Today,  

by Jennifer Laycock

If you run an ecommerce site selling products that can also be found elsewhere, putting your price in your paid search ad could go a long way toward improving your conversion rates. That’s the point Jennifer Slegg makes in a post on pay per click conversion rates and ROI at her blog today. Jennifer reminds readers that while many companies spend their time focusing on driving clicks, they would be better served looking at ROI and considering how the information in their ad impacts both click through rates and conversion rates.

According to Jennifer, most ecommerce sites are driving a lot of useless clicks from bargain shoppers. She explains:

When you are selling a product that is not exclusive to your site, especially with high-ticket items or items that people tend to shop around for to find the best pricing, you end up paying for clicks from people who are just checking to see if you have the best price or not, and they don’t have the intention of buying from you right then… unless you were fortunate enough to be the last site they checked (which goes against regular PPC techniques where you want to be the first click) AND you had the best price. And obviously, you will have lower conversions and a low ROI (return on investment) when you do have a high percentage of non-buyers.

It’s a good reminder and one that she backs up with some good insight. While including prices certainly doesn’t work for every industry, there are times where it’s a good idea to consider including prices in your posts. For more on this topic, check out her post on the most important pay per click metric and my own posts on The Number One Rule of Pay Per Click and Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign.

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Today,  Web analytics firm IndexTools goes to Yahoo in a purchase that will augment Yahoo’s strategies for promoting its advertising business to clients.

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Admin wrote: Search engine optimisation is a term the experts use when they adjust different elements of your website to make it easier for the search engine spiders to find you, to improve the relative ranking of…
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Admin wrote: 

Wendy Piersall offers up an excellent post about blog ad networks this week over at eMoms at Home. Whether you’re looking for a network to join or one to buy ads through, this post is a worthwhile read.

Wendy starts off with a great little primer on why you might want to join an ad network instead of relying on affiliate programs and options like AdSense.

Most emerging networks pay on a CPM basis - CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand impressions (where M stands for the Roman numeral of 1000, for added confusion). This means that publishers are paid a set amount of money for every 1000 times they display an ad on their website. The reason this is an important revenue model is that publishers are paid more consistently than when site visitors need to take an action like in CPA or CPC models. And sometimes, advertisers have either terrible landing pages, insufficient tracking systems, inappropriate ad creative or a clunky shopping cart, all of which are completely out of the publisher’s control and can foil the click, lead or sale.

She goes on to share a list of more than a dozen questions you should ask before signing on with any ad network. In fact, if you’re considering joining an ad network with one of your blogs or web sites, I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to read this list. I looked at a few networks myself last year when considering how to ad advertising to my hobby blog. I found enough issues in the TOS of each of them to make me decide none of them were a good fit.

Wendy wraps her post up with a great list of ad networks that are going strong. If you’re looking to join one, this is useful information. If you’re looking to expand your online advertising to include bloggers, this is great information.

Some of these networks are new, but are attracting very strong niche blogs. Companies that are dropping their paid search campaigns in favor of more traditional online advertising might want to spend a little time looking through these networks and testing the value of direct advertising on niche blogs with highly engaged audiences.

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Today,  

In case you thought you were alone, you’re not the only one miffed* at ABC’s Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos after last night’s "debate." Over 16,000 people have commented so far at ABCNews.com’s debate page—and most of it’s not good.

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