Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

I apologize to anyone who has had trouble loading or browsing the site. I have been having some hosting issues related to PHP that have been wreaking havoc on my site. I think they should all be worked out by now, but sorry for any inconvenience.

Having a good host makes troubleshooting and fixing problems much easier.  Especially a host with good customer service.  I have been through a lot of different hosting account, most all of them shared, and experienced some of the best and worst hosting.  I like my current host a lot, NationVoice, and have also liked using West Host in the past.  Unfortunately in this instance, I caused the problem and it took me a long while to fix it.  I am not very good at PHP, but I make do.

If you are in the market for PHP Web Hosting, Make sure you check out Mckremie.  I have heard some good things about them from other people.  You can find more about Mckremie here.

Here is my attempt at a recap on making the #1 article across all sections on Digg, on August 17th. I wish I had been able to do this sooner, but I have been terribly busy at work, not to mention in Michigan watching my Mountaineers beat the Wolverines. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

This is the picture that made #1:

Quick Facts on my Digg Post here. These numbers are total numbers to date starting from the day it was submitted to Digg, August 16th.

92,470 Pageviews and 81,224 Unique Views (just for the How to get Fired from Dairy Queen Picture)

2:23 Average Time on Page (I am surprised it was this high)

Ever wonder what a #1 article on Digg looks like in terms of analytics? Here is what my Google Analytics looks like:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just an update about the previous post. The post about getting fired from Dairy Queen, the one below, made #1 on Digg this past Friday. It was submitted during Thursday afternoon and made popular in the wee hours of Friday morning while I was sleeping. It was a nice surprise to say the least, to see that 40,000+ people had come to my site while I was sleeping. The post received about 700 users on Thursday, 71,000 on Friday, and so far about 2,200 Saturday and today each. I am pretty happy with how the site held up, never offically going down but getting slow at some points during the day on Friday. Kudos to the wp-cache plugin helping with the load and Nationvoice.com for hosting my site for me in Dallas (through The Planet I believe). I will post a much more comprehensive update later this week on life after the front page of Digg, covering total users, time on site, number of links gained, jump in alexa, jump in Technorati ranking, and how long did I continue to see traffic from from this particular Digg post, which received a little over 1800 Diggs. Basically just an in-depth look at how the site was affected by becoming the #1 article on Digg.

*Per Jon West’s need for me to specify, when I say #1, I mean #1 across all topics or top of the top 10 list.

This is how you get fired from Dairy Queen

A recent study at Vanderbilt University found that women who get cosmetic breast implants are 3 times more likely to commit suicide than women who do not. I am assuming that “cosmetic breast implants” refer to people who are receiving a breast enlargement and not implants for some other medical reason.

The study had some other interesting findings, these same women with breast implants are more likely to die from smoking, drug or alcohol abuse than women who do not have breast implants. It is definitely worth the read.

A colleague of mine passed me this study in an email today, I am surprised that I have not seen it before. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting find that anyone in the Search industry should read.

Cornell University did a study of 397 search queries to determine eye tracking patterns for Google results. They used undergraduates students to perform searches in areas related to movies, travel, music, politics, local, and trivia. The picture below is a representation of the results they found.

While this study only covers organic/natural results, not paid, and does not include anything past the first page, I don’t think it would be an outlandish assumption to say that these trends also hold true for those two areas as well. It is obvious from this heatmap image, how important rankings are and specifically being “above the fold”. I would be very interested to see Cornell repeat this study after a few years and see if there is a pattern change of how users look at search results. Maybe users would become accustomed to seeing “spammy” results at the top of the page for certain queries and start to naturally shift focus to lower results. Or, the results could be similar. Anyway, its food for thought.

Link to original study

Mirror For Digg. Original is here

Digg Mirror, Original posting on Digg is here

I read this article last month and thought it was on point as it discusses 10 marketing and sales tips from strippers. Funny concept too. Its a shame they don’t teach stuff like this in school. Well these tips, and stripping too I guess. Actually, that is part of a new prostitution major at a school in New Zealand. Enjoy!

According to Alexa’s data/rankings, these are the current top 10 sites on the internet in the US.

1) Yahoo.com

2) Google.com

3) Myspace.com

4) MSN.com

5) Youtube.com

6) Ebay.com

7) Facebook.com

8 ) Live.com

9) Craigslist.org

10) Wikipedia.org

Other than Myspace, which I think is the trash can of the Internet where everyone designs hideous pages, I pretty much frequent all of these on a daily basis. What will be interesting to see is if Digg.com can break into the top 15 and if Facebook can surpass Ebay. I think they will both do this by the end of the year, especially considering ebay has been seeing a consistent decline in traffic/rankings compared to Facebook (according to alexa).

Mirror for Digg. Original is from here.

Original was posted here

This article is going to tell you how my company dropped their CPC for branded terms by 50%. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Keep reading.

Before I go on any further, let me clarify for anyone who might be slightly confused when I refer to branded terms, I am referring to search terms with some version of a company’s brand name in it. As a little background, I recently came on board at a Fortune 50 retailer to do SEM work for them. They have been having some internal discussion about whether or not they should be advertising on branded terms because upper management thinks it is cannibalizing organic results. Thats another article I will be posting, the findings from our experiment of Organic cannibalization from Paid Search. Anyway, we see a very high CTR, conversion rate, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for our branded terms, but our CPCs were in the high teens and it was costing a lot.

When thinking about the Paid Ad keywords, it can be thought of just like typical supply and demand. The more players bidding on a keyword the higher the CPCs will be. Because of this, branded terms tend to cost less than others. Have you ever thought you might be driving up your own ad cost? That is exactly what we found with my company. Our brand is very large and so is our paid advertising budget. We spend millions a year on paid search. There was a theory that since we were such a large player for purchasing our branded terms that we might be bidding up our own prices, so to speak. A test was done and our max CPC was reduced to what our average CPC cost was. After this was done, we saw a drop of several cents in CPC price. Then, after we lowered it to the average CPC, it was lowered roughly another 20%. All the while, watching to make sure none of our terms went inactive for search, thus indicating we had gone to low. After lowering it the second time, we had successfully cut our CPC by nearly 50% and were seeing single digit CPC.

To pull it all back together in case my train of thought was off, we realized that our brand power was quite large and that we could lower our branded CPC by simply lowering our bids. I thought the findings were pretty darn interesting. Not to mention the lower CPC allowed us to realize a higher ROAS.

Anyone else seen this before? Also as a disclaimer, I am not taking credit for these results, I actually started a few days after the theory was put in to effect. I just thought I would share our findings.