A new study on search engine loyalty from the RKG skunk-works

Sudden drops in conversion rates can happen for a variety of reasons. Here are some tips for identifying and addressing these issues.

Has eBay been phasing out syndicated Yahoo ads in favor of Google’s? RKG records indicate a major change in the search partner landscape.

Is Bing gaining share?

The deal is done. What does it mean for paid search?

A more careful study yields a different perspective.

Bing hasn’t stolen much traffic yet, but the traffic it has taken seems to be high quality and the source may surprise people.

How your PPC efforts are tracked can have a significant impact on the program’s performance. Javascript-based tracking systems used by most web analytics systems typically lose 10 – 30% of the sales driven by paid search. Find out why and how to plug this hole.

For better or worse, this is where online retail is heading, and your marketing and merchandising teams will benefit from being there at the beginning.

We took a look at “Market Share” of the big three engines over time and saw some interesting trends.

Yahoo has been testing a feature that allows advertisers to add videos, custom search boxes or images to their traditional text search ads. As presented in Beta, the program seems more aligned with Yahoo’s bottom line, than with those of their advertisers.

These suggestions were posted at SEL yesterday, in case you missed them.

Can Yahoo automatically add keywords to your account and activate them, all without your pre-authorization?

We’ve complimented Google here before on their efforts to improve their content network. It it nice these changes are beginning to be noticed by the get-rich-quicksters too.

One day isn’t an entire retail season, but I thought it interesting to compare CyberMonday 2008 to 2007.

As November begins, the situation has become bleaker.

We do not observe broad weakness in online sales.

The ad spend share situation by engine is essentially unchanged since last month.

“In social networks, on the other hand, users show up to find friends; ads are, at best, irrelevant to that goal.” Byran Urstadt, Tech Review

Looking at our agency’s client base in aggregate, last month Google received 79% of our clients’ ad dollars. Yahoo received 17%. Microsoft received 5%.

“But one thing that struck me is that I just found out today that the way AdSense works is we don’t actually know how much of a cut we’re getting. We just take their ads and run them on our site and they send us a check at the end of the month, and we trust them to give us a fair amount of whatever they were paid, though there’s no actual way to determine what a fair amount might be.” – FJY

Last week Google and Yahoo announced an agreement by which Yahoo would be allowed to selectively serve Google ads along side search results on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s partner sites, and take advantage of Google’s Content ad platform as well.

May 2008 search engine share results aggregated across RKG clients: steady, no big change. Google at 81%.

Microsoft will offer cash back to users who make purchases after using Live search. IMHO, you can’t buy user loyalty.

For the first time, Google nudges Yahoo out of the top spot as most popular US site.