Smart Keywords

Guess Google, Yahoo and MSN will have some competition for the cell phone search arena.
Aol annouced today that it is rolling out mobile search.
Seems a natural fit to AIM et al.

This is a personal experience post.

I had one of my strategic PPC terms disallowed by Yahoo’s Global Quality Control – seems they are an independent force inside Yahoo – and was having a hard time getting things brought back to status quo.

Enter the new and improved Yahoo Customer Service people. My Diamond ad rep was on vacation, as were, it seemed, everyone who could possibly help me. So somewhat frustrated but resigned I left a couple of messages about the situation and figured I would be waiting a couple of days before things started to move.

Well I was wrong. I actually received a call from my guy from his vacation and he tapped a couple of people in the company to make sure I was helped. Ultimately the term was reinstated in under 12 hours.

Now I am impressed. Keep up the great work!

I thought I could see all the angles but this one slipped under my radar. It seems a lot of people are registering domain names for five days and then returning them.

This article about this new game is intriguing. I would not have thought the saving of $8 was worth so much effort.

Seems Google has a far-reaching plan of attack. They rolled out Google Moon yesterday on the anniversary of the first moon walk.

They have also been seen to be grabbing as many domains as they can with galaxtic implications. Though I have not seen www.googleforce.com yet, how long before we get the link that scrolls across the page:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …

came two bold men filled by The Force…

It has been a hectic Monday, so this is the first chance I had to log in to my MCC at Google and found this at the start of the first account I was looking at:

Coming soon: Simplified keyword states and quality-based minimum bids
In the coming weeks, your keywords will no longer be evaluated as normal, in trial, on hold, or disabled. Instead, your keywords will either be active or inactive, depending on their quality and maximum CPC. Each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid based on its quality. As long as its maximum CPC meets this quality-based minimum bid, your keyword will remain active and trigger ads. Learn more.

Claria, formerly Gator, the leader in behavioural pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, has announced that it is rolling out their own search engine.

Dubbed VistaLabs Search (obviously a beta name), the engine should start searching for a replacement of a buyer since Microsoft dropped out after too much bad press.

I wonder if they will put this online and tell about it in a pop-up – the bane of search engines.

I came across and ad at Craigslist where Ask Jeeves was looking for people with knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and/or Italian.

Guess they will be pushing hard into the foreign market soon.

Thought this was an interesting little insight. We who are deep in the trenches see this every day. One company drops out and another enters briefly, only to then become a major presence.

Putting it in theoretical terms is an interesting approach.

The original annoying pop-up purveyor, Gator, has come a long way from the days when everyone hated them and the nuisance adware/spyware installs that seemed to plague everyone.

That little smiling Gator icon used to be everywhere on your computer. I guess the firewall and anti-spyware companies loved them – as they may have been a big contributor to the huge growth of that industry.

A name change and a new direction has the now Claria company looking credible and knowledgebale enough for Microsoft to take an interest. This recent article shows just how far they have come.

The New Media Report from Ad Bumb had this interesting item today:

ADS FOR POD PEOPLE
Now podcasting has everything radio and the internet have—including ads. Podcasting advertising provider, PodcastSPOTS, celebrated this July 4th by introducing the first ever pay-per-click podcast advertisement on its own cast, the Ads On Pods Report. PodcastSPOTS’ service equips podcast producers with both ads and content to help them generate revenue and increase their number of listeners. “We built a site that lets podcasters insert audio ads and podsafe music into their podcasts, and get paid on a per-click basis, per-insert basis, or a variety of other methods, and we made it super simple to use,” PodcastSPOTS’ co-founder, Mark Kanter, said in a recent statement. Speaking exclusively with ADBUMb, Kanter added: “As a podcaster, you could say ‘I want to have five spots on my show today.’ You can make them five unique ads or you can make them all the same ads. And as an advertiser, you could say ‘Hey, I’ll pay a little extra to be the only ad in your show.’ So there are all kinds of ways to go about it and we put it all in there.” This new ability to generate revenue from podcasts will no doubt help the infant industry grow, and we predict that advertisers and podcasters alike will be hearing music before long. (How could we resist?)

Guess it’s time to look into this a little deeper and see what type of CPA this new advertising venue has to offer.