Rick Whittington Consulting

This isn’t a political post, rather to show you how not to keep your “customers” up-to-date.  After hearing today that the bill the US Senate passed last night included hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for manufacturers of wooden arrows for children, Puerto Rican rum manufacturers and American Samoa.  Wanting to read the bill myself (all 400+ pages, I hear), I went to senate.gov.

The fact of the matter is that you, the American citizen — the “customer” — won’t find any mention of the bill on the Senate’s homepage.  Matter of fact, I spent 20 minutes searching for it, and think I found it, but I’m still not sure because half of the bill isn’t about the economy.  I turned to a news site that offered a clear link to the legislation, and I found:

Sec. 308. Increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
Sec. 314. Indian employment credit.
Sec. 502. Provisions related to film and television productions.
Sec. 503. Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.

…and the list goes on.

Why do the American people detest Congress?  Perhaps it’s because Washington doesn’t provide us adequate usable access to the legislation that crosses the floor.  Here’s a link to the bill, and if you’re for or against it, call your Senator or Representative, but good luck trying to find their contact information on their web sites.

I’m digesting this blog post today from Bazaarblog about how Office Depot increased clickthrough, conversion and sales from their Google ads simply by putting information based on customer reviews in their ads.  What a great idea!  Office Depot recently started a creative test to see how searchers would respond to messaging from product reviews on their site.  The result was a 78% increase in clickthrough rate, 23% increase in conversion and almost 200% increase in revenue from their Google ads.

Here’s a sample of one of their ads (from the Bazaarvoice case study):

Office Depot Google ad

This would be an interesting test for online retailers that test copy in Google ads.  You can bet we’ll be testing it!

I’m loving this blog post at the Get Elastic blog that comments on a You Tube case study where the guru in the video suggests that one buy button design always works the best.  Folks, please don’t be tricked into thinking that there is one button style that works on all web sites.  It simply isn’t true.

Read the commentary in the Get Elastic blog post and I think you’ll agree.  My personal experience from testing hundreds of sites proves that there’s not one “magic” buy button, page layout, or product display.  All businesses and sites are different (thus keeping me employed and working on new projects).

The video, though, does bring one point to light, and the point is that you can’t improve your results if you don’t test.  Spilt testing can reveal better design that helps you sell your products more effectively.

When determining which phrases your site should be optimized for, or when searching for the right phrases to bid on in your paid search campaign, wouldn’t it be great to have an idea of what people are thinking when searching for that phrase?

Microsoft adCenter Labs released an interesting tool focused around determining the level of commercial intent for search phrases.  Here’s how it works.  Type in a word or phrase, and the tool will give you a measure of the likelihood that the phrase will lead to a commercial transaction.

For example, the tool says that “dvd player” has a commercial intent of 0.63816, while “sony progressive scan dvd player” has a commercial intent of 0.86043.  The higher the number, the more likely that the search phrase will yield a transaction.

You can use this data to determine what phrases are more likely to yield transactions for your company (or web site).  I used this free tool in a trial paid search campaign for a client.  We targeted one exact phrase which had a commercial intent of 0.47, and a variation of the original term that had a commercial intent of 0.81.  The ad copy and the landing pages were identical except for the use of the search phrases in the headlines on the ads and landing pages.  The results?  The term with higher commercial intent received nearly double the conversion rate of the term with lower commercial intent according to the adCenter tool.

Personally, I would use paid search to test terms rather than just relying solely on the commercial intent tool, but the tool has been fairly accurate in my experience.  Try it out now.

The newest keyword research tool available is Google Insights for Search.

This new tool lets you type in a search phrase and graphs out interest over time.  While the graph will tell you how many searches have been done for a particular term over time, the numbers aren’t absolute search volume numbers, just a gauge of popularity.

You can also see regional interest for a particular term, either targeting a country, or if you choose the United States, you can see search popularity for that term by state.  You can even get a breakdown by city.

So how is this helpful?  Here’s one way to use the tool.  If a client wants a paid search campaign, and the campaign lends itself to geotargeting, we can run the advertisements in popular areas to get the biggest impact.

If you advertise locally via paid search, you might also find the search phrases that give you the largest number of impressions in your market.

Of course, the trend graphing feature is impressive.  You can learn how many searches occurred for a particular phrase over time, and you can learn about related top searches and searches that are on the rise.

Companies have been throwing money down the drain using Google Adwords for years, partly because they use broad match for their ad campaigns.  Even if you’ve discovered exact match and phrase match options in Google Adwords, wouldn’t it be great to see the visitor’s actual search query in Google Analytics?  Here’s a tip — albeit an advanced one — to get real keyword detail from your Google Adwords campaign using Google Analytics.

First, though, I’ll start with why this is important.  These are in no particular order.

1. Keyword detail helps you discover negative match options. If you’re bidding on “dog food” and someone searches for “how to make your own dog food,” your ad is going to appear.  You may be selling dog food, and a visitor like this is not going to find information on your site on how to make dog food.  You don’t want that click.  After seeing this keyword detail in Google Analytics would perhaps want to add “make” as a negative match option for that ad group.  This helps you hone in on buying traffic that’s going to convert, making your campaign more profitable.
2. You’ll get revenue and conversion rate data on every search, which helps you make decisions about the keywords that you are bidding on.
3. It may help you generate ideas for new products, services, blog posts or other search phrases that pertain to your site but you haven’t thought of yet.

For a step-by-step explanation of how to set this up, browse over to the Get Elastic ecommerce blog and read the instructions.