I just posted an article on the ten steps to optimize a paid search landing page. It summarizes approaches to consider when trying to improve conversion rates. It is also the subject of the next Internet Marketing Review newsletter. Click here to read the article on optimizing paid search landing pages.

I attended (and spoke) at the Optimization Summit put on by Optimost in San Francisco this week. After sitting through the presentations and talking to folks who attended, I came away believing that testing tools and techniques are getting better, but still not hitting the prime time. Ann Holland (Marketing Sherpa) gave a great presentation on survey results around testing roadblocks and the reality is that people like the idea of testing and want to test but are highly resource constrained. Marketing, creative, IT, etc. are all overloaded with things to do and try so that makes starting up a testing program difficult. In addition, the knowledge on what and how to test is still way behind where I thought it would be by now.

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Designing or revamping your Web site? Here are some best practices you’ll want to read before getting started!

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Bounce rate is a great way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. Why?
- It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool.
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I had a chance to speak with folks from both Marchex (who runs Enhance) and Yahoo at the SEMX conference here in Seattle on Monday to clarify what was meant by the Enhance press release on Monday. My original thoughts when I first read the release are below - this is a correction post. What is going on is that advertisers can now buy some Yahoo text placements through Enhance. Yahoo has backfilled some places that they can’t or won’t fill with their own text ads, with ads from Enhance. So, what does this mean:
- Depending on your business and keyword sets, you can get into areas of Yahoo that you have been unable to before.
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We use geo-targeting quite a bit on Google with our higher volume campaigns. If you have the volume, tracking and technical ability to manage a highly decentralized campaign, you can achieve better results through discrete geo targeting, improved positioning and lower CPCs (I’ll cover this in-depth in a future Internet Marketing Review Newsletter).

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I just posted the Search Marketing Fact Pack from Advertising Age and eMarketer here. The PDF is chock full of stats, facts, insights, tips and lists. It also includes lots of ads from search engine marketers to pay for the publication. I highly recommend saving it as a resource for pitches and insights.

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