Biznology

Avinash Kaushik, whose blog Occam’s Razor is a must-read, had a lot to say at the Emetrics Summit this week. I tried to write it down for those not lucky enough to attend.

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I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at Jim Sterne’s Emetrics Summit—it’s one of the few conferences I go to where I learn something from the conference speakers. (I always learn a lot from talking to the attendees.) Today I presented a quick run-through of the basics of search metrics, so I posted the presentation for download.

I am speaking this week at Jim Sterne’s Emetrics Summit, which gives me the opportunity of hearing the terrific lineup of speakers Jim has assembled at this conference, including Jim himself. Jim led off the proceedings with his keynote speech, where he explains to the attendees how to see “The Big Picture.” Jim is always entertaining, but more importantly, his insights help all of us to see where we should be focusing our efforts.

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Many of you know by now that Bill and I update our book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc, with each printing. Well, the sixth printing, which we completed in August, is now available and it is our most extensive revision yet.
Big changes have affected the paid search industry, with MSN Search moving away from the use of Yahoo!’s paid placement facility in favor of its own, the growth of personalization in results, and the increasing use of hybrid auctions.
If you’ve already bought our book, thank you. You can review the full list of updates that we’ve made in each printing so you can keep your knowledge up-to-date. In the next few weeks, I will cover some of these changes in more depth in separate blog entries.

When Bill Hunt and I wrote about dayparting, we expected people to use it to optimize their conversion rates—different days of the week and different times of the day probably yield different conversion rates. If you track which times are most lucrative for you, you can bid higher or lower (or not at all) to make your budget go farther.
But we really didn’t think about using dayparting to combat click fraud. Here’s a very interesting story courtesy of Andy Beal for his SEO Scholarship contest that shows a new way of thinking about using dayparting. Maybe others knew this already, but is was new to me.