Google

As a core component of paid search quality score, a strong Click-Through Rate (CTR) is vital for ensuring lower costs per click and higher ad visibility. If you are seeing your CTR decline over months or years it can be concerning, but not necessarily an indication of a problem with your copy or PPC program as a whole.

Yahoo! announced their Q4 ‘09 earnings on Tuesday, making their best effort to portray a 4% year over year decline in revenue as a signal of a turnaround. While that certainly beats the 12-13% declines Y! saw earlier in ‘09, there are still troubling numbers deeper in the report and in RKG’s data.

Traffic from mobile devices has grown tremendously over the last year, but the quality of that traffic may be sketchy.

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

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

RSS feeds from search results make it easy to monitor your brand across the web.

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.

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

Feedburner users: we recommend delaying migrating to Google Accounts as long as possible, as the current process is broken.

Our RSS subscriber counts are down 50% and our reach numbers down 60% after migrating from Feedburner to Google. Is this real, or a tracking hiccup?

The end of an experiment.

I’ve recently noticed Chrome’s “Destination Search” doesn’t work for sites with unconventional search-form HTML. Perhaps there’s a broader lesson there.

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.

We’d welcome JCP customer relations to our blog to describe how to reach JCP customer service.

“An entire generation of web analytics experts are being trained by Google to analyze business exactly the way Google wants your business to be analyzed.”

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

Yesterday Google announced SearchWiki, allowing Google users to customize their search results.

As November begins, the situation has become bleaker.

“We’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. “

Helpful or harmful to users and advertisers?

We do not observe broad weakness in online sales.

Google released their Quality Score Changes early last week. Based on early results, we’re seeing minimal effects.

Last week came the real GE/Google energy announcement.

Here’s a three minute video with some advice on how aggressively to bid in paid search.

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