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August 20, 2009 Google Chief Economist Says Conversion Rate Doesn't Vary Much by Ad Position Google's Chief Economist Dan Friedman Hal Varian and his team have conducted research on whether ad position affects conversion rate. Their conclusion is that it doesn't much. I have a feeling "much" is subjective among SEMs. Their research showed that for search results pages with 11 sponsored ads, conversion rates "only" varied 5% from first place to last. So, if an ad gets a 1% conversion rate in the first place, the worst it would get is 0.95%. Friedman Varian wanted to emphasize that ad position is affected by ad quality. Therefore, ads with higher ad position are likely better quality and more likely to have higher conversion rates. In other words, don't compare apples to oranges when testing ad position. You would need to test the same ad across various positions.

July 27, 2009 PPC Click Fraud Rate Drops to 12.7% in Q2 2009 Click Forensics has released data regarding pay-per-click (PPC) fraud for the second quarter of 2009. The news is good. Not only is click fraud down from the first quarter of 2009, it's down year-over-year as well. This year's second quarter click fraud rate came in at 12.7%, which is an almost 8% decrease from the first quarter, which was 13.8% The second quarter of 2008 came in at 16.2.%, which means Q2 2009 came in 22% lower than the year prior. Click fraud did increase from certain programs and sources.

Google is also adding some features to Insight for Search. There's a new forecasting feature that makes predictions based on historical data and search patterns.

Conclusion We've hired people with no, a little, or a lot of industry experience, and none of those experience levels have a positive correlation to long-term success. Instead, a few traits common among people I really trust are intellectual curiosity, excellent communication skills, a broad (and not always college-based) education, and a cautious obsession with the unknown lurking beyond the horizon.

Social media users are 83% more likely to be loyal customers, retailer says For a new marketing medium, social media isn`t doing too bad at Lion Brand Yarn Co.: 20% of shoppers coming to the e-commerce site from one of the retailer`s social presences, including those on Ravelry and Flickr as well as its own blog, buy merchandise. What`s more, Lion Brand Yarn finds social media users are 83% more likely to be very loyal to the brand compared with those shoppers who don`t use social media. "We didn`t go in with a big P&L—blogs, podcasts and social networks do not involve big out-of-pocket costs, and they just made sense for us because we`re used to communicating with our customers," said Rabinowitz, who spoke at IRCE in a session titled "Social Media: If Not Now, When?" "Through social media we can talk with people online directly, we can convey we are a small, family-owned business, and we can help them understand who we are as individuals within a company, which is important because people like buying from people, not corporations. With social venues you can personalize your company."

Additionally, Yahoo! search will now accept Google Base, a product publishing tool. Five Google Base items will now be supported: Event, Product, Review, Job, and Personals. Those who have Event and Product information can submit their feeds to Yahoo! Site explorer to get their enhanced results automatically displayed.

Tracking conversion value as expected customer value For many AdWords advertisers, simply tracking conversions is an “advanced” tactic. High-performing marketers go a step further and also use AdWords conversion tracker to dynamically track the value associated with each conversion. With a simple modification to the conversion tracking script (and a tiny bit of custom programming), you can track the monetary value associated with each conversion. If one conversion brings in $30 while another brings in $50, both values will be recorded with their respective keyword in the AdWords reports (Google doesn’t currently allow you to see conversion value in the normal interface. The “total value” and “value / cost” stats are only available through reports in your AdWords Report Center.).

Internet tracker Hitwise claims that "the share of search traffic to Web sites generated from paid listings has dropped to about 7.25% over the last four weeks, down from 9.8% during the same period a year ago. And Hitwise noted that paid clicks from searches for brand name terms--such as Home Depot ( HD - news - people ) and Orbitz ( OWW - news - people )--saw especially sharp drops."

How Do You Measure Social? Some great tools can help you monitor the online conversation, ranging from free (e.g., Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, FriendFeed, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) to, uh, committing (e.g., TruCast, BuzzMetrics, Cymfony). The more expensive tools are worth what they cost, but the free tools are easy to set up and, well, they're free. And sometimes getting started is the biggest hurdle. You may just want to get something going on the cheap, show the value of your effort, and lobby for a robust, programmatic solution to monitor online activity and engage your customers where they hang out. You'll be surprised how much you'll learn, and you'll probably really enjoy it. The real challenges aren't technological, but operational. You have to define the right governance policies to manage customer engagement through social media, and you have to build the right workflow to prioritize responses, route information to the right people, and manage your content even as you release it into the wild. Employees need encouragement to participate, and they need clear guidelines about exactly when, how, and where to get involved. It takes effort, but the payoff can be tremendous. So don't stop at measuring your marketing efforts' success, or even the sentiment expressed in the broader online conversation about your brand. It's great to monitor online activity, better to develop reporting around online activity, and better yet to engage customers in their native online habitats.