A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net — People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it’s a losing strategy.

~Dave Winer

• Don't brag about your hangover- yes, many people drink heavily at conferences but when speakers consistently talk about how hungover they are from the night before, it makes me feel like they aren't serious about their responsibility to impart wisdom.
• Be prepared (or at least fake it)- the audience can tell who knows their shit and who doesn't, especially if they accidentally say into the microphone that they're just going to wing it.
• Don't make jokes while others are speaking- being on a panel is a delicate situation with three egos trying to have an intelligent conversation on-stage without being redundant but please make sure anything you say adds to the conversation and don't just interrupt someone to make a stupid joke!
• Don't use thin white text on a black background- basically make your powerpoint slides legible.
• Give practical advice- the best presentations give practical, relevant and actionable advice and don't wax philosophical summarizing grand ideas.  Even better, tailor your presentation and suggestions to your audience and show that you've put some thought into your recommendations- that's impressive.

There you have it! If you keep these tips in mind at the next conference you speak at you probably won't suck and might even be invited to speak again!

The only session I ended up attending at Affiliate Summit East was the Facebook advertising panel that Dennis spoke on with Alex Schultz, Zac Johnson and Shoemoney.  I thought the panel went well overall but they essentially covered most of the same topics from other Facebook advertising panels I've seen or read. Here's a few takeaways:

• Use Facebook's demographic reports- see who is clicking on your ads, target them, then take it a step further by using different ads with subids to look at who is converting.
  
• Create "new" accounts for demographic research- get ideas for offers to run and see what's working
• Facebook advertising is like the wild west right now- the current state of FB's self-serve advertising platform makes being successful on FB a very tedious and laborious process. Large advertisers and agencies have stayed away thus far because of this but FB is working on bulk upload tools and major changes to the platform which means the FB advertising landscape will likely be very different in 1-2 years and clicks will be much more expensive. Until then, there is a lot of money to be made as an affiliate.
  

A lot of websites have more than one conversion configured- lead, sale, signup, pageview, etc to help track website goals. What kills me is that you have to run a performance report and break out conversions separately to know the numbers for each of these conversions. On top of this, the campaign/ ad group/ keyword summary screens in the AdWords interface doesn’t separate the conversion types so you see an aggregate number. If someone who didn’t know there were multiple goals configured logged in, they might think sales or email signups are higher than they actually are.

Holler if you have a solution to view conversions broken out…

Local businesses can now attach a physical address with their AdWords ads that will be shown dynamically depending on the location of the searcher. If Google is unable to determine a searcher's location or if there are no relevant addresses to show, they'll simply show your ad without an address.

If you're currently running Google Local Business Ads, your current ads won't change until the next time you update or change them- they will then magically transform into local extensions. The next version of AdWords Editor will support this new ad type.

Any business can attach an address to their ad so if you sell handmade jewelry to a shop in your town, you can input the shop's address. It seems you can claim any address you want- anyone want a Madison Avenue office? Here's what Google has to say about this:

If your business name isn't trademarked, it's possible that other advertisers may create ads associated with your business location. However, on Google properties only one ad per business location enters the auction for a given keyword search. Google is committed to showing relevant ads, so the ad with the highest ad rank will enter the auction.

I look forward to testing these ads for our local business advertising clients and will likely report back on my findings on CTR and anything else I find interesting about them.

Work offline- it's a desktop application, a little off color for Google but oh well. I like to build and work on campaigns when I'm traveling.

Make bulk changes- a key differentiator, you can simply highlight ad groups, keywords,  and campaigns and change bids, destination URL, etc.

Copy or move items between campaigns and ad groups with keyboard shortcuts.

Navigate your accounts easily and quickly.

Share changes- you can export a file for sharing, email the file and the recipient can simply import the campaign to view it.

Google AdWords Editor

VS.

Google AdWords Online UI

“How much do I spend to test an ad?”

I’m guilty of asking this question at some point regarding PPC advertising and I see the question asked a lot on affiliate marketing forums and super affiliate blog post comments. I’ve also seen ridiculous answers like 30 clicks (wtf?) and $100 in spend (WTF!?)- are you serious?

If we were optimizing a campaign and in a single ad group we had two ads running, one at 1.74% CTR (43 clicks) and the other at 1.58% CTR (38 clicks), which is doing better? If we’re playing “winner stays on,” which should be replaced? Most people might say “the ad with 43 clicks and a 1.73% CTR is best and should stay up, DUH!” Well, unfortunately, the conclusion is not so simple.

The answer isn’t a magic number of clicks or how much you’ve spent on the ad, but whether the difference in clicks is significant or just statistical noise. I have a tip to help you but we’ll get to that later.

How do you tell if the difference in clicks is significant? You can think of this in terms of a binomial distribution (yes, I’m taking you back to first semester stats class) where you flip a coin ten times and count the number of times you land on heads. We should expect the coin to land on heads 5 times (the mean) because there are two sides of the coin and ten experiments- a 50% chance. It also may land on heads 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0 times and 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 times with a decreasing probability in either direction. Landing on heads 3, 4, or 6 times would represent a large percentage change from the expected mean: -40%, -20%, and +20% away respectively. Now let’s say we flip the same coin 10,000 times. I’m not sure how long this experiment would take to complete but tell me how many times you would expect the coin to land on heads. You might say 5,000 times but the chances of that are pretty slim, again. The coin is more likely to land heads something like 4,695 times or 5,129 times, -6% and +2% respectively. Notice how as the number of experiments grow, the percentage away from the mean becomes smaller, despite the fact the number away from the mean is larger- this is called regression towards the mean.

What does regression towards the mean have to do with our ads? Well the trick for determining boundaries of significance is taking the square root (√)of clicks (n) and using that number above (n+√n) and below (n-√n) as boundaries. If the boundaries of competing ads cross over one another, the difference in clicks is probably noise. In the case of our earlier example, √43 is almost 7 and the √38 is about 6. Therefore, the the lower boundary of 43 is 36 and the upper boundary of 38 is 44, thus the two boundaries overlap and the difference is noise and not significant, therefore you should keep the ads running until your boundaries are not overlapping.

What if the number of clicks was 380 and 440? The √380 is about 19 and the √440 is about 21. The upper boundary of 380 would be 199 and the lower boundary of 440 is 419, the boundaries do not overlap, the difference is significant and the ad with 440 clicks is a clear winner.

* There is a caveat to this rule as PPC is much more complicated than CTRs and clicks. You should also be looking at conversions, among other factors! What if an ad has 5 times more conversions because the psychology behind that particular ad attracts a buyer that's more willing to buy or call? That's a clear winner in my book! Be careful and use this as one of your many tools in optimizing PPC campaigns.