Earlier this year, About.com conducted a qualitative survey that resulted in identifying three primary mindsets of Search: Answer me, Educate me and/or Inspire me.

One of the top findings in the report confirms that “People’s behaviors, needs and preferences in the offline world drive their behaviors and preferences online.”

The most interesting finding to me was the idea that people go to Search to find a certain type of expert. About.com sums it up like this – “The right kind of advertising could be the expertise people are looking for.”

Experts in the study are identified by Searchers as allies – those with topical experience or motivation; credentialed experts – PhDs, MDs, CPAs, etc; and finally, crowds – reviews, votes, and other social evidence from people the Searcher does not know.

Click the graphic below to learn more about the results from this About.com survey:

Embed this infographic on your own blog or website by copying & pasting the code below:

<a href="http://certifiedknowledge.org/blog/is-it-me-youre-looking-for-inside-the-mindset-of-search/"><img src="http://www.qualityscores.com/images/mindsetofsearch-qualityscores-ck.jpg" border="0" alt="psychology of search infographic" width="50%" height="50%"/></a>

Alpha males have the highest Rank. Alpha advertisers have the highest Ad Rank.

Ever heard of the alpha male?

It’s a term used to describe the dominant male among  animals that live in groups. Usually the alpha male has special privileges like eating first, drinking first, being the first to mate or even the ONLY  one to mate.

Wikipedia refers the alpha male as being the animal with the highest  RANK.

What does this have to do with AdWords?

Well, remember how Google ranks ads on search results… Using a mesure called Ad Rank.

Ads with high Ad Rank take high positions while ads with lower Ad rank sink at the bottom.

But that’s just half the story and like social animals, Alpha Advertisers (advertisers with ads of high Ad Rank) get benefits that their competitors don’t. If you can increase your Ad Rank, Google will be generous in terms of traffic, position and cost.

Ad Rank Formula

You can do it.

The formula is very simple…

Ad Rank = MaxCPC  x Quality Score

… and very important to understand.

Anytime you change your bid (maxCPC), Ad Rank goes up or down. Every time your Quality Score (QS) changes, Ad Rank goes up or down.  Every time Ad Rank goes up or down, your ads get preferential treatment… or not.

Where To Find Your Ad Rank

Sorry.

Well, you can’t find it. We know that Ad Rank exists but there’s no place in adwords where you can see exactly what ad rank each of your ad is receiving. However, it is possible for you to find out exactly what you’re missing out with a low Ad Rank using the Impression Share metric.

Impression Share is the percentage of the times your ads where shown out of the times they were eligible to be shown.  By customizing the columns in your Adwords account, at the campaign level, you can see how much impression share your ads have lost due to a lower Ad Rank. That’s one way to tell if you have great Ad Rank or not.

How To Get Higher Ad Rank And Dominate The Jungle

In order to have high Ad Rank, you need the ability to bid high and get high Quality Scores. It’s important to have both and it can be a challenge to obtain them. Although you can work your way up with high QS, it will be much easier and more profitable if you can afford bidding high as well.  Let’s get into more details…

Jungle Rule 1: Earn The Ability To Bid Higher

Yikes!

It’s all about your conversion rate. Every time you increase your conversion rate, you increase your ability to bid high. In fact, you should figure out the bid that yields maximum profitability for your business (yes, there is one) with every conversion rate you achieve.

How to have better conversion rates?

The offer. The copy. The design.

Those are my personal ingredients to high conversions…  in that order.

The offer is by far the most important component and it impacts everything else you do. To have the best offer, you need to know what your potential customers actually want. This is important and most people assume they know and fail to take the extra effort to “really” find out. If you’re interested in having a method to discovering what customers want, I always recommend The Perfection Of Marketing by James Connor, a book that I think every business owner/marketer should own.

Once you know what your prospects want, you need to know how to convey it with powerful copywriting. Spend time crafting a message that resonates  with your target market  in simple words.

Then comes the design. Crappy won’t do it (most of the times). Though some great copy writers can pull it off with crappy web design, you should leverage every tool at your disposal. A clear, clean and simple design wins. And by the way, simple and clear is usually better than beautiful.

Jungle Rule 2: Get The Highest Quality Scores

Yep!

Ah, that little number we love to hate loving over at Tenscores.com. Are you still wondering how to increase Quality Score? Can’t blame you. There seem to be a conspiracy around the web to put people on the wrong track at every turn.

I wonder who started it…

Here’s the ONLY  thing you need to know about QS and it’s not complicated:

If you have low QS… unless the diagnostic bubble tells you otherwise, Quality Score  EQUALS click-through rates. Nothing else.

Let me explain.

The diagnostic bubble is that little place besides keywords that give you some indication about why you have low scores. Take a look at the screenshot on the lower right.

Adwords diagnostic tool

The “keyword relevance” part is key. What they really mean is keyword click-through-rate (CTR). So, unless that bubble tells you of landing page problems or load time problems, all you have to focus on is CTR. That’s it. The tricky part is, the CTR is not necessarily yours, it is sometimes other advertiser’s CTR. But even that is no big deal if you focus on increasing your own CTRs continuously (without sacrificing conversion rates of course).

So unless things change, as of today, November 2011, there’s no such thing as semantic relevance in calculations of quality score. And if there is any at all, it is small enough to simply dismiss it. Since the day I stopped worrying whether my landing page was relelvant or wether my ad had keywords in it and simply sharpened my ad-writing skills for higher CTRs, quality score has become the least of my challenges. All that Google cares about in regards to QS is CTR. Thanks to Craig Danuloff for confirming this in his book on quality: Quality Score  In High Resolution.  Anyone who wishes to disagree should read that book in its entirety first.

So please, will you give more attention to your Adwords ads CTR?! I beg you, for the sake of your business.

And here’s where the circle is closed: the best  way to get higher CTR is to figure out what searchers want and give it to them. Just like increasing conversions.

Once you can afford bidding high because your conversion rates and profit margins are so good and you understand quality score well enough to increase it, the snow ball starts to roll, your ads get more exposure, you get more traffic to your website, your costs are reduced and you become an Alpha Advertiser.

Don’t wait any longer… rule your jungle!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

This is a guest post by Sean McVey.

Last week, Hinge Research Institute released an online marketing research study that analyzes the effectiveness of various digital marketing techniques for professional service firms.

500 firms participated, and as part of a larger survey each was asked to rate 15 techniques on two factors:

1. The level of focus the firm puts on each technique

2. The effectiveness of each technique for lead generation

The research team took a close look at one group of firms that was growing the fastest (based on year-over-year revenue) and generating 40% of their leads online. The goals was to understand how this high growth group was finding success with online marketing.

Data pertaining to PPC advertising shows that high growth firms focus on this technique over three times more than average growth firms:

In addition, high growth firms rated PCC more than twice as effective for generating leads than average growth firms.

To round out the study, 20 top online marketing experts were interviewed and asked to rate the effectiveness of the same marketing techniques. The experts’ ratings aligned closely with those of the high growth firms.

Why is it that the experts and high growth firms rated PPC as more effective?

The data don’t provide a definitive answer, but it is likely that the experts and high growth firms better understand how to get value out of PPC advertising than do average growth firms.

Many firms simply pour money into paid search — with dreadful results. But companies that fully tap into PPC’s potential are able to generate consistent, positive results.

For a breakdown of the other 14 online marketing techniques, download the full report (it is free; no registration required).

Sean is an Online Marketing Strategist at Hinge, a firm specializing in branding and marketing for professional services firms. For follow up questions, you can reach him on twitter @SeanTMcVey.

Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it.

A couple years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can spend most of your money on sites that are bringing in quality traffic. This is a quick graphic of the workflow that I still use today.

• The ‘Discovery Campaign’ is one of your lower daily budgets, and its goal is to find good placements where you want to spend more money
• The Placement’s Campaign is one of your higher budgets as it only contains sites that are helping you reach your overall goals

While I find this workflow is very useful, the overall problem is when do you decide to block placements? In your AdWords account, the only data you can see for any placement is conversions and conversion rates. The problem with so little data is that if you wait until you have enough statistically significant data to make a decision, you will never find all of the good placements, and spent too much money on bad ones.

There is another way to gain insight into placements with Google Analytics that you can use to determine if a site is sending you quality traffic.

Evaluating Placements with Google Analytics

To have access of this data you need to link your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account. Next, navigate to the placements information under the AdWords reports (found under traffic sources).

If you have goals setup, then you can sort by the goal completions, conversion rates, and other data points to find the sites that are doing well for you.

While this data is useful for adding placements, it can also be useful for finding placements that you want to block even if you don’t have statistical data.

Sort Placements by Bounce Rates

Instead of trying to find sites that you want to add as placements, examine bounce rates to find sites where the traffic is so poor, you don’t want to wait for statistical data.

In this case, we have a handful of sites that have sent more than 18 visitors and have a 100% bounce rate. No one from any of those sites has even gone to a second page, therefore, we will often block these even though we don’t have statistically significant data.

Please note, you don’t want to just block sites if there bounce rates are 100%. You should also double check the ad copy and landing pages to make sure the offers are relevant for that site. If you consistently see high bounce rates for your display campaigns, then you might need to change the offer and landing page before deciding to block placements.

Just remember, a bounce in Google Analytics is a visitor who only went to a single page and then left your site. If someone gets to your landing page, picks up the phone and calls you, finishes an order over the phone and then leaves your site – they will be counted as a bounce even if they spent twenty minutes on the phone with you.

Create Interaction Goals

A quick way of seeing what sites are bringing in good versus poor traffic is to create interaction goals within Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can create goals based upon time on site or page views per visit.

If you create goals with these types of metrics, then you can easily examine what sites are not meeting your basic minimum interaction and then block those sites that are underperforming.

Conversely, if you find that sites are bringing in visitors that are spending several minutes on your site, you shouldn’t block those sites until you have enough clicks to determine if those visitors will eventually convert.

By using interaction goals, you can gain another level of insight into the placements where you are spending money, so you can make better decisions about block the sites or spending more money on the sites to gather more data.

If you have various types of goals on your site, I would recommend splitting out these types of goals by goal set. You might have one goal set that is all revenue events, and another one that is site interaction. By splitting these different types of goals out by goal set, then you can see one tab of just interaction goals, and another tab of just revenue goals. That way your revenue goal events will not be polluted by site interaction events and vice versa.

Conclusion

Overall, I like Google’s display network. There is a lot of traffic and conversions to be had from managing it correctly. However, if managed incorrectly, the display network can be a money pit. Therefore, you do need a system for managing the display network so it will perform for you.

However, the patience and money required to always have statistically relevant data is beyond what most AdWords advertisers have. Therefore, when you see sites that have several visits and 100% bounce rates, feel free to block them quickly. When you see sites that have some visitors, and those visitors are spending time on your site, then you should be more patient in determining if the site will eventually be a converting one for you.

By using Google Analytics to examine your AdWords data, you can go beyond just examining conversion rates to also determining interaction rates and gaining another viewpoint into the placement sites where you are spending your money, so that you can spend your budget as wisely as possible.

It’s almost time for Pubcon Vegas – one of my favorite shows each year. I’ll be there all week long, so feel free to stop by and say, “Hi”.

If you’re trying to figure out where I’m going to be – I’ll make it easy and give you a quick list.

Tuesday, 11/18

1:30 Hardcore PPC Tactics: David Szetela, John Ellis, and myself will delve into the tactics that are not used by many. If you’re looking to spice up your PPC campaigns – this is the place to be.

2:55 The Best Tactics in Landing Page Optimization: Every year this is one of those session that Tim Ash, Joanna Lord, and myself do where the audience is flowing out the door trying to peak inside. This is the must see landing page session. If you want a seat – get there early.

4:15 Enterprise Level Bid Management: Wister Walcott (Marin), Dave Roth (Yahoo), and myself will discuss bid management at an enterprise level. Ok, with Wister and Dave there – I’m not going to talk bid management – I’m going to talk time management and tools for large to enterprise accounts (and I find these tools really good for mid sized accounts as well).

Tuesday is going to be a busy day…

Wednesday, 11/19

11:30: PPC & SEO Finally Walk Down the Aisle: This is going to be a spotlight session. Rob Snell (great ecommerce stuff) is going to go first for 30ish minutes. Then I’m going to get into how to marry PPC & SEO together so you can get the both of best worlds (and show you how 1+1=3).

1:45 Advanced Google AdWords Book Signing: I’ll be (I think) in the Expo hall signing books. If you have a copy, bring it by. If you don’t – then they should be selling them there. Now, if only Amazon can figure out how to sign kindle versions.

3:00 Pubcon Labs on AdWords: Pubcon is trying something new this year with Pubcon Labs. Spend a bit of one-on-one time with an expert. I’m totally booked up already, but you can always see if there’s someone else you always wanted to meet at Pubcon Labs.

The Rest of the Time

I’ll be around Pubcon most of the week. So, assuming it’s not super early – I should be somewhere around the conference.

If you see me, just stop by and say, “Hi”.

Hope to see you at Pubcon.

If you want to stay on top of all the internet marketing events going on (not just ours or ones we’re speaking at), you can see all the events on the Internet Marketing Events Calendar.

This Thursday the Market Motive workshop on Advanced Display Advertising is open to everyone.

In the workshop, we’ll look at:

• Finding and blocking placement sites
• Filtering your ambiguous intent keywords for better targeting
• Removing current customers from broad reach targeting
• Controlling your remarking based upon search session behavior
• Buying & Measuring CPM
• And of course, a bit more here and there

If you are using the display network, or want some ideas for new things to test across display – you’re sure to take away a few items from this workshop to use.

The webinar will be this Thursday, November 3rd at 9:30 PST / 12:30 EST.

Signup here for the webinar.

Hope the see you there.

Google has been making strides in social; and so far there’s only one of these changes that has affected ads – the +1 button.

This button has many marketers confused about who can see a +1 button next to their ads, if they can remove the button, how it will affect CTR and Quality Score, etc.

There’s an answer to all these questions: the next Marketing Nirvana show.

My guest will be John Lee, the Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing who has really dug into this button and how it will affect you.

You can also follow John on Twitter at @John_A_Lee.

In the show we will discuss:

• What is the +1 Button
• What does it do
• If you can opt out
• Quality Score & CTR impacts
• And much more…

The next show will air on November 7th at 12 EST / 9 PST on WebmasterRadio.FM.

You can also subscribe to the show at iTunes or listed to the archives at Webmaster Radio’s Marketing Nirvana Page.

If you missed either of the last two few shows, you should check them out at iTunes or Webmaster Radio.

• Search Query Data with Chad Summerhill
• Devising Killer Facebook Ads with Marty Weintraub
• Quality Score in High Resolution with Craig Danuloff
• And of course, many others…

I hope you enjoy the show.

Everyone can make a basic form and capture leads. However, most basic forms are full of errors.

As a form gets longer, and more complex, your conversion rate can continue to drop.

In this webinar, we will examine:

• How much data you can ask for
• Common mistakes to avoid
• Some form experiments
• Additional insights about form design and testing
• As always, we will leave time for Q&A

The webinar will take place on October 26th at 12:15 EST.

For those who can’t make it – sign up anyway to receive access to the video after the event.

I hope to see you there.

Register on Trada’s site: How to Create the Perfect Form

Have you ever wondered what search queries actually make your ads show?

Some of these queries will be great (and should be added as keywords) and other queries will be terrible, and added as negative keywords.

While this sounds simple, there’s a lot more to examining search queries; which you can learn in the latest episode of Marketing Nirvana.

Chad Summerhill and myself talk about search queries, managing workflow, match types, and a few of Chad’s new projects.

You can download the latest episode from Marketing Nirvana’s iTunes page or listen to it at WebmasterRadio.fm.

Enjoy the show.

Organic search can be an excellent traffic stream that helps your website increase its visibility, find new customers, and ultimately be a nice source of revenue for your company.

However, organic traffic has some drawbacks:

• You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates
• You can’t get rapid feedback
• You don’t get traffic on certain keywords until you rank for the terms

This is where your paid search campaigns can help out your organic teams: testing and rapid feedback for tests.

In this column, we will examine a few ways in which your paid search account can help your organic teams get the data they need to make good decisions.

Testing Title Tags

Organic title tags serve two major purposes:

• Tell a bot what your page is about
• Serve as a headline on search result pages to get the click from searchers

Many companies are resistant to changing their headlines when they are ranking for certain keywords because it can affect organic rankings. However, if your headline is not very compelling, then searchers will not be compelled to click on your listing to arrive at your landing pages.

A PPC headline’s goal is to showcase your product, draw attention to itself, and ultimately get the click when there is a good match between the search intent and your website.

The overall goals of an organic title tag and a search headline are very similar.

Most search engine organic headlines are 55 – 65 characters.

A paid search headline can be 60 characters when it is display above the organic results; and the description line 1 ends in a punctuation mark.

You can test your organic headlines with paid search to see which ones have the highest CTR.

With these headlines, don’t let you paid search team write them without input from the organic team. The organic team will need certain elements in the title tag for ranking purposes. Therefore, have the two teams sit down and do some brainstorming on possible title tags. When you have a few ideas; use those ideas as your headlines in your paid search ads.

Test Home Pages

Your homepage usually receives more traffic than any other page on your site. A homepage’s goal is to identify to visitors what you do and then quickly segment them further into your site so they can take actions.

However, testing homepages is a scary proposition with organic traffic. You cannot just make a few homepages and tell the search engines to rotate where the traffic goes to on your site. You do not want all of these homepages indexed as that can cause other issues with your site’s rankings. Yet, homepages must be tested as a slight increase in conversion rates across a site can make a large difference in your overall site’s revenue.

There is an easy solution – test with PPC. However, you cannot use your PPC landing pages to test this traffic. Your PPC landing pages are built for conversions. Your organic pages are built for both rankings and conversions.

Have the SEO and PPC teams sit down with a designer and work through some possible homepages that will help both conversions and SEO.

Then, put these pages in their own folder and use a global disallow in your robots.txt file.  If you need more clarification on robots.txt files; please see: What PPC Practitioners Should Know About Robots.txt Files.

Next, send your branded traffic to these various homepages to see which variation has the best lift in revenue. If you do not have enough branded traffic to test, then send some of your very specific exact match traffic to these various pages.

Once you have the results, then you can roll out these changes to your homepage.

Testing Templates

With most content management systems (CMS); you do not make changes to a single page’s layout. You make changes to a template, and that change is reflected across all pages using that same template. This makes it difficult to test large sites for SEO purposes as the CMS is an all or nothing change.

You can use paid search to test your template change ideas. Just as with homepages, you do not want your paid search team to design these on their own as your navigation and other offers will be stripped away to try and increase conversion rates. With your templates, you need to think about site navigation and page information for organic ranking purposes.

Therefore, create a few static pages outside of your CMS; but work with the SEO team on how the pages can be laid out so that if the new template is better, it can be implemented across the site without hurting (and hopefully, helping) your current organic traffic.

If you offer hundreds of products, do not just test a single ad group with a new template and then roll our the changes. Make sure you are testing enough different products and services to be confident that the new template will work for all of your products.

With these pages, also make sure that you are excluding them from being crawled by any bots except the PPC ones.

Mitigating Risk With ACE

While all of these tests can help your organic search traffic bring in more revenue; while you are testing your PPC revenue often drops. Your organic headlines, templates, and homepages usually convert lower than your dedicated landing pages. Therefore, use ACE or AdWords Campaign Experiments for your tests.

With ACE, you can test a small percentage of your PPC traffic for SEO purposes and then keep the rest of the traffic for your higher converting PPC campaigns.

Conclusion

Organic traffic is wonderful. Ranking number one for a term can bring in a significant amount of traffic. It is difficult to test titles and page layouts with organic traffic. If a test is done incorrectly, it can also hurt your organic traffic. Randomly changing title tags, H1s, and the content of your pages that have nice organic traffic can have detrimental effects.

However, you must keep testing pages to try and increase conversion rates. Landing page testing is essential for both PPC and SEO. It should not be kept just within the realm of PPC. The only additional constraint your have with SEO that PPC does not need to conform to is that the page must also satisfy bots as well as humans.

SEO has lots of traffic; but rankings can be temperamental and you cannot accumulate any data until you actually rank. PPC has lots of traffic; but it also allows for rapid feedback. You can start testing traffic immediately to see what pages lead to higher revenue.

This is where PPC can help our the SEO team. Design tests with both the SEO and PPC teams working together. Use PPC to administer the tests; and when your find better results – roll them out to your website with the help of the SEO team.

When these two departments work together, your website’s revenues usually increase; and who doesn’t want their website to generate more money?