After the restart

... I've got access to AdWords with Firefox, but still no Google Analytics. I'll check to see if anyone that I know is suffering from the problem.

Undocumented functionality

Weirdly I've got a problem with Google today. I can't access Analytics from either Firefox or IE, but more annoying - I can't access my AdWords account from Firefox. Since Firefox is my browser of choice, that means a deliberate action to open IE so that I can view my AdWords numbers.

Since the analytics module seems to be down in both browsers, I'll assume that the issue is at Google's end. On the Firefox problem, I wonder if I have somehow got a cookie which is disrupting the AdWords access.

I'll try a restart later today but now I think about it, I had the same problem yesterday evening so a simple shut-down probably won't cure it.

Keep on Testing, Igor! (repost)

Regular readers may be bored by my continuous emphasis on testing, but if you don't know whether the latest piece of finely honed copy is better or worse than the one that went before, then what drives you to change it again other than the calendar and some organic reaction deep in your gut?

I've been testing an AdWord on our champagne site against our base ad. The test has been running for about 5 weeks now which is quite a long time. Why so long? The answer is that the data is confusing and it depends which timebase you look at in deciding which is the better ad.

Over the whole of the month of October, the new ad underperformed the base ad by about 8%. I was a little surprised by that as I thought that the new ad was structurally better and should have performed better. I decided to keep it on.

In the first 4 days of November the new ad has outperformed the base ad by more than 100% and overall it is now a better ad than our base ad, despite underperforming for the whole of October. Is this a blip or a real indication of the relative merits of the 2 ads? I don't know.

If anyone has any suggestions then I would be happy to entertain them.

Tags:

• AdWords
• eCommerce
• Champagne

AOL search, take 2

I wrote a post the other day about AOL search and asked whether its search results blurred the boundaries for some of the people that were using it. Edwin Aoki (who I believe works for AOL) commented:

On the recently released AOL Search (and even before, I think), all of the paid ads are listed in a light blue banner labeled "Sponsored Links".

I believe this is similar to how all of the major search engines distinguish paid placement versus organic results. Is there something in particular that you think AOL is doing that's more confusing?

Well Edwin, you be the judge - this pic shows the results of a similar search on AOL done earlier today. Clicking on the pic will let you see a larger version of the image. As you can see, the page is water white throughout and although there is a demarcation between sponsored ads and organic results it is subtle which could cause confusion. The person who made the initial search thought that they were looking at organic results which was what led me to pose the question in the first place.

Has AOL blurred the boundaries here?

Tags:

• Blogging
• AdWords

AOL Search

I was with someone the other day and he showed me the results of a search that he had done on AOL. He pointed to a site listed towards the top of the page and said "that's a good position". It was a paid advertisement and I wonder how many other searchers on AOL are unaware that a number of the search results in the 'Golden Triangle' are pay per click ads and not organic search results.

At one level it may not matter, providing that the advertisers are being honest about their relevance to a particular keyword search, at another it's relevant since searchers should probably be able to spot the difference between a search and an organic result fairly easily. Has AOL blurred the boundaries here?

Tags:

• Blogging
• AdWords

The cost of sale

We have a site which has been running since the middle of August. We have been driving traffic towards it using AdWords and the cost of the qualified clicks has dropped by about 12% over that time. I think that we'll be able to drive it down further by refining how the AdWords are used and having parallel campaigns which focus on particular keywords.

That's all good, but the cost of sales is still too high. I have been doing some research to find out some independent opinions of the site to discover why the site isn't converting a high enough proportion of its visitors. There are a number of areas that the participants think that we need to change and I will be sharing the outputs of that survey with Chris and Phil. We won't necessarily implement it all blindly, but we will try to think through what we might reasonably do to react to some of their comments. The point here is that the sample that we have used for the research isn't statistically significant, but there is still some commercial truth in what has emerged from the research.

Experimentation is key to any eCommerce site. There is absolutely no point in increasing the resources devoted to promotion or search engine optimisation unless you are confident that the traffic has a reasonable chance of converting. Higher AdWords traffic to a site that isn't selling is simply a strategy designed by a liquidation specialist looking to make money from another bankruptcy.

That means changing things and measuring people's reactions to those changes. What is the dwell time on the site - what is the average number of page reads - how many go through to the sign-up page - how many hand over their card details? Making changes slowly and then checking to see whether those changes have a beneficial impact on the figures takes time, but it is worthwhile when it pays back with a higher average sales value per visitor to the site. If you are lucky enough to have a high volume of visitors then it can be worthwhile using some form of Taguchi modelling, but if, like this site, the number of impressions is relatively low then you will have to make judgements based on simple individual research and focus groups to get an insight into whether the changes you are implementing on your site will be beneficial.

Tags:

• eCommerce
• AdWords