Firstly, what is ‘the conversion funnel’? Well, the conversion funnel is the steps which a website visitor has to complete in order to fulfill your desired goal, whether the final outcome is a lead or a sale. Each step in this process is vital. After all, if a website visitor does not complete all of these, then the sale has not been made.

Most online marketers only look at the end result. However, it is important to consider the non-converting cases in order to discover at what stage the sale process was stopped. This information can then be used to improve the process and increase the conversion rate.

What happens if your website achieves a lot of downloads, but few sales? Could it be the checkout process? How secure does a user feel when they are completing their purchase? Are they been offered too many alternatives at this final step? These are all important questions to consider.

I believe in the KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid. The fewer steps a website visitor needs to take to complete your desired goal, the better. Just by improving the final steps within your conversion funnel, you can greatly improve your overall conversion rate.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can track the user’s progress through the different stages the checkout process. This allows you to monitor your conversion funnel metrics and learn valuable information which can be used to improve your website.

Is the company performing a civic duty here or are they blurring the line between business and politics (Although in reality there never is a clear line to start with)?

And strangely enough, the link only seems to appear when I visit Google using Firefox, not when I use Opera (which is my preferred browser) . Is Google actively trying to poach users from Firefox because it knows Firefox users are more amendable to trying new browsers?

I installed the Chrome Beta as soon as it was released, and I uninstalled it again within the hour for various reasons.

1. some sites I frequently visit didn’t work.
2. some sites only work if I am willing to accept all cookies (yeah right)
3. the functionality is a bare minimum, although this could be a positive in some cases
4. the incognito feature is cool, but i wish it could be my default setting

and lastly -call me paranoid- after installation Chrome listed as ‘recent bookmarks’ sites i last visited two years ago for a research project i was doing at time. I regularly remove private data from my computer (or so i thought) so i have no idea where chrome retrieved that information from. My Google account has browsing history disabled, so it shouldn’t have gotten it from there?

In fact, having Chrome record all my activities by default makes me uneasy. Think of it, even when you set your default search engine to e.g. Yahoo, Chrome (i.e. Google) still knows about your searches and the links you click.

Sure, every browser has that ability, but Google has a vested interest in actually using that information, unlike Firefox or Opera. Microsoft (IE) could use that data too, but I have faith in their inability to actually do something with it.

So basically it comes down to: how much information are you willing to give to a company whose aim is to index your life?

Publicly, Google always maintains that relevance and user experience take priority over revenue generation and so the minimum bid was introduced to ensure that search engine users would not be bombarded with poor quality advertising. By raising the bar, Google forced advertisers to reconsider the ROI of their Adwords campaigns rather than spam the search results with ads by bidding en masse on cheap, non-commercial keywords in the hope of getting a few extra clicks.

Noble as the minimum was intended to be, most Adwords advertisers will be able to tell tales of being ‘slapped’ with minimum bids of up to $10 per click. Needless to say that very few businesses would be able to pay those prices and Google was never very forthcoming with a helpful explanation in order to lower them again.

On a bigger scale, the minimum bid also completely negated Google’s argument that it does not behave as a monopoly in the search engine advertising market. By setting a bottom, the free market auction for keywords becomes a whole lot less free and Google theoretically can tweak the minimum bids to squeeze the most out of its advertisers and boost its revenue. That is a factor the company cannot ignore as it keeps increasing market share and attracts ever greater scrutiny from governments and competitors.

By abandoning the minimum bid for a ‘first page’ bid Google hopefully will introduce again greater transparency into its advertising platform. More practically, Google’s move will reactivate a sizeable portion of ad inventory that currently sits dormant on its platform and give the company a boost in revenue in time for the upcoming holiday season.

So although as an advertiser we welcome the perishing of the opaque minimum bid, we will be keeping a close eye on our costs as a mass of previously inactive keywords comes back online.

What do I want from Google? There is one thing that I have ALWAYS wanted for as long as I can remember and it is a simple little thing.

A RANDOMIZE BUTTON next to search results. Not the crumby “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that makes me think “I‘m Feeling Like Kicking Your…” instead when I search I want to be able to RANDOMIZE my results COMPLETELY. If I am doing research for something I don’t like combing pages and pages of links sorted by Google’s algorithm. To be honest I have little faith in the fact that the results are truly independent. Money makes the world go round and Google’s algorithms wouldn’t want to make a dent in the billions. So you get Google results.

I don’t disagree with this practice, they’re just looking after their own interests, HOWEVER, being able to randomize the results order for the same search phrase not only improves the depth of the current search (you view a variety of results that otherwise gets lost by a sorting algorithm) but also gives the proverbial ‘man on the street’ much more of a chance to show his stuff and I think it would improve research a lot.

I don’t think revenue would be lost as advertisements could still be displayed next to the search results - unless Google is using its algorithms to ’streamline’ the results order for its own financial benefit.

Much of the team responsible behind the creation and design of Cuil are ex-Google employees but the look-and-feel as well as functioning of the site unlike Google.

The ads on the site are on the left-hand side of the page, with a larger description text but still resembling the same format as used Google and Microsoft. When searching it provides more results at face, with similar search matches across a tab and well as categories to break down your search. The site is very responsive and quick but may be overwhelming to those used to Google’s minimalistic search engine.

The launch didn’t go completely as planned with various mishaps such as some popular search terms returning no results or an intermittent service.

Only time tell if this can complete and overtake Google to be the next-Google killer.

Some people seem to think this is a good deal but from a search marketer’s perspective, it is not. At first sight I would welcome a standard advertising platform that allows marketers to target specific search engines. But the terms of the deal are half-baked. Yahoo will not abandon its Panama platform in exchange for Adwords but do they really think advertisers are going to bother to use 2 different systems to achieve the same goal? I really can’t see that happening and unless Yahoo is prepared to over time outsource all its advertising to Google it should realise it just rolled in the Trojan horse.

The deal also stifles competition in the market even further. The Big Three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) have distinct characteristics and different users. Most marketers for instance will tell you that MSN has much better converting traffic than the other two and that Google is definitely the most expensive to advertise on. By effectively swallowing Yahoo, Google gives marketers even less choice of where to spend their budgets.

Perhaps, if Microsoft plays its cards right, it could gain something from this after all. Now that Yahoo has made itself irrelevant in terms of search advertising, marketers only need to distribute their budget between Google and MSN. A much easier decision to make than having to split a budget three ways.

Your thoughts?

And that was the most surprising part of the session: nearly everyone in a room with hundreds of people raised their hand. Of course technically speaking using Excel to increase your prices by 10% also makes it a bid management tool. Nevertheless people in the industry seem to take bid management really seriously - as they should. I couldn’t help shake the feeling though that the panelists conveniently touted all the wonders of bid management without touching on its many shortcomings. Only David Rodnitzky from PPCAdBuying.com played the devil’s advocate and warned against the dangers of being sold an expensive, complex system that may not actually offer a return on investment.

I have to agree with David that bid management tools often over-promise and under-deliver and for a very simple reason. bid management makes sense for large PPC campaigns where it is unwieldy to set prices manually. But it is exactly for those large campaigns that the data you have available for each keyword is very sparse. Long tail keywords may contribute a significant portion of your revenue but by their very nature each individual keyword gathers information in a fairly random manner. No matter how smart your bid management system, it cannot make assumptions from data that doesn’t exist. To get around that most system group long tail keywords in clusters and aggregate their data. How you cluster the data though will greatly influence of the system and as far as I know there is no one optimal way of doing it.

A comment made by search marketing veteran Kevin Lee (and with which other panelist Chris Zaharias from Omniture agrees in spirit) also illustrates another difficulty faced by automated bid management. Kevin said that half of the paid ads in top positions are put there by idiots, not rational beings. How would a bid management system incorporate the behaviour of an irrational market into its decision making algorithm?

When choosing a bid management system be careful not to over-complicate things. For small to midsized campaigns you probably don’t need any fancy systems. Choose a tool that is flexible and that lets you override its bid adjustments. That way you can control for events such as special promotions or sudden increased competition in the market. And remember, bid management tools are only an aid, not a solution.

Google dominates the PPC market not just because it has the most users, but for a large part because it is so easy to advertise on its Adwords platform. But many advertisers don’t like Google’s grip on the market and are just waiting for an opportunity to move a larger part of their budget to alternative search engines. Hopefully Microsoft’s tool will facilitate this.

update: you can signup for the adcenter beta here