Small Businesses Intimidated by Search Marketing December 19, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Though they invest heavily in building an online presence, 59% of small businesses with websites don’t currently use paid search marketing. And of those, 90% never even attempted it, according to a survey by Microsoft Advertising.
What’s more, 73% of small business owners say they are so intimidated by search marketing that they would rather do their taxes than create a search marketing campaign, reports MarketingCharts.
The survey, which examined the search marketing behaviors of 400 small-business owners in the U.S., also revealed that despite lack of investment in paid search marketing, the weakening economy and increased competition, 86% of small-business owners felt that they could be missing opportunities to grow their business, while three in four believed prospective customers might be searching online for the service they offer.
Read The Rest—>Small Businesses Intimidated by Search Marketing
Britney more popular than Obama December 2, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentBarack Obama will make history by becoming the first black US president, but in the world of internet search he trails the singer, Britney Spears.
Of the billions of searches carried out on the portal, Yahoo.com, over the last year, Mr Obama was third behind Spears and World Wrestling Entertainment.
Mr Obama was, however, the most searched-for politician during 2008.
The subjects of the most sought-after news stories were hurricanes, Caylee and Casey Anthony, and election 2008.
“Every day, people turn to the web to learn more about the world around them,” said Yahoo’s Web Life editor, Heather Cabot.
Read The Rest—>Britney more popular than Obama
YouTube Lets Advertisers Peddle via Search Results Pages November 14, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentn a continuing push to monetize the site, Google will begin selling space to advertisers on YouTube search results pages.
Advertisers can bid to promote themselves via YouTube Sponsored Videos; the ad results will appear on the right-hand side of the YouTube search results with a small image and some text, writes The New York Times. As with Google search, advertisers can set a maximum price per click; they are charged each time a viewer clicks on the ad. How high the ad appears within the results depends on a number of elements, including not only how much the advertiser is paying per click but also how much interest the message has generated in the past, AP writes.
Read The Rest—>YouTube Lets Advertisers Peddle via Search Results Pages
Tweens’ Favorite Media Online, Search Integral to Shopping July 30, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe vast majority (83%) of tweens (those age 10-14), spend at least an hour online per day, compared with 68% reporting they watch an hour of TV per day, according to an ROI research study commissioned by DoubleClick Performics, writes Chief Marketer.
Radio (29%), magazines (10%) and newspapers (5%) were less popular among tweens, writes DoubleClick SVP of search operations Stuart Larkins.
The research studied the online search and purchase behavior of various demographic segments across 10 product categories. Some 1,000 panelists from eReward’s active members responded to the survey.
Search
- A minimum of 40% of tweens reported using search to gather more info about products/services about which they’d seen an ad.
- Some 78% said they use Google most often; 14% cited Yahoo instead.
- More than a third of tweens said search results have had “extreme impact” on their decision to purchase apparel.
Product Categories
The top product category of interest to tweens is apparel; they report shopping for apparel on average 8.2 times over the previous six months, for electronics 4.5 times, home furnishings 4.4 times.
Among the apparel and electronics categories, the following are the items that tweens primarily recommend or purchase:
- Apparel: Everyday/casual clothes, footwear and accessories
- Electronics: MP3 players, videogaming systems and digital cameras
Search is an integral of the online and offline shopping process, according to DoubleClick. Fore example:
- More than half said they use search to determine where to purchase apparel offline
- 80% typically search for apparel brand names
- Two-thirds use search to find the best price for electronics
- Though 71% of tweens’ home-furnishing purchase take place offline, 52% of those purchases involved search.
Online Behavior
- 87% of those who go online more than three times a day (nearly half of tweens do) spend at a minimum half an hour online each time. Six in 10 visit social-network sites at least once a day.
- Seven in 10 have a social-networking profile, more than 5 in 10 have a profile on MySpace, more than 3 in 10 have a profile on Facebook.
- Less than 4 in 10 reported reading blogs frequently or occasionally.
FOR MORE GREAT MARKETINGCHARTS CONTENT CLICK HERE
Big News for Publishers: Google AdSense Now Supports Third-Party Ad Serving Technology ( Via Search Engine Round Table) May 20, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentOriginal content at Search Engine Round Table HERE
Google announced that AdSense (the AdWords content network) now supports the use of third-party ad serving techniques and technologies. I am not sure if most publishers understand the significants of this. Many large companies would not even think about placing an ad on a publisher’s site without being able to track the results of those ads (impressions and clicks) through a third-party ad serving intermediary. Got that?
What this now brings to AdSense are major agencies and advertisers with large budgets, who are now more willing to dip their ad budgets in Google’s content network. More advertisers with bigger budgets means more money for AdSense publishers.
There are a few requirements for these ads to show up on AdSense publishers sites.
(1) You must opt into image ads
(2) Enable advertisers to target your AdSense channels
(3) Opt into placement targeting
If you have all three, then you can now enable advertisers to place these ads on your site.
Will the ads look different? Yes, they shockingly won’t contain the ‘Ads by Google’ text near the ad. Even more of a reason for larger advertisers to use the Google content network.
Will the ads act differently? Yes, they will open in a new window as opposed to staying in the same window.
Which third party tracking vendors are certified?
(A) North America: Ad servers include DoubleClick DFA and Mediaplex/ValueClick
(B) North America: Rich media include DoubleClick Rich Media, Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Interpolls, Pointroll, and Unicast.
(C) North America: Research include Dynamic Logic/Safecount, Factor TG, IAG, and InsightExpress.
You may need to update your privacy policy to include more details about these third-party tracking techniques. More on that over here.
Can you block these ads? Many you can by using the competitive ad filter, but the third-party Flash ads you cannot block without contacting Google.
Here are three videos from Google on 3rd-party ad serving to help explain it better. It is a three part series by one of our favorite Google personalities, Maile:
Google To Sell Performics, Eyes Expedia And Skype April 3, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment| Google To Sell Performics, Eyes Expedia And Skype | |
| by Tameka Kee, Thursday, Apr 3, 2008 7:30 AM ET | |
| PUTTING QUESTIONS ABOUT POSSIBLE CONFLICTS of interest to rest, Google announced Wednesday it will sell search marketing and optimization firm Performics, which it acquired as part of DoubleClick. The decision comes three weeks after Google’s $3.2 billion takeover of online ad service DoubleClick. The sale will enable Google to preserve the trust of its users, according to Tom Phillips, who is overseeing the company’s DoubleClick acquisition. “It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business,” Phillips wrote in a blog on Google’s Web site. “Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission.” Google doesn’t have a buyer for Performics yet, but several of the company’s business partners already have expressed interest, Phillips wrote. In other fallout from the DoubleClick deal, Google reportedly is preparing to eliminate about 300 jobs in the biggest purge in the company’s nearly 10-year history. The New York Times reported Google’s layoff plans on its Web site late Wednesday, citing an unnamed person with direct knowledge of the upcoming cuts. Meanwhile, travel giant Expedia’s shares were up in late-afternoon trading Wednesday amidst rumors that Google was considering acquiring the company. And buzz persists about the search giant’s intentions to gobble up eBay’s beleaguered Internet chat division, Skype. Representatives from the trio of companies said they don’t comment on rumor or speculation, but that didn’t stop investors or the blogosphere from buying into the ideas. The Expedia buy would make Google a direct competitor of travel portals like Priceline and Orbitz Worldwide–companies that currently use the giant’s paid-search platform to advertise their own travel deals. And that would generate a costly conflict of interest, according to industry analysts like The Motley Fool’s Rick Aristotle Munarriz. “Sleeping with the enemy is one thing. Paying for its fare and making a rival stronger in the process, is another,” Munarriz wrote. On the other hand, a Skype acquisition would fit right in with the giant’s voice-based cross-platform communications strategy, which includes the free GOOG-411 directory assistance service, an existing VoIP service with GTalk, as well as GrandCentral, a phone call management service that Google purchased in 2007 for $50 million. While Skype has not been a financial success for eBay (with roughly $400 million in revenues in 2007–a drop in the bucket for its parent company), the VoIP provider has surged in popularity, boasting that it currently supports some 10 million users simultaneously at any given time. Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget argues that with the right engineers and financing (a la brains and budget backed by the Googleplex), Skype would be a valuable acquisition: “Once integrated with Gmail, contacts, etc., Skype would give Google the most complete all around communications platform on the web,” Blodget wrote. “Google’s global dominance, meanwhile, would provide an awesome distribution platform for Skype. Sounds like a match made in heaven.” The speculation increased amidst the noticeable absence of bigwigs from Google’s voice products group–including vice president of product management Salar Kamangar and GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet–at Wednesday’s CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas. “That doesn’t mean the team is busy working on a partnership or acquisition of Skype instead of attending the conference,” wrote TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. “But given that we’ve heard from sources close to the deal that something is happening between the companies, it’s not a stretch, either.”
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Bots Helped To Boost Microsoft Live Search Gains July 17, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentBots Helped To Boost Microsoft Live Search Gains
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
July 12, 2007 03:40 PM
In a blog post, Compete analyst Steve Willis attributed Microsoft’s search gains to prizes awarded to users participating in Live Search Club, which features games that post queries to Microsoft’s search engine. Questions immediately arose about the atypical magnitude of Microsoft’s search share gain. And it turns out those questions were well-founded. Some of Microsoft’s statistical spike can be attributed to bots, though the exact percentage isn’t clear. Live Search Club users believe that automated searches account for a significant portion of Microsoft’s search share gain. “The reason their search engine is being hit so frequently is that people are running automated ‘bot’ programs to play the Live Search games for them,” said Live Search Club user Jack Krause in an e-mail. “Microsoft is essentially being DDoSed by thousands of people hundreds of times per minute, but they are mistaking this rise in traffic for people actually using Live Search.” Live Search Club awards players tickets that can be redeemed for prizes including Microsoft Xboxes, Zunes, and other items. A Live Search Club user who wrote to InformationWeek claimed that Windows Vista was a prize option earlier this week, but Microsoft removed it because the number of winners was so high. To hear Microsoft tell it, the company’s fulfillment center simply ran out of Vista. “We hoped the club would be successful, and planned accordingly,” said a Microsoft spokesperson via e-mail. “As you can see from the numbers it was far more successful than we ever could have imagined. Windows Vista and Office 2007 have been the most popular offer, and ran out of our allotment from the fulfillment center. Both products will be available again shortly.” “You can completely max out the number of tickets available within 6-8 hours without even being at your computer,” a Live Search Club user said in an e-mail. “Many, many people were doing this, redeeming the tickets for several copies of Windows Vista, and reselling them on eBay, etc. There isn’t even a limit to how many accounts you can open and how many prizes you can win.” eBay currently shows 16 completed auctions in the past week for Live Search Club accounts with 20,000 points — enough for a Microsoft Zune. With those accounts going for between $25 and $35, Microsoft may be moving quite a few discount Zunes. Stephen DiMarco, Compete’s CMO, said that Compete had updated its numbers as a result of questions, removing search gains attributable to Live Search Club. Without Live Search Club, Microsoft Live’s U.S. search query volume rose from 8.4% to 9.1%, rather than 13.2%. So the good news for Microsoft is that more people are using Live Search. The bad news is that more bots are using it. DiMarco claims that bots don’t affect data collected from Compete’s 2 million person audience panel. “Bots can’t impact our data,” he said. “Our data is immune to bots so our metrics would be bot free.” Pressed on this point, he conceded that the software Compete employs to track the clicks of consenting panel members might not be able to distinguish macros — which he said are different from bots — from user-driven input. The forums hosted at Facepunch Studios (registration required) currently contain hundreds of messages detailing the lengths to which users have gone to obtain Live Search Club prizes. So does this forum with a Naru country code domain. One user of the Facepunch forums has posted more than a dozen photos of prizes (registration required) other Live Search Club participants won, including Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, Xbox games, Microsoft tote bags, and two Zune music players. The forum posts contain links to bot code that can be used for automating Live Search Club games. One of them is currently hosted on Google Pages. There’s even an instructional video on YouTube to teach would-be scammers how to beat the system. Not everyone appears to be pleased however. The Facepunch Studios forums contain numerous posts berating those abusing Live Search Club. Microsoft may or may not be catching on. One forum post from earlier today notes that Microsoft has starting to ban users for Terms of Service violations. Another post warns not to use the Club Live Player bot because Microsoft can detect it. However, Facepunch forum members have indicated these posts are fakes. “As for click fraud, there is always a risk with these kinds of promotions, and we are working diligently to shut down any illegal activity,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Microsoft Search Share Rises With Prizes July 11, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentMicrosoft Search Share Rises With Prizes
By Thomas Claburn MSN and Microsoft Live’s U.S. search query volume jumped from 8.4% in May to 13.2% in June, a 67% increase, according to Internet metrics company Compete, Inc. The key to Microsoft’s success? Prizes. “A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products,” said Steve Willis, a Compete analyst, in a blog post Monday. “All of the games involve using Live’s search engine — to get the points, you have to search with Live.” Blingo.com, powered by Google Willis said that Club.live.com wasn’t generating noticeable traffic in April. In May, Compete tracked some 330,000 unique visitors at that site. In June, that number had risen to 3 million unique visitors. “If Microsoft can actually leverage this traffic to Club.live into actual search users and string together a few more months like this, they could really threaten Google’s top spot,” said Willis. A person posting under the name Cliff Parker on the Compete blog questioned the firm’s data. “[S]earch market shares usually move by tenths of percentage points per month,” Parker said. “A move this big in one month is unprecedented. Are you sure your data are correct?” Willis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Compete boasts an active monthly sample of over 2 million users, compared to the 120,000 users sampled by Internet analyst comScore Media Metrix 2.0. “Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multidimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population,” the company states on its Web site. “Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.” As for other search engines, Amazon’s Alexa.com shows a noticeable increase in traffic at Club.live and a 52% increase in page views over the past three months. Google saw its search query volume drop from 67% in May to 62.7% in June, a 6.5% decline. Yahoo’s search query share stood at 19.6% in June, down from 19.7% in May and from 26.7% in June 2006. Ask.com’s search query share declined to 3.3% in June, down 3.5% in May and 4.1% from June 2006. Internet metrics company comScore published its take on U.S. search market share numbers for May: Google (50.7%), Yahoo sites (26.4%), Microsoft sites (10.3%), and Ask (5%). Your mileage may vary.
InformationWeek
July 9, 2007 07:58 PM
search efforts may finally have found some users., has been using prizes to woo searchers since 2004.
Just An Online Minute… Study: Spyware Still Plagues Web Searches June 5, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentJust An Online Minute… Study: Spyware Still Plagues Web Searches
Posted June 5th, 2007 by Wendy Davis
Search engines continue to drive users to spyware and other nuisances. That’s according to McAfee’s recent second annual State of Search Engine Safety.
Overall, 4% of all search results take users to sites characterized as “risky,” down from 5% last year. Sponsored links account for more than double the risky links as organic results, according to McAfee, with 6.9% of paid links leading to suspect sites, compared to 2.9% for organic links.
In other words, purveyors of spyware and other unwanted programs continue to purchase keywords on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and other search engines in order to drive traffic to their sites, where they can hijack people’s browsers or otherwise cause mischief.
Still, the situation is better than last year, when 8.5% of paid links led to potentially dangerous sites. McAfee researchers attributed some of the recent improvement to Google’s tweak last year to its AdWords system. Last July, Google changed its criteria for paid search ads by setting minimum bids based in part on the quality of landing pages. Now, just 5.4% of pay-per-click ads at Google led to a suspect site, according to McAfee, down from 8.5% last year. But, while Google became safer for searchers, rival Yahoo apparently became relatively more dangerous. Nine percent of paid links at Yahoo led to suspect sites this May, up from 6.5% last year, according to the report.
Keywords most likely to lead to suspect sites include terms related to digital music and free — or formerly free — file-sharing programs, including Kazaa and Bearshare.
Study: E-tailers See Value in SEO, PPC Spending April 12, 2007
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Study: E-tailers See Value in SEO, PPC Spending
Internet retailers are shifting more of their marketing budgets to buy pay-per-click online ads and improve their organic search results, writes Internet Retailer, citing a survey it conducted.
Some 30 percent of responding merchants say at least 50 percent of their sales come via search engine marketing; 82.8 percent say their PPC spending will not be reduced in 2007; and 75 percent say search is performing as well as or better than other forms of marketing. Only 12 percent say SEM underperformed compared with other marketing efforts.
Somewhat surprisingly, most e-tailers prefer to keep their efforts in-house. Only 26 percent use an outside agency or PPC program, and 66 percent say they have no intention of contracting out for such efforts.
Some 39 percent emphasize PPC over organic SEO, and 34 percent put the focus on natural search; 26 percent say they use both equally. For sales conversions, 46 percent say organic search has better results, and 37 percent cite PPC as having a higher conversion rate; 16 percent say they’re equally effective.
Eighty percent of e-tailers are making changes to their website text to match what people are searching for. For the most poart, those engaged in PPC efforts plan to trim the number of keywords they manage but increase spending on those that survive the cull. The intents is to improve ROI on the most effective keywords.
