Last Year’s Advice

The top 6 how-to posts of 2008

When I was a kid I held on to anything interesting—keys that didn’t fit my house, a stack of Boy’s Life, the tag for my Galaxy Wash Levi’s jeans—long after they’d stopped being useful. So even though you’re supposed to throw out the old when you start a new year, I can’t quite bring myself to let go of some of our best advice blog posts from 2008. That may be my compulsion, but fortunately I think you’ll find these posts interesting, too.

While I seek professional help, here are the top tips of 2008 (with links to them), as measured by your positive comments.

1. Convert Your Clicks 

Ten landing page tips help you turn your clicks into customers. That’s a lot of tips, you say. Well, you’ll need them if you’re trying to tell customers why they should buy from you, get them to stay, and then get them to take action.

2. What’s a Good Click-Through Rate? 

The right click-through rate is one of the questions we get all the time, which is why you may be a little bit sad that the honest answer is, “It depends.” The article, by our own Noah Belson, points out that click-through rates can vary by campaign and keyword. Noah gives you five ways to increase your click-through rate, but also tells you to watch out for numbers that matter just as much—like your conversion rate.

3. The Good, the Bad, the Creative 

I would have read this post for the title alone. If that wasn’t your favorite Western, though, Noah came through with a Magnificent Seven—tips, that is—to help you clean up your ads. Among them: Include your keywords in your title and descriptions, make sure your ads are relevant to all of the keywords in your ad group, and test your ads.

4. Three Questions about Your Clicks 

What do you do when your clicks suddenly spike? Panic? Well, that, or look for the reasons. There are lots of things that can make click totals go up, and Yahoo! customer solutions manager Kastle Waserman wants you to ask yourself three questions to help you figure out what’s happened. And no, I’m not writing those questions here. That’s what links are for.

5. Have Some Email with Your Search 

We know you don’t just do search marketing—or at least, that you should probably be doing more than just search marketing. Guest blogger Abe Mezrich tells you how to reach people in the most popular Web activities: email and search. The key, he says, is to use them together. Search can make your e-mail smarter, and e-mail can make your search campaigns more effective.

6. Measuring Search and Display for Success 

Our analytics guy, Matt Lillig, takes you past the debate about which is more effective—search or display—to the conclusion that search and display make each other work better. And how does he know that? More importantly, how can you know that? Analytics. (The clue was there the whole time!)

If you’re not quite ready to say goodbye to our old advice either, you don’t have to. Just click on “How-to’s” or “Tips” on our navigation bar, and it’ll all be there for you. Just like my old comic books, which now reside under my son’s bed.

  —Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user freeparking.