Hitwise announced today that the search term Facebook was the top U.S. search conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Overall, Facebook related terms accounted for eight searches across the three top 10 lists.Yahoo! related terms accounted for six spots while MySpace terms accounted for four searches across the search engines. Other search terms that were among the top 10 searches for all three search engines include youtube, facebook login, craigslist and yahoo mail…

Hey marketers and data heads: heads up! Next week is a good week to tell your boss you’re taking “enrichment time off.” We totally support using this excuse to take afternoons off and go to baseball games, or using it to let your boss know you won’t be at work on a Friday, when you’re actually planning to hit the slopes early for a long ski weekend. “Enrichment time”. But regarding next week, we’re actually talking about legitimate, professional, guilt free, educational enrichment time at two web analytics conferences happening at the same place in San Jose — next week!You’ve heard of eMetrics, a premiere event for marketing and website analytics…

Our friends at Wider Funnel and WhichTestWon.com were surprised to find that an unconventional left-hand placement of the add to cart button on BabyAge.com outperformed right-hand placement in an A/B split test, achieving a 16.7% higher conversion rate.

The discovery was surprising because it seems 99.9% of online stores place the cart button on the right hand side, and you’d think that customers have been conditioned to look for the cart button there…

According to Techcrunch, app store veteran, UrbanSpoon, has officially launched their iPad app. I agree with them in that the iPad app will not be useful for quick dinner solutions (like it is when firing up the app on an iPhone), however the iPad app will be useful for longer, more thoughtful decisions. Details of the UrbanSpoon iPad app below:

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I’d like to share with you a way to save money in your Yahoo Search Marketing account that is not as obvious as the regular optimization strategies. As you probably know, when you advertise on Yahoo’s search network, your ads don’t just show on Yahoo’s search results page. They are also displayed on countless search partners that Yahoo has agreements with. This new optimization strategy is centered around the search partners…

The Internet Evolution blog has released a very interesting post which lists the top 10 personalities across 10 different Digital Media/Web 2.0 categories. The categories included:Social NetworkingEnterprise & Cloud ComputingNews/MediaGreentechWireless & GadgetsE-CommerceSearchSecurityDigital EntertainmentMost Over-RatedBelow are a few of the categories that caught our attention, check out the Internet Evolution blog for the complete list…

Yahoo announced this morning that its services will be pre-loaded on millions of Samsung phones worldwide. The new deal expands a relationship between the companies that began in 2007. Samsung is the second largest handset maker in the world, by unit sales, according to hardware tracking firm Gartner.
Samsung is the third largest handset maker in [...]

*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the “View Original Post” link below…

We’re grateful to be nominated in this year’s Search & Social Awards alongside great Conversion and ROI blogs Wider Funnel, GrokDotCom, Site Tuners and others.

If your RSS reader is looking a bit thin lately, voting in these awards is a great way to “discover” blogs that you want to read in categories like SEO, PPC, affiliate management, Web analytics and social media…

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Let’s start by asking one of the most important questions in conversion rate optimization (CRO):

A good question.

In this article, you’ll get:

• A clear and defined process for CRO
• Checklists to print and check off as you go

I’ll share the same processes that I use to consistently boost my clients’ conversion rates – sometimes even doubling or tripling them…

Last Friday, in his weekly whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin discussed how to get around Google penalties. He started by helping viewers assess whether an actual penalty occurred or not, looking at items like: Ranking Drops, Traffic Drops, Technical website issues or link issues. Rand mentioned that Google also looks at factors for the penalty such as severity, repeat offenders, and authoritative brands vs…

Over the past few weeks, we’ve posted 4 videos that suggested small changes you can make to your AdWords account to help you improve your performance. This week, we’ll provide you with some guidance for measuring the results of these changes.With AdWords, you can see how successful your advertising is by monitoring the statistics in your account. Understanding these statistics allows you to assess your results and further tweak your campaigns for even better performance…

I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from Performable. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks…

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I’ve been a bit slow on picking up on Facebook, I’ve had an account for ages but Yoast.com never had a Facebook fan page. My buddy Roy kept poking me though and telling me that I was missing out.

So now it has: Yoast on Facebook. So I would really like if you join me there, either directly through the link before or by just clicking Like on the widget in the sidebar below

Join Yoast on Facebook is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast - Tweaking Websites…

WordStream this week announced the release of Keyword Management for SEO. It offers the same keyword suggestion capabilities as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and similar tools, but layers on keyword analytics, keyword grouping and organization, and integrated content authoring tools starting at $49/monthRather than offering a static list of keyword suggestions along with a handful of related keyword suggestions, WordStream for SEO provides you with:

• Traditional Keyword Research: Not unlike existing keyword tools, WordStream offers keyword suggestions that the software pulls from a deep database of search queries…

It must be infographic week here because we’ve found yet another killer graphic, this time from the team at DataDial on the topic of Search Engine Optimization. Their infographic is essentially a guide to SEO, which discusses: keyword research, site structure analysis, on-page optimization, link building, high/low value SEO tactics, and social media link baiting.

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It’s been an amazing journey. Five years ago today, Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation. At the time, we had no idea how popular Google Analytics would become. To a great extent, Google Analytics’ popularity is a reflection of the phenomenal accomplishments and hard work of many talented and passionate people here at Google. But mostly it is you, our customers, who have made the product what it is today…

Despite the travel havoc caused by the volcano in Iceland, today we hosted our first Google Analytics User Conference in Europe. Six of our Dutch partners joined forces to deliver an interactive and informative day for hundreds of our Dutch users.Clancy Childs (Google Analytics EMEA Lead Sales Engineer) discussed business intelligence, traffic improvements, conversion optimization and the Google Analytics API…

Whole books have been written about the ins-and-outs of landing page design.

Each element on the page, each word, graphic, block of text and link, contributes to conversion, or lack thereof. However, this complexity can be boiled down to six essentials.

If you’re designing a land page, or revamping those pages you have, make sure you cover these six points:

1. State Your Value Proposition

What is it? What value are you providing the customer? What is in it for them?

Your value proposition should be part of the ad text, and it definitely needs to appear on your landing pages…

The latest study by 8coupons.com shows that 85% of users regularly shop/spend money within a 5 mile radius of where they work/live. The data is based on 8coupons.com’s 1.3 million users and 180,000 local deals.The example below, maps out one year’s data compiled by tracking all the users in ZIP code 10003 (East Village, Manhattan). The map is a visual interpretation of the average consumer deal search pattern in NYC…

Cross posted from the Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog.

ad:tech San Francisco is this week, from April 19th to April 22nd, and we’ll be there. Our product experts will be on hand at the Google booth Tuesday and Wednesday to answer questions and provide updates on AdWords, Analytics, DoubleClick, YouTube, AdSense and the Google Content Network. In addition, we’re holding the workshops “Insights Lickety Split in AdWords Search Funnels and Google Analytics” and “Google Ad Innovations @ ad:tech,” as well as speaking at the session “Marketing Masters - The Bleeding Edge of Advertising Innovation…

It is surprising how often these "simple" things come up.

"What is the difference between a metric and a key performance indicator (KPI)?"

"What is a dimension in analytics?"

"What is segmentation?"

"Are goals metrics?"

And many more.

There seems to be genuine confusion about the simplest, most foundational, parts of web metrics / analytics…

Last week at the Google Analytics blog, Nick and Avinash released episode of their Web Analytics TV program, this time discussing topic such as:

• How to create Advanced Segments for many sites (or other parameters)
• Tracking affiliates in Google Analytics
• Using an Event as a goal like tracking people who watch videos to conversion
• Measuring embedded Flash with Google Analytics
• Using custom reporting to display landing pages and page titles
• Breaking down paid vs organic search by landing page
• How site overlay currently works and reasons why it could not work
• How to get the / and /index…

This is the 8th edition of Web Analytics TV with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski where you ask questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.Here is the list of last week’s questions. In this episode we discuss:

• How to create Advanced Segments for many sites (or other parameters)
• AdSense in $index calculations
• Tracking affiliates in Google Analytics
• Using an Event as a goal like tracking people who watch videos to conversion
• Measuring embedded Flash with Google Analytics
• Should you use two analytics packages like Google Analytics and Urchin?
• Using custom reporting to display landing pages and page titles
• Breaking down paid vs organic search by landing page
• How site overlay currently works and reasons why it could not work
• The difference between unique visitors and absolute unique visitors
• How to get the / and /index…

The Gmail blog announced a new feature to Gmail that I have been wanting for quite some time: drag & drop attachments, rather than the traditional: add image >> browse >> search/locate >> attach. Google has enabled this capability for both Chrome and Firefox at this time.

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Most pay per click performance measurement has been at the keyword level i.e. which keyword resulted in conversion.

The problem is this is a blunt measurement tool. It would also be great to know what steps led up to that keyword. For example, did the visitor search on a number of different keyword variations before s/he arrived at that particular keyword. Up until now, this type of tracking has been painful to implement…

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing analytics with a internal search case study from Adi Reguev, and PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Michal Neufeld – Google Analytics – Tying Adwords Into Analytics

Some pros of tying the two together:
- Understand the whole funnel, from search to site exit
- Instant and granular view of ROI on AdWords
o This enables optimizing to profitability
- Uniform goal language between the two systems…

Here at ROI Revolution we are always students of the best practices and the smartest strategies in the world of data driven paid search. Brad Geddes, founder of the Internet marketing training firm bgTheory (pictured right), has some of the most powerful pay per click insights around.

Brad is a long time internet marketing veteran who regularly speaks at search marketing conferences throughout the country and is the only Google AdWords Seminar Leader in the world who teaches, under Google’s authorization, AdWords 301 and 302…

When PPC Hero first pulled the tarp off Google’s newest AdWords extension beta, we got a lot of juicy details about the lead generation mechanism coming down the pipe, but few ideas of how this might impact advertisers on the whole.

Corey Trent over at Marketing Experiments recently published an article on Google’s new lead capture extension where he and I discuss the impact that a feature like this will have on AdWords, businesses and PPC in general…

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Adi Reguev – Go Internet Marketing – Internal Search

Some key questions…

1. What/how much people are looking for [something]…