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December 27, 2007
Organic and Pay Per Click Rankings: More Than "Hits", Perform A/B Testing.
By Scott Goodyear
The other day I was reading a post at Google Blogoscoped called "How Google Tests Results Quality" and thinking about how many people will use advertising as a crutch for sites that have low rankings. While searchers may click on advertisements and top ranked pages, that doesn't mean that they like what they see once they reach their destination. This is why some web masters become perplexed that they can have a high "hit" count and high pay per click ad spend but low conversions or sales. This often leads to sentiments like "Pay Per Click advertising is a joke" or "top rankings don't really matter".
But being number one can be huge. PPC advertisements can bring in tons of revenue. What many sites fail to do is create good, converting content. If you are in the same boat, are you running A/B tests? Are you tracking trends related to visitor interactions with your site?
SEOByTheSea had a great patent examination of Google Ad patents back in July. One take away is that engines can rate clicks on an advertisement based on an examination of time spent. If I click through an advertisement but spend only a few moments before I click the "back" button in my browser, then click on another advertisement, or perform another search; these additional actions can serve as clues to Google that the quality of that ad is probably low. I would add that this same type of examination of time spent can also be applied to help rate relevance in organic search results algorithmically (by examining trends in searches) or by using human reviewers, as Google appears to do.
If you are paying for an advertisement or if you are getting lots of hits on organic keywords you owe it to yourself to start understanding your analytics package. An A/B test can help you to better fit into the shoes of a site visitor and make running changes to your site. Like Google, also consider hiring contractors to simply surf your site and give feedback. As it's the holidays, re-connect with your friends and family and see if you can get their feedback as well. All feedback, good or bad, should be welcome.
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