Archive for June, 2006
In ideal world we would expect to be provided with highly personalized media and TV. In ideal world we would hear or read only the advertising we are interested in. In ideal world the information would be extremely easy to find, there would be no email spam and even browsers would be enhanced for our convenience. Are search engines trying to make the world ideal?
The answer could be read between the lines of the new patent filed to major search engines last week. Here are the patents search engines received on June 15, 2006:
Method and system to detect e-mail spam using concept categorization of linked content
Method and system for finding and aggregating reviews for a product
System and method for scalable data distribution
Providing useful information associated with an item in a document
Yahoo
Method of controlling an Internet browser interface and a controllable browser interface
Syndicating multiple media objects with RSS
Syndicating multimedia information with RSS
RSS rendering via a media player
Microsoft
Searching electronic program guide data
System and method for indexing and prefiltering
Although the titles of the patents sound very promising one shouldn’t count on being provided with all the features listed. The situation when the patents are developed not because they are of great importance but to mislead competitors is not an impracticable case.
Are you tired of answering other people questions? And how about doing that for money? Yahoo gives the planet a chance to reveal its witness via its new product – Ask the Planet.
Yahoo blog presented Yahoo’s new feature recently. We’ve all got the chance to win “the world’s coolest prizes” answering “the world’s biggest questions”.
The questions divided into categories will be put every weekday by some celebrity, expert or even user. For each best answer status you receive you will be given one entry to compete for the prize of the day.
Look through the calendar featured on the Ask the Planet site to find out who will ask the next big question. Maybe tomorrow’s question will be posed by your favorite celebrity!
*And Yes - our very own Jeremy Hermanns is available on Yahoo Answers for any SEO or SEM Questions!
Do you like to listen to the radio while driving your car? And what about the ads that you hear? Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, has his own opinion on what should those ads be. He suggests that radio ads should be targeted personally to each driver according to where he is located at the moment.
GPS-based ads delivery will probably be carried out with the help of dMark – Google’s $1.13 billion acquisition to automate radio advertising broadcasts. AdWords advertisers will be provided with even larger variety of ads delivery options.
Looks like time of in-car radio highly targeted personalized GPS location-based advertising is just around the corner.
We discovered this strange anomaly a few days ago with one of our bigger ‘online’ branded advertisers, no longer we’re any ‘.com’ derivitaves showing up in the daily AdWords account reports. Our team later dug into a few other branded advertiser accounts and noticed the same anomaly occurring.
Proof:
After logging into the respective AdWords accounts for each client and confirming that we were indeed bidding on more than one ‘.com’ keyword variations; we went online to search for their listings. What did we find? Nothing, that’s right not even a forced ‘match type’ to the existing brand term - there were no listings from AdWords whatsoever.
Why has Google decided to remove these profitable, and high converting terms from our results pages - I mean we are trying to even pay for them?
Check for yourself - click a Top Brand ‘.com’ term below:
Sony.com (0 Paid Listings - screenshot)
Ford.com (0 Paid Listings - screenshot)
Pepsi.com (0 Paid Listings - screenshot)
Match.com (0 Paid Listings - screenshot)
Now try the same Top Brand terms without the ‘.com’:
Sony (4 Paid Listings)
Ford (20+ Paid Listings)
Pepsi (2 Paid Listings)
Match (5 Paid Listings)
Google’s Quality Index History:
Looks like Google has always been refining their ‘Quality Index’ or QI scoring algorithm, as evidenced with their recent additions of the ‘back relevancy’ survey and now scoring the paid advertisers website landing page on a myriad of additional ‘undisclosed’ conversion metrics.
Traditionally the Quality Index was thought of as a simple formula based on the AdWords Campaign historical CTR and average CPC. This additional quality metric has been credited along with a few others as the main reasons why Google has been able to better monetize advertiser CPC prices vs. Overture/Yahoo! - and has from nowhere dominated in 4 short years the PPC marketplace.
Conclusion:
To properly run a smart and successful AdWords Campaign, be sure to pay attention to the following points:
-Research your competition
-Use proper Campaign/Adgroup taxonomy
-Always have relevant titles and descriptions
-Constantly look for new keyword/copy opportunities
-Optimize and Test, Optimize and Test
You never know when Google will add yet another facet to their Quality Index that could impact your existing AdWord account(s) profitability, the only guaranteed insurance is to run a well tested and relevant campaign.
The owners of LoveCity.com a company named JP Enterprises, filed the lawsuit in a U.S. district court in Colorado, accusing Yahoo Search Marketing of ‘unfair competition and trademark dilution and infringement’. The lawsuit seeks to recover damages as well as punitive damages.
The lawsuit asserts that Yahoo! in an effort to increase website traffic deliberately inserted keywords and tags that contained trademark variations of “lovecity” and “lovecity.com” into Google’s AdWords paid search advertising system. Now this is just strange, but well documented - So, why is Yahoo driving traffic from Google AdWords, to their own “MFA type” search results? Is Yahoo that hard-up for new visitors and monetizable traffic?
The Lawsuit stated:
The “Defendants’ willful insertion of plaintiff’s trademark into paid advertisements constitutes an effort to artificially inflate their profits by knowingly misleading consumers as to the source of the response to their search…It has caused, and continues to cause, actual confusion, is tarnishing the goodwill and reputation of plaintiff, and is causing lost sales.
If you recall Google has already won a lawsuit filed by Geico alleging Google encouraged unfiar and unlawful use of trademarks for profit - but lost a International Trademark court battle in France against Le Meridien. Looks like the jury is still out as over 8 other cases are pending in France, Germany and the US against the search giant.
Just searched for ‘Taxes’ in Google government search and the regular one. My observations;
1. In the regular results, there are approx. 462 million results. And the Google Government search finds 28,100,000 ? I had no clue if government has so many sites/pages dedicated to taxes. But, maybe its a good thing to know government is interested in our taxes and filled up so many pages 
2. I get the same ads (also the same untargeted global ads by us -spray money across the globe to see if it works elsewhere too)
Integrating it with your homepage is a cool thing though. And personalized content with RSS feeds make Google again my favorite
Needless to say that Google is fast in releasing new features and innovations. Now that the ‘buzz’ around video ads for AdSense has dissapated, Google develops a new ad format for contextual advertising. It combines two existing AdSense formats – text adlinks and a search listing box.
Now both bow PPC ads with descriptions and regular text link ads are displayed in the same module. Three regular ads are on the top of the ad unit and the adlink situated on the bottom. The boxes themselves are of 2 formats: Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) and Square (250 x 250).
For now it’s hard to conclude whether the new format of ads delivery will influence the CTR positively or negatively - only time will tell.
