'conversion' Category

• adCenter Misses An Optimisation Trick for Advertisers

  With the upcoming merger of the Microsoft and Yahoo search networks in the UK, we’ve been looking at optimisation techniques on the adCenter network. Wayyyy back in the dawn of time (well, a year or two after AdWords started) we were doing work on optimising ROI, when we spotted an intrinsic economic problem – a [...]

  July 7th, 2011

• Google Analytics Mystifying Weighted Goals

  Google Analytics offers goal measurements, and you can identify the sources for visitors completing goals. If you’re trying to optimise revenue for a site, knowing where the buying visitors come from can help you focus on bringing in more of the same type of visitor. If you’ve created goals, such as a “thank you” page [...]

  November 13th, 2010

• Convert Tab Separated Values (TSV) File to CSV for Import: Ruby 1.8

  I have a few applications that drop Tab Separated Values files – like the Google AdWords Editor. Sometimes, when trying to convert from TSV to CSV, you can get away with changing a tab to a comma. But fairly often, I find that the TSV data isn’t a strict comma separated format, when using only [...]

  September 20th, 2010

• Consistent User Interfaces Help Users

  Conversion rates, user satisfaction, and retention improve when you deliver a consistent user interface – one in which you tell customers something that is consistent with what you actually do. The issue arose with a client, but I have a personal experience of a very similar case. I logged into our banks internet banking facility. [...]

  February 7th, 2010

• Why Advertising Is Decreasing

  I read the most unutterable drivel in a TechCrunch article – “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet“. There’s parts of the argument that I don’t have any personal experience with, but when looking at the bits that I do know about, I believe that the author, Eric Clemons, is just spewing nonsense. He points [...]

  March 23rd, 2009

• Recession – Killing Me Softly

  If the recession isn’t doing enough to kill your business, here’s our top list for self-inflicted wounds you can use to drive your website into the ground. 1 – Ignore Other Opportunities You can appear on Google Map listings. In Image search. In Video search. On YouTube. Blog searches. Mobile search. News sites. News aggregation [...]

  March 11th, 2009

• Google’s Approach To Click Fraud – 2007

  Well, I’m a year late finding this PDF about Click Fraud, ROI and Advertiser Response by Kourosh Gharachorloo of Google. I was doing a periodic scan to see if anyone else has published how to interpret the autotagged gclid in AdWords. It’s nice to see that my old article anticipated many of the arguments – [...]

  October 18th, 2008

• Spectacle Recycling, Content Match And MFA

  Part of what we do is SEO and conversion improvement, so I tend to take a close look at other sites that rank well in organic search, to see how they are constructed and whether they work only for the site owner, or work for the visitor too. That was thrown into highlight this week [...]

  September 28th, 2008

• Christmas Is Coming. Really.

  Having been approached a few weeks before Christmas by some online stores keen to boost their sales in peak season, last year, may I point out that planning your Christmas paid search activity should be in progress, now? For maximum impact, you’ll want purpose-designed landing pages to optimise conversion. That usually means running some experiments. [...]

  August 26th, 2008

• AdWords Quality Score Changing

  In possibly the most significant announced change to AdWords, the Quality Score is changing. This should, within a month or so, cause improvements in conversion if the details are correct. It would be quite possible to mess this up. I suspect that there will be some weeks of agony as first, users will assume that [...]

  August 22nd, 2008