Michael Roebuck's Blog

A client called recently and reported that the results for an A/B Ad Test they were running was out of whack. Google seemed to be favoring one ad over the other even though all the settings were set to show the ad equally.

After a quick call to Google, we find out that Google will no longer allow you to runs ads completely evenly. With the importance of Quality Score raised in the past months, that plays a factor into how often the ad shows. So the ad that Google deems more relevant to the keyword will get more play, even though we've selected it to run evenly over time.

Basically whichever ad is given the higher Quality Score in conjunction with a better CTR will appear more often despite having the setting to rotate evenly. It will still try to show them more evenly, but it most likely will give favor to the better performing ad.

I personally think this is a bad idea. We run A/B tests all the time to track effectiveness of ads and ensure we are always running the best possible ad. We also use this to track landing page effectiveness. By running the identical ad, we can track certain variables within a landing page.

Therefore, if any of you are using A/B tests for your Google ads, go check the data. It may start skewing very soon!

Labels: ab, google, test

Fresh off the Yahoo! Store Blog: The official announcement of Yahoo! Web Analytics.

As Paul writes on the Official Yahoo blog.... "...Any merchant that has tried to set up full analytics on their store knows there are challenges to getting full tracking from entry page to order confirmation. Today, I am happy to announce that we have completed the first phase of our product integration with IndexTools to solve that problem. Announcing Yahoo! Web Analytics for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. Now merchants can enable analytics at the click of a button to capture full referral data, internal search keywords, step-by-step checkout conversion rates and filter and segment all of this to find meaningful actionable insights that translate into more revenue for their stores..."

Full post can be read here:
Introducing Yahoo! Web Analytics

IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Brandi and I had the opportunity to travel to Yahoo! a couple weeks ago for training on this new program. It wasn't new to us as we have been using a white label version of IndexTools for several of our clients for several years now. I was very excited to hear everyone could have the opportunity to use it.

If you have any questions regarding IndexTools or need help setting up, please be sure to let us know.

Labels: analytics, indextools, yahoo