Peter Thistle

Nice party – great new facility for Rhino Marketing. My 15 milliseconds of fame happens about 2:09…

Avinash Kaushik extends the ideas of his landmark “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” providing actionable insight with his usual clarity, vision, and enthusiasm. This book belongs on every web marketers reading list. Avinash’s fans may well eagerly await his next title – will it include a “:”?

When it comes to small business online nothing beats focus. I love how this website works – on offer is an elegant solution to one single problem: how to mount a mobile device in your vehicle.

http://www.proclipusa.com/

The product itself is great, I bought one perfectly designed to mate my 1999 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 with my 10-years-newer Apple iPhone. It’s nice functional solution to an awkward problem.

The website uses a product selection function that works the same way, making an otherwise awkward buying process simple and almost fool-proof.

Competing with a myriad of businesses serving the vehicle after-market this site works because it chooses to do  just one thing better than anyone else.

Several months ago I received a call from the Googleplex offering to optimize one of our client’s PPC campaigns.  I expect our high spend level got their attention and the call was prompted by the results of some efficiency test.

Google’s recommendations resulted in ad impressions dropping by half, and CTR doubling. In theory this would be good, an indication the campaign had been better targeted and made more relevant to Google’s search audience.

However today I reversed all changes. Our client complained they’ve been getting fewer inbound leads and more importantly: the wrong kind of leads. They sell B2B but careful analysis of the new campaign’s performance indicated it lost some of that traffic in favor of retail traffic, individuals. The numbers were “improved” by, in effect, switching target markets.

I attribute this to Google’s PPC analysts strictly numbers-oriented approach thinking about keyword counts rather than keyword meaning, not accounting for the overlapping B2B / retail keyword spaces, and generally not developing an understanding of the clients business and target market opting instead to just “go by the numbers”.

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