Smart Keywords

Funny that it has taken this long for behavioral marketing to reach mainstream interest. We have been using it for well over a year to great success.
True, there must be people who are turned off of a company because of it, but they are well outweighed by the ones who convert that never heard of the company. Now that the masses are gearing into the space it is time to roll on to the next new thing.
Psychosocial seems popular…. you can get a lot more granular and over time a lot more accurate.
IM contacting is becoming more used – hey with telemarketing shut down and the Can Spam laws that are now in effect, it’s not surprising.
Link purchases are hitting a wall (called Google).

The recent announcement that Google has been approved to open offices in mainland China has all types of implications for the global search industry. With a presence in the country and the chance to develop personal ties with the government officials that oversee the internet presence in China, Google may become part of the democratization of mainland China the last bastion of Communism.

Remember that Google News was being filtered and banned not so long ago in China.

Remember that search engine topics and advertising was being carefully monitored by the governing bodies that filtered/censored the media’s presence in the country.

The internet is a great equalizer. But even though the access speeds and availablity of wireless networks seems impressive, it is generally an upscale population that has use, or for that matter desires access.

Hopefully the admission of Google will be remembered as a time when another isolationist , restrictive country began a more open policy.

Missed this until I read the current issue of Information Week. Adobe is buying Macromedia for $3.4 Billion in stock…. nice another merger that shrinks the companies pushing out technology. No doubt we will hear of some products being eliminated as there are a few that overlap a bit. This shake out should be of interest in the coming months.

Just got this in my email from my AdSense account, so now we have the spin from the other side.

Hello,

We’ve made many recent improvements to Google AdSense. Read on to find out more.

Increasing monetization through new forms of advertising

As part of our goal to improve the monetization of your sites, Google has introduced a number of new features for advertisers, which will directly impact you as an AdSense publisher.

We anticipate that these features will introduce new advertising dollars into the content network by giving advertisers additional ways to reach their objectives.

We’re currently testing these new features with a select group of advertisers, and expect to make the features more widely available in the near future.

Site targeting: focusing on the audience

The keyword-targeted ads that you’re used to seeing on your pages will now be joined by a new type of site-targeted advertisement. Site-targeted ads allow advertisers to select the specific sites they feel are most appropriate to their campaign, and to run their ads only on those sites.

We believe that advertisers will leverage both our traditional keyword-targeted advertising which runs across the entire AdSense network, and our new site-targeted advertising, bringing more ad dollars to publishers.

CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue

With site-targeted advertising, advertisers set a maximum CPM bid – that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you’ll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.

For every eligible impression, both pay-per-impression ads and pay-per-click ads compete in the same auction. Our technology will automatically display the highest performing ads on your pages.

Expanded text ads: testing new formats

We are also running a test with text ads that expand to fill the entire ad unit, so that only a single ad will appear in that unit. At this time, this test will only apply to text ads in a site-targeted campaign and to ad formats banner-sized or larger. The expanded pay-per-impression text ad will have to beat out all of the competing ads before it can appear, so publishers can be assured that any expanded text ad is a highly competitive ad. These ads will be served to any text-enabled ad unit and will abide by your text ad color settings.

More image ads

Because of these new features available for advertisers, the number of image ads in the Google advertising network will grow. To take advantage of these ads, and the increased earnings potential that they offer, we encourage you to review your image ads preference in your AdSense Account Settings page.

You can also choose your image ads preference on a format-by-format basis when generating your ad code. For publishers who want to fully leverage image ads, we now provide an image ads only selection.

Your image ad inventory will also include a small number of Flash ads from a test group of advertisers. These new ads will adhere to the 50KB size limit for image ads, and will be reviewed according to our content guidelines.

Finally, we’ve added the wide skyscraper (160×600) format to make a total of 5 ad formats supporting image ads. If you’re opted in to image ads, be sure to use one of these formats so that we can send image ads to your pages.

Though the new Site Target CPM advertising will not roll out until later in May, the potential is getting discussed fervently on many of the forums – and this with full details yet to be disclosed.

The annoucement came today at AdTech and the race to find out more has been quick.

Google has a bunch of pages already on their site and this one:
http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/sitetarget?hl=en

seems to show the direction it is going to take.

Basically as I see it they will allow advertising that is not directly relevant to the topic or content of a site but that has a crossover to the demographics of the users of the site. For example, teen info sites about one set of information may also find ads from other sites that are of interest to them in general placed there.

This will allow advertisers to begin using demographics – something that so far has not been a real criteria in search marketing. Though not on target for absolute relevancy the successful advertisers ,who will be able to rise above the disabling process, will be those that do know how to reach across various content and provide users with alternative information, products and services that is of interest to the people who visit these sites.

By allowing the advertiser to use image ads as well as PPC ads the scope of Google’s content advertising has moved to a new and potentially prosperous place for all concerned.

Advertisers will love the freedom, content providers will relish the new income sources and Google gets to make money all around. A win/win situation for all including the users who will ultimately have the power to determine what type of ads are seen on their favorite sites by making the CTR the determining factor and providing further marketing info to all concerned.

Watch how successful it is by the duplication of it by other engines….

I just noticed that Google is flogging the Google Mini on the homepage today.

They must have numbers for the CTR on that spot below the search box and just throw things up and test the results… may have to offer to buy a spot there for a day and see if they are interested…

So the question is when are they just going to flip things to a true portal. Will they wait until the company wants to spike their stocks?

Talking about stocks the Google financials come out this afternoon… will post back when they do so we have something else to share.

I am generally not into lists – as they come across as too definitive and most are too subjective. But the recent announcement of MSN’s Search Champs 2 briefly got me annoyed at the arrogance of the name.
I agree some of the members have some serious skill sets and may have been on a lot of short lists, but if the name is to be really applied where more people would stand back and say well that is pretty close to the Dream Team I would select, I think a new list should be made.
If I was able to convince anyone I reached out to to make the Search Dream Team my list would include the people listed below – remember it is not a definitive list and could be longer and cover even more niched areas of our industry but with these people I think there is pretty much nothing the group could not adapt to and dominate.

1. Danny Sullivan – does he need a bio other than maybe the Godfather of Search!
2. Aaron Wall – SEOBook has serious game and is still developing skills exponentially.
3. Dr. Garcia – the famed Orion can skillfully simplify even the most complex industry methodologies.
4. Mike Grehan: best speaker we have in this industry.
5. Dana Todd: it’s not just that redhair that gets your attention (though I swear it is part of the marketing).
6. Mikkel deMib Svendsen: Leading European Search Master.
7. Ignacio Hernandez: Nacho knows the Latin market and engines better than anyone.
8. Detlev Johnson: this guy is everywhere. I really think he has clones.
9. Bill Hunt: hey IBM thinks he has game.
10. Nick W: ThreadWatch is an institution and the writing is always fun to read.
11. Aamon Johns: more than a BlackKnight.
12. Andy Beal: WebSourced’s key player.
13. Dan Thies: His Labs have given us some cool tools over the last few years.
14. Scottie Claiborne: quietly really gets it done.
15. Bruce Clay: If he had a penny for every copy made of his map he would be Bill Gates.
16. Lori Weiman: KeywordMax Director and very sharp former lawyer, just in case we need one.
17. Jay McCarthy:WebSideStory senior developer who brings a bunch to the table.
18. Peter Hershberg: Reprise Media has come along way and he leads a great team.
19. Kevin Lee: He Did-It… always a good choice for a go-to-guy.
20. Elisabeth Osmeloski: she can oversee all the egos at SEW and contribute insights!
21. Barry Schwartz: RustyBrick has helped many and keeps well ahead of the curve.
22. Me: hey someone has to buy the beers and tell the jokes!

by kid mercury — get your free lottery ticket

I read Andrew Goodman’s ebook on PPC marketing. It wasn’t bad, but I have a tough time recommending it. The book takes more of a conceptual perspective as opposed to a scientific, methodical approach, and as such books often do, takes regular detours from the main idea. I think a key requirement to make a good PPC ebook is to have plenty of case studies of successful PPC campaigns, and showing all the key steps along the way: which tracking code solution was used; how the keyword research processed developed; how the company looked at web analytics to revise its strategy and its web site; how the bid management process was conducted; which PPC engines proved to be most successful; and so on. This would be a gold mine of information — although I imagine many companies would be reluctant to have their commercial tactics commercially exploited.

In other interesting news, FastCompany has an interesting post on the increasingly frequent scenario of bloggers being fired for blogging. The FastCompany blog entry deals specifically with the case of a blogger who was reprimanded for blogging at work.

I guess I should get back to work.

by kid mercury — today’s your lucky day. get your free lottery ticket.

That’s right folks. Spammer Jeremy Jaynes, allegedly the eighth ranked spammer in the world, has been convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison.

There are a few things that are really disturbing about that statement:

1) Spamhaus, an organization that clearly has way too much free time on its hands, has somehow created a ranking system to determine who are the most prolific spammers. I couldn’t find a breakdown as to how their calculations were determined. I guess their afraid of spam rank optimization (SRO)?

2) I agree that spam is a bad thing. But isn’t it often it’s own punishment? If your company gets caught using blatant spam tactics, doesn’t that do enough damage to your credibility/brand as to be a sufficient punishment? I mean, nine years is a really long time, especially when we think of sentencing for some other crimes:

Man commits rape and burglary — gets six years total
Woman steals $250,000 — gets two years
The maximum sentence for voluntary manslaughter in Kansas, USA is 100 months — less than 8 1/2 years

So apparently spam is worse than rape, theft, and killing someone.

Hope this doesn’t set a legal precedent for search engine spam…..

From kid mercury

Recently, there’s been much talk about the new Google patent application, which, among other things, suggests that links from disreputable sites will hurt the ranking of the site receiving the link — even if there is no reciprocal link. If this is the case, it opens the door for some rather dangerous possibilities, namely the intentional “de-optimization,” for lack of a better term, of competing sites. This could be, I suppose, the next step in the evolution of black hat search engine optimization.

Naturally, many in the search marketing community are none too pleased with this development. With Google apparently taking a far more pro-active stance in fighting what it perceives to be search engine spam — and allegedly doing far more questionable things, like stealing AdWords clients from SEM professionals — it seems quite certain that search marketing is headed down a rather ugly path.

So, a question: what this mean for ethics in search marketing? Or are there even any ethics at all? Are “ethical” search marketing professionals actually doing their clients a disservice by introducing morals? I’m inclined to think that ethics in search marketing are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Now more than ever before, the game is about risk and reward. The search industry as a whole has always had somewhat of a shady reputation, but if Google, the ruling emperor of the search industry, is going to resort to shady tactics as well, then it may be time to simply admit that the search industry is not a place where thinking ethically will get you very far. Thinking in terms of risk and reward, on the other hand, just might.