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Brad interviewed by Meet Innovators

October 28, 2008

Adrian Bye runs a fantastic site that interviews top CEOs and executives and publishes the transcripts.

Some recent interviews are :

• Tony Hsieh from Zappos
• Drew Curtis from Fark
• Patrick Byrne from Overstock
• Jason Fried from 37 Signals

And now myself.

It appears even Matt Cutts liked the PPC interview.

Adrian is a long time friend of mine who understands networking, interviewing, and connecting people together. MeetInnovators.com is definitely a site worth watching.

Use Demographic Targeting to Reach Your Customers in New Ways

October 28, 2008

I’m a little late in posting this. My latest Search Engine Land column was published while I was away on vacation in Europe.

It shows how to combine the power of demographic targeting with the targeting of AdWords to create some really targeted campaigns.

Hope you enjoy it.

Use Demographic Targeting to Reach Your Customers in New Ways

From Google – Paid clicks more likely to convert

October 27, 2008

Google and Compete did a joint retail study examining the role of search in retail, and they have a webinar about the findings.

One retail study they were involved with started that in 7 out of 8 categories they tested, paid clicks were 50% more likely to convert than organic clicks.

Personally, I’ve always felt paid should convert higher for two reasons:

• You get to choose your keywords. You can show in natural results for terms unrelated to your products/services. For paid, the relevance should be higher.
• Many consumers know they are ads. Often we click on natural when we’re surfing/researching, and ads when we’re more in the mood for buying or researching a future purchase.

If you are in the retail industry (or a paid search manager), the webinar is definitely worth watching.

The note above about the conversions comes on the ‘Key Findings’ slide if you’d like to jump to that point and listen. Then jump to the slide ‘Paid clicks are more likely to convert’ to view the chart.

Local Info

The other chart that most of us involved in local will be interested in is the ‘In-store purchases’ near the end of the presentation. “Up to 43% of of online shoppers purchase in-store”. That number changes a lot depending on who you are talking to; however, this study does show a chart of in-store purchase percentage by a few verticals, which is useful.

Affiliate & Retail Info

Slide ‘many people click now and buy later’ shows a chart of how much time occurs between initial search and purchase time. It’s common to see one to two weeks pass. If you’re an affiliate with a same day or one week cookie, this is important to understand in your driving traffic to a site where you might not gain the commission.

The Actual Study

It’s an adobe webinar so you will need flash installed to view it:

Google retail industry webinar.

Should you offer Free Shipping?

October 27, 2008

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld right now about the pros and cons of free shipping.

Should it be part of the purchase, a marketing tool, when you should display it, etc…

It’s a good read for anyone in the retail business.

Microsoft adCenter Resources

October 24, 2008

I don’t talk about adCenter very often; however, Microsoft has a strong PPC platform that is worth testing to see how your ads perform.

Microsoft launched a learning center for adCenter recently.

adCenter has a fantastic community site.

I’m also a fan of their analytics solution. Here’s some screenshots and a review I wrote up about adCenter analytics earlier this year.

Give adCenter a Try When..

Most PPC marketers start with Google, add Yahoo when they max out Google, and then add Microsoft when both of those are maxed out.

If you’re a small business managing your own account and not spending a lot of money; that might be the way to go (time is money).

However, if you are a dedicated PPC manager, or a business with a high spend, or a high percentage of your client recruitment from search – you should test out adCenter to determine your returns. You might want to move a slice of the Yahoo/Google budget to Microsoft permanently. The one thing about adCenter is they know they are the small player, have engaged the community exceptionally well,  and have done many things right in helping people to transition accounts to adCenter.

Other Microsoft adCenter Resources:

• Excel plug-in (easy keyword research tool)
• Bulk upload your account (you can use AdWords Editor exports to make this simple)
• Microsoft adLabs – If you’ve never visited this site, use your Friday afternoon to learn some new (and fantastic) tools.

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