I love techie tools and I'm always tinkering with new stuff I run across. I guess that makes me a Techie Tool Tinkerer. Say that ten times fast! So when Andy Beal blogged about a new services called AdWords Optimizer by Click Muse, I gave it a shot.

I manage a lot of Ad Groups in under the Google AdWords system. I mean, a lot. Optimizing them all is a painfully manual process if I want to do it right. Each situation requires a lot of individualized attention. So the promise of a tool that could in any way enhance this process is very attractive.

AdWords Optimizer does a very simple thing: It looks at the clickthrough rates of all your text ads in a given Ad Group and then makes recommendations on which ads to keep and which ads to dump. If two ads are performing at a statistically similar level, it suggests that you pick one to keep and that you create another to test again. It also gives an estimate of the potential clickthrough gain you might achieve if you dump the losing ad(s) in favor of the winning ad.

If you only have one text ad creative running for a particular Ad Group, it chastises you for this as well (and rightly so...don't put all your eggs in one text ad kiddies).

This sounds all well and good, doesn't it? Not so fast there, my little AdWords managing friend. There's another piece of the puzzle and if you get dazzled by all the shiny objects that this tool throws at your way, you might take your eyes off the real goals.

Here is a simple question: Are you looking for clicks or are you looking for conversions? That is to say, are simply looking for people to visit your site or are you looking for people to visit your site and then take some meaningful action that you consider to be valuable (like purchasing something, downloading a trial, registering for an email list, etc.)?

If you said, "I just want clicks! Gimme gimme gimme clicks! Me want clicks! Clicks am good!" - then I would suggest you go to this site instead. You'll be happier. But if you astutely realized that clicks are just the ante and that conversions are what you are really shooting for, then you might want to read on before putting the AdWords Optimizer chamber to your temple and pulling the trigger. Click, Click, Boom!

Here is a real situation I encountered:

"Winning Ad"
CTR: 3.76%
Conversion rate: 3.7%
Cost per conversion: $74.30

"Losing Ad"
CTR: 1.31%
Conversion Rate: 25.0%
Cost per conversion: $9.74

Wow. My clickthrough gain would be well over 200%. Seems like a non-brainer. Dump the dog and go with the studly ad, right?

However, digging into the numbers more thoroughly, what you find is that the "winning ad" only had one converter and the "losing ad" had 4 converters (this campaign has only been active for a short time and is extremely narrowly focused so the low absolute number of converters is to be expected).

If I were to go with this program's suggestions blindly, I'd turn off the ad that is generating more actual customers. The AdWords Optimizer only looks at clicks and that would seem to be its major limitation.

I'd love to see them upgrade the tool to integrate conversion data, though I'm sure that it would be a trickier algorithm. But a boy can dream, can't he?

It's still a useful tool for nudging you in the right direction. But like most things, you shouldn't just follow its advice blindly. Think about what you really want to accomplish and make sure the program's recommendations jive with those goals.

Now, I need to get back to optimizing those AdWords campaigns. Ugh!

Technorati Tags: AdWords Optimizer, AdWords, Google, Clickmuse, Andy Beal, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

People often come up to me and ask, with awe, "Are you from the future?"

I simply cock my head at a jaunty angle, flash a wry smile and say, "No. No I'm not. But I did just read one of next year's best selling business books."

Surprisingly, this raises more questions than it answers. The truth of the matter is that some nice person at Random House sent me an advance, uncorrected proof of an amazing new book entitled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die .

I'm not supposed to quote from the text because it is an advance copy, but I can only imagine that they sent it to me so I would read it and talk about it right here....which is what I'm doing. So let me try to explain to you what this book is all about.

Imagine if Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell had a baby. That baby would grow up to write this book. Oh, and the child's godparents would be Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. And they'd all live together on a houseboat. That last part is irrelevant. Sorry.

Seriously though, Made to Stick is going to be next year's huge hit. Unfortunately, it doesn't come out until January 16, 2007.

I'll do a more complete review when I'm permitted to actually quote from the text, but I think I can safely speak in terms of the book's main themes and strengths.

The book outlines what makes some ideas stick while others fade away. Brothers Chip and Dan Heath outline 5 factors they label as SUCCESs. To stick, an idea (and message) must be:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Story (that is, employing stories)

If you like Seth Godin's work (especially All Marketers are Liars), then Made to Stick will take you a step further in teaching you how to craft your stories and make them more effective and memorable.

If you are a Malcolm Gladwell fan (especially The Tipping Point) you will enjoy this book all by itself just for the tone and anecdotes. It's an easy, pleasurable read. And I think it would be interesting even to people who aren't necessarily focused on messaging and marketing. If you have to give a PowerPoint presentation - EVER - you would do a thousand times better if you read this book and followed a couple of simple rules. I'm already beginning to employ these techniques and I'm telling you, they work.

If you didn't read the Eisenberg's Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, you are late to the party. Get your stinky butt over to Amazon and order a copy. It has been this year's must read for marketers, web jockeys, and savvy business people. There isn't another book out there (or on the horizon) that can challenge it this year for usefulness and insights. But when Made to Stick hits in early 2007, you'll have the perfect companion piece to help you refine some of the things you learned while reading Waiting for Your Cat to Bark.

Or maybe I just like marketing-type books written by brothers. Who can say? I've been accused of stranger things.

Do yourself a favor and go pre-order your copy of Made to Stick. If you will recall, I got my pre-ordered copy of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark way ahead of the official publication date, so given that Made to Stick is already being circulated to mooks like me (and it's in damn good shape as it is...hey Random House! Do you want me to send you a list of minor typos? Who do I send them too?), you just might get lucky and get this ahead of the crowd. That way, you'll have a head start in learning this stuff. And those that learn this stuff well, will be next year's marketing stars. Trust your Uncle Eric on this one.

Hey Random House! Why can't you get this out in time for Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice/Insert your own generic festival, holiday or religious observance here? This would be a huge seller. I would love to be able to give this book as my corporate business gift this year.

My dilemma is that there are about 30 people I'd love to share this book with right now, but all I have is this advance copy and I'm worried that I'll never get it back! It's just that good. Plus, I like the alternate cover on the advance copy (advance cover shown above and Amazon cover at right). The one they show at Amazon is good too (duct tape is stickier than Post-It Notes, but as an idea, Post-It Notes are both literally and figuratively "sticky" - clever!).

Sorry to tease you with this unobtainable morsel. But I couldn't resist. Have you ever had one of those books that you rapidly devour only to find that when you are through that you wish you had taken more time to savor it because now that it's over you have no other book to look forward to that even comes close to comparing to what you just read? That's what happened to me with Made to Stick. Now what should I read? Leave me a suggestion in the comments, please!

Technorati Tags: Made to Stick, Chip Heath, Dan Heath, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, All Marketers are Liars, The Tipping Point

"Ring the bell. School's in session" - MC Hammer

Did you know that there were magic words that go along with any good search optimization effort? It's true. And each set of magic words is different depending on the web page you are optimizing. I'm not talking about the keywords that you studiously research. These are other magic words. Using these magic words will become more and more important in the future. So how do you learn the magic words and how do you use them?

Let's start with a story. Aaron Wall is a well-respected blogger, author of a search engine optimization (SEO) e-book and maker of SEO tools. He's a nice guy, but is willing to take a stand when needed. About a year and a half ago, Aaron noticed a search optimization company that was doing very bad things on behalf of its clients. This company was called "Traffic Power." Aaron publicly blogged about all the bad things that Traffic Power was doing. He then warned that Traffic Power and all its clients would get banned by Google eventually.

Traffic Power took exception to this and sued Aaron.

The online search engine community is pretty close knit and this story took off like wildfire. Soon, literally hundreds of web sites reported stories like:

"Aaron Wall sued by Traffic Power"

"Traffic Power sues Aaron Wall"

The story got so big that the Wall Street Journal even picked it up.

Within a month, you could do a Google search for Aaron's name and the fifth result was for Traffic Power's web site.

Traffic Power never publicly acknowledged the lawsuit on their web site and they certainly never used Aaron's name anywhere on their web site. So how could their web site rank so highly when searching for "Aaron Wall" - a phrase that didn't even appear on their web site?

The term "Traffic Power" had become a "magic word" associated with the search phrase "Aaron Wall." Because these two terms ("Aaron Wall" and "Traffic Power") had been found together on many, many web pages all over the Internet, Google eventually began to think that these terms were related. Google believed that there was some "Traffic Power-ness" to the search term "Aaron Wall."

I used to be able to demonstrate this phenomenon directly. But Aaron was right. Traffic Power did get banned from Google. So this association no longer exists. But rest assured, it did.

So what does this have to do with optimizing your web pages?.

Everything.

You probably won't have hundreds or thousands of people writing web pages about your keywords/web sites and associating specific "magic words" with your web pages and products. So what can you do?

Let's take it backwards. Let's look for the relationships that already exist between the search terms we want to optimize for and the "magic words" that already surround that search term.

I use the term "magic words" for dramatic effect. I actually prefer the term "supporting words." And the whole concept has the egghead, super-geek name of "Latent Semantic Indexing" or LSI. Calling these things "supporting words" makes it much more accessible for the lay audience (much like we advocate changing the naming of the concept of RSS feeds into calling them "subscriptions"). I'm going to gloss over some of the gory details to make this more accessible. Those who are involved in LSI more passionately than I am will surely find my explanations lacking. But as an introduction for you to use today to help you in optimizing your web site, this level of detail will do. Trust me.

Supporting words are basically words that we aren't going to optimize for directly. For example, if we were trying to optimize for a SQL Server product, we can guess that a supporting word might be "Microsoft." Microsoft makes SQL Server so an association is reasonably to expect.

Of course, Microsoft makes a lot of stuff that isn't related to SQL Server. So we wouldn't optimize for the word "Microsoft" directly. We're not trying to rank for the word "Microsoft" on its own. But not having it on the page could hurt us because it is a word that co-occurs frequently with the phrase that we are interested in optimizing for (i.e. "SQL Server"). Make sense?

For quite a while, I have been using a beta product (actually from Microsoft, though you wouldn't know it except to look at the copyright) to gain some insight into what the geeks call "statistically co-occurring terms." In plain English: words that show up a lot together on the web.

You can use that tool here: http://rwsm.directtaps.net/

When you do a search with this tool, take a look at the list(s) of words along the left pane (you can ignore the right pane...it's just the same old MSN search results). Be sure to click the "plus" (+) signs to expand each list. This tool gives you a rough insight into what some of the supporting words may be for your selected search phrase.

Enter Quintura. This is a new (free) download that uses data from the big three search engines (as well as many, many others if you change the options) and puts this same kind of information into a visual format.

You type in a search term (like "Improving Customer Experience ") and you get sort of a solar system map of words. The closer the words are to the searched term, the more related. The bigger and bolder the word is, the more important it is. I wouldn't worry too much about these size and location attributes. Just focus on the content. The resulting image looks something like this:

Interesting, huh? There are a lot of terms that seem to co-occur with the phrase "Improving Customer Experience" that are non-obvious. Using some of these words on my web page could help me rank better for the phrase "Improving Customer Experience."

To make this tool even cooler, you can "drill down" on these supporting words a bit. For example, if I put my mouse over the term "Improving" I get this (the outline emphasis is mine):

Hey! Check that out! The word "ice" is an associated term. I'm sure that it doesn't hurt that I've associated the phrase "ICE - Improving Customer Experience" both on this site as well as within any strategic link building activities I've done. But the fact is that the word "ICE" has now become a supporting word for the phrase "Improving Customer Experience."

I know that I'm a mega geek, but you have to admit, this is way cool. This will allow you to fully understand the universe of important words related to your keyphrases in a much easier and more intuitive manner. Continue to do your regular keyword research. There is no substitute for this. Use tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker if you can afford it. Otherwise, there are a number of free online tools to at least get you started. Then use this research to begin to generate supporting words (you can get some of your supporting words from the research you generate using Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker as well, but they aren't free).

You can download Quintura yourself if you want to play around with it. It's free and doesn't even require registration. Can't beat that:

http://www.quintura.com/download/

Consider yourself schooled. Now go teach someone else about "supporting words."

Technorati Tags: Supporting Words, Magic Words, Latent Semantic Indexing, LSI, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Results Clustering Tool, Quintura, Google, Microsoft

Our always-popular Tag and Social Bookmark creator got featured on Lifehacker.com today. That has meant a substantial rise in traffic as you might imagine. And it has also awoken me from my slumber. I promise to carve out some time to get the ideas in my head down on the blog.

Some things to look forward to:

• The Worst Vending Machine. Ever.
• A Preview of Chip & Dan Heath's forthcoming book "Made to Stick."
• "Is-ness" vs. "Does-ness" - it's important and overlooked.
• Retro book reviews for two updated classics: Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum and Krug's Don't Make Me Think (I re-read both recently after having read nothing but MBA books for the last several years) .
• Much, much more.

Thanks for sticking around my little ice cubes.

Me am pointer. Me am unashamed.

Joshua Schachter rants about the lack of innovation in alarm clock UI design.

As someone who has puzzled over the setting of a number of alarm clocks in various hotel rooms, I can really relate to the sentiments here. Come to think of it, there really are very few design standards or heuristics when it comes to alarm clock design. Many a night I have just phoned for a wake-up call rather than gamble on the fact that I correctly set some foreign alarm clock...and I hate being awakened by the phone! Scares the bejeebers out of me ("bejeebers" being a technical term in this instance).

Given the ubiquity of the humble alarm clock, you would think we could all agree on some standards and make our lives a bit easier. Does the little dot of light mean AM or PM? You know?

OK. I guess I'm more like a reviewer than a pointer since I couldn't keep my comments to myself. So sue me.

I got this from Om Malik who is apparently changing roles at Business 2.0 to strike out on his own...I'll be interested to see what he does next. Seems like lots of shake ups among the A-listers. First, Scoble leaves Microsoft. Now Om is leaving Business 2.0. Is there something in the water?

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, Alarm Clock Design, UI Standards, User Interface Standards, Joshua Schachter, Om Malik, Robert Scoble

A new book by Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, is very near...if not already here. Amazon says the book hasn't been released yet (it says July) but Tufte's own web site is acting like it's available now (says that orders ship in one day). I'll probably be getting this book eventually. It's a little pricey so I'll wait for some early adopters to give some reviews.

But what I think is worth noting is that Tufte is selling some pretty interesting prints from this new book as well as his other books such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. These limited edition prints are $500 apiece. Or you can get the whole lot of 16 for a mere $5k. Hurry! Act now. The editions are limited to print runs of 40 each.

I think it is a cool idea. I'd love to get some prints from Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Very pop-art. I'd be the coolest geek on my block with some blown up prints like that hanging on my wall.

Drop by the Tufte web site if you want to drop some coin on his swanky book art.

Technorati Tags: Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Books, Art, Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think

Back in the olden days, I used to go to this establishment called "a video store." This was a place you could rent videotapes (and later DVD's) to watch at home. Occasionally, I would go to this establishment with a particular movie in mind to rent. But more often than not, I would go in to simply browse and see what was available. You see children, the "video store" only carried so many copies of each movie. Once those were all rented, you could not get the movie you wanted that night. Oh sure, you could stare at the pretty box on the shelf, but you could not actually watch the movie. Yes, we lived like savages.

The other day, I went to an even more archaic institution, the library. I've talked about my love of libraries before and I've lamented their slowness to embrace modern technologies. My favorite library has begun offering a bunch of books on tape online, so to speak. You see they aren't really on tape...you can download them. I guess they are more appropriate referred to as "audio books." I tried it out once and it was a huge pain in the ass since the software didn't support the ubiquitous iPod. Being the geek that I am, I was able to get around the Digital Rights Management (DRM) by downloading the book, burning it to CD and then re-ripping it with iTunes. Too much hassle for me, especially for something I was only going to listen to one time. But that isn't really the point of my story.

The point is that the library has set up its digitally downloadable books to be browseable. That is, they display all the titles that are available and you can peruse them at your leisure. They even have little thumbnails of the covers to enhance the browsing experience. This behavior reminds me of my browsing of the movies in the video store. I can look over what is available without having a specific title in mind. It's related to search activity, but it's really browsing. The metaphorical equivalent of telling the virtual librarian "No, thanks. I'm just looking."

Which brings me to my main point. I almost always use the library web site before visiting in person. But for two activities, I really need to just go to the branch location and browse. These activities are looking for CD's and looking for DVD's. For these two items, I'm typically interested in what is available and possibly stumbling upon something new, unexpected or forgotten. I can't search for "a movie I've always wanted to see but forgot about." I gotta browse to have that serendiptous experience.

If I know exactly what I want, using the library web search is adequate (not awesome, just adequate). But so often, I just want to browse. Why can't the library's web site allow me to browse what is currently available? Don't show me what's checked out (unless I ask...like if I want to put a reserve on something). Then let me select what I want and put a hold on it so I can come by after work and pick up what I selected without hassle.

We know they can do this because they have already done it with the audio books. Granted, the audio books system appears to be an outsourced service, but it does provide an example for libraries to follow.

I so desperately want to design a better library. Unfortunately, the economic motivations are very different for libraries. There is no profit motive for loaning out a few more books, CD's or DVD's. Therefore, it is very hard to persuade libraries that they could improve the customer experience by addressing these new-fangled technology needs. And of course, there is the issue of cost. Who is going to pay for all that techno-work? I'll tell you what, if I ever hit the lottery, one of the charitable works I will perform will be to create the most rocked-out library system the world has ever seen. It will take the best of the best from any number of disciplines and create a library that will be the envy of every library on the planet.

In this perfect library, I will use RFID too. I will tag every piece of media. One of the things that pisses me off more than anything else is having the computer say that something is available and then locating where it is supposed to be on the shelf only to find it missing. Oh, it's probably in the building somewhere, but who knows where it got shelved. A librarian friend of mine once told me that she believed that between 10-25% of all the materials in the library were mis-shelved. Granted, she thought that the vast majority of those were just a few spaces out of place, but what about those books and other materials that land so far out of their element that they become essentially lost. No one looking in these sections is looking for that mis-shelved book and so the likelihood that they resurface on their own is minimal. I'm sure librarians must do some mass checking of the shelves a couple of times a year to find these misplaced books. RFID would solve this problem a lot more efficiently.

But I digress. Here is the main point:

Are there elements of your customers' real world behavior that could be replicated or supported online? In my example, browsing available videos without searching for a specific title is something easily done in a brick and mortar store. And it could be replicated online without too much fuss....but it isn't in most cases. Supporting real world behavior, habits and patterns in the online space can be a good idea sometimes. It can also be a horrible idea in other ways. For example, it is bad to extend a real world metaphor too rigidly or inappropriately to the online world...anyone remember Southwest Airlines first web site that used the metaphor of the check-in counter very literally? Bad idea.

But don't let that stop you from thinking about this issue. What are your customers doing offline that they might like to online? It might be slightly different in execution, but if you nail the core of the right idea, you'll hit a homerun with your customers.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, User Experience, Library, Libraries, Browsing, Searching, Offline Behavior, Online Behavior, RFID, iPod, DRM, Digital Rights Management, iTunes

If you hate personal posts, then this is one you can skip.

Yesterday, I was honored to be recognized as the Fisher College of Business Executive MBA Valedictorian. Given the outstanding quality of my classmates, I consider this a singular honor. I guess that makes me the "Alpha Type A."

But I also want to recognize the members of my MBA team. Getting this degree was a team sport and I, in no way, got through it alone. And in every way possible, I share my Valedictory honors with my team:

Jack Harper: CEO, First Service Credit Union
Nancy Barcalow: Nationwide Insurance
Brett BeGole: GE
Greg Sheehan: Dentsply
Ryan Murray: Murray Energy Corporation

This is an awesome group of people and I am honored to have been able to have experienced this program with them by my side. We were finalists in the Business Plan Competition and I am convinced that we would have won if we had not had to withdraw because of scheduling conflicts (each of us were either traveling or otherwise unavailable at the time of the competition due to the demands of our jobs). In short, we rocked the program from top to bottom. Kicked ass. Took names. Got the degree.

Thanks to all my other classmates and the professors that honored us with their time, knowledge and experience.

And finally, thanks most of all to my wife and my family who supported me more than they even know. I couldn't have done it without them.

Technorati Tags: No tags today.