Marketing Pilgrim

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has found herself a CFO that she believes has "expertise [in] simplifying complex organizations and managing growth."

Tim Morse will leave his position at chip maker Altera Corp and gladly accept a package that could see him earn as much as $1.5 million in his first year at Yahoo.

"Yahoo! is an amazing brand with a unique combination of assets, and I am extremely excited to be joining a finance team with a deep commitment to financial excellence and fiscal discipline," said Morse in a statement. "I look forward to working with the entire leadership team to continue to focus on driving results and creating value for our shareholders."

Sounds to me like Morse Code for "I’ll take the Microsoft negotiations from here, thanks Carol."

Poor Bing.com. It seems that for every good news I read, I read something equally pessimistic. It’s gotten to the point where I think of Bing as the Grand Old Duke of York (bear with me if you’re not English-born):

The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up;
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

OK, first the good news! Efficient Frontier is reporting that Microsoft’s Bing.com is seeing an 8% increase in the number of clicks on paid search results. They’re also reporting a 20% lift in the number of overall search queries conducted on the search engine since the re-brand.

Microsoft has possibly pulled a fast one on the European Commission (EC) in its wrestling match to see whether their Internet Explorer browser (IE) will be packaged in the new Windows 7 offering. The EC has contended that by including the browser in the operating system that competition is being squeezed out unfairly by Microsoft. Well, we may be seeing that EC stands for ‘Exceptionally Clueless’ considering how they may have stepped all over their own case against the software giant.

The BBC reports

In January 2009, Brussels reached a “preliminary view” that Microsoft was denting the chance for true competition by bundling its browser software in with its operating system.

Microsoft has then taken the step to not offer IE in the Windows 7 operating system release in the EC regions.

In the wake of the run-in with St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa last week Twitter has officially launched its verified accounts beta. The service was mentioned over the weekend in Biz Stone’s blog post that made it known that Twitter would bow to no one on legal concerns that they viewed as frivolous.

Mashable’s Pete Cashmore tells of the new process

The feature has been a long time coming, and many celebrities will jump on the opportunity to prove their legitimacy. It’ll also solve the entrenched problem of celebrity impersonations, which are confusing for users and unwelcome by those being impersonated. Businesses, however, will have to wait: the feature has not been rolled out to corporate entities yet.

Analysing and Converting Paid Traffic

Andy Atkins-Krüger – WebCertain

In his session Andy looked at the range of ways both a PPC and organic SEO a campaign could be broken down to measure how effective each stage was performing. Aspects such as number of visits, pages views, dwell time and bounce rate were all seen as important elements to measure.

Andy also suggested that rather than take the traditional approach of looking to only improve the final stage of the shopping funnel (i.e. optimising the buy page) improving who gets onto the website in the first instance was equally important.

So to recap, whilst people typically look to the shopping cart for initial conversion improvement—Andy advocated starting at the other end of the chain and at keywords.

Quick: stock up on nonperishables, call your loved ones home, gather them close. The world is coming to an end. First we told you the Twittersphere just ain’t what it used to be. Now, brace yourself for this one:

Twitter traffic month-on-month is flat—or maybe even declining.

I know. I’m sorry to break it to you this way; it’s such a shock. But I couldn’t prolong the agony. Hey, hey—sit down. Breathe into a paper bag. Put your head between your knees. We’ll make it through somehow.

But let’s face the sad facts: although Twitter is clearly the wave of the future, not everyone is as forward thinking as we are in embracing the latest, greatest way of doing . . . well, everything.