Brandon Adcock dot com

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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).

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Here is a trivia fact that I found today and had no idea about.

One ounce of gold has the capability to be stretched, as a single wire, 50 miles in length.

Which college/university has produced the most presidents?

If you guessed Harvard, you are correct. Harvard is responsible for 6 of the 43 Presidents. Who went to Harvard you ask; John Adams (2nd President), John Quincey Adams (6th), Theodore Roosevelt (26th), Franklin Roosevelt (32nd), John F. Kennedy (35th), and George W. Bush (Harvard Business School - 43rd)

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.

I think I am going to start posting random trivia facts on here. I seem to run across them online or hear them on the radio on the way to the office quite a lot. I would say I will post one a day, but the odds are I will not. So lets just say, I am going to try to post them as often as I can and hopefully it will be close to one per day. So for today, drumroll please….

Roaches can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes.

Gross I know. So when trying to kill a roach, don’t try and drown it.

Ever get really frustrated when you call a hotline or a company’s customer center and you can’t seem to get to a human?  I know I have had this problem, especially when I have had to call UPS.  But I have a little trick/hack that almost always works and send me directly to a human within seconds.

A guy I used to work with at a consulting firm told me about his days managing a call center for AOL.  Dream job, AOL call center.  He actually had a lot of really funny stories about working there.  He told me about how they would design their phone system so callers would just get so frustrated they would hang up because of how the options are so circular.  Very ridiculous, I know.  He taught me a trick about automated phone systems that will send you directly to a human.  Once you call and receive options if you say “Human”, “Agent”, “Human Being”, or one of a few cuss words, it will send you directly to a representative.  It is designed to take very frustrated people directly to a representative.  It works almost every time I have used it and it has saved me a lot of headaches.  So next time you call and get stuck in the hellish world of automated phone systems and all you want is to speak to a real person, just say one of the above things and it should send you to a person.

I would like to pose a question I have not seen much discussion on (maybe I just missed it) and give my thoughts on it too. I want to know and get people’s opinions if larger, older sites can use SEO tactics that newer sites would be penalized for? Now I am not talking about using hidden text, doorways, or cloaking, but rather in terms of general, ethical practices.

For the sake of discussion, lets say you are working for a large retailer with a domain from the mid 1990’s, high pagerank, and over 200,000 pages indexed. Do the same keyword density rules apply to pages from this site as they would a newer site? Or, can this particular site leverage its older domain and brand power to have higher keyword densities in copy that younger sites can’t? What about in regards to titles, metas, and alt tags?

While I am in total agreement that all copy and tags should be as natural as possible, and also be readable to the end user, I am starting to think that larger/older sites have higher thresholds, particularly on Google, than younger sites. This is stemming from some recent changes we have made to our site at work. I don’t want to find that threshold, but I am very intrigued by the power of older domains. Are there other areas where the domain age will allow for techniques newer sites might not be able to use?

This is one of the funniest videos I have seen in quite a long time. Of course, you have to like this kind of humor. Do Dah Doo Doo

http://youtube.com/watch?v=todQtQrOUZs

I am trying out this new theme, feedback is welcome. This is supposed to be an “imac” type theme. I don’t use mac’s but I think I really like the theme.  The cool thing about this theme is that you can drag and drop the boxes on the right to be in a different order. Go ahead try it, it’s fun.