-time analytics, you can either watch what visitors do as they do it, or watch each movie later.

Two recent studies indicate that around 75 percent of online retailers based in the United States are deploying video on their websites.

Firstly, the e-tailing group’s ’13th Annual Mystery Shopping Study’ reveals that nearly 75 percent s of U.S. online retailers had video on their websites in the fourth quarter of 2010 (up from 55 percent a year early).

ForeSee Results’ annual top 100 online retailers index confirms that higher customer satisfaction leads to more sales. And the top 100 online retailers are getting better at serving – and selling – their customers.

According to ForeSee, customer satisfaction with e-retail has reached an all-time high score of 78 on the study’s 100-point scale. Nearly a third of the Top 100 online retailers scored 80 or higher, a major improvement from 2007 when only four websites exceeded 70. Meanwhile, none of the top 100 e-retailers scored below 70.

Fuse Visual has launched Conversion Dynamo, a new plug-in system designed to incentivize first-time web visitors to sign-up, buy, or engage in some other transaction you want them to take when they visit your website.

Conversion Dynamo detects a new visitor and lets you offer a one-time incentive to complete a transaction within a limited amount of time set by you. By presenting visitors with a limited amount of time in which to complete the transaction they are encouraged to take action then and there.

The easier it is for visitors to read your website content, the more likely they WILL read your content, click on your ads, subscribe to your newsletters, buy your products or take other actions you want them to take.

Which begs the question? How readable is your website? Juicy Studio offers a free readability test to let you check this.

If you love the idea of a free, open source alternative to Google Analytics, check out Piwik.

Piwik is a nice looking web analytics platform that offers many of the same features as Google Analytics, plus some impressive extras.

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts such as Adam Audette reckon the click-through rate (CTR) of your organic search engine listings affects how high your pages appear in such search engines as Bing and Google.

As we discussed in ‘How Your Title and Description Tags Boost Clicks… and Search Engine Rankings’, two major factors likely to bear upon your CTR are the title and description tags, respectively, of your web pages.

Seven out of 10 U.S. consumers (76 percent) admit to typing fake information into online registration forms.

Given that 6 out of 10 (66 percent) also believe sites should offer ‘social sign-in’ functionality, the incidence of fake registrations may be reason enough to let people sign up to your site using a Facebook, Twitter or other social network account.