I was recently asked to review an existing campaign. The manager I was working with was looking at Cost/Conversion information based on country.

The 1st thing I told her was not to base any decisions based on this information. Why not? Because there was no information on the quality of the leads. You can have a country with a great cost/lead and no sales. What good is that?

Cost/Conversion Metrics Can Cause You to Make the Wrong Business Decisions

Connecting Adwords or Google Analytics to your sales information or CRM can sometimes be a challenge and take time. But that is no excuse not to do a basic analysis. You can probably easily find information on sales/country from your sales department. Even better is to get the revenue information. Take that information and cross reference it to your cost/lead.

With this information you have an important metric: Cost vs. Revenue or ROI. Now you can make intelligent business decisions. For example:

• Countries which have a high cost/lead but few sales must be optimized. If there is not much left to optimize then you may want to discontinue the campaign or lower bids significantly
• A country which has many sales and a high ROI should be tested by increasing bids or adding more keywords

Next time you look at your cost/lead metrics remember to look at cost vs. revenue before making what could be the wrong decision.

An eye tracking study for AdSense ads by Tobii suggests that more information is remembered when it has a high contrast color. “Increased awareness can lead to higher recall of the ad, thereby, helping build the brand of advertiser which can increase clicks.”

This is a little confusing because if people are remembering the ad, presumably they will later come in directly – without clicking - since they won’t be looking at the ad anymore.

This result is seemingly contradicted by an eye tracking study from Jakob Nielsen. Their conclusion is that:
“Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.”

That would suggest that blending into the site is better than having a high contrasting color. It is true that the first study was referring to memory and not what people look at, but if they don’t look at the ad, it will reduce the chances of recall.

Sample ads Google uses as examples. Note that none of them would blend into a typical website.

So what are our recommendations? Test!

Your circumstances can be different than a particular study or a general trend. We recently tested ads which blend in against ads which have more contrast. Surprisingly, the ads which had more contrast did much better with clickthroughs.

Since we are one of the 1st companies to use this new, affordable eye tracking solution, I thought I would share some of the results. During our usability testing studies we ask users to tell us what catches their eye first. However, this is a subjective response.

That’s where eye tracking comes in. GazeHawk has figured out how to use webcams to track the eye and create a heat map. This is a much cheaper solution than using specialty equipment.

For our test, we asked for female users because of the nature of the site we were testing. GazeHawk warned us that they could not promise any demographics at this point but we decided to take our chances.

In the end we received both males and females—and there was a big difference in what they looked at. If your website is skewed to a specific demographic you may want to wait until they can offer tester segmentation.

This composite heat map shows that people focused on the center of the site. We have blurred the map to protect our client’s privacy.

Here are some highlights of our test:

• The eye tracking confirmed what we thought would get the most attention. What was surprising was how extreme this was. Other elements were hardly looked at. A heat map like this can go a long way to convincing clients what people look at
• The other surprise was the amount of attention our small flash slide show attracted. Conventional wisdom says that flash is usually ignored. It could be that our site is exceptional because there is a small amount of text which continues from slide to slide
• We were puzzled when we saw that many people fixated on the left side – but there was nothing there. When we checked on the live site we realized that for some reason the heat map was missing the side menu. The menu location is the bright area on the heat map above.

GazeHawk was great to work with:

• The tests came back a little later than promised but I would chalk that up to startup pains
• Their website should have more information. Many people don’t know all the subtleties of reading eye tracking heat maps and they can come to the wrong conclusions
• They included brief feedback from the testers. That is a nice addition

Eye tracking is one more tool to use in conjunction with usability testing and web analytics. It would be more useful if eye tracking was combined with a task. Hopefully, that option will be available soon.

Running PPC campaigns in 3 search engines has its challenges. There are many 3rd party pay per click management solutions to help, however Google Analytics can do many of the same reports.

One of the biggest challenges is to make sure all 3 campaigns are targeting all the important keywords. The best way to analyze this is to have a chart which compares the traffic for all 3 search campaigns by keyword.

How the Pivot Chart Optimizes PPC campaigns

• In Google Analytics go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines and click on paid
• On the left drop down go to Keyword
• Click on the pivot icon – the 2nd from the right

The pivot chart should be part of your pay per click analytics routine when using Adwords, Bing and Yahoo

• Compare the numbers across the search engines
• If you see a zero in one search engine you are probably missing that keyword or underbidding—because the other search engines shows clicks



The first keyword has clicks on Yahoo and MSN. However Google shows zero clicks. Find out the problem on Adwords

• Next step is to go and optimize those ad campaigns
• Find out if you:
  • Forgot to add this keyword to Adwords
  • If the bid is too low
  • If there is another reason the keyword is not showing

You should check out conversions before you do the optimization. I will show you how to do this in another post.

Google Israel’s R&D center director Yossi Matias has closed the deal with Labpixies’ Ran Ben-Yair. Labpixies is a web site gadget developer. Flood-it! Is one of their best know widget games.

Google has purchased their 1st Israeli Internet Company

The widgets are developed for iGoogle, iPhone, Yahoo as well as many social media platforms.

Yahoo and Microsoft also have research and development centers in Israel. How long will it be before they start doing some local shopping?

The other day I was watching a TV show on Pink Floyd: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon

David Gilmour, one of the band members, said something that made me want to jump up and say: Do a usability study!

He was very proud of the album but seemed to be a little bit sad that he would never have the experience of hearing it for the first time (a result of being involved in the album creation).

Abridged version of: Pink Floyd: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon

This is why we do usability studies. The people in a company see their web site all the time and don’t have the ability to see their website objectively. Listening and watching people see and use a website for the first time is an eye opening experience for them.

So even though Pink Floyd band members could not have the experience of listening to their album for the 1st time they can have the next best thing: Listen to the album with a person who has never heard it and ask them to verbalize what they are thinking.

Maybe I should branch out and offer this service to bands so they can improve their albums before they are released. Do you think it will help?

Rumors are that the Google Superbowl ad in the 3rd quarter will be this ad on YouTube.

Rumored Superbowl Google Ad on YouTube

Whether it is true or not I though it would be fun to see how the search engine result page (SERP) is different in Israel. What is interesting is that although the search result is the same, you can see in the screen shot below that in Israel there are ads.

Rumored Superbowl ad SERP in Israel

You might think that there are ads only in Israel. However, if you do the search in the USA you can see that there are even more ads (see screen shot below). Google did not want to show the sponsored search ads in their ad. Could this be because it hurts the search experience?  The ad experience?

To be fair, if Google did include the ads and the clicks were on the ads, some may complain that Google was hinting that people should click on ads. And the ads might distract from their message.

Rumored Superbowl ad SERP in USA

Whether or not the ad will actually run it sure is creating a lot of buzz on the internet. The screen shot below shows just a few reactions to the Google Superbowl ad.

Google Superbowl ad reactions

Most companies know that they have to own their URL, and website. What is surprising is that they don’t know always know that they must own their Adobe Flash website presentations.

In order to increase conversions it is necessary to makes changes on the website and Flash presentations are no exception. Unfortunately, this is not possible without access to the source file.

If conversion optimization is important make sure you have all the Adobe Flash source files so you can edit and optimize your website Flash presentations

The Flash source file is usually with the designers or one of their subcontractors. Even if you just want to change one of the links on the presentation, you first need to retrieve the flash source file from the designer.

Our experience shows that it is not always possible to get this file for various reasons.
The web site owner either has to compromise his conversion optimization efforts or pay for a new flash presentation.

In order to avoid this, you should always insist that you receive the Flash source file so changes can be made. Conversion optimization means you control the user experience. Technical and other obstacles have to be removed.

Recently, SEO companies and web designers have been complaining that Google eliminated Local results for their business segment as you can see in the screen shots below.

SEO Companies don’t have local listings (right screen shot) whereas plumbers have local listings complete with map and phone numbers.

A Google employee, Joel, H. explained this new policy in Google’s support forums

“Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham].

I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today”.

I am sure that Google is basing this decision on the analysis of users’ click actions. It makes sense that for plumbers the location is critical because they have to come to your house. However for SEO companies it is not important at all.

For example, most of my SEO Company’s clients are in the USA, Europe and the Far East—only a small number are in Israel. The same can be said for many businesses and if you do a search for financial analysts you can see that there are no local search results.

No local search for financial analysts.

If There are No Local Results in Google Should You Optimize Your Site for Localization?

In many cases you should for the following reasons:

• Even though location may not be important, all things being equal there are some people who prefer to work with a company that is close by.
• Google’s results page is localized, even if local results are not shown. All things being equal, an Israeli SEO company will appear higher in Israel than outside of Israel.
• Google changes their algorithms frequently. Today they may not show local results for your business segment and tomorrow they may put it back in as mentioned in the forum post above.

Some people wonder why companies from all over the world want to work with us. After all, we are located in a bad neighborhood–one of our neighboring countries openly says they would like to wipe us off the face of the earth.

And it’s not like there aren’t any good Internet marketing companies in America, Europe and everywhere else.

I believe that the reason is the people. Israelis are innovative, creative and get things done fast. But what has nurtured these qualities?
Dan Senor and Saul Singer attempt to answer this question and more.

“START-UP NATION  addresses the trillion dollar question:
How is it that Israel — a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources — produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK?”

“How is it that Israel has, per person, attracted over twice as much venture capital investment as the US and thirty times more than Europe?”