I’m going to the search summit conference in Sydney this week. It should be good. If anyone reads this who is attending leave a comment!

A friend of mine started a blog. Take a look, he’s a good writer.
Boomtown Rap

I’m getting something out of this new blog on startups. The first two posts profile successful internet entrepreneurs and their best decisions and worst mistakes.

Marketing Experiments is an excellent website. I’ve been reading their research and case studies for about 18 months and recommend a subscription (it’s free!).

This is a synopsis of their latest study

“We examine how reducing customer anxiety by matching your site’s appearance to prospects’ preconceptions and expectations increases conversion to sale.”

They then outline 8 ways to reduce customer anxiety and increase conversions.

1. Testimonials (they have good advice on how best to incorporate these)
2. Language and Tone
3. Credibility indicators especially 3^rd party ones
4. Site Ratings
5. Guarantee
6. Other anxiety reducing features such as “about us” and customer support information
7. Page design so that the important elements are along the primary eye path
8. Colours and Themes in keeping with the product and the target market

The full report with details of the case studies used to test each element is here. In the two case studies, the first one yielded a 12.7% higher conversion rate after changes were implemented. The second one had a 70.5% higher conversion rate.

The changes to the quality score went in overnight and with it a major bug! I’m glad I saw reports of the bug before I looked over all the campaigns I manage as it has affected most of them.
The adWords official blog doesn’t have an update yet but here’s an overview from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.

Edit: All fixed - no major dramas in the end

There was a useful addition to adWords functionality today. You can now temporarily pause keywords and ads in the same way that you can pause a campaign or ad group.

Two major changes affecting the adWords quality score are imminent.

1. There will be more transparency regarding quality score with a new column in the adWords reporting interface. This is scheduled to be available as early as tomorrow.
2. There will be changes to the quality score algorithm in the next week or two. The full details aren’t known but Nick Fox, Senior Business Product Manager for Ad Quality reported that the “bulk of the impact will be on keywords not driving traffic.” So I take this to mean that the click through rate will play an even more significant role.

Information from Andy Beal.

Edit - I read it on Andy Beal’s blog first but the official adWords blog has the updated info. Looking through all the blogs I read it seems as though a lot of people are covering this today. Hardly surprising given the importance that quality score plays in adWords campaign success.

There are reasons why a brand new pay per click campaign will take time to start performing at an optimum level.

1. There is no click through history so Google assigns a predictive quality score rather than one based on historical performance. You will start with a low quality score which will mean a period of “buying in” (with a relatively high bid price) to get a good ad position. Expect that experienced advertisers in competition for your keywords are probably paying less if they have earned a higher quality score.
2. If you have keywords set up using the broad match option, you will probably get a lower volume of ad impressions at first than you will when the campaign has been running for some time. Your keywords will not consistently be broad matched until your quality score improves.
3. When a campaign is new there is no data to analyse and draw conclusions from to improve the campaign performance. Nothing has been tested yet so you don’t know the best ad position, the best time of day to run ads, the most effective ad copy and how well the landing page converts. Over time a systematic programme of testing each of these variables will give valuable information on what works the best. Experience with other campaigns gives a head start to knowing what to try first, but nothing beats the actual data from a campaign that has been running for some time.
4. Targeting is one of the key principles of PPC advertising and the narrower the targeting the better. If someone searches for “vintage heuer watch” then an ad title “vintage heuer watch” and targeted ad copy will get more clicks than a generic “ladies watches” ad. It’s essential to organise the campaign into targeted ad groups so that the ads can then in turn be properly targeted. This can be done effectively right from the beginning but when the campaign has been running for a while there will be some keywords that will be worth putting into a new ad group to further improve performance. You can’t always predict which keywords in advance.

What does this mean for new advertisers / new campaigns?

• Perseverance will pay off. Google rewards good advertisers by giving them higher ad positions for a lower cost. This creates opportunities for those who know what they are doing and who put the work required into an ongoing cycle of testing and targeting.
• Be careful not to jump to conclusions too early and start making changes that may be counter productive in the longer term. I expanded on this here.

It’s easy to get access to a large amount of information about your website visitors with analytics software such as Google Analytics. Analytics is worth the effort but only if you’re going to do something useful with the data.

This list of the top ten web analytics blogs is a great resource for advice and news from analytics experts.

I like this post from Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor.

He recommends that newcomers to analytics start with the bigger picture before getting bogged down in too much detail. The big picture questions are:

1. How many visitors do you get?
2. How do they get there?
3. What do they do on your website?

The information gathered by answering these high level questions should then be used in conjunction with your website goals. What’s the purpose of your website and what actions do you want your website visitors to take?

Starting at the macro level can form the basis for implementing changes and measuring results so you actually make real use of the stats.

Queenslanders can BYO (thongs) hehe