It’s not hard to find examples of PPC best-practice violations. In fact, it’s darn easy - too many online retailers have sloppy paid search campaigns. As you will see, it’s often the advertisers with big budgets that are “doing it wrong.”

Though these retailers will not be ticketed, fined, jailed or suspended for these offenses, the lost revenue and poor campaign performance they experience may be far more costly.

#9 - Stupid DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion)

Big-budget advertisers bid on so many keywords, they often use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to show the keyword the searcher has queried in the ad text. Good idea, since click through is typically higher when there’s that extra keyword relevance. Unfortunately, many lists are so big they include nonsensical keyword phrases, or keywords that don’t match the adgroup’s text, display URL or worse, the landing page.

“Sally Hansen nail polish”

Nothing moisturizes and refreshes the skin like a coat of nail polish!

“home hair cutting”

“Duhahhhh…I was just on my way hair cutting home, officer…” Sounds like Shopzilla’s had a few too many highballs. Guilty on both counts of DKI.

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While in London this week, Jason Billingsley spotted something different in Google search results.

If you look closely, you’ll notice the display URL in Adwords ads are above the ad copy, not below. Ad copy also appears on the same line as the display URL in some cases.

I did a quick search in Google Blogs (search within only blogs) to see if anyone has blogged about this yet or may know what’s going on. Over here in Vancouver, I still see the traditional ad display so all I can do is speculate that Google is shakin’ things up and testing the impact of different ad structure.

Jason also observed that the text appears larger than usual which indicates Google may be testing out new formatting of not only paid search but also organic.

Of course it could be handywork of an internal prankster at Google, or the equivalent to Jason’s computer trying to drive on the opposite side of the road while across the pond. (PS, if you’re wondering what the stars are, that’s a feature of StumbleUpon - you can see which pages have been reviewed and rated by Stumblers, and if one of your friends gave it a “thumb,” that will show up too.)

Anyone have more information on this?

It was a privilege to have esteemed author, researcher, consultant and speaker Eric T. Peterson join us for this months webinar: Web Analytics for Online Retailers - Technology & Satisfaction 2008

Eric is the founder and CEO of Web Analytics Demystified, where you can find more helpful information and research on the strategic use of web analytics, staffing issues, business process and measurement.

As always, if you missed the live call we have a replay for Web Analytics for Online Retailers in our webinar archive at ElasticPath.com.

Eric presented the findings of a study of web analytics practitioners and I highly recommend you watch the replay to see the full charts because there is a lot of data you may find interesting that is not covered in the highlights below.

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Alan Rimm-Kaufman was kind enough to videoblog the concepts covered by his panel at the recent Shop.org conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alan was presenting on how to be customer centric in paid search marketing.

Alan presents in his slide deck a number of things customers really want (yes the Spice Girls did make a cameo in the presentation although they were a no-show in person at the Shop.org event). He then applies them to a real product search experience for one of Under Armour’s running shoe models: the Proto Power Trainer.

What A Searcher Really Really Wants From Your Paid Search Ad

• I want to type 2, 3 or 4 words into Google (Longer queries may reflect “long tail” search terms. Product-specific searches like “under armour proto power trainer” are far more specific than “running shoe” and typically converts higher if you have what that searcher wants in stock and at a favorable price)

• I want to use my own words, not yours (Customers may use different word orders or synonyms like running shoe, athletic shoe, sneakers, trainers or runners)
• I want you to handle my typos and misspells (It’s easy to type “armor” rather than “armour” - especially for US customers)
• I want to find your ad on page 1, above fold (Customers expect very targeted queries to deliver relevant results. Product keywords are important in search ads for higher click through)
• I want ad copy which helps me choose (
• I want ad copy which is honest (If you promise a product - you better send the customer to the right landing page - not the home page or even the category page. Make sure the price in your ad matches the price on your landing page)
• I want a landing page which loads quickly (Alan has a great article on this at Search Engine Land)
• I want a landing page which lets me do what I want to do me as quickly as possible (We’ve got a great webinar on landing page optimization)

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Today is my first day back at my desk here in Vancouver after a lovely week in the Canadian Rocky mountains. While at the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator program, I enjoyed the best green tea I’ve ever had in my life. The brand is “Higgins & Burke” and this is the only green tea I’ve tasted that hasn’t given me a bit of nausea after drinking it. I must have it here at my home office!

So I turn to my trusted Google search engine to find out where I can get my lips on more of this tea. Typing in “Higgins and Burke” into the search engine delivers these results:

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In case you missed it on TechCrunch the other day, Google is now showing search boxes within SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for some of the larger online retailers like Amazon, Zappos and Office Max.

The boxes only appear for certain keywords, for example “amazon” and “shop amazon” but not “amazon books.” Zappos shows up for “zappos shoes” but not “zappos shopping.” For other sites, adding “shop” or “shopping” to the site name won’t trigger a search box at all.

OfficeMax should be pleased that this works for them but not for Staples and Office Depot, at least it makes them seem a bit more important? I noticed that Target and Walmart get a search box, but not Sears. NewEgg, Radio Shack and BestBuy get one, but not Circuit City. Ebay and Overstock also are left out, which is a bit of a head-scratcher.

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Okay, maybe this is more of an opportunity than a hack, but links from Page Rank 8 pages are hard to come by, and from Google itself nonetheless. But for Google Checkout merchants, you can get a link from the Google Checkout Merchants page, and no - Google doesn’t use nofollow or robots.txt to blog Page Rank from passing.

Now a general rule of thumb amongst SEOs when scoping out link opportunities is to find pages with less than 100 links. Obviously this page far more links than that. But don’t worry, here’s an explanation from Google’s Matt Cutts himself:

Matt’s exact words - The “keep the number of links to under 100″ is in the technical guideline section, not the quality guidelines section. That means we’re not going to remove a page if you have 101 or 102 links on the page. Think of this more as a rule of thumb. Originally, Google only indexed the first 100 kilobytes or so of web documents, so keeping the number of links under 100 was a good way to ensure that all those links would be seen by Google. These days I believe we index deeper within documents, so that’s less of an issue. But it is true that if users see 250 or 300 links on a page, that page is probably not as useful for them, so it’s a good idea to break a large list of links down (e.g. by category, topic, alphabetically, or chronologically) into multiple pages so that your links don’t overwhelm regular users.

Source: SEOmoz

I would imagine Google is going to crawl its own pages as far as they go. Yes, if you understand the Page Rank concept that “link juice” is divided among all the links on the page - the more links the less nectar you get. But Page Rank is exponential. 100 links on a Page Rank 8 page could pass more value than 50 links on a PR4. If I’m wrong here, please drop a comment.

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Google Trends is just one of the nifty tools the Big G hath bestowed upon the Internet marketing community. Basically to type in keywords to compare their search volumes against each other over time. There’s also a “what’s hot” element, each day there’s a list of “Today’s Hot Trends.” Some of them are really hard to believe that they are remotely search-worthy, but clicking on a keyword will show

But I digress…Back to the Hack!

If you run separate online stores for different countries, you need to understand that sometimes a couch is a chesterfield, sneakers are trainers, french fries are chips, and candy bars are chocolate bars. Google Trends lets you enter a number of variations of keywords that essentially describe the same product and figure out which countries use which term more often.

Example 1:

“flash drive” vs. “USB drive” vs. “memory stick”

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Today is January 14th, which means we’re only one month away from what some believe is the 2nd largest retailing event of the year. Last year, Valentine’s Day raked in $905 Million in online sales.

Though men are expected to spend the most on Valentine gifts and are stereotypically procrastinators, ecommerce marketers should not run a last-minute Valentine’s campaign. Today we’ll talk about ways you can sell lovin’ through email, social media and your website.

Interesting Statistics

Last year, Discovery Card conducted a Valentine’s Day Shopping Survey and found that:

• Men expected to spend an average of $127 on their ladies, and the ladies $74. Of the women, 53% said they would purchase gadgets for their men.

• 65% would make their purchase one week before February 14
• 10% of men would wait until February 14
• 39% of women planned on spending nothing
• 22% of men and 15% of women planned to purchase a gift online

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Google’s shaking up its search page for the holidays…do you notice anything different?