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Because the AdWords system rewards keywords with high click-through history (relative to competitors) with better ad positions and lower cost-per-click, click through rate is considered an important performance metric. Along with a keyword's relevance to ad text and landing page copy, click through rate influences a keyword's "Quality Score." Every PPC campaign is bound to have a few (or few thousand) keywords with low click through rates. You can identify them easily enough with web analytics and campaign reports, but what do you do with them?

Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit and, while clicking on ads ?may? be declining, it certainly hasn't gone away. This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?

We have worked with many demand or lead generation companies over the past 10 years. Most of the time when they come to us, they ask us to help them increase the number of people they convert into a free trial, a free download, or to create an account. Conversion Isn't an Event, it's a Process We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don't necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue. This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product. When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

'm often asked what I think the hottest trend in ecommerce is and I believe it's video content. So I'm excited to see more new technology emerge that can embed video right into retail email, and retailers experimenting with it. Anna Yeaman reports one retailer boasting a 20-27% click through rate without linking to video, and 51-65% with links to video. And Forrester Research reports video in email can increase click through by 2-3X.

I've always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. ...

Chad White from the Retail Email Blog recently spotted this email from TigerDirect that dynamically updates image files when a product sells out. This practice prevents the frustration and disappointment when one clicks to a product that's no longer available, creates urgency for other products and may prompt the recipient to open TigerDirect emails right away in the future.

Fill in the form information and click the Generate URL button below. If you're new to tagging links or this is your first time using this tool, read How do I tag my links? If your Google Analytics account has been linked to an active AdWords account, there's no need to tag your AdWords links - auto-tagging will do it for you automatically.

With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer service mix. And why not? A February 2008 study from Forrester Research, "The ROI of Interactive Chat", found merchants with click-to-chat options (also known as "reactive" chat) earn a 15 percent return on investment (ROI) on the chat service itself. Merchants with chat invitations and pop-up windows tied to user actions (also known as "proactive" chat), meanwhile, earn a whopping 105 percent ROI.

As email users, we expect and value emails that are timely, meaningful and relevant from people that we know and trust. Anything that doesn't meet this criteria is considered SPAM. Your goal is to create "Love Opportunities" where recipients WANT to open, click and buy from you.

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

he latest punch thrown in Yahoo!'s fight to stay relevant and avoid a take over by Microsoft is their unveiling of their new ad management software, named AMP!, which will ship this summer. Though pay-per-click text ads remain Google's (and thus the online ad industry's) bread and butter, there has been a lot of movement around online display advertising over the past year, an area which Yahoo! is currently top dog. Since the beginning of 2007, Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL built up its Platform A with acquisitions of Tacoda, and Quigo, WPP spent $649 million to purchase 24/7 Real Media, and Yahoo! itself paid $680 million for Right Media. And now with AMP!, is Yahoo! actually opening up their ad silo?

Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing - particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization - it's often practical to test dozens or hundreds of ideas within a short time. So if you have more than one competing suggestion for "what will work best", the solution is "test them and let's find out". The answer is quantifiable, not emotional.

Response rates are almost always higher for new subscribers to an email list. According to the "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide" by MarketingSherpa, subscribers click through at a 25 percent higher rate in their first month than in their second, and 67 percent higher in the first month than after the first year.

We are proud to launch the new ClickTale Real-Time Monitor, which enables you to see where visitors are coming from, and watch exactly what they are doing in Real-Time! See precisely which pages they are browsing, as well as all their mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes. This is an industry first in web analytics, and we are proud to be able to offer it to you today, for FREE!

Ideally, your landing page should be a place where you can get visitors to do what you want, whether that be buy a product, click on links, or even just read through information without having to do any additional work. There are a number of things that you can do to improve your site's page. Here's a list of 100 resources that can help you get on the road to building better landing pages.

Back in Crimes Against Hypertext, I identified several common examples of poor hyperlinking. It generated an interesting discussion so I thought I'd write a follow-up, adding a few more examples and some solutions.