From Google Adwords Blog

We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad. For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions. In other words, an ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position, would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average. Ads above the search results have a conversion rate within ±2% of right-hand side positions.

The bottom line: conversion rates don’t vary much by position.



What this means for our clients — we optimize your ads so that they show on page one 99% of the time. While other companies bid for high positions this causes your ads to be rationed or leads to your campaign hitting your budget cap early in the day. Most PPC campaigns have budget limits. If your campaign has a daily limit that it routinely hits you are wasting money. Our campaign limits are rarely hit because we bid your keywords with advanced distribution (not standard distribution that rations your ads).

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We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad. For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions. In other words, an ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position, would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average. Ads above the search results have a conversion rate within ±2% of right-hand side positions.

The bottom line: conversion rates don’t vary much by position.

What this means for our clients — we optimize your ads so that they show on page one 99% of the time. While other companies bid for high positions this causes your ads to be rationed or leads to your campaign hitting your budget cap early in the day. Most PPC campaigns have budget limits. If your campaign has a daily limit that it routinely hits you are wasting money. Our campaign limits are rarely hit because we bid your keywords with advanced distribution (not standard distribution that rations your ads).

Read more about this here…

This video is very interesting. I don’t know why SEOMoz shares this incredibly valuable data with the public, but here it is:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Correlation, Causation & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

For more detailed info on this topic please refer to this post that provides the basis for the video:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-best-practices-seomozs-new-policies-based-on-updated-correlation-data

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Google has suddenly found cause to reveal more information in their search query performance report. They call this the “Enhanced Search Query Performance” report. I would call it the “Complete Search Query Performance” report. You can read more about it on the Inside AdWords blog.

After years of hiding data in both the Search Query Performance report and in Google Analytics, Google has finally discovered that it’s wise to help customers save some money on completely useless ad spend.

Thank you Google for doing the right thing.  Thank you for acting like a partner.  Thank you for ending a ridiculous game. Maybe now Google can also put this information into Google Analytics as well so that we don’t have to hack our way into it with filters!  Maybe now Yahoo! will provide the same data for us so that we can make wise choices with our keywords and negative keywords.

With all the greed and graft that passes for the “free market” these days, it’s good to see at least one company mending its ways without the heavy hand of government legislation.

In short – Thank You Google.

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Double listings on Google’s search results pages can give your website additional exposure and more traffic.

Google explains these listings like this:

“When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.”

Your website will get more clicks and more visitors if it is listed twice in the top 10 results.

How to get indented listings for your keywords

To get an indented listing for one of your keywords, do the following:

You must have a web page that already has a top 10 ranking for that keyword. If you do not know how to get top 10 rankings on Google for your keywords, use this tool.

Create a second web page on the same domain that links to the first web page that has the top 10 ranking. Optimize the second page for the same keyword as page one but use different content.

Link from the first page to the second page with your keyword phrase in the anchor text. If possible, use a contextual link within a body of text rather than a site-wide navigational link.

Get

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Below are some AdWords tricks you can actually use. I submitted these tips to the MarketingSherpa Community as part of their seventh annual ‘Marketing Wisdom from the Field’ report.

When geo-targeting try not to use radii or self defined areas, use the location targeting offered by Google as this will ad a forth line of text to your ad and will dramatically increase CRT, quality scores and drive more visitors who convert better. I have seen a 100% increase in conversions rates with a 30% drop in conversion costs by switching to this strategy with some clients.

Experiment with banner ads in placement targeting on the content network. There is a reason Google has recently created a banner building tool inside their platform — they have massive inventory holes for banner space due to the economic downturn. Banner ads are the first things large companies cut out of an ad budget because they have low conversion rates. A smart user of of AdWords can find great placements and can send out targeted messages with banners.

Lastly, and this is so so important, all AdWords users need to be aware the the AdWords data they see inside

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David definitely knows the ins and outs of SEO. He gave us quick fixes that immediately moved us from page 10 to page 2 on Google. We are still in the process of implementing all of David’s advice and expect to continue rising up in the rankings. David also helped us navigate Google AdWords to get the best response for our budget. We got leads within a few days of activating our account.

Karen Tran
Marketing Manager
AVF Consulting, Inc.

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Received November 18, 2008

As a psychologist in private practice for 25 years, I’ve had to learn a lot about marketing. My best efforts had me receiving one phone call for a new referral perhaps every week or two, which is quite respectable for my profession. Now, on a typical week, I get 4 or 5 phone calls. Yesterday, I picked up 6 messages from my answering service, all of which were from Dave Foreman’s efforts. That’s 6 in one day, compared to one every week!

Dave is a marketing genius, someone who makes things happen and gets extraordinary results in this ridiculously competitive field (not to mention this economy). How often can you say that about someone who actually has delivered on the promise! When I learned he had a website with testimonials, I knew I had to write this…it was not solicited by him. But imagine how you’d feel if someone increased your productivity, enabling you to do what you love, in such a dramatic way.

Thanks, Dave

Todd Pressman

pressmanandassociates.com

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The post below has top notch advice for optimizing YouTube videos, if you have the stomach for it… Some of the comments on the post are pretty angry.   These are “grey hat” methods.  If you are pure as the driven snow you may want to go back to your article posting sites, social bookmarking and “blog posting.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/

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From Anne Smarty at Search Engine Journal

While nowadays almost every webmaster knows its basics, some things still cause misunderstandings

Robots.txt can prevent bots from crawling the page or directory but not from indexing or ranking the URL when it’s found via external references. In this case search engines will use information from these external sources to make judgments about the page and also to formulate the snippet (title and description that appear in search results

If you have both general (i.e. wildcard *) and specific (e.g. User-agent: googlebot ) user-agent sections, keep in mind that Google (and other crawlers) will only follow the most specific section and ignore all other sections (including the general one): thus repeat all the directives from general section in all specific ones.

The matching is from the left to the right, meaning that crawlers are blocked from anything that begins with / pattern. So if you have blocked yoursite.com/a directory, for example, keep in mind that you are also blocking all directories/ pages going after the root and starting with ‘a’ (e.g. yoursite.com/about). The related case was described in the recent WebmasterWorld thread.
To be on the safe

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