Do you ever wonder where most users click on the Google search results pages? MarketingSherpa did a study back in 2006 I just happened across, using a heat map (get a free heat map for your site). The study tracks the mouse arrow on the page and where they click. I think the study results are a bit expected, yet a bit surprising at the same time.

Here are my bullet points regarding this image:

• Notice the sidebar sponsored results. Little to no activity. If this is the case, where do all of the PPC clicks come from for search results? Unless you’re the highest bidder and being shown on the top sponsored, there isn’t much action.
• The top sponsored results seem to get the best activity as far as sponsored goes. It would appear the most opportunity would be the last, or bottom of the top sponsored results. In other words, closest to the natural results. Problem is, you have to break your bank if you’re in a competitive market to get those top spots.
• The natural list is what was expected. People prefer natural results over sponsored results. The top 1-2 spots get the majority of the clicks and while the rest of the top 10 get some activity, the top spots are going to pull in a good 60-70 percent of the traffic.

Putting the pieces together, be careful of your sponsored ads. Keep good logs to ensure the clicks are good true clicks. A good click will stay on your site longer than a second or two. A good click will visit your site for a minimum of 15-20 seconds, but generally a few minutes.

If you really want the bang for your buck, go for the the top of the natural results. The clicks are real and no chance of fraudulent activity. Not to mention it usually costs a lot less when it all boils down. Want to learn more? Give us a call! 866.LNK.WRTH.

**EDITED**
Per Enrique’s question below, I did an image search and found a link to this site, so credit to them and the actual sources of these images, but here is some other great information about searcher behavior:

Working with clients who need reputation management can really help open your eyes on what and what not to do. There are a lot of things that can fall into this list, but here’s a quick list of a few simple guidelines to keep your reputation in check online:

• Answer customer support quickly, promptly and friendly. You can have a sub-par product but if you treat your customers with the respect you would expect, it will take you a long way.
• Invest in managed it support. A reliable it support can help with your business since this will lessen the time that your website goes down. Having an it support team means that you can always be there for your customers.
• Don’t piss off customers no matter how strongly you feel about your side. Make it your goal to do everything you can to make that customer happy. All it takes is one pissed off customer ripping you on a blog or site and it’s never going away.
• Don’t engage in discussions about your company and/or product on message forums or blogs if you plan on saying something you’ll regret later. Once you publish it, it’s published and there’s no taking it back.
• Intended or unintended deception is like digging your own grave. The worst thing a company could possibly do is deceive customers in any possible way. The feeling of “being had” is one that people like to talk about the most. Sometimes this can be an honest mistake, which is where quick and friendly customer support would fly in and handle the situation before it blows up, so keep up with what your customers are saying.

With these things in mind, let’s now take a look at what Network Solutions has been doing. I’ve always wondered why people are still paying more than triple the price for a domain name at Network Solutions and Register.com when you can buy the same name over at Godaddy for less than $10! Evidently registrars are participating in a tactic called Front Running, which lets registrars snatch up domain names people search for making them only available through their own service and allowing them to charge higher prices.

Network Solutions has forced millions of people to buy Internet domain names from them instead of cheaper competitors through a scheme that’s netted the firm millions of dollars, a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP states. ICANN, whose policies facilitate the scheme, is also named in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

“Imagine if you asked a car dealer if they had a black convertible and were then forced to buy the car from them. Would you get a good deal? Each time someone asks Network Solutions about a domain name, the firm creates a monopoly for itself, forcing consumers to pay the price they demand,” said Brian Kabateck, lead counsel in the class action and Kabateck Brown Kellner’s Managing Partner.

The lawsuit also targets ICANN due to them allowing it to continue. Granted, ICANN will be fine after this is all over, but Network Solutions is going to need a strong reputation management campaign once this is said and done. This example might put it into perspective; a domain portfolio of 750 names would cost $20,000 MORE using Netsol.com versus Godaddy.com. Same product, same yearly charge, just $20k more each year. Keep them for 10 years and it’ll cost you $200k more.

Let this serve as our official letter to Network Solutions. If you decide you want to start knocking down the bad sites replacing them with the good, we can help you!

A friend forwarded me a link to a wiki site. As I was looking, I realized that females are often hit with a lot of options that men never will and it gave me the idea for this weeks hypothetical. Male or Female?

Let’s say you have the opportunity to experience life as the opposite sex. You would become an extremely blessed male or female in all areas that are possible; looks, personality, wisdom, brains, perfect body and all of the opportunities that typically come to these people. This would be for a minimum of one month.

Would you take this chance and if so, which sex do you think would be the most fun?

This is one of those cost of living calculators that make me so happy that I live in Dallas. The cost of living in Dallas is so minimal compared to most cities in the U.S., especially Manhattan (New York City) . . . take a typical $50k salary and plug it in and this is what you’ll see:

Go check out how your cost of living stacks up to another city.

First, my apology for missing last week’s hypothetical. I figured it was inevitable I would eventually miss one, but no excuses, just slipped by. Which leads me to the hypothetical I have for this week. It deals with the old saying, “If I only knew then, what I know now!”

If someone gave you the option of taking all of the knowledge you have right now and starting your life all over at the age of 18 would you take this chance, even though you have just as much of a possibility of failure as you do success?

or

Would you take what life has dealt you to date and continue on the current track, but you’re given the guarantee that you will live a happy and comfortable life?

Reading studies about online advertising is something I always enjoy to dig in to. It really gives you an insight of how companies are spending their money and what they feel is the best bang for their buck. Running an online business and actually being in the marketing industry makes it even more beneficial to understand our target market.

Today I read MarketingSherpa’s Study on the Best & Worst Online Tactics & Budget Plans. I was very happy to see how well the SEO market is doing with the highest Search ROI percentage (57%), trumping paid search ads by almost 25%! No wonder Google is trying to take the feet out from under SEO companies.

What do I mean by that last comment? There is no secret that a main staple of any SEO campaign is link building. Or maybe it is a secret to some, but an SEO firm can optimize the hell out of your site but it’s really nothing without a solid linking campaign. (INSERT LINKWORTH) There is a reason why a marketing agency  should use LinkWorth and many use it already as part of their process; it’s effective and it simplifies their jobs. How much of what we do actually works? According to this study, quite a bit. Here’s a graph showing the emergence of text link ads into the marketplace:

What a pleasant sight to see. We had the largest increase from ’06-’07 and we’re in the top 3 of outperforming tactics. What’s even more impressive is the fact link building campaigns are tough to work into conversion systems, while you can also improve the conversion in your site using backlinks from sites like https://agencybacklinks.com as well. I think we do a great job of educating our customers in how they’ll see the benefit, but if you come across someone that lives and dies by the analytics conversion system, it might be a tough sell.

One more thing about this study that interested me was the expectations of emerging tactics. See the image below:

It appears viral video is an area where marketers are looking to increase their budgets. They list Youtube.com, but there are loads of sites videos can be uploaded to. One example of the viral video tactic is the girl Kina Grannis who entered a contest with Doritos to win a music contract with Interscope Records. She used the social network Digg.com and wrote a song “Gotta Digg” for that community. Long story short, it was a hit and so was she, along with getting a contract with Interscope.

Have an agency and interested in using LinkWorth? Call 866.LNK.WRTH and we’ll get you started. Know what you’re doing and ready to go? Or have your own site to promote and want to do it on your own? Then go signup and create your account. You can be on the ground running in just a few minutes.

I recently posted our success, or lack thereof, advertising over on Facebook. In the post I pointed out that it could very well be the lack of knowledge on my part, but I posted our numbers and usually numbers don’t lie.

Today I was forwarded a great article from one of my good friends, Simon, with the title of “Google’s Loss is Murdock’s Gain“. In this article, it speaks of Google’s lack luster earnings and recent stock drop, along with what Google says is one of the main causes.

“We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as we would like,” said George Reyes, Google’s chief financial officer, implying that the sites on which the minimum payments are due were social networks. By far, the largest social network on which Google sells ads is MySpace, which is owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation. In 2006, Google agreed to a three-year deal to sell ads on MySpace, committing to pay a minimum of $900 million.

This falls back to my gut feeling about social networks, the user demographics and their spending abilities of the influencer marketing agency standard. Here’s an example:

Let’s say you put a shopping strip across the street from a University. In this shopping center, you have Mercedes Benz, FAO Shwartz and Saks. While there will definitely be some sales from students, most will walk right past on their way to Fraternity or Sorority houses, local bars or music hot spots.

I know some people have said they do well with social advertising, but when a company like Google openly states they are losing money through advertising in social networks, then you can bet your ass that your chances aren’t all that great. Straight from the horses mouth:

“We have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the MySpace relationship,” Mr. Brin said. “I don’t think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet. We are running a lot of experiments and we have had some significant improvements. But some of the things we were counting on in Q4 didn’t pan out. There were some disappointments there.”

Reading this makes me think even more that Izea’s SocialSpark has a huge chance to be the flop of the year.

Earlier today we put our new ad checking spider into production. The much needed upgrade is using up to date technologies along with verifying code and text of the ad. What this means is, if you publish an ad using the wrong anchor text or the wrong code, the ad is not going to be validated until it is published correctly.

Another advantage to our new spider is the advanced level of communication. Rather than just telling you the ad is not found, we’ll be communicating the reason why our spider was unable to validate the ad. We do expect a period of a few weeks to get the communication feature completely finished.

We do encourage you to let us know if you notice any unusual activity or messages being sent. What I mean by this is if we’re sending incorrect information or something repetitive, or just out of the ordinary, then contact support. This doesn’t relate to messages about ads not being found. If you are receiving an ad not found message, we request that you hold off contacting us until you have received more than one consecutive messages regarding the same ad.

Based on the post just made on Microsoft to buy Yahoo, it made me realize that this news made about 1,000 people extremely happy.

Yahoo was talking about laying off 20% of it’s workforce, which roughly came out to around 1,000 people. While I have no idea where that decision stands, it had to make about 1,000 Yahoo employees some of the happiest people in America.

It’s called “Sticker Shock“. When you look at something and instantly realize that what you’re looking at buying does not meet the price you’re looking at on the price tag. According to Wikipedia, the term sticker shock came from the high price of automobiles in the 70’s and 80’s.

Imagine telling someone you’ll pay $45 BILLION for something. This is what Microsoft told Yahoo in an unsolicited letter proof of income document.

Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft’s closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition. Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use – EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices – this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders, what is a payroll software?…

Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers…

We would value the opportunity to further discuss with you how to optimize the integration of our respective businesses to create a leading global technology company with exceptional display and search advertising capabilities. You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines…

Due to the importance of these discussions and the value represented by our proposal, we expect the Yahoo Board to engage in a full review of our proposal.

The reactions are mixed with some saying Microsoft is buying a big bag and others saying it is a smart move by the software giant, saying the online advertising sales is where Microsoft lacks.

I think the interesting fact here is, Bill Gates can write a check for $45 billion and still have $14 billion left over. “Yahoooooooo!”