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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Many websites exist in multiple languages. However, the way you institute language switching (or country detection and language selection) can make a large impact on your visitor’s ability to interact with your website.

I was recently in Italy. When I visited Google Reader, I was forced to interact with the page in Italian. There was no way I could find to change the language back to English. Google reader exists in many different languages; however, they had taken my language choice away from me and forced me to read the site in Italian (which I don’t speak).

As a comparison, this was also an issue with Google Analytics first launched. However, now on the homepage of the site is an easy to find drop down box that allows you to select the language to view the website.

Having your site in multiple languages can be very useful – if you don’t forget about the visitor.

As a reminder, if you allow someone to switch languages, please reload the exact same page in the new language. Too many sites bring you back to the homepage again, and force you to find the exact same page again in the new language.

If you are working on SEO efforts, you should not be changing the site’s language based upon user location – please have separate, spiederable pages for each page and language combination.

I recently wrote about the simplest way to jumpstart your keyword research. First, read that post. Secondly, come back and use these sites to examine the results.

1. Your site
2. Your top competitors site
3. Thesaurus.com
4. Ask.com
5. The DMOZ page for your category
6. The Yahoo Directory page for your category
7. If you’re a location based business, try the local.com search results for your keywords
8. Is the number one page/site in the organic results related to your keywords?
   • If yes, spider for keywords
   • If no, spider for negative keywords
9. Google News or Yahoo News. Do a search for your keyword first (this one might not be around forever. Google doesn’t normally let their results get spidered)
10. The top authority magazine’s or newspaper site in your industry.
11. The sites where you get your news about your industry
12. Any sites you regularly watch for information about your industry
13. If it’s one of your industry resources, spider it for new keywords

While the word ‘bleach’ often conjures up images of housewives doing laundry, the number one demographic that searches for this word is an 18-24 year old male.

Ever heard of Japanese magna? Bleach is one of the top shows.

There are times when our keywords describe more than a single topic. It’s important to examine those keywords to determine what to do with them. In many cases, you’ll want to write something more specific in the ad copy to clarify the different. Other times, you may wish to change the keyword matching options and use more negative keywords.

In the case of bleach, one ad copy could call out Clorox; while another one talks about selling DVDs. Someone learning more about bleach’s effect on clothing is probably not in the mood to buy a magna DVD.

How do we find out this information?

Demographic Prediction

A great tool to start with is Microsoft adLabs Demographic Prediction Tool.

In adLabs demographic prediction tool, the ‘general distribution’ describes the audience who use MSN search. The ‘Predicted Distribution’ is Microsoft’s prediction of what demographics will search for that particular query.

Organic Results

Not only are organic results are a great way to kick off your keywords research, but a  quick search on Google would let the people at Clorox know there is a problem as every single top result is about anime or magna.

What can be more useful than a Google search result, it a Ask.com result that has information about narrowing down your query. If you had done the same ‘bleach’ query on Ask – you can see there are differences between anime and Clorox.

Filtering Out the Noise

The issues is that if you are advertising for either Clorox or Bleach anime, you want to make sure you’re only being shown on appropriate keywords. One of the best ways to start is by using the AdWords keyword tool.

You can use these results to find negative keywords so your ad is only displayed on more appropriate search results.

The other technique is to use very explicit ad copies:

Don’t Confuse the Searcher

In order to have high converting landing pages, you must meet the expectations of searchers.

When searcher’s can be confused by results, or your keywords can describe other industries, follow these simple steps:

• Examine your keywords
• Examine their meanings
• Use negatives to filter out the noise
• Use ad copy to pre-qualify the keyword’s meaning (or the searcher’s intent)

Don’t just give up on the traffic – as with everything else – optimize towards what you can control.

Yes! Please! I often survey attendees of an AdWords Seminar, and a common theme often emerges.

• Most of the audience uses Google Analytics.
• Most of the audience does not use the AdWords conversion tracker.

They are different tools that should be used differently.

AdWords Conversion Tracking

The AdWords conversion tracker just tracks conversions. You can define a conversion in many different ways (sale, lead form, page view) etc. You can define different conversions within the same account. Once you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you can run reports to see performance statistics by keyword, ad group, campaign, ad copy, landing page, content sites, etc by different conversion types (what keywords lead to contacts vs. shopping cart checkouts).

AdWords conversion tracking passes that stats back to your AdWords account so you can easily access all you conversion information cross referenced with your AdWords data within the single AdWords reporting interface. This is a huge timesaver.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an analytics system. It will give you more information than you need to know about your site and visitors. You can easily define goals (conversions) within your analytics account. Google Analytics will tell you about visitors to your site that came from other sources than AdWords. You can view browser, screen resolution, referring site info, and your AdWords account within Analytics (as well as hundreds of other data points).

Like AdWords conversion tracking, analytics should be used to make decisions. Whenever you decide to implement analytics, the first question you should ask is ‘What information do I need to know to get my job done well?’. You can ask that of the design, marketing, and other departments within your organization. Then look for an analytics solution that fits your needs.

For most small businesses, Google Analytics will fit that need. If you need to make real time decisions, then it will not meet your needs.

However, it is much more difficult to extract data such as what content sites are sending you converting traffic from your Analytics account. From within the AdWords conversion tracker – it’s easy. From Analytics – incredibly difficult.

Use Both Google Analytics and the AdWords Conversion Tracker

Assuming you’re willing to use Google Analytics, and it gives you the data you need to perform your job – then you should use them both. Since these two tools perform different functions, you need a tool for each function. Neither are difficult to install, and the data can be invaluable for increase your website’s effectiveness.

AdWords Conversion Tracking Resources:

• Video: Setting up conversion tracking (watch this first)
• Setting up AdWords conversion tracker FAQs
• PDF guide to setting up AdWords conversion tracking
• Troubleshooting conversion tracking

When is the last time you looked at your website in different browser resolutions?
If its been a while, maybe these statistics will make you change your mind:

Source: Weinreich, H., Obendort, H., Herder, E., and M. Mayer, “Off the Beaten Tracks: Exploring Three Aspects of Web Navigation.

Searchers are still clicking ‘above the fold’ in what is visible when your page first loads.

The issue is, we all have different screen resolutions.

W3.org publishes stats on the screen resolutions.

Just because it’s the published number does not mean that applies to your site.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Analytics for this blog:

In the past month, this blog has been viewed on 128 different screen resolutions. In addition, the most common screen resolution (1024×768) which normally makes up 48% of all visitors, sees half of that typical number (only 21.87%) for this site.

While more people are scrolling overall, and some companies are  ‘debunking the fold’; every time I most actions on a site to below the fold, I see conversion rates drop.

While vertical scrolling is getting some traction, horizontal scrolling is not. Make sure you page does not force individuals to scroll right to view additional content.

It only takes a few minutes of your time. Change your screen resolution, surf your site, make notes of areas to test for different resolutions or areas where you are most likely losing conversions or traffic and need to make some design changes.

One idea is to split test your pages where the major change is layout based upon different screen resolutions before you do any major redesigns.

Another option is to use crazyegg to create a heatmap of where your visitors are clicking and make decisions or tests from that data.

You should have some analytics package installed – don’t forget to use the data!