Internet Marketing

Why doesn’t Google allow advertisers to buy “Proper Names”? Proper name searches are one of the most popular searches that people do on search engines right? What are five top things that you do on the internet nowadays?

1. Check your email
2. “Google” someone
3. Read news on how McCain is losing in the polls
4. Check your flailing stocks
5. Facebook (has that become a verb yet?)

That is just my list but is probably true to a certain extent. I think I must Google someone at least once a day and people are always looking for lost friends, loved ones, and classmates. Google a while back made a decision to scrub all paid sponsored listings for any “Proper Name” searches. Why would you turn your back on all of the revenue that could be made from those searches? There must be millions of searches a day on people’s names that Google could be monetizing and they use the excuse that users complained that there were paid ads on their names and that Google was invading their privacy. Couldn’t they just create rules around advertising on “Proper Names” so that they weren’t deceptive or confusing as to what the product offering was?

Just imagine how many advertisers would probably like to advertise for Proper Names such as public record companies, White Pages companies, Reunion, Classmates.com, Friends Reunited, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, LinkedIn.com, ZoomInfo.com, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Just do a search on Google for “Neil Clark Warren“, shouldn’t there be ads for books on Dr. Warren, links to eHarmony.com, etc. Neil Clark Warren is the founder of a very popular online dating service, eHarmony.com. His name alone probably gets searched 1,000’s of times a month for people doing research on his Relationship Compatibility Test.

Now if you do that same search on Yahoo you will see a full marketplace of ads on Neil Clark Warren and guess who is buying an ad? Yup, Amazon.com and a couple other book stores since he is a published author. Is this finally making any sense to you? The only sense I can gather from it is that Google thinks that they should be able to get you all of the information you need on people in their natural search results even though most of the public record information isn’t crawlable content on most websites.

For full disclosure on the topic, I used to work for a public records company that spent a good deal of money on public name searches and when Google made the decision to remove all proper name searches they weren’t too happy. I currently don’t have a client that buys proper names but still to this day can’t understand why they are still not allowing advertisers to buy generic names. Instead, we have to read IMDB and Wikipedia listings on people if they are important enough to have a page created on their name. Come on Google, get with the program dude.

-Brian R.

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I attended Danny Sullivan’s sort of new SMX Advanced conference here in Seattle this week and was walking around the exhibitor areas looking to see if there was anything new to report and the best booth stop of the morning for me was at the Microsoft Advertising booth. I talked to a guy that was super informed on the new MSN adCenter Desktop tool that is currently in Beta right now and he gave me a preview of the tool and I was super excited that MSN beat Yahoo to the punch to match a tool that Google has had in the marketplace for quite sometime now. Here are some features of the adCenter Desktop tool:

• Bulk editing bid prices
• Bulk editing destination URLs
• Ad Group geo-targeting
• Uploading changes instantly to your Account
• Set and monitor bid and CTR alerts
• Keyword research tool and optimization (see monthly search traffic and demographic data for keywords)
• Create campaigns with wizard tool
• Ability to view and manage multipule accounts

I know you are about as excited as I was to hear this news and you are just about to leave to go search MSN Live for a link on downloading the tool. Here is the link for you:

MSN adCenter Desktop Tool Beta

You can either sign-up online for the pilot or contact your Account Executive to get you access. I know everyone including myself can’t wait for MSN to acquire Yahoo so we can put a dent in Google’s empire on paid search.

MSN also recently updated their Microsoft Advertising logo. I went searching around for the new logo that I first saw in my Account Executive’s signature file on email. It was interesting to see Microsoft’s progression of logos for Adcenter. I have included a few below that I found. Remember that Microsoft launched the MSN butterfly logo way back on Feb. 14th, 2000.

New Microsoft Advertising Logo:

Here is another great adCenter resource if you have any questions or are an API develop:
Microsoft adCenter Community

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Google has recently made a change to its display URL policy on it’s paid search ads. Google claims this has always been its policy however it has seldom been enforced. The new rules will require a ad’s display URL to match the destination URL. So for example: a display url of www.somewebsite.com must land the user who clicks on the ads to the somewebsite.com website.

Advertisers are still allowed to send users to either a subdomain foo.somewebsite.com or a subdirectory somewebsite.com/foo/foo.html. Google claims this policy is in effect to minimize any surprise or confusion on the surfers behalf if they land on a website not listed in the display url.

For now all ads currently running will not be disapproved unless a complaint is filed or Google is notified about the directly. However all new advertisers or new ad placements will need to comply to these new restrictions.

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Yahoo! Search announced on June 4th that Quality-Based Pricing has launched on their Search and Content Match products.

Here are some of the Key Features of Quality-Based Pricing:
• They will evaluate the quality of traffic from their distribution partners’ sites.
• Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
• The discounts will automatically be applied to your Yahoo account.

In an ongoing effort to raise the value of our Sponsored Search and Content Match products, they announced the phased rollout of the quality based pricing feature that should help increase the value of Yahoo! Search Marketing traffic to advertisers. Quality-based pricing is designed to measure the value of the traffic coming from Yahoo’s distribution partner websites and price clicks accordingly for their advertisers.

What is Changing?
Previously all traffic was treated the same—you were charged the same for traffic from all web sites within our network. With quality-based pricing, you may be charged less for certain clicks than you normally would pay, depending on the overall quality of the websites that are providing this traffic to you. As a result, your click charges can decrease.

How will Click Charges be Discounted?
“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites. Discounts will be automatically applied to your account.

When will this Start?
This feature will roll out beginning June 4th and they will continue to expand it over time. This is just one of the things they are doing, along with future projects like domain-level blocking, to help increase the quality and value of traffic.

What Do I Need to Do?
There’s nothing you need to do to receive a discount—your click charges may be discounted based on the quality of traffic you receive. Keep in mind that the amount of the discounts may vary between advertisers: Some may experience a noticeable decrease in overall cost-per-click, while others may experience only a small decrease in spend.

Do I Need to Change how I Bid?
Quality-based pricing does not change how you bid on particular keywords. Both bid amount and ad quality determine an ad’s rank in Yahoo’s paid search results. As always, you never pay more than your max bid.

More Information
For more details on this launch, you can contact Yahoo Search at: 866-YAHOO-SM (866-924-6676) or visit the Yahoo Quality Based Pricing FAQ

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Beating industry watchers expectations and a full 35% higher than 2005’s spending, online marketing spending has reached a record $16.9 Billion dollars according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Here is how the money broke down:

40% - Search Ads
32% - Display Ads
18% - Classifieds
8% - Lead Gen
2% - Email Advertising

While 17 billion dollars sounds like a great deal of money its important to note that this still accounts for only an estimated 5.6% of total marketing monies spend annually. However, online ad spend continues to grow year after year while other mediums such as newspapers and broadcast television are seeing stagnation and in some cases decline.

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Google today unveiled its new revamped Analytics service. Google Analytics is a free service that allows webmasters to track and analyze their websites traffic activity. All new accounts will have the new version activated immediatly while existing accounts will be phased into the new upgrade over the next couple of weeks.

The new release appears to mark a shift away from providing users with simple numbers and charts to a new approach where the data is set in context to give the data meaning and spot trends.

Brett Crosby, senior manager of Google Analytics:
“It’s not just one lonely number sitting on the page, telling you if your traffic went up or down. We present it with other data, so you can see if the data show that things are good or bad. Maybe your visits are down, but your conversions have tripled. Once you have the reports, you still need to understand what the data is telling you.”

It appears from their online demonstration of the new analytics that they have increased flexibility in the layout of the data as well as tied the conversion tracking of AdWords more tightly into the overall reporting.

If Google integrated its Website Optimizer and developed and automated AdWords bid management system into this program you would be very close to having a pretty automated all encompassing traffic and conversion machine.

I for one hope this doesn’t happen as I enjoy having a job.

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Google recently posted on their AdWords blog the introduction about a new bidding system based on what you “prefer” to pay. In other words instead of setting a maximum price per bid you are allowed to enter a “preferred” price and Google will attempt to set your average bid a that price point.

From their blog:

“Today, we are introducing a new bidding option called preferred cost bidding — a feature designed to help you save time while achieving your advertising cost goals more consistently. Instead of setting a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) bid, you can set a preferred CPC or CPM bid that represents the average price you want to pay.”

Read more Below:
Inside AdWords: Introducing preferred cost bidding

Preferred Cost Bidding Help Center

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Eric Enge over at Search Engine Watch has a brief post today discussing the importance of reciprocal linking. He discusses why link trades are still important, and how they should be done properly:

With regard to reciprocal linking, don’t ever trade a link with a site that you would not simply link to on its own, even if they didn’t link back to you. If it’s good enough for you to link to, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t try to get a link back from them. You just need to view the process as part of a larger relationship.

One fairly obvious thing he doesn’t mention is that the more and better linkbacks your site gets, the higher your Google Page Rank will ultimately be.

He mentions:

Is reciprocal linking dead? Of course not. What should be history, is the practice of requesting reciprocal links for the purposes of improving search engine rankings (if you are still sending out those link swap request emails, please stop, you are wasting your own time and effort).

He’s right in that it’s no longer advisable to cultivate hundreds of link exchanges with any random site you can find, but it’s still true that a few strategic link trades with high quality websites will go a long way to boosting your Page Rank, and therefore your position in the search engine result pages.

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I got a link to this site last week from one of my associates and have been reading up on it to see if it will have any legs.

The new search engine is called: Powerset.com. They are focused on bringing natural search to the forefront for search. The only problem I see with this is that they are so far behind the game that I don’t see them gathering enough steam or market share to get advertisers on board. I have enough of a problem justifying the time spent getting Ask and MSN PPC campaigns up for the low volume of traffic they return.

Snap.com made a small run at trying to be a natural language focused search engine with CPA advertising and I totally forgot about them until I ran into this site. I actually couldn’t remember if it was Go.com or Snap that was trying to do this. I can remember when Snap.com had run a series of TV ads during the holidays back in the day and gained some momentum from being in about position 25 down to the #6 largest trafficked website on Media Metrix. Where am I going with this? Not sure, but in order for these guys to make some real noise they might want to spend $10M of the $12.5 million that they raised in TV advertising since it’ll be near impossible to advertise a competing product with the big boys.

Ohh, and just in case anyone thinks that this is new technology to Google, check out Google Suggests before you buy any stock in them. I just had to look at the title of my post to remember what the URL name was again which isn’t a good thing. Say “Powerset, Powerset, Powerset”…There should stick now, maybe?

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After a great deal of speculation Google today has formally introduced a CPA beta program for publishers and advertisers. The news was broken on The official adwords blog.

“Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site.”

You can apply for their beta program if you are a publisher in the United States.

Learn more about the program here

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