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According to Marketing Experiments' Dr. Flint McLaughlin, whenever you use an X-Y range in your ad, most people will revert to the first number as the mean (average) standard. In other words, on a range of 35-50%, one will assume that 50% off is the exception, and most items are 35% off. (Slide 18 of PPC Live Optimization Clinic replay)

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?

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.

Most companies measure keyword performance - and especially PPC keyword performance - based on one factor: did that word or phrase bring converting visitors to the site on the visit in which they converted.

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?

Are you a Google AdWords advertiser using Google Analytics? STOP! You MUST read this post because you are losing money daily and we are going to help you stop the bleeding. There is a problem with the default functionality of Google Analytics when used in conjunction with AdWords. Google Analytics (GA) doesn't report the actual phrase a shopper entered into the search bar, only the keyword phrase you are bidding on.

Last April, I posted a script that allowed paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors. This was essentially a free tool that gave website owners the ability to weed out ineffective keywords and put more money toward the precise phrases that were really driving their business. Google Analytics doesn't do this out of the box. It will tell you exact search queries for visits from organic listings, but for paid search, you're stuck with the keywords that you're bidding on. With broad and phrase matching, these could vary pretty drastically from what the visitors typed into the search engine.

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?