Category: Miscellany

Sometimes it’s tempting to leap to conclusions in paid search. In this cautionary post, we’ll provide a tool for testing whether data has changed meaningfully, or whether you’re looking at statistical noise.

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.

Customer lifetime value comes from protecting your customer’s interests.

More scratchings on the so called PPC buying cycle.

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

Today I noticed a new feature on my Google results pages: A “web” plus box that expands to show new SERP features.

There is no substitute for flexible systems and smart, well-trained users.

Taking a look at the first month and a half of Q1, it looks like the pain in the retail sector is spreading and deepening.

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.

Transparency makes for better business, and for better government.

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

Today’s pet peeve: illegible captchas.

Driving in this morning, three stories on NPR caught my ear as having a paid search angle.

As a citizen, I’m pleased to see the Palin paid results free of crass commercialism, partisan attacks, and sleazy picture sites. But I wonder: why are those ads not there today?

Zappos has expanded beyond shoes.

Merlin Mann at Google on managing email overload.

Asking about what would complement someone best — what a nice and effective way to discuss someone’s less strong areas.

Softball, mysql, and Bush.

“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

Forrester’s Carrie Johnson speaking on the idea, “Search Is.”

I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video.

Because we use our tools to build ever better tools, our technological prowess is increasing exponentially fast.

This was a new one for me: a job seeker running AdWords against a brand name to try get an interview. Ack!