Averages are interesting. The problem is they aren’t much more than that.
It’s interesting to know that your daily average number of visitors is 49,000. Or that the average visitor sees 4.2 pages. Or that your Yahoo Search Marketing paid search click-through-rate average is 2.1%.
But before moving these numbers from interesting to important, or accurate, or [...]

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ClickFraud tracking company Click Forensics Inc. announced today that “industry average fraud rate rose to 16.6% for fourth quarter 2007, up from the 14.2% click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for third quarter 2007.”
I wish could trust these numbers. But I really don’t. They could be high or low, [...]

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How important is the latency reporting problem for PPC discussed earlier this week?
Take a look at this report snippet from onlynaturalpet.com. As part of our initial work on the account we’ve been cleaning up the organization of many ad-groups, so since early December there has been quite a lot of campaign and ad-group reorganization going [...]

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The fact that many paid search visitors come to the website multiple times from multiple sources is well known, but solid stats about this aspect of user behavior are hard to come by. I’m down at the Channel Intelligence Retail Summit in Orlando, and they’ve just shared some interesting related data.
The following numbers are based [...]

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Many of the visitors who click your paid search ads don’t complete a purchase on the day of their click and initial visit, but instead come back some number of days later and buy.
The paid search engine tracking tools and major web analytics packages can (generally) track these delayed purchases. They assign credit for this [...]

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There are a number of factors which limit the accuracy of typical PPC Expense/Revenue reports.

Deleted Cookies or other internet issues – Everyone doing business online has learned that all tracking has some significant limitations, which impact accuracy from a little (5% is considered typical) to a lot (cookie deletion rates have been reported in excess [...]

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Our friends and partners at Omniture announced Thursday that they’ve completed their acquisition of Visual Sciences. This is a huge event for the company and the industry. Congratulations are due on both the vision and execution.
The official press release makes clear (for the first time to my knowledge) that their intent is to migrate HBX [...]

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When looking at the stats for one ad-group within a campaign, isn’t it likely that you’ll next want to see the stats from the following ad-group in the campaign? Or the previous one? Or dive down to the keyword level? And then move to the keywords for the next ad-group. Or move up from ad-group [...]

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One good question left in the comments of our ‘Keywords and Queries’ post was: Can’t you get query-by-keyword info from the Google Adwords ‘Search Query Performance’ report?
The Search Query Performance report is the closest thing you can get from Google, or any of the engines as far as I’m aware, but it has several limitations.
First, [...]

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You buy keywords to run paid search ads. Users type keywords into search engines to perform searches. It’s easy to forget that they’re not the same things.
I’ve taken to calling the ones you buy ‘keywords’ and the ones people type ‘queries’. And about 100 times a week in one conversation or another I have to [...]

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