We all know that Keyword Quality Score in Google Adwords determines how relevant your keywords are to the advertisement, and the secret of achieving maximum quality score has never been fully revealed. Recently I’ve been testing the impact to quality score by *Click Through Rate* Vs. *Ads relevancy to keywords*, the campaign is targeting local entertainment business. In this case, all the paid search keywords are local keywords, so click through rate was pretty high.

Before show you the results, you may want to watch this video officially released by Google. This is an introduction of Google Ad Auction system by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. After this video, you will have a better idea why CTR is so important to quality scores.

I am a big believer in “SEO is nothing without providing decent user experience to your visitors“. Imagine you ranked as #1 for many popular keywords, but your website is crap and people who enter your website cannot find what they want, they will definitely go away and never come back again.

Well, you must be curious how the hell I could learn website user experience from Gordon Ramsay’s TV Progam: Kitchen Nightmares. Before I tell you the full story, please let me quickly introduce this TV program to readers who have never watched it. Each episode of Kitchen Nightmares was about how Chef Gordon Ramsay helped a desperate restaurant and saved them from closing. I watched several episodes of Kitchen Nightmares during Christmas (check out my Xmas seo posts collection) because I simply love food and cooking. What surprised me was that running a restaurant was amazingly similar to running a website, and below are the lessons I learnt from this TV program.

First of all, I wish everyone has a wonderful holiday for Christmas and New Year. Instead of having turkey, I am going to write this entry with a collection of SEO posts that famous SEOers posted for Christmas 2009.

Is there anything more interesting than reading changelog of the latest wordpress update? I guess the answer would be NO to wordpress fans. Wordpress just released its latest wordpress 2.9 update, which resolved more than 500 tickets and bugs.

So let’s have a look at its core updates

First off, I want to say thanks to SEOmoz (a very authoritative SEO blog) for holding this amazing SEO webinar. Though it was SEOmoz’s first ever webinar, but apparently it was really successful (SEOmoz had to add a second session due to overwhelming responses).  I missed first webinar session due to arrived home very late on 10th Dec. For the second session, which was few hours ago, I finally managed to get home early (6:45pm London), though was still late for first two chapters. This wrap-up is just for those who hasn’t got a chance to join this webinar and my note taking speed was not fast enough, I am sorry for any missed part.

seo tips from seomoz pro webinar

This link building strategies webinar covered following topics

Nedstat is one of the largest Web Analytics company in Europe, it provides comprehensive and complex web data analysis solution to many big brands. Because one of my clients is currently using Nedstat to track website, so I am quite lucky to have fully access to it. I decided to write a number of posts of how I use Nedstat to analyse web data and generate insights for improving performance.

nedstat web analytics

Here is Nedstat Web Analytics Series 1, to use Direct View to determine the customer behavior.

Goal completion tracking is the ultimate way of measuring online success, it can be sale, sign-up, engagement or even abandonment. Number of goal completions is not just a figure, it’s what we can use to find insights to obtain better outcomes. Many people are still just comparing number of goal completions month by month or day by day, but they are yet to know where has to be improved. So how can we determine the goals value in an effective way?My answer is: Advanced Segmentation.

google analytics advanced segmentation

One of my clients has multiple ads running on Facebook, Google Adwords and it also has a large amount of traffic from Google organic search. How would I tell them the performance of ads? Maybe just number of goal completions of each day or each month? NO, if I do that, I won’t be able to tell where we should improve, whether is ad not attractive enough, or the landing page sucks or anything else. Apart from that, customer behaviors are totally distinguishing on different sources, segmenting the goals data can help understand those behaviors and hence find better solutions.

Here are the steps of setting up advanced segmentation of goals (take my client’s data as example)

Are you still creating Google Adwords campaigns and ad groups by manually typing in Google Adwords API? If you have less than 20 ad groups then you will be fine, but what about 200? even 2000 ad groups? This post entry is for those new PPC managers who are struggling with creating massive Google Adwords Campaigns (let’s say 500 ad groups each), but please bear in mind, it is Not any sort of fancy new technique to magically create 500 Ad groups from uploading excel spreadsheet within 2 minutes. Although I would love to see Google to come up with any new functionality to make my life easier, but apparently they cannot just let me finish my job within 5 minutes.

easy and fast create google ad groups

See how fast that man is typing in the picture? You better to be faster than him. In order to get massive ad groups created faster and easier, we need following tools

• Microsoft Office Excel
• Google Adwords Editor
• A bottle of Redbull (it’s boring work, make sure you don’t fall asleep)