The reverse is true with sales, if one keyword led to someone buying three items then that keyword has been three times as valuable to you and you’d want to know about that.
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Anyone who deals with PPC accounts on any sort of level will know just how important Conversion Tracking is to an account. Without it you’re essentially blind – you can optimise your keywords and ads to increase the click-through rate and lower the bid costs as much as you like, but if you have no idea which keywords are actually leading to sales then you have no way of knowing which clicks are making you money and which are never going to lead to a sale. Essentially, without Conversion Tracking, managing a PPC account is little more than educated guess work.
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We all know that Analytics is a great tool for isolating and analysing data about usage of a website, however, what if you’re using it in conjunction with a pay per click account in order to optimise that account? If this is what you’re doing then there’s no point in looking at users that came to the site via natural search or referrals, they’ll just muddy the waters.

A good trick is to create a PPC only profile on analytics in addition to your existing analytics, you can do this by excluding irrelevant data. Here’s how… (more…)

Not only can PPC accounts cost you a whole lot of money very quickly, they also suck up time like you can’t imagine. Properly building a PPC campaign for a mid-to-large scale ecommerce site could easily take three days, even if you know what you’re doing. After that, running the thing can eat as much time as you have to give, especially if you’re one of these people that enjoys data and graphs, i.e., someone like us. (more…)

Data released recently by iPerceptions earlier this month has confirmed what we at Top Click Media have all though for a while, that simple, traditional Adwords text ads are still the most successful form of online advertising.
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Email spam is one of the most annoying phenomena of the modern world. They waste everyone’s time, clog up email accounts needlessly and part the vulnerable and stupid from their money with alarming efficiency. Today, another reason to hate spam and spamming has emerged, as if we needed one, the fact that it’s killing the environment.
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This morning, Google have released an early version of the software development kit (SDK) for the new edition of the Android operating system.  As I type, hundreds of developers are downloading it with a view to building mobile applications for the new OS when it is officially released.
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If I was working for the Microsoft PR department right now, I’d probably be holding my head in my hands and wondering what I have to do to repair the damage done by Windows Vista. This despair would have been brought on by recent reports that, despite the fact that Windows Beta testers have been hugely positive about Windows 7 and that many of them are now running the beta version as their main browser, most companies still do not plan to upgrade immediately to Windows 7 when it becomes available.
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Amazon.com has courted controversy over the last few days by banning adult books and DVDs from its list of bestsellers. The upshot being that the books and DVDs no longer featured on the all important sales rankings. The online retail giant became the subject of a deluge of emails bouncing around the internet over the long weekend, asking people to boycott the site in response.
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A few weeks ago on this blog I wrote a post called something like ‘Facebook Makes you Stupid,’ in response to research from the US that Facebook use lowers attention span. Now, it appears that research has been backed up.
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As more and more people get into the exciting world of search engine optimisation and PPC marketing, it gets harder and harder to differentiate yourselves from the herd. For this reason, people have started to look to more sophisticated strategies in an effort to optimise their pages, little things they can tweak to make it easier for their users to spend money on their sites.

This almost always means getting to grips with a particular application that we’ve all come to know and love, that’s right, Google Analytics. (more…)

What if, for whatever reason, be it manpower, money, the nature of your site, you know you can’t compete for number one? Is it time to just give up on the SEO game?
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When calculating the amount of work it’ll take to get to number one many companies make the mistake of thinking that putting in the work to get to number there will be a temporary ‘big push’ followed by a more manageable period of maintaining that position. Unfortunately that logic fails to take into account the incumbent of number one site, your competitor – the element in all this over which you have the least control.
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Whether or not it’s worth going all out for the number one spot is affected by a huge number of elements. Some of them are common sense, stuff like the keyword competitiveness, the conversion rate, the value of the sale etc. Really you just have to look at the number 1 spot as an investment and weigh value in terms of the traditional metrics.
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