Sometimes when prioritizing the factors that have the greatest impact on an AdWords account’s performance, the greatest gain may be in improving conversion rate, rather than applying other PPC-focused tactics. PPC ad management techniques such as changing bids, keyword build-out, implementing negatives, and others assist with the overall performance of an AdWords account, but focusing on improving a conversion rate may bring you the greatest gains in the overall business picture.

I believe that Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google, is a very smart man. (If you haven’t seen his introduction to Google’s ad auction on You Tube, I highly recommend it.) He recently released a study showing that conversion rates in AdWords don’t vary much by position. This seemed a bit counter-intuitive to me, and didn’t exactly dovetail with my personal experience, but he addressed the issue with a well reasoned sense of its complexity, and I can buy most of the thinking.

Trick question. You can’t. Yahoo doesn’t review your landing page to compute your quality score for PPC campaigns like Google does.  Yes, they have quality score, and they monitor your ads for breaches of policy, and yes click-through rate matters to your quality score on Yahoo, too, but nope, they don’t look at your landing [...]