On 22th April, Google is going to make a big announcement about changes to Adwords. You can read their post about it here: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/next-tuesday-is-your-chance-to-step.html In the post, they offer 3 teasers… 1: It’s no longer about devices. 2: Context matters more than ever. 3: Connecting people to content. Which suggests Read more…
Money Week recently put out a package with the headline, “The next time these two lines cross – Britain goes bust” and, under the headline, there was a chart. You can see it here: http://pro.moneyweek.com/myk-eob-tpr-cut/EMYKP754/ I have some comments to make: #1: I think the combination of headline and chart is Read more…
I read this story: Yahoo Wants Back in the Search Game. And, for some reason, the following quote sprung to mind… Sherlock Holmes (from TV show Elementary): “My hobby is conspiracy theorists. I adore them. As one would a barmy uncle. Or a pet that can’t stop walking into walls.” Steve
I just watched a webinar on “Growth Hacking”. I was curious to see how it’s different to marketing. It isn’t. (Other than ghastly jargon, like you need to “optimize on-boarding”, and the exhortation to make your pages “awesome”.) Either someone has knowingly re-branded time-proven marketing methods so they can own Read more…
Catalyst has just published a report documenting the average click rate for each organic position in Google. The ctrs range from 17.16% if you’re the #1 ranking site, down to 0.51% if your ranked 10th. They’ve even broken down the stats for branded v unbranded keywords, query length etc. You Read more…
If you have a website that’s selling to the UK, should your website buttons say “Add to Cart” or “Add to Basket”? After all, Amazon.com has “Add to Cart”, but Amazon.co.uk uses “Add to Basket”. Does this mean – given how many website split-tests Amazon have run over the years Read more…
Danish copywriter and split-tester, Michael Aagaard, shared a number of his web page split-testing case studies. You can see them here: http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/small-changes-increasing-conversion-rates/ To me, the most interesting – in the sense of “bang for your buck” – was the first one. In this test, the only change was the text Read more…
Recently, there’s been a debate going on in the PPC world over whether you should pay attention to quality score. I suspect this has, in part, been triggered by Google making a mess of quality score reporting. Now we don’t really know what our Quality Scores are, it encourages people Read more…
This week, Google announced a change to the way they rank ads. The very short version is: Our system for ordering ads on search results pages uses a calculation called Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank was calculated using your max CPC bid and your Quality Score. With this update, Ad Read more…
Over the last week, I’ve been thinking about how Google has changed fundamentally. If you go back a few years, the focus seemed to be to create great products with little downside for the user. Famously, they had “20% time” – where developers could spend one day a week on Read more…
