Who Does Google Think You Are?, Karen Weise, Bloomberg Busienss Week (Feb 2)
Find out who Google thinks you are as a marketing target in terms of interests and age. As the article says, the url is awkward - just search Google for ad preferences manager - follow the link and sign into your Google account. Are you what Google thinks you are?
The issue is Google's intention to bring together in one place all the products a Google account holder uses in order to integrate the data - and know its users better.
Of interest: "The concern has prompted regulators in Ireland and France to announce they’re going to examine Google’s new policy. A bipartisan group of eight U.S. representatives sent Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page a letter with questions about the change. Google responded on Jan. 30, emphasizing the controls users do have and how new approaches will make it easier and quicker for people to find the information they want on the Web. They also noted that Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, praised the clarity of the unified privacy policy."
UPDATED: Google Officially Rolls Out Ads At The Bottom Of Search Results, Pamela Parker, Search Engine Land (Nov 3)
You may have noticed - Google sometimes places ads at the bottom of the page now. Not to be too alarmed - Google has said it won't show ads at the bottom and on the side at the same time. That's some relief.
Google says it's getting better response with ads at the bottom - "Google says ads at the bottom fit “better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom.”"
That's because we have trained our eyes to jump over the first couple of results at the top.
3 Critical Title Tag SEO Best Practices [Video], Chris Fernandez, Biquitous (Nov 7)
Everything you need to know about the title tag.
Author - "So in this post, I’ll share some of our “secret sauce” for creating great title tags, explain why the title tag is arguably the most important factor for increasing traffic and SEO on your website, and show you 3 critical title tag SEO best practices for creating title tags that will yield the biggest bang for your buck."
Google Earnings: GOOG Made Nearly $10 Billion Revenue For Q3 2011, Nearly $3 Billion Net, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 13)
Google increased revenue again to 9.72 billion in Q3.
More figures in Google Gains as Advertising Demand Helps Sales Top Estimates , Business Week (Oct 14)
Google holds 82% of the search advertising market. That must keep the coffers full.
Related - Report: Paid Search Rebounded In Q3 2011, Search Engine Land.
Q1 Online Ad Revenues $7.3 Billion, Search Nearly Half, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (May 26)
Figures for online ad revenue: For the full year 2010 paid search constituted 46 % of total online ad revenues.
New York Times: Yes, Google’s Panda Update Hit NYT-Owned About.com, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (April 29)
Why would the New York Times be surprised that About.com would be hurt by Google's changes to downgrade sites that push ads over content? About.com has been 60% (or higher) ads for years. The content between the ads is good, but the screen has been loaded with promotions. Drop in traffic also meant drop n ad revenue. Solution? About.com "is currently expanding the volume and distribution of expert content on its platform ..."
Paid search market bounces back in 2010, Lance Whitney, Digital Media (Jan 18)
Market for paid search ads is very strong despite - or maybe because of - the recession.
"For 2010, spending on paid search ads rose 18.5 percent over 2009, a year when spending declined. ... Retailers in particular funneled more money toward paid search ads last year, especially over the holiday season as online shoppers opened up their wallets, a sign to SearchIgnite of improving consumer sentiment."
PPC: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, Andrew Goodman, Traffick (Jan 10)
Was Overture, the premier pay per click advertising engine, only 8 years ago? it was later acquired by Yahoo and made into the Yahoo Search Advertising machine. And now Yahoo Search Marketing is fully integrated with Microsoft. Andrew Goodman describes what search engine marketing people worked with then.
In A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web (Nov 26) New York Times scooped the story of how DecorMyEyes was pumped up in Google web search results through negative criticism from very angry customers. Since then there has been much slamming of Google - and much analysis. Expect change soon.
Is rudeness the key to Google search success? , Amber MacArthur, Globe and Mail (Nov 29)
Amber MacArthur says that the gaming won't work - why rely on Google when you can ask your friends in Facebook?
What Google's Search Change Means For Your Website, Katherine Noyes, PCWorld (Dec 2)
There was a weakness in Google's algorithm. Google's team has plugged the hole with a method that "detects merchants that provide "an extremely poor user experience" and then assigns them lower rankings." That probably means assessing the tone of user comments.
"A much more logical approach, then, would be simply to include the overall nature of those ratings as one of the many factors used to create Google's ranking results. I'm betting that's what Google now does."
But, maybe the root cause was the New York Times itself accidentally giving authority to DecorMyEyes.
Author gives advice - stick to the basics - and stay away from negative tactics.
Five most important factors for ranking are:
1. Keyword-focused anchor text from external links.
2. External link popularity.
3. A diversity of link sources.
4. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag.
5. The trustworthiness of the domain based on its "link distance" from trusted domains.
Postscript: The Decor My Eyes Fiasco & Local Reviews Tactics, Chris Silver Smith, Search Engine Land (Dec 6)
Has advice for everyone considering the "effect of online reviews and ratings upon your rankings in local search and regular keyword search results"
Google Does Away With “Sponsored Links” Label, Now Ads Are Labeled “Ads”, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 5)
Google has decided to call a spade a spade - sponsored links are now Ads.
"Today, it seems like everyone should now be able to see the AdWords listings labeled as “ads” as opposed to “sponsored listings.” "
Yellow Pages launches Web unit , SUSAN KRASHINSKY, Globe and Mail (Oct 26)
Yellow Media, parent company of Yellow Pages, has seen the writing on the online wall and is expanding its virtual reach. It is launching Mediative - an online advertising and marketing company. To do this it has acquired a few online marketing companies in Canada.
"In recent weeks, Yellow Pages has bought Internet ad firm Uptrend Media; Enquiro, which handles search engine marketing and research to help companies get their brands noticed through searches on websites such as Google and Bing; and retail advertising agency Ad Splash Media. All those companies will now be folded into Mediative. "
Some numbers: Mediative can access 17 million unique visitors through the "37 websites owned by Yellow Media, such as YellowPages.ca, AutoTrader.ca, and through the websites where it now sells display ads, such as CFL.ca and MarthaStewart.com. "
Google Instant Search Has Already Made Millions: Report, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 26)
"A new study suggests that Google Instant Search has already had a positive impact on search advertising, benefiting advertisers through higher impressions and clicks, and adding to Google’s bottom line in the process."
I'm not sure why that's the case - perhaps because people are even more inclined to click on the first 5 results that appear - or are ads and paid search more instant?
Has some revenue figures for Google - for Q3 - "$7.29 billion overall revenue, minus $3.77 billion revenue from outside the US"
Surviving The Impending Yahoo-Bing Ad Transition, Matt Van Wagner, Search Engine Land (Oct 18)
Next stage in the Microsoft Yahoo agreement is about to happen in which "all paid search ads appearing on Yahoo will be powered by Bing through Microsoft’s AdCenter servers. "
It means something to paid search specialists now that much more traffic will go through AdCenter.
"Even though text ad formats are nearly identical on Google and Bing, ad ranking, keyword harmonization, ad rotation and testing, demographic targeting and ad scheduling all function differently in AdCenter."
How Consumers Search For A Perfect Meal, Mark Sprague, Search Engien Land (Oct 15)
If you use the Internet to find restaurants, this analysis of restaurants searches will be interesting. It was written for the SEO person seeking to optimize a website, but the searcher will find the search behaviour helpful. If you don't have a strategy for finding a restaurant when you want one, this will help: location, type of food, quality (using keywords), value (discounts), and brand.
Of interest:
* At the highest level, consumers are interested in location, quality and type. These themes should underpin your website copy. * Consumers are much more interested in quality than value by a three to one margin. The terminology they use (best and top) and the most requested content type i.e., Reviews supports this observation. * When consumers search by brand, they already know about you. If they have never visited your restaurant before you should support this group with reviews and location information. * Many consumers are cost-conscious, and search for discount coupons. What was a bit of a surprise in the data was how often the term voucher was used. I think this reflects the relationship that hotels have with the local restaurant community. I don’t think I’ve ever received a coupon from the concierge, vouchers yes, coupons no. * Last but not least, you have the option to provide potential customers with three distinct ways to find your restaurant. Statistically large numbers of consumers search by nationality, by food type and by the style of the restaurant. This behavior suggests a multiple landing page strategy.
Turns out that searching for a family restaurant is different. More on that in a later posting.
Facebook Sells Your Friends, Brad Stone, Business Week (Sept 22)
550 million Facebook users - advertisers are flooding the pane on the right side with highly targeted ads - and they intend to do much more.
"All this is cause for concern to Facebook's critics—and their numbers among privacy advocates and politicians grow every time the social network pushes the boundaries of the service beyond what its users originally signed up for. People join Facebook to share their lives with friends, yet the information they reveal "is being used by strangers for completely unrelated commercial purposes," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year over changes to the social network's privacy policies. "That is a little unsettling.""
But knowing that doesn't seem to be changing everything.
"The Web has now advanced to the point that most large sites can serve ads based on a user's browsing history. Google, which intercepts users at the vulnerable moment when they're searching for information, has ridden its refined brand of targeting to $23.6 billion in revenues last year. Facebook takes targeting even further. If you recently got engaged and updated your Facebook status to reflect it, you might start seeing ads from jewelers in your hometown. They've likely used Facebook's automated ad system to target recently engaged couples living in the area. "
Read the entire article for detail on the current state of advertising on the Web and how "Facebook plans to be "the greatest advertising juggernaut" since Google.
Big brands dominate Google search results, Pandia (Sept 18)
This doesn't look good --
Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News found that Google, “Instead of allowing each company to have only two possible listings they can now have up to ten! Google has shown in the past that they favor brands but to give up every listing above the fold to one is a huge step.”
This is fine if your only meaning for the word target is the American retail company, and your only intention is to shop. On the other hand - and in defense of Google, if the only keyword entered is target, lit's likely that the searcher really does want the store.
There is a difference in results between the US google.com and google.ca . At Google.com the first four results today) are from the target.com domain, followed by one Wikipedia article on the company and the Target facebook sites.
Google.ca has only the main Target site and the Wikipedia entry (indicating that at least Google knows Target is not in Canada).
But, back to Pandia's point - this weighting of the big retail firms at the top may crowd out smaller businesses - thus making the work of SEO people even harder.
It also concludes with "The main problem, though, is that searchers do not benefit from this strong focus on enterprise and shopping related search results."
Google eyes Canadian expansion , LuAnn LaSalle, Globe and Mail (Aug16)
Google is working on attracting more clients in Canada for its many business services.
"Google could provide not only advertising, but business applications like email, Google maps, the Google business channel on YouTube, co-marketing opportunities and product integration, he [Chris O'Neill ] said. "
Of interest:
"Two-thirds of Canadian retailers are using e-commerce but their websites are generating just five per cent of total sales, according to a study released this summer by the Retail Council of Canada.
Another study recently suggested that businesses spend only 11 per cent of their marketing budgets online. "
Yellow Media, online Yellow Pages) is the main competitor - "Yellow Media is transitioning to an online company and is targeting small- and medium-sized businesses with services such as website building, email marketing, video production and search-engine marketing. "
Paid-search spending on the rise by Lance Whitney, Webware (Jul 13)
"Spending on paid search in the U.S. grew 14 percent in the second quarter and 11 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same periods in 2009, according to a report released Tuesday by SearchIgnite. The company, which offers search optimization and online media services, found that the latest numbers for pay-per-click (PPC) and other types of paid search signaled the strongest growth for the sector since the fourth quarter of 2008."
Google has 78.4 percent of this market.
Bartz: “Google Is 90% Search, That’s A Fact” – Except It’s Not, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 24)
Yahoo CEO Bartz should get her briefings from Danny Sullivan - he has the numbers that say Google is not 90% search.
To be clear - "ads generated 97% of all of Google’s revenue" - but Google does not reveal how many of those ads showed in search.
"Ad revenues also overlook the fact that Google’s not a one trick pony when it comes to products. Yes, it offers search. And a web portal. And email. And online web applications. And online video viewing. And maps. And many other products. And “billboard” in the forms of ads it places across the web on pages and in other people’s products."
Will Facebook Be Tomorrow’s Google, and Google Tomorrow’s Microsoft?, by Bindu Reddy, TechCrunch (May 15)
Bindu Reddy, ex-Google-employee, finds some chinks in the Google business armour, manly concerning product promotion. Facebook knows a lot about people and, she says, can do a better job of directing bits of interest to you - as well as ads (which is the point).
"Want to see pics of your cousin’s wedding? Want to know what movies your co-workers are watching this weekend? What music your friends “like”? You need to go to Facebook. The bottom line is that you are now trained to go to Facebook to discover things. With the growth of the Facebook app platform and support (so far) from apps like Farmville and Mafia Wars, Facebook has also grown into the number one destination on the web for entertainment and spending time."
I am not so enamoured with Facebook, but it could be the company I keep. If your friends are there, you have to be too.
Google may not be as adept at delivering relevant ads.
"Google’s ad business models are based on intent and relevance and not on discovery. The performance based AdWords and AdSense models are easier to measure and appeals to the logical / analytical minds at Google. The power of influence, discovery and brand advertising needs more right-brain thinking than Google’s left brainers are used to."
I might have ignored this article had it not received a recommendation from the very astute Stephen Arnold - Sharper Than the Tooth of a Serpent, A Xoogler Analysis of Google
Arnold says more in an earlier posting - Social Networks, Testosterone, and Facebook (May 13)
He writes of the advantage of searching social networks over the wide web - networks such as delicious, and stumbleupon - to get fewer, but relevant and more recent results. Facebook is the biggest - a Google of the social scene - and has the power to disrupt search.
"To sum up, Facebook has some real potential to disrupt Web search with its social methods. The company can index Web sites its 400 million members say are important. Within Facebook, it might be easier to ask friends and then run a query across Web sites Facebook members “like”. Is this objective search? Not in a million years. But that’s not the point. The impact is that search traffic bleeds from some vendors and flows to Facebook. That cost advantage may be trivial right now, but going forward it may become a larger factor. That’s the point in my Information Today column. Also, the testosterone factor is important. Facebook is what Google was. I know this makes me giggle, but your reaction may be different. Instead of being Googled, now a company can be Facebooked. New verb."
TweetUp Scores Its Own Search Column In TweetDeck, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 23)
Adwords come to Twitter streams - "TweetUp, the new AdWords-like ad platform for Twitter has added a prime, new publishing partner: the popular Twitter client, TweetDeck."
TweetDeck is a browser for following contacts across social medial places including Twitter and Facebook.
TweetUp helps you (you as a promoter of something) boost tweets - "TweetUp combines sophisticated relevance algorithms with a bidding system to raise your best tweets to the top of search results and make it easy for you to acquire new followers. "
Internet Ad Revenue Hit Record High In Q4 2009, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 7)
Data on online revenue shows some growth from 2008 to 2009. Search accounts for 47% of the revenue.
"The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says that U.S. online ad revenue hit an all-time high of $6.3 billion in Q4 of 2009, a 2.6% increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 14% increase over Q3 of 2009."
Synonyms made easy, Google Custom Search Blog (Mar 17)
Enhancements to Google Custom Search for better search.
"Today, we're excited to announce that we've made it easier than ever for Custom Search and Site Search administrators to enable advanced synonym options. Now, you can add sets of synonyms specific to your website content and can also trigger search expansion, so that a query automatically triggers results for synonymous terms."
SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask), by Stoney deGeyter, Search Engine Guide (Jan 19)
Series of 6 articles covers the basics of what to think about in desigining your blog or website so that it will place well in search results. Searchers need to be aware of these points as well - such as the importance of the title tag, how the meta description is used, considerations in site structure and how that will be show up in the url.
Social Media: What It Is, How To Use It, and Where To Begin, by Jordan Kasteler, One Man's Blog (Jan 26)
Thank you Jordan Kasteler for this primer on social media and how to use it for marketing and promotion. The article includes a description of qualitative and quantitative metrics to use for evaluation the success of participation in social media.
"Social media is an all-encompassing term used to describe any of several online channels that utilize the technology to facilitate social interaction through written, visual, or audible communication. Examples of different types of Social Media sites include:
* Social Bookmarking – (delicious.com, stumbleupon.com)
* Social Networking – (facebook.com, myspace.com)
* Social News Aggregation – (digg.com, reddit.com)
* Social Q&A – (answers.yahoo.com, answerbag.com)
* Media Sharing – (youtube.com, flickr.com)
* Micro-Blogging – (twitter.com, plurk.com)
"
Use these to open two-way communications between a company or organization and its customers. But whatever the campaign, results don't happen overnight - allow three to six months, and be genuine (no spam), patient, and attentive.
Google Gets 75% Of Paid Search Clicks & Dollars: Report, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 18)
Google gets lion's share of revenue for paid search.
"The stats cover Q4 of 2009, and show Google’s share of paid search clicks rising from 71% in Q3 to 74.4% in Q4. Yahoo’s share of paid clicks, meanwhile, dropped from 24.4% in Q3 to 21% in Q4. Bing’s share was down slightly, but remains up 31% year over year."
The Five Most Frequently Asked Questions About Paid Search by Josh Dreller, Search Engine Land (Jan 14)
Answers to:
+ What’s the difference between organic and paid results?
+ What is search engine marketing (SEM)?
+ What is paid search?
+ What's PPC?
+ Why is it important to do paid search?
How Google's New Ad Formats Depart from Google's Old Philosophy , Traffick.com (Nov 24)
The worm turns: Google does what it used to criticize others for. It seems "Google is doing paid inclusion! In several ways. " and "Google is ramping up a direct ad sales force and turning into the Yellow Pages, where it suits them. "
How Google's New Ad Formats Depart from Google's Old Philosophy , Traffick (Nov 24)
Andrew Goodman itemizes the "key differences between New Google Advertising (2009-) and Google Advertising Classic (2001-2008):"
One of these is "paid inclusion". Goodman charges that "Google, the search engine, is now heavily dominated by advertising and thinking about advertising" - implying that this goes beyond product search and affects general search.
"Google's early experiments with blended search results made it seem like they never planned to charge anyone for appearing in a whole diversity of (often commercial) forms of listings. Viewed from a certain angle, it now looks like they're cooking up ways to charge everyone for everything. The free ride is rapidly coming to an end."
Please - say it isn't so.
November 2009 Google Page Rank and Algorithm Update, By Guest Writer Brandon Leibowitz, Pandia (Nov
This article confirms that you must keep pages and site fresh to improve the PageRank.
Google has recently updated its search engine algorithm and Page Rank. One item -- "Existing pages with no updates or slight modifications had a loss in page rank, while pages that are new have passed on the link juice from the homepage to deeper pages."
Many other tips.
INFOGRAPHIC: Value of SEO v. PPC, Infographic at Search Engine Land (Nov17)
Compares doing search engine optimization to place better in search result to constructing search engine marketing keyword triggered ads.
Mostly it shows that more clicks go to the top ranked organic results than the text ads.
Real-Life Lessons in Using Google AdWords by Darren Dahl, New York Times (Oct 14)
Describes how Google AdWords works and how small businesses using Adwords might manage an Internet advertising campaign .
"Here are the basics: Google AdWords are keyword-driven ads that show up along the right-hand side of a Google search page under the rubric “sponsored links.”"
Good advice at the end: "Monitoring an AdWords campaign requires a lot of effort. That’s why some entrepreneurs, like Rick Smith, prefer to outsource the management of their campaigns."
Google's quarterly revenue, profits increase by Tom Krazit, Webware (Oct 15)
Google's financial figures from Q3 are quite strong, and suggest that ad spending, at least for Google, hasn't suffered from the downturn.
+ "Overall revenue was $5.94 billion for the period ending September 30, an increase of 7 percent compared to the third quarter of 2008."
+ Net income was $1.64 billion or $5.13 / share
+ "Revenue from ads placed on Google's sites rose 8 percent to $3.96 billion, while revenue from ads sold through the AdSense program to third-party Web sites increased 7 percent to $1.8 billion. "
More figures and charts in Be a Search Engine Land member & get express commenting, library access, videos & more…
by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 15)
+ "Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $3.14 billion, representing 53% of total revenues in the third quarter of 2009"
Search Ranking Factors Shows How Little SEO Has Changed by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 24)
72 search engine optimizers gave the following as the top ranking factors for search engine results:
1. Anchor Text from External Links
2. Keyword Use in Title Tag
3. Raw Link Popularity
4. Diversity of Linking Domains
5. Keyword Use in Root Domain
Welcome to the new Search Engine Journal, by Loren Baker, editor. Search Engine Journal (Aug 5)
New look and features at SEJ..
"Search Engine Journal is now the flagship of the Search & Social Media network, which includes IMBroadcast, Daily SEO Tip & other properties which we are currently relaunching and acquiring."
Colours - very cool and sophisticate, and social interaction - with images, are the two starting points.
Nice layout on the home page - rolling pane with articles and links to columnists (Ann Smarty is here) are above the fold, and latest articles below. Makes it very clear that this site is about
The Next Frontier In Search Marketing, by Sramana Mitra, Forbes (May 22)
Composition of online advertising seems to be shifting away from paid search ads to optimizing on organic results. Organic results are results returned by search engines according to retrieval and ranking algorithms, independent of advertising revenue. However, great effort and money is spent in optimizing sites to show well in organic results.
Forbes identified a new search engine marketing company Enquisite that could change this.
"Through its suite of products like Enquisite Campaign, Enquisite Optimizer and Enquisite Auditor, customers can maximize their traffic flow from organic search results, and agencies can be completely transparent in demonstrating the progress and value of their work. They can even charge on a pay-for-performance basis, making organic search engine marketing a viable bucket in which CMOs can now safely allocate ad dollars."
Attention to optimizing placement in organic search could siphon away ad dollars from other media.
"Instead of spending advertising dollars on newspaper and magazine ads, focusing on acquiring more organic search traffic as a key pillar of advertising strategy should become mainstream in the next 12 months. Thus, I see organic as the next big frontier in online advertising."
Longer Search Queries Hurting PPC Clicks? by Chris Crum, WebProNews (May 18)
Paid search / pay per click is running into some snags. Clicks are declining while searches are increasing. Search queries are longer, and maybe fewer ads are showing (there's a technique).
""An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query," explains comScore's Gian Fulgoni. "And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.""
Google money machine all cranked out?. Cade Metz, The Register (May 14)
Paid search slipping, and with it so will revenue at Google.
"According to those clever net-watchers at Hitwise, paid ad clicks took a significant nose dive during the past month. In the four weeks leading up to May 9, Hitwise says, 7.25 per cent of all search engine traffic came from paid clicks, compared to 9.84 per cent in the same period last year.
That's a 26 per cent drop. And with Google controlling upwards of 60 per cent of the search market, you have to wonder if Mountain View is finally feeling the Meltdown."
Pay-Per-Click Web Advertisers Combat Costly Fraud, by Susanna Hamner, HeraldTribune (May 13)
Click fraud is a serious problem for companies as more turn to this form of Internet advertising. It could be as high as 13% of all clicks on ads are fraudulent according to Outsell Inc., an information industry research group. Google claims less than 1% is fraudulent but several others challenge that figure.
"One of the challenges of click fraud detection is distinguishing genuine clicks from fraudulent ones. Indicators of click fraud include suspicious activities from an Internet Protocol (I.P.) address — the address assigned to every computer that uses the Internet — in a region the advertiser does not serve, or a large number of clicks in a short period. For instance, a clicker might view 10 pages on a site but spend exactly 2.1 seconds on each page."
It has created a new business. Click Forensics is one of several companies that try to eliminate click fraud.
Organic v. Paid Results - Different Searches = Different Biases, Hyperarts (Apr )
Somewhat of a literature review on the preference of searchers for organic results over sponsored / text ads. No surprise - it depends on the question - and when searching for products, users are more likely to click on the ads. Quotes many figures - such as, # “participants rated 52% of the organic listings as relevant compared to only 42% of the sponsored listings” .
"The bottom line is that businesses should not rely solely on one or the other, organic or paid. Focusing solely on paid search engine advertising, rather than organic SEO, essentially removes more than 50% of potential customers/clients. Although, this differential between organic and paid results does vary depending on the type of search, there appears to be a consistent bias for organic results and against paid results."
Moving beyond the paid search keyword, by John Federman, Webware (Apr 10)
Forrester reports that web sales are growing faster than sales at brick and mortar stores.
This article recommends putting more attention to advertising at retail sites, and not rely on search engine paid search alone. It identifies some interesting shifts in past 5 years.
"Yet, the past five years have demonstrated some shifts that marketers may not have foreseen:
* Search engines have displaced catalogs and manufacturer websites as a point of purchase initiation.
* 64 percent of consumers are using multiple sources for their research including reviews, physical stores, online stores, and search engines.
* 24 percent of consumers begin their search on retail sites, up from 21 percent a few years ago.
* Retail sites have displaced search engines as the No. 1 venue for beginning product research."
Google to target ads based on Web surfing habits By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer. SFGate (Mar 11)
Google's move to target ads based on "interest" is troubling to some. It's not the first - Yahoo and Microsoft have been doing a form of it - but it might be the biggest (or most intrusive).
"Although Yahoo and Microsoft already have been tying ads to people's presumed interests, Google's embrace of this "behavioral" targeting is more troubling to privacy watchdogs. That is because the Mountain View-based company already has used its dominant position in the Internet search market to build a huge database of potentially sensitive information about the kinds of things that people are looking for on the Web.Now Google is taking it a step further by tracking people's favorite Web sites to divine individual tastes and then package ads falling under the same areas of interest. The company intensified its monitoring activity in December when it began putting a sliver of DoubleClick's computer code, called a "cookie," on its advertising partners' Web sites."
More in Behavioral Targeting: Google Pulls Out the Stops, Robert D Hof, Business Week (Mar 11)
"To help advertisers place ads, Google will cull information from its content network—the thousands of sites where the search giant places text and pictorial display ads related to the content of those pages. The vast network ranges from little-known blogs to such large sites as those for Amazon.com, BusinessWeek, and The New York Times. Google will not use data from users' Google searches to target ads. "
Google Will Let People Choose How Its Ads Target Them Peter Sayer, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Mar 11)
"Google plans to target online advertisements based on the sites people visit, not just the searches they make or the site on which the ad appears, it said Wednesday. It will also allow people to define the interest categories for which they would like to receive ads."
Google knows a lot about us already from cookies that track activity at Google Search and websites using AdSense. Advertisers can use that to target ads. Google does offer a way of opting out of that - by enabling a cookie - need a browser plugin to make that permanent.
As well Google will allow users to maintain a profile of interest categories through the browser. Use the same plugin to set preferences.
"Google will allow surfers to view, delete or add the interest categories associated with their browser, and will identify the information used to serve up a greater number of the ads displayed on YouTube and on the sites of its AdSense partners, Wojcicki wrote. Google already identifies this information for some, but not all, of the ads it distributes."
Also see Making Ads More Interesting in the Official Google Blog.
Ads Now on Google News Search Results, WebProNews (Feb 26)
"Google is now showing ads on Google News search results pages in the U.S. Basically, you'll just be seeing AdWords off to the right when you enter queries, just as you would with a regular Google Search."
Ads aren't showing on news.google.ca yet.
Having advertisements with news is not a new concept, but having them triggered by the occurrence of keywords could lead to curious consequences.
Paid Search Just Got Visual: SearchMe Launches AdView Beta (Free Ads For First 500 Signups) by Eric Schonfield, Tech Crunch (Feb 24)
Placement of visual ads - it had to come. SearchMe, a search engine where you page through a view of each result, is selling placement in the sequence so that the user will come upon a related site (serves as the ad) or video.
"To see how this works, search for “Ralph Lauren” and if you flip through to the third result, it will be an ad that shows a landing page for its fall collection. In other words, the Website becomes the ad itself. This approach is similar to what StumbleUpon does, with ads placed in every 20 or so Stumbles. But the ad unit can also be a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe. For instance, check out the third result when you search for “Mac” (SearchMe inserted one of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads for demonstration purposes)."
But how does the searcher know? The ads are not marked as ads - at least not in this example.
3 Google Keyword Tools You Should Be Using, Search Marketing Blog (Feb 24)
Three very interesting tools for looking at words and phrases - show trends, search volume, popularity etc.
Especially - Google Insights for Search which uses Google Trends. Study terms, locations, time ranges.
Obviously useful to marketers, but also to searchers to get a sense of a topic and phrases used.
The Great Video SEO Frontier by Liz Gannes, Business Week (Feb 13)
Expect to see more videos at the top of Google search results. Already 1/4th of U.S. Google search results show videos according to a study done by Forrester.
+ On a set of 40 popular keywords - "Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages,"
+ Ratio of spaces on first page of results to number of competiting results is very much in the favour of videos. For videos it's 11,000 to 1, and for text, 500,000 to 1 chance of getting placed.
+ To show how important video is now - "there were 12.7 billion video views in November 2008 and 12.3 billion searches. "
+ All leading to advice for the SEO specialist - "For his part, Elliott recommends that video marketers optimize keywords by including them in titles, tags, and file names; host their videos on YouTube, which shows up by far most often in Google results; and make sure to add new content, because freshness matters."
As people get more accustomed to seeing videos in their first page of Google search results, the range of marketing possibilities grows wider
By Liz Gannes
Innovative Search And Its Impact On Brand by Mark Blanchard, Search Engine Land (Feb 11)
A primer on what is needed to show well in search results and why it matters:
+ It matters because "39% of search users feel that the brands that appear in the top of the search results are the leaders in their field"
+ There are several ways to do it - some low cost -- "Fortunately, there are numerous ways to make your search campaigns more innovative, ranging from high-end initiatives such as building a site in Flash, or creating widgets or gadgets, to low cost/low effort “fixes” such as updating your meta data to include more compelling descriptions and keyword-centric titles, or using your internal links to promote the search value of certain pages. "
+ In case you wondered how much a sponsored ad might cost - "At last check, Google was estimating that you would have to spend between $8.57 and $11.41 for an average CPC in their network to obtain a top 3 position on the term “credit cards.” "
+ What should you do? Make your content user-centered. "To assess if your copy hits the mark, determine whether it’s designed to help the end user make a decision or solve a problem, or if it simply talks about the company. "
Stepforth offers several tutorials on search engine optimization and marketing. On Feb 10 it presents a video from Google's Matt Cutts on SEO Answers: How a Search Engine Ranking is Created - and specifically the parts of the snippet. Good for website owners to know and good for searchers to see how Google works.
SEO Trends for 2009, Matt McGee, Small Business Trends (Jan 26)
Small business is realizing that they need to pay attention to search engine optimization in order to be found - beginning with showing how good they are through the content of the site. SEO people are much in demand and becoming very busy - but be wary of who you choose - some are unethical in charges and service. This demand (and mixed quality) has led more companies to set up in-house capability.
Personalization is also changing the game --
"Plus, things like your location, your recent searches, and which datacenter your search gets sent to can also impact the 10 search results you see at any given moment. It will continue to become more unusual to see the same 10 results when you and a friend in another state do the same search.
This renders ranking reports borderline useless. In other words, it’s no longer about whether your business is ranking for a certain search term at, say #2 in Google. Traffic and conversions are what you should be tracking, not what number you rank at for a specified term."
Report: Google Leads U.S. Search Advertising Market With 76% Market Share, by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Jan 20)
Search advertising is doing fairly well in the US - only down by 8% in terms of clicks according to the Efficient Frontier report. Google has a stuning 76% share of that, but Yahoo has managed to add 3% to its. Unfortunately - does not give the dollar figures.
Ask.com Plays The Google AdWords Arbitrage Game by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 17)
Danny Sullivan has evidence that Ask.com is displaying Google Ads to make more money -- "Ask is using specific text to make you think you can conduct and conclude a purchase at their web site, when you cannot. Instead, what you are far more likely to do is click on a Google ad that Ask carries, earning Ask money (and almost certainly more money than they paid to get your click from Google)."
Ask.com has said that it was "an isolated incident", but they said that to Michael Arrington's article, Ask.com Experimental Search Is Effectively Nothing More Than An Ad Engine
Ask.com Experimental Search Is Effectively Nothing More Than An Ad Engine by Michael Arrington, TechCrunch (December 9, 2008)
This is damning and true - sponsored ads fill the page on the query Michael Arlington ran for stocks. Ask explains that this is an "edge case" because of a "syndication partner", but it's not a very persuasive argument or a good excuse. Here's a query at the main ask.com for banks in canada - there are 10 sponsored ads - and none of them for Canadian banks.
The Beginners Guide To Effective SEO Daniel Taylor, SEOConsult in the UK (Nov 23)
Succinct and clear - six things to know about search engine optimization - keywords, access, navigation, content, links, and do continuous optimization.
The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Strategies (SES) Chicago (Oct 31) -- Press release about SES conference in Chicago provides a good overview of what search engine marketers need to know and be able to do.
Wagging the Long-Tailed Dog: Search Behavior & The Economy by Lance Loveday, Search Engine Land (Oct 24)
In case anyone thought search engine marketing was easy, this article shows great sophistication in analysis of search data as it relates to converting interest (the search target) to real sales. The state of the economy will make a difference, even if people run more queries.
"Here’s the problem: while the overall search volume numbers are likely to keep climbing, the nature of those queries is likely to shift in response to macro behavioral trends. Here’s how it works: a barrage of news stories about global economic meltdown causes consumers to get nervous and rein in spending. They don’t shop as much, and even when they do, they buy fewer goods and/or shop less often. This doesn’t necessarily cause them to spend less time online (God forbid) or search any less. It just means they search for different things. So the number of purchase-related queries may decline while the number of information or entertainment-related queries increases. This, in a nutshell, is what I believe is happening right now."
Google extends global search ad lead by Mark Sweney, Guardian (Oct 23)
Google really is a juggernaut in search advertising. Article quotes figures from Efficient Frontier on the market share in Europe (92.5%), UK (86.7%), US (71.4%) - largely at the expense of Yahoo.
Live Search Adds Fourth Search Ad Before Organic Results, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Sept 12)
Live has announced that it will allow 4 ads in the top position - before organic results.
Google has a maximum of 3.
Yahoo is also 4.
Ask can show up to 5.
Live made this change to satisify the advertiser, but which number do you, dear search engine user, prefer? Which number will keep you going back to that engine?
Want top search results? Tread carefully by Stephen Shankland, Cnet News (Sep 8)
In search engine optimization, it's not just white-hat methods (seen as legitimate ways to increase notice) or black-hat (recognized as devious and dishonest), there is a lot of gray.
"Some "white-hat" methods pose no problems, but others range somewhere between crafty and definitely naughty "black-hat" techniques. Notwithstanding Google's belief that it's not so tough to comply with its guidelines, the trouble for SEO companies is the size of the gray area."
Google quietly launches AdSense for Feeds By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Aug 15)
Google is using technology from its acquisition of FeedBurner to enable Adsense for RSS feeds.
"Once integrated into publishers' RSS feeds, it'll serve up contextually-related advertising based around the content, helping publishers make money off the growing number of users accessing their site through RSS readers instead of the site where page and ad views have been factors in revenue."
Google allows more in-depth look into what people are searching By Miguel Helft, International Herald Tribune (Aug 6)
Insights for Search from Google contains data on what people have been searching for. It's an extension of Google Trends. It's mainly for marketers but could be used by economists, forecasters and other researchers.
"The tool is aimed primarily at marketers, who may use it to devise and track advertising campaigns. A car company, for instance, could experiment with different versions of a television ad in Cleveland and Columbus, and check the number of resulting searches in each city to see which one is more effective. Or it could use the data to find out where users are searching most actively for "fuel efficiency" and aim ads for a gas-sipping vehicle there."
From the Google page for "Insights for Search" - "With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames."
Google Has Over 75% Of US Search Ad Market by Danny SUllivan, Search Engine Land (Jul 17)
Of interest:
"For the second quarter of 2008, Google had 77.4% of the search advertising spend, according to data tracked by Efficient Frontier, which manages ad campaigns for a wide variety of large advertisers. The data covers 23 billion ad impressions and 390 million clicks. Google's share includes a small percentage of contextual ad spend (which is not search), as does Yahoo's. "
"Google's cost per click is well above the others, about $0.70 on average, with Microsoft around $0.60 and Yahoo around $0.50. "
Shows share of market - Google has 91% in Europe (excluding the UK) and 51.5% in Japan.
B-to-B Blogs Take a Dive: Forrester By Ken Magill, Direct (Jul 3, 2008 )
Corporations are dropping their business-to-business blogs as marketing tools, but this article argues the problem is in the dull material in the blog, not the tool itself.
"Successful corporate blogs “talk openly with an authentic voice,” and are “humble and honest,” two traits that run counter to many corporate egos, said Forrester’s report."
Vertical Search Engine Healthline Launches “Semantic Ad Network” by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (June 8)
"Vertical health search engine Healthline has introduced what it’s calling the Healthline Media Network, a contextual ad network for medical and health-related sites. According to the company, the new ad network will utilize Healthline’s “semantic health search technology” to better understand partner page content and do a better job of matching ads accordingly."
Search engine optimisation by Jemima Kiss, Guardian (June 9)
"For internet businesses, the strategic battle to rank high with web engines is critical"
Short and clear article on what SEO is.
Google-YouTube: Was it worth $1.6 billion? by Stephen Baker, Business Week Online (May 22)
Targeting ads in YouTube isn't easy.
"That YouTube remains a phenom is undisputed. But it’s about a year and a half since Google snapped up our little social media whirlwind, and it hasn’t come up with any really brilliant ways to make big big bucks off the thing. Or put another way. The kind of money that’s proportionate to the service’s influence as a capital way to waste time, keep up on pop culture, and make sense of our wacky pols. I.E. as an important barometer of life as we know it."
Business Week's Digital Dish has a video on Yahoo-Microsoft, the End at Last? (May 9, 2008)
"The Digital Dish wonders if the Microsoft/Yahoo dance is really over, then sizes up Microsoft vs. Google and News Corp.'s slumping Internet revenues"
So - Yahoo stock didn't drop as much as it could have because people are expecting Microsoft to come back - speculation of course. Also discusses display advertising and who will get the dollars. And MySpace.com - not so hot anymore at least from advertising point of view. Concluded that "anything can happen".
Can't wait for the sequel.
Alarm at Google Yahoo partnering Maggie Shiels, BBC (May 10)
During the Microsoft - Yahoo tango, Google and Yahoo announced the intention of partnering for online advertising. A coalition of 16 American civil rights and rural advocacy bodies are asking the US Department of Justice to investigate the for anti-trust issues.
"In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thoma Barnett, head of the Justice Department's anti-trust division, the coalition argues that such a deal would give Google almost 90% of the search advertising market and strengthen its influence over internet users' access to information."We face a possible future in which no content could be seamlessly accessed without Google's permission," the letter states.
The effect Mr Flowers says of such large partnerships is never positive and would for the black community, as for other communities, "condense competition, increase prices and limit new business opportunity on the internet".
Google Isn't The Only One Claire Cain Miller, Forbes (Apr 21)
Information on web advertising dollars
"Video advertising has other problems. Consumers don't like video ads slapped up before and after YouTube videos, for instance. And advertisers are reluctant to place ads in videos for fear the ads will wind up next to questionable content.
The shaky economy prompted eMarketer to lower its U.S. online spending estimate by $2 billion to $26 billion for 2008. This represents a 23% increase in total revenues from 2007. Spending is expected to grow 16% in 2009.
Still, Web spending is growing at a much faster rate than spending on traditional media. TNS Media Intelligence expects network television and magazine ad spending to rise only 3% and 4% in 2008, respectively, and newspaper ad spending likely will fall 1%. "
Blended Search: A Year Later Robert Murray, Search Engine Land (Apr 9)
JupiterResearch sponsored by iProspect examined user response to blended search results - the practice, introduced a year ago, of including news, images, video and other material along with web search results on a page.
"Overall, the study shows that users are roughly twice as likely to click-on specialized search results that appear within the general search results page than they are to click-on those types of results within the vertical search categories."
There are implications for marketers.
"The bottom line is that blended search has changed the competitive landscape of the search results page. It essentially increases marketers’ inventory and chances to show up amongst the clutter. The question is – are you prepared? Companies that have developed and optimized a variety of digital assets will have a distinct competitive advantage. Those who lack such assets will not only forfeit page real estate to their competitors, but quite possibly, a whole lot more."
Search Illustrated: Link Juice Is Good For You! Search Engine Land (Apr 8)
Great image to show "various site and link components that combine to form "nutritious, healthy" link juice". Search engine marketers should keep these in mind to do rank well in search engine results. Shows what search engines rank on.
- keywords as anchor text
- authority site
- relevance
- followed or not followed
- site traffic
- depth of content
- number of outbound links
- page rank.
The Pros And Cons Of Search Engines by Anthony Malakian, Bank Technology News, American Banker (April 2008 )
Paid search engine marketing from the perspective of the buyer, in this case banks - considerations in deciding to use pay-per-click vs ranking in organic results. Many banks are choosing paid advertising, and at least one, Wachovia in the US, says it is attracting new customers. Others feel that good placement in the organic results is better for building trust and ultimately relationships.
Some figures:
+ "As a percentage of total online advertising spending, paid search-engine marketing has increased to 48 percent in 2007 from 15 percent in 2002, according to Pittsburgh-based e-marketing solutions firm Elliance. That figure is expected to continue to rise."
+ "Hagarty says today it costs a bank an average of $18 per click for its ad to be included in one of the top-three most expensive spots on a Google search-engine page when the term “credit card” is searched. Only 18 months ago, that figure was $8. Top institutions are shelling out between $500,000 to more than $1 million monthly to remain competitive in this field, he estimates."
The following is one of the clearest descriptions of the two forms I've come across.
"Pay-per-click advertising is defined as “sponsored links” in two sections of a search page: The most expensive three or four spots are in a typically shaded section at the top of the page; the less expensive eight to 10 spots are on the right-hand side of that page. (Organic results include everything else on that page.) For each keyword or set of keywords, top billing is auctioned off to the highest bidder, depending upon time of day, geographical location or other factors, and can range from one penny per click to more than $20 per click. Advertising banks pay the bid price (per click) only when an Internet user taps a link. Organic searches, by comparison, are a much more inexact science; these results are generated by three factors that the bank builds into its home Web site: content, URL architecture and inbound links to its site."
Video ads now showing on Google, Yahoo search By Elinor Mills, Webware (Mar 28)
"Video ads for select keywords are now showing up on Google and Yahoo search sites. I took a look and I have to say I prefer the Google ads because they seem less intrusive and obnoxious."
I tried the examples mentioned in the article from Toronto.
+ No visual ads for smartphone or curve at Google.ca or Google.com.
+ There was a Honda ad and a Special K at Yahoo.com, but not Yahoo.ca
Conclusion - we're still somewhat protected from these in Canada if we stick to the .ca versions of the search engine.
Google's paid search growth soft again in February by Juan Carlos Perez, Computerworld (Mar 28)
From excerpts from a comScore report online advertising is softening and will affect Google's revenue stream.
"In February, clicks on Google's U.S. search ads grew 3.1% year-on-year. ...
Coupled with a 0.3% year-on-year decline in January, also per comScore, a trend is emerging that Google's pay-per-click (PPC) ad business may be losing steam, after powering the search company to mindblowing levels of revenue and profit growth for years."
Google has had difficulty getting into display advertising, though that may change with the acquisition of DoubleClick.
"In November, Yahoo ranked first in the U.S. in display ad impressions with a 19% share, followed by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive at 16.3%, while Microsoft came in third with 6.7%, according to comScore. Google took seventh place with 1%."
Google: It's Official, We Own DoubleClick by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (March 11)
EU approved Google's acquisition of the online advertising operation, DoubleClick.
The Secret Of Large Term Lists (It's All In The Bidding) by Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Search Engine Land (Feb 25)
Insight into what "PPC advertisers" must consider when picking words and phrases to generate 'pay per clicks'.
Has a good description of 'long tail'
Q: "Head terms"? "Tail terms"? What do you mean?A: Chris Anderson introduced the Long Tail concept in a 2004 Wired article, then later expanded it on his blog and in his book. The Long Tail argues that virtual retailers with lower inventory holding costs can carry more SKUs, and that the aggregate sales from many non-best-sellers can top sales from best sellers.
The Long Tail is a merchandising idea, but the metaphor has been stretched to other areas ("paid search is the long tail of advertising", "terrorism is the long tail of war", "microbrews are the long tail of beer"). In linguistics, Zipf's Law says the frequency of word use follows a power law, with a tiny set of popular words seeing huge usage, and a huge number of words seeing small usage. In paid search, high search volume single- or double-word phrases are called "head terms", and three- or four-word phrases with lower traffic are "tail terms."
Figures on the growth of online advertising:
"As consumers spend more time on the Internet, companies are redistributing advertising dollars from traditional media to online media to follow this trend. In its quarterly wrap-up report, IDC says total U.S. Internet ad spending in the fourth quarter of 2007 (4Q07) grew nearly 28% over the same quarter in 2006 to $7.3 billion. For the full year 2007, online ad revenue grew 27% year over year to $25.5 billion.
IDC research also found that Google's net U.S. market share declined for the first time in two years due to slower growth in domestic fourth quarter sales. The market leader's net U.S. Internet advertising market share was down 0.5 percentage points to 23.7% last quarter compared to 3Q07. Google's estimated net U.S. Internet advertising sales (excluding the traffic acquisition costs they pay out to the partners in their networks) grew by a little more than 40% in 4Q07, but its year-on-year growth rate in the quarter before had been 50%.
"If a merger between Microsoft's new media business and Yahoo! would come to pass, the combined entity would have a net U.S. advertising market share of about 17% based on our 4Q07 data," says Karsten Weide, program director for IDC's Digital Marketplace: Media and Entertainment service. "It would not quite bring Microsoft-Yahoo! to where Google is in online advertising in the U. S., but it would give them a much better fighting chance than if they went it alone.""
Google tops list of UK superbrands By Bonnie Malkin, Telegraph (Feb 25)
Top business brands in the UK are: Google, Microsoft, BP, and BBC. Google bumped BBC for top spot this year in the view of 1,500 professionals. It got this spot for its business in 'media-marketing services - advertising solutions'. Saatchi and Saatchi is in the same category and was 50th.
Full brand list is in Superbrands Official Top 500 (pdf)
"Google handles more than 75 per cent of all web searches in the UK. It also is the leader in paid searches, the fastest-growing segment of the multi-billion-dollar online advertising market."
Social media marketing strategies: Why and how By Kent Lewis, Pandia Search [Feb 12]
This is an eye opener. Universal search (blended search, integrated results) means that search marketers must find new ways to be listed above the fold. Mainly, they need a "social media marketing strategy".
It isn't enough to optimize a website -- "In Google, one domain can only generate a maximum of 2 listings per search, but social media gives you a chance to compete for the remaining 8 results: Generate a footprint on a variety of popular and relevant social media sites to get content in through Universal Search." Kent Lewis shows how with advice on building a community, get into the directories, be active in blogs and wikis, build profiles at social media sites - there's a list.
New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics Starcom Mediavest (Feb 12)
It's possible that there is "no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics" - the number of times an ad receives clicks may not be a measure of brand recognition or ad campaign success.
This is because the clickers are a fringe group on the web. Only 6% of Internet users click on the ads, but they account for 50% of the clicks. "In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. "
The study, Natural Born Clickers, was done by Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore.
, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. T
Danny Sullivan and Eric Enge discuss the Evolving Search Market Stone Temple Consulting (Feb 11)
Eric Enge and Danny Sullivan, two very knowledgeable search marketing gurus, discussed several trends in web search today, and their implications for search advertising.
+ several engines introduced blended search in 2007 in various forms. Sullivan predicts that Google will be doing more this year. Blended search has helped in the "verticalization of search" - essentially that people see the images or video in the search results and don't have to think to click on a tab for a special collection. The mix of content types, however, does complicate the work of search engine optimizers.
+ social bookmarking does not seem to be affecting ranking yet. Danny Sullivan says that Yahoo is not using del.icio.us or Flickr to influence rankings. But building links is important - and activity in social media will be part of that.
+ personalization has had a weak start. Everyone is trying to personalize ads, starting with Microsoft, but actually personalizing search results has been slow to non-existant. Search marketers are relieved for now, since full personalization would make optimizing pages more difficult.
+ bookmarks do play a role in personalization. Google uses subscribers' Google bookmarks to assess interests.
+ content, both men maintain, is the most important factor in ranking - the content must add enough value that users will want to link to it.
+ search marketing will soon be part of mainstream marketin. Sullivan -- "... search integration is when you start to do a marketing campaign, you are thinking about search along side outdoor, television, print, radio, and all those sorts of things. You are thinking about search when you start creating taglines in the very beginning."
+ search is part of the economy and certainly of marketing - this cannot be ignored. Sullivan -- "We've only had search for about ten years. We are still not to the point where you hear many people talking about how search is being taught in college. It should be, but you do start hearing incidental things here and there. I don't know how you could be running a marketing course these days and not be taking about search. And, if you were going to college, and you are trying to learn how to be a marketer, and you are enrolled in a college course that did not have search as a significant part of the curriculum at this point, you should be finding another college. How can you ignore the amount of revenue that Google is making?"
Is Search A Lie? Can You Really Believe Google? Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week (February 08)
Can a PR firm manipulate results at Google (and other search engines) to the degree that this man claimed?
"I sat next to a a guy I’ve know for years from a major public relations/media relations firm at the World Economic Forum in Davos two weeks ago and he told me how his company manipulated search to improve the image of its clients."
One commenter advised, "... growing need for people to understand the difference between legitimate search results and PR-fueled, or otherwise manipulated, search results."
Yes, but identifying these results usually takes a fair amount of subject knowledge and awareness of techniques to notice the signs of the gamed results. No wonder people trust search results less .
New—And Unfortunate—Changes To Google Local Search Daniel Bower, Search Engine Land (Feb 6)
Makes the point that Google's new 10 item display of local results on queries pushes down the "natural" (aka organic) results - they don't show until you page down. Gives an example from the UK of removals in London. You can see the same with movers in Toronto .
Note: "Google determines whether to display a 10-Pack based upon geographical terms that are queried alongside business category terms."
Daniel Bower shows that Google's system for determining which 10 businesses to show can be "gamed" easily. He has looked closely at the system and concluded ... "My criticism derives from changes that reduce the overall quality of the results being displayed, that appear, in part, to have been motivated by financial ends."
Paid Search To Take Off In Canada Mke Sachoff, WebProNews (Nov 30)
"Canadian revenues from online advertising hit C $1.01 billion (US $894 million) in 2006, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, a jump of 80 percent in one year."
Google is king in Canada - "Google had 80 percent of all Canadian search engine queries in the second quarter of 2007. The company has a larger share of the market than in the U.S., where it accounted for 53 percent of queries in August 2007, according Nielsen//NetRatings."
Understanding Searcher Needs and Intent - Notes from SMX London 2007 Site Visibility (Nov 18)
Site Visibility is a blog on search marketing for people in the UK. This posting has notes from "Understanding Searcher Needs and Intent at SMX London". Gord Hotchkiss, one of the speakers, talked on understanding searcher needs.
"Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro talked about the concept of working memory, which means most people can only deal with a few ideas at the time, whether that’s products that fit their need or brands, which would suit them.
Gord said from his research users go through the following stages.
• Awareness
• Set criteria – also known as satisficing
• General Search - Leads to Ideas
• Specific Requests – leads to brands"
Good general model.
Making YouTube Pay Off Andy Greenberg, Forbes (Oct 10)
It won't be long before ads are linked to the videos we view. This article also gives some information on the indexing Blinkx can do.
"Blinkx released a tool Wednesday that lets online publishers place targeted text ads in any video embedded on a Web site based on the actual content of the video. That's a big contrast to Google's approach: Google figures out what ads to pair with a video based strictly on the video's title and any keywords attached to the clip. Blinkx software "listens to" and "watches" the video, then inserts text overlay ads based on the spoken words and to some extent, the images in the clip. That technology depends on algorithms developed by a longtime Google competitor, search engine Autonomy."
I wonder what ads will be attached to those thousands of pet videos.
Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Expands Google AdWords Agreement, Now Reselling AdWords in Canada Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal (Oct 10)
"Yellow Pages Group has entered into a new strategic agreement with Google to become the first Canadian based reseller of Google AdWords. Under the agreement, Yellow Pages Group will be able to provide its 425,000+ advertisers with setup and consulting on Google AdWords campaigns."
"Yellow Pages Group owns Canada’s most visited online yellow pages, YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca, along with CanadaPlus.ca, a local search network."
Yellow Pages clicks with Google MATT HARTLEY , Globe and Mail (Oct 9)
"Advertising partnership allows benefits of online market without challenging Web leader"
Of interest:: "In Canada, 86 per cent of Internet users are Google users, according to ComScore MediaMatrix data."
In defense of Ask's commercial advertising following my earlier posting -- Ask's Marketing taken to task, it has been pointed out to me (by a prominent search person) that Ask works to be "a search engine for all types of searching" - for everyone and with any need. Ask may advertise in Entertainment Tonight but it also advertises on National Public Radio in the US.
It has many kinds of ads too - including this one saved at eSnips that just has text, some clicks, and music at the end.
That's the plain, unadorned ad - not all that exciting. So I went to YouTube to see others including the one that Barbara Quint questioned. That one, and another, Kato , are done as musicals (Kato, my favourite, was in the style of a Gilbert and Sullivan operatta). Both were advertising the new Algorithm at Ask for ranking results with a follow-up message of Experience Instant Getification. I'm not sure about the message being conveyed - I will leave to others the figuring out of match of message to demographic segment, but I can say that the entertainment value is very high.
See more videos of Ask.com commercials at YouTube. Judge for yourself.
Google to show videos on other websites Michael Liedke, AP via Globe and Mail (Oct 9)
This is how Google is going to make money from YouTube - allow other websites to show the videos with an ad attached.
"The ads accompanying the outbound YouTube clips won't be in a video format. Instead, they will appear as a graphic straddling the video or as a link along the bottom." ... "The material sent to other websites will be confined to video from providers who sign consent forms." ... "If the broader distribution of video pays off, it could encourage Google to distribute other types of content, including news stories and audio files, across its vast network of advertising partners."
It's done through Google AdSense network. Maybe this is why Google stock went past $600 US today.
Google sees gold in 'widget' ads, AP via CNN Money (Sept 19)
"Google Inc. will try to cash in on the Internet's latest craze by distributing ads within "widgets" - the interactive capsules designed to bring more pizzazz to Web pages."
Does this ruin a good thing? Google has over 14,000 widgets (or gadgets as it calls them) that people can add to their iGoogle personal page. Now those widgets can come with ads - as long as they will appeal to the user.
Andrew Goodman commented in Traffick - Google's Gadget Ads Rolling Out - hinting that the desirability or usefullness of the gadget might be lessened with ads attached. Also has this interesting line - "There are editorial policies governing Google Gadget Ads. These include "not exceeding 50% utilization of a user's computer" through things like "heavy animation sequences.""
PC World has some examples of these gadget ads - Google Tests Interactive Ads - James Niccolai, IDG News Service
"The format allows companies to build ads that include audio, video, games and live data feeds, and to spruce them up with the Flash and JavaScript programming languages. The ads wind up looking like small Web pages within a Web page, and people can save them to a blog or their iGoogle home page."
Interview with Chris Sherman of Third Door Media by Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog (Sep 17)
Chris Sherman, currently Executive Editor at Search Engine Land, has been involved with search engines from the earliest days when WebCrawler and Yahoo were the two dominant features (1994 - that long ago!). There's a short bio here, and some background on the Search Engine Conference. Has advice for people in search marketing.
Of interest - innovations that will affect mobile or local search: "Maps combined with images rock my universe. I can easily see a day when you do a local search and your results include thumbnail images of brick & mortar storefronts. Those images can in turn be the virtual storefront for the millions of small businesses that aren’t and probably won’t have web sites - hosted by the search engines. I think you’ll also start to see some immersive experiences where you’re not really searching as much as exploring ... "
Google Plans to Put Video Ads Into Search Results by Bryan Gardine, Wired Blogs (Sept 7)
I think the big bang I just heard was the other shoe dropping. Google moved to "universal search" to blend results from web and video and other formats, it owns YouTube, it excels at advertising - it follows that there will be video ads.
"At CitiGroup's Technology Summit in New York this week, Google's Business Product Manager for Ads Quality Nicholas Fox said the company will be moving ahead with integration of video and image ads within sponsored search results."
Will this clog my dsl broadband (Sympatico is already slow), or make extra demands on my aging computer? Will there be plug-ins we can use to block these ads?
The "Slums" Of Search by Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Jun 29)
The presence of big brand names in the sponsored results that show in search engine results makes a difference in user perspective on value. Canadian companies are 3 to 4 years behind the US in adopting paid search with the result that known vendors rarely show and searchers distrust what they do see.
"As more advertisers adopt search and are promoted to the top spot through the quality of their ads and votes of confidence on the part of users through their click throughs, the more valuable this real estate becomes from the user's perspective. In no longer becomes a "slum" but a prime destination."
Finding Success in Social Media by Eric Enge, Searchday (June 20)
It's important to have a profile in the social networking sites -- "Setting up profiles for yourself or your clients on social media sites is an excellent idea. First of all, it prevents someone else from creating a profile on the social media site using your name. Second of all, it is great for reputation management (more on that in a moment). Thirdly some social media site profiles do actually pass PageRank, which you can choose to pass back to your main site."
Lists several sites and gives guidelines.
SEM expert Jill Whalen on organic search engine optimization, Google and more, Pandia (May 7)
"Pandia talks to Jill Whalen about organic search engine optimization, the Social Web, personalization and her lack of trust in Google."
Of interest re social web:
"Pandia: Search engine marketing used to be about on page optimization — filling in title and headline tags etc – and link building. Now people are talking more and more about the social web and social marketing optimization.Jill: Yes, with the social web, it has become more complicated. However, I do not think “mom and pop websites” – i.e. smaller company sites or personal sites – have to worry about this. They do not need to get on Digg to get relevant visitors. That is not where they would find their target audience. "
Google and Yahoo to dominate US Paid Search market in 2007, BrowserMedia (Apr 20)
"An article published by eMarketer has some interesting figures on the US paid search advertising market, a market dominated by Google and Yahoo.
Paid Search makes up the largest slice of the US online advertising market, with spending on paid search making up 42.5% of total online advertising spend last year."
Internet advertising in Canada surpasses the $1-billion mark by KEITH MCARTHUR, Globe and Mail (May 1)
"The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, which represents advertisers, agencies and websites, said online advertising spending totalled $1.01-billion in 2006, up 80 per cent from $562-million in 2005."
"Spending on online classifieds and directories showed the fastest growth, up 120 per cent to $273-million in 2006, according to the IAB. E-mail marketing grew 82 per cent to $20-million; search marketing grew 79 per cent to $353-million. And display advertising - the most mature online ad medium - grew 58 per cent to $364-million."
Nearly all the news about Google and Yahoo concerns their successes in entering deals related to online advertising.
- Google buying DoubleClick
- Google managing radio advertising
- Yahoo's ad deal with newspapers whereby the newspapers give content and Yahoo sells advertising.
[See Yahoo announces online ad deal with publishers by Miguel Helft, New York Times via IHT (Apr 17)
Also, Google to Buy DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion by Juan Carlos Perez, PC World (Apr 13)]
Ultimately, these takeovers and deals will change the arrangements for advertiser or search marketer in reaching their markets too.
The Evolution Of Search by Chris Copeland, Search Insider (Apr 13)
Copeland sees search marketing changing from one that has been keyword based to one that seeks context for transactions. He doesn't mention it, but personalization efforts at the search engines will contribute to this as well.
Web content is all media, and in search we are just trying to find the bits we want. As Copeland says, "The media business has long been based on predicting user behavior. Media is placed where we believe consumers will be. Whether it is moviegoers sitting at home watching “Grey’s Anatomy” on Thursday night or men reading Sports Illustrated and wanting to see shaver ads, advertising’s track record is a history of planning and buying around where we predict people are and what appeals to them".
Google to Acquire DoubleClick for $3.1B, Reuters via eWeek (Apr 13)
"Web advertising leader Google Inc. said on Friday it has agreed to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a top online advertising network, for $3.1 billion, beating out other major Internet players with its bid."
Google hurts Yahoo with DoubleClick deal, Donna Bogatin, ZDnet blog (Apr 13)
Competition between Google and Yahoo intensifies. Yahoo had had an edge in graphical display advertising. "For agencies and advertisers, Google and DoubleClick will provide an easy and efficient way to manage both search and display ads in one place."
AOL introducing paid search service, Reuters via IHT (Apr 9)
AOL is launching AOL Search Marketplace, its own paid search service that is a a customized version of Google AdWords.
Of interest: "The company [AOL] is one of the Web's largest seller of display ads. But it has fallen behind in paid search, where advertisers bid on keywords from search terms.
Google's dominant text-search technology has made it the most powerful advertising channel on the Internet. According to Jupiter Research, about 25 percent of online ad spending went to Google in 2006 compared with 8 percent to AOL."
Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads (Beta) and Some Search Advertising History, ResourceShelf (Mar 22)
Payment arrangements for ads may be changing to a "cost per action" rather than pay-per-click. The advertiser pays for lead acquisition or some other measureable result. This is the method used at Snap.com (Bill Gross invented Overture and pay-per-click), and in a pilot at Google.
Cats and Mice: The Shifting Sea of Search Results, SEOBook (Apr 2)
This what is wrong with search -- "Google can never show the most relevant results for everything. No matter what algorithmic loopholes they close they inadvertently open up others. And anything they trust gets abused by marketers."
Lists all the acts by search engines to limit spam and all the counteracts by spammers to get around it and find other holes.
Buyers and people looking for information interpret search results differently, Pandia (Feb 22)
New market research study tell us that "buyers view more search results and are more brand orientated than information searchers". That part isn't surprising. These buyer searchers look at the organic search results 98% of the time, and the top 3 sponsored listing 96%; they look at more and spend more time. Infomation searchers look at fewer and spend less time.
The lesson - get placed near the top of the organic results to be seen.
Mamma.com Announces Partnership with Entrieva Inc. -- "Technology platform will optimize search advertising revenues" -- Marketwatch (Jan 25)
Here's a partnership -- "Entrieva's ClickSense(TM) contextual targeting solution will enable highly relevant search-based text ads to be served on web pages when users type commercially based queries. As the ad achieves a higher degree of contextual relevance, the ads become more valuable to the viewer and perform better for both publishers and advertisers. ... The technology will be implemented on the Mamma.com search engine and will also be integrated into the Copernic Desktop Search software."
People seem to be loosing interest in Desktop search. Will this really work?
Law Professor Predicts Wikipedia’s Demise, Thomas Claburn, Information Week (Dec 5, 2006)
Will Wikipedia be "crushed under the weight of an automated assault by marketers and others seeking online traffic"?
"As marketers turn to automated tools to alter Wikipedia entries in order to generate online traffic, the professor predicts Wikipedians will burn out trying to keep entries clean. "
Optimizing Images for Search Engines By Grant Crowell, SearchDay (Dec 28, 2006)
People are paying attention to making their images easier to find. A panel discussion at the Search Engine Strategies Conference revealed that image search "is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL."
Google Images holds largest market share - 72% according to Hitwise.
Image search optimization is important to promote products. "The panelists agreed that image search optimization is a necessity for merchants to incorporate into their marketing plans. "Shoppers are visual. They simply need to see what they're buying," said Evans. She also said she regarded image optimization as "the next frontier of search for merchants.""
Google makes 20 cents per search? by Greg Linden, Geeking with Greg (Dec 27)
Google may be making $.20 per search while Yahoo received $.10 to $.11 per search in 2006. Data comes from article in Business Week, Why Yahoo's Panama Won't Be Enough.
That article looks at ways Yahoo might match Google. It can't rely on search-related text ads which comprise only 46% of the online advertising market. "Yahoo has to wring more money from all of its available inventory. That means attracting advertisers to the social-networking and user-generated content that has ballooned on Yahoo's site, in some cases growing faster than Yahoo's premium properties and creating tons more inventory on which Yahoo can serve ads."
Mentions competiting ad models and services: TACODA (behavioral targeting) and Quigo (branded sites).
Brands for the Chattering Masses By KEITH SCHNEIDER, New York Times (Dec 17 ) [Requires registration]
The times are changining for marketers and brand meisters. The days of the disembodied voice advertising Kraft recipes on Ed Sullivan are over. Today agencies like Nielsen BuzzMetrics do the work online.
"The company, an A. C. Nielsen unit formed this year in a merger of three smaller companies, asserts that it has welded together technology, communications and business expertise in a new way; in essence, it can gain access to the electronic musings of millions of people to learn about the values, desires and opinions that start marketing trends. Essentially, BuzzMetrics represents the entrepreneurial convergence of brand- and online-business specialists holding M.B.A.’s — several of whom trained at Procter & Gamble — with computer scientists who say they are building the digital equivalent of a crystal ball."
And they do it using search engines that scour blogs and community places to see what is being said.
"The search engines retrieve phrases, opinions, keywords, sentences and images, and the company runs the data through processing programs powerful enough to sift millions of messages simultaneously. By analyzing vocabulary, language patterns and phrasing, the programs determine whether comments are positive or negative, and whether the authors are men or women, young or old."
BuzzMetrics is one. Others are Umbria, Cymfony, BrandIntel (Toronto); Biz3, and MotiveQuest. (All but BrandIntel are in the US).
People turn off ads on the television, block popups, and refuse telephone sales. What's left? Comments on products at review sites.
"At the same time, new surveys show that 90 percent of consumers trust word-of-mouth suggestions, and that some make purchases based on such guidance. “Consumer-created content is still new enough that it’s much more influential at driving brand awareness than driving purchases,” said Ms. Riley, the Jupiter analyst. “People who read about something on a blog will generally do some further research, either by asking friends or through a search engine, for example, before forming their opinion,” she said."
Nielsen BuzzMetrics is owned by VNU, a Netherlands company. BuzzMetrics took over Intelliseek, notable for Web search and software for several years, and became Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Mr. Kadayam, previously of Intelliseek, has created Floodgate - "It is a program that displays in real time what people around the world are saying on thousands of blogs and message boards. The program shows each new message as a blinking green dot that fades to light blue and then vanishes after a few minutes. The program can cluster messages according to general themes, and track keywords and phrases and the full content of what the writer is saying."
It's really all about commerce, but more than ever before, the consumer will be heard.
Thanks to Barbara S for this lead.
Danny Keeps a Consistent Thread in Pubcon Keynote by Andrew Goodman, Traffick (Nov 17) -- comments on Danny Sullivan's keynote speech to PubCon, a conference by WebMasterWorld for webmasters and people working with search marketing/optimization.
"Overall, Danny's theme was one we've heard him touch on consistently: exploring what makes search such a powerful marketing tool, one that resonates with users/consumers in a way that flies in the face of traditional interruption marketing. "
Get the impression that search engine marketing isn't respected, or seen as legitimate advertising - yet. Also that there are worries that the search players (Google, Yahoo etc) are deviating from search and instead doing video and radio - and they want to pull in advertising. Will this cause a decline in search engine marketing, and if so, what would those consequences be?
Yahoo Readies New Search Engine, By David Shabelman, The Deal (November 7, 2006)
Yahoo has had trouble for some time with handling paid listings. This announcement indicates that it has a new service ready for the advertisers, but will users see a difference also?
"Yahoo is preparing to roll out its second-generation search engine, dubbed "Project Panama," which will replace the platform it has used since acquiring Overture Services Inc. for $1.6 billion in 2003.
The company's new search engine will be more helpful for users and more lucrative for advertisers, said Steve Mitgang, senior vice president of advertising platforms and products at Yahoo."
Google: Where Should It Go from Here? by Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert (Oct 24)
Comments on an article in Business Week -- Observers: Google should focus on search AP (Oct 20) -- many people have ideas on what Google should be doing especially in matters related to search. Tyburski concludes, "I think Google's priority is advertising. That is, after all, where the money is". I have to agree - they will have to pursue those areas where they can attract more advertising revenue.
NET SENSE: Cracking the social network code Commentary: Communities will likely drive ad growth, Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Jul 25)
Not too long ago, Google, following Overture's lead, adopted sponsored search - ads that are based on amount advertiser pays and the popularity of the ad. Francisco sees the next big source of revenue to come from displaying ad on the social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube where more people are gathering and spending time. It's like putting an ad in a bus station.
"By 2008, we might just be saying that one of the fastest growing online ad opportunities is what I'll call "search-filtered display ads." In other words, marketers will increasingly take someone's search history or search behavior, and use that information to target ads on social network pages they browse."
You thought you were already bombarded with ads - sponsored listings, text ads, banner ads, embedded videos - it's about to get much heavier.
The Revolution Will Be Televised, Details After These Ads by Google, SEO News at Stepforth (May 24)
"Google introduced a new age of advertising earlier this week by announcing plans to distribute video commercials on websites in its pay per click AdWords network. The move opens the once exclusive marketing channel of televised ads to a far wider array of small and medium businesses."
Marketwatch has a video -- Capitalizing on the online video explosion -- in which Richard Fetyko of Merriman Curhan Ford "discusses companies who stand to gain from the explosion in online video, which he calls the next "big catalyst" for the Web."
The Counterattack On Google - How Yahoo and MSN are scrambling to slow its search-ad juggernaut - Business Week ONline (May 8) -- This isn't about search, it's about advertising.
" These tiny text ads, usually no more than a dozen words in length, generated more than $10 billion last year and are expected to top $14 billion in 2006, according to eMarketer. Increasingly, Google, Yahoo, and others send the ads along, for a split of the revenues, to a network of publishing partners so they can run alongside other types of online content, from blog entries to news stories on CNN.com. For instance, auto site Edmunds.com showcases Google text ads for local dealers or car insurance companies alongside its content."
MSN is going to start using demographics (or what it knows about you) for text-ad placement. Yahoo isn't saying but it might be aiming at matching ad to search query and pages of online content as Google does.
ISO Best-Selling Model for Web Classifieds By Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Apr 20) -- Suddenly the Web became the place to search for classifieds, at least in the United States. These are vertical search engines that "scrape" the web for listings. Oodle, as an example, indexes more than 15 million ads from across the US Web. Google Base invites people to list what they want to sell. This article describes several more. How will this affect newspapers who have depended on revenue from selling ad space?
Google integrates classifieds into search results by Charlene Li, Forrester (Apr 6) -- Charlene Li noticed that ads for real estate and cars were turning up in Google results in the form of suggested refinements to the search. The refinements were the same as those that show in Google Base. I can't replicate this in google.ca or google.com. Google is likely experimenting with a view to employing Google Base on certain types of queries.
Local Search to Grow to $13 Billion by 2010, Marketing Vox (Feb 16)
"The Kelsey Group predicts that the global market for local search, including online Yellow Pages, will grow at an annual rate of 30.5 percent in the next five years, reaching $13 billion in 2010 from the $3.4 billion in 2005, report MediaPost and ClickZ."
Two articles by Andrew Goodman at SearchDay to report on Danny Sullivan's keynote address at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference.
Search Marketing's About People and Principles, Not Just Algorithms, Part 1 - Interesting mainly for comments about the movie Good Night and Good Luck where "plumes of smoke in Clooney's movie symbolize the lingering potential for bias, and the hazy but not invisible pressures to self-censor controversial views". Presents a series of obloquies as a method of describing the main techniques used by the search marketing community and complaints about them.
Search Marketing's About People and Principles, Not Just Algorithms, Part 2
"Sullivan senses the tide turning in terms of public acceptance, predicting that ongoing education by experienced community members, and a rising bar for what constitutes minimum professional standards, will eventually win the day in the battle for more positive PR (and we don't mean PageRank) for the search marketing industry."
The Definitive Guide To 2006 by David Berkovitz, Search Insider (Jan 10) - Describes 8 developments expected for search in 2006 among them will be combining search with behavioral targetting. MSN started demographic targetting. Can behavioral be far behind?
The State of Search Engine Marketing by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jan 9)
-- New SEMPO report on the search engine marketing industry shows "U.S. and Canadian SEM industry has grown from $4 billion to $5.75 billion, with paid placement accounting for 83% of the total spend." Search engine optimization was 11% of a total of $643 million. Market is expected to grow to $11 billion by 2010.
-- 95% of search marketers advertise through Google, and 60% through Yahoo.
A-List Web Sites Use Hidden Text to Fool Google, Yahoo! and MSN by Robert G Medford, SEO News (Dec 19, 2005)
Medford has found that some big and well known companies have used "black hat" search engine optimizing techniques to get higher rankings in search engine results. These have mainly been variations of hidden text, loading key words into no-script tags and CSS styles, as two examples. Among the companies that Medford found were GM, Harry and David, and Fairmont Hotels. Medford has screen shots and text to show how the spamming was done.
Medford notes that the "methods employed by the offending sites may be unethical, but they are not illegal" and that the site owners may not be aware that these techniques have been used.
Paid Search to Grow 41% With Google Leading the Way by Kevin Newcomb, Clickz (Jan 4) No wonder Google's share price is predicted to climb to $600. This article says that Google had 64% of the paid search market in 2005 estimated at $10 billion. This is expected to grow to $14 billion in 2006 with Google keeping the lion's share. According to Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray -- "Over the next five years, we estimate the paid search industry will grow at a 37-percent CAGR [compound annual growth rate] to more than $33 billion in 2010, and we expect Google to capture the lion's share of that revenue and grow faster than the market as a whole."
AOL-Google: Who Gets What By Steve Rosenbush, Business Week Online (Dec 21)
"Both sides stand to benefit from their wide-ranging $1 billion alliance, with the search giant perhaps gaining the most."
Google bought 5% of AOL for $1 billion, thus elbowing out Microsoft and Yahoo, and continuing as the search engine for AOL. But to win this it has to allow AOL to place display ads on Google pages. Although this is a change in Google's position on ads, the analysis in this article suggests that Google could attract a new type of online advertiser and gain in revenue.
In the end, it is really all about advertising. Remains to be seen what searchers will gain.
Sponsored Search: A Brief History, by Daniel C. Fain and Jan O. Pedersen, ASIS&T (Dec/Jan 2006) -- It's time we recognized that sponsored search makes free searching possible.
"Sponsored search has evolved to satisfy users' need for relevant search results and advertisers' desire for qualified traffic to their websites, and it is now considered to be among the most effective marketing vehicles available."
Keyword Prices Rise in Q3; Ranking Positions Drop by Christine Blank, DMNews (Nov 23)
" Cost per click rose from $27 on average in July to $30 in September, according to Performics' Third Quarter Search Trend Report, which tracks search marketing campaigns.
In addition, cost per keyword increased from $20 to $26 from July to September because of the "natural growth of search," said Cam Balzer, director of search strategy at Performics. "Campaigns are getting bigger and growing across the board." "
Organic Search Rankings on the Move, or Pink Hats Meet Green Hats by Andrew Goodman, Traffick (Nov 16) -- about changes in the ranking algorithms that are happening at Google and Yahoo. Google's this year is called Jagger, and Yahoo's is Weather Report. These changes are usually done to block spam, but can mean serious dislocation for businesses that had "optimized" their pages for keywords. Goodman sees a connection at Yahoo in the reordering to Yahoo's practice of selling "paid inclusion" - ie to pay to be included in the "organic" results; and at Google and Yahoo, to encourage businesses to buy sponsored listings.
"Assuming there is another loud outcry, you can expect Jagger to be watered down some in a month or two. But it will have achieved two intended effects: removing spam and reminding business owners to buy advertising on the search engines."
"This brings up another twist: with Yahoo! Search, it seems more likely that you'll continue to be able to pay for inclusion (as you can now) in the organic rankings to avoid, in essence, being "Jaggerized." "
Goodman also mentions Yahoo's Mindset, where the searcher can adjust the relevance ranking towards shopping or towards research.
Web Increasingly Cluttered By Sites Full of Paid Links By Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Aug 11) - my sentiments exactly - "Everywhere I turn online these days I stumble over junky sites that do little more than clutter up the search results at Google and Yahoo." She's talking about the link directories that turn up as paid listings and even more annoyingly as "organic".
Another development is to write for the Web to attract the search engines and hence the advertising. This is what happens at ArticleInsider.com run by InfoSearch Media Inc. "The articles were written under contract by more than 200 writers and were commissioned specifically to get listed in search engines, according to chief executive Steve Lazuka."
But the shocker is "content scraping" -- "software programs that grab snippets of text from a variety of different Web sites and reassemble them into sentences on particular topics to help flesh out garbage Web sites."
Marketers Curious About Jeeves' New Bag by Kevin Newcomb, Clickz (Aug 2) - Ask Jeeves is offering a new auction-based paid-search program.
"The ads will appear on search results pages on the Ask Jeeves site, as well as on its syndication network. That network includes several properties owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, which completed its acquisition of Ask Jeeves last month."
Search Personalization and PPC Search Marketing by Kevin Lee, Clickz (Jul 15) - Lots of discontent with the relevance of search results at the big engines. Predicts that search engines will do more with personalization to improve relevance. Notes that Amazon's A9 was an early adopter. Says that all search engines may begin to take into account age, gender, geography, previous search, previous click, affinity to paid results, operating system, ISP.
"As marketplaces get better at pairing advertiser listings with searcher intent, smaller marketers may be unable to deal with the additional complexity of thousands of keyword ads (search and contextual) that can also be targeted by geography, gender, age, and perhaps even behavioral factors. These marketers may need to partner with specialists and technologists to attack the marketplace with advanced analytics and campaign management. Many marketers still haven't gotten their arms around the existing search advertising and contextual auction marketplaces."
Web Content: Knowing Whether It’s to Sell You or Inform You by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUP Digital (July) - Interviewed Kevin Lee of ClickZ about paid search and began to see the worth to consumers as well as businesses.
"Before talking with Lee, I was skeptical. I mostly ignore paid links, as I suspect many consumers do. I also understood that Lee has a vested interest in promoting paid search. But, like he does in his columns, he presented some powerful arguments in support of paid search for consumers and businesses alike."
Report: Google to Start New Payment System AP via Yahoo News (June 17) - Some might say Google is losing focus. It plans to introduce an online payment system that would compete with PayPal.
"Expanding into online payments might make Google less dependent on advertising, which accounted for nearly all of its first-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion. The merchants who run auctions on eBay are major buyers of Google's ads, which appear alongside search results."
Sponsored search to grow 47% in 2005 in Net Imperative (June 13)
"Overall, Merrill Lynch forecast that online advertising in the US would reach $12.4bn this year and $25bn by 2009. This means that sponsored search would account for 45% of all online adspend in 2005."
Use of search engines is the driver to this growth, and it has been increasing with the spread of broadband use.
Study: Search Engines Still Fail to Disclose Ads by Pamela Parker, Kevin Newcomb, Clickz (Jun 9) - Seems search engines aren't getting it about the value of full disclosure of paid results, whether of paid listings or paid inclusion. Consumers Union has released a fourth, and unfavourable, report on disclosure by search engines of placement and inclusion of paid results.
"A follow-up to a 2004 study examining the ways search engines identify and explain paid search results, the latest study found little improvement over last year, and concluded that none of the 15 search engines examined had satisfactorily disclosed their practices."
"Of the top search engines, AOL Search, Google, and Yahoo! Search Marketing were given good marks for disclosure, but showed minimal change over the year before. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! Search were downgraded for making headings less visible, and removing hyperlinks to disclosure statements. MSN Search was the only major search engine to show improvement, largely because MSN discontinued its paid inclusion and content promotion programs, giving them less to disclose."
Full report at Consumer Reports WebWatch (Jun 9) - Still Searching for Disclosure - Re-evaluating How Search Engines Explain the Presence of Advertising in Search Results by Jorgen J Wouters.
Report shows that engines are downplaying the sponsored results by muting headings or labels. Ask Jeeves in particular has gone from good to poor by making disclosures harder to find and reducing visibility of headings. Yahoo similarly has toned down the headings for sponsored results, though on my machine they still seem fairly clearly marked. The main problem is that Yahoo makes no effort to mark paid inclusion, whereas in the past you could guess they were part of the top 20. Only two engines were found to have improved and both are metasearch engines: CNet's Search.com has better headings and added a disclosure statement ("about this page"); Websearch.com puts sponsored results at the top and indicates sponsored by (though very faintly).
Stepping Up Search: How Behavioral Targeting Can Enhance ROI by Scott Ferber, MediaPost (June 6) - Getting you to click on a paid listing is only the first step of a long endeavour to get you to come back. This article explains "behavioural marketing", a mining of anonymous data on what you (and others) look at when browsing sites.
"The notion behind behavioral targeting is relatively simple. Using anonymous data, it enables marketers to deliver ads to consumers based on their recent online behavior--i.e., what they recently bought (or basketed and didn't buy), where they surfed, or what they searched for. Based on this information, ads can be tailored to drive users back to the advertiser's site to complete the desired registration, purchase, or other action."
Intermix is just the start - Commentary: Ramifications of adware suit are broad by Bambi Francisco, (May 3) Marketwatch [requires free registration]
Likened the hawkers that greet cruise ships to live popups - exactly so.
Definition of adware: "adware is software that's mysteriously installed on computers without user consent. It can track user activity and serve up advertisements related to that activity. It's typically bundled with applications, like screensavers, or music file-sharing applications or when people mistype URLs."
There may be some suits against adware companies in the United States. Notes that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has sued Intermix Media Inc.
Of particular interest are Francisco's comments about Ask Jeeves -- "Ask Jeeves is particularly worth noting since there have been a number of independent sources alleging that Ask Jeeves uses distributors of spyware." -- This explains why SpySweeper picked up ask.com cookies on my computer. Ask Jeeves itself may not be doing anything wrong but the advertisers it accepts may be.
Danny Sullivan picked up the story in Ask Jeeves Accused Of Pushing Spyware SEW Blog (May 2) and asked AsK Jeeves, who denied the accusations. John Park, senior vice president for desktop products at Ask Jeeves, said that Ask Jeeves was no longer " flagged by Microsoft or any of the other products that are mentioned below". But, as I mentioned, the latest SpySweeper still thinks it's adware.
Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO By Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (Apr 27) - a strong defense of the search engine optimizer as a key partner in web page design.
"How can search engines not be considered by designers? More people use search engines than Internet Explorer and Firefox combined, because EVERYONE uses search engines, regardless of their browser. If you haven't constructed your site with search engines in mind, they may not properly index and rank your pages. In other words, you built it -- but no one may come."
Gold Mine Found in Web Searches , by Lisa Baertlein, Reuters via Yahoo News (Apr 18) -- has some figures about paid listings.
+ "Research shows global Web search advertising revenue, which is big business for the two Internet giants, will be almost $8 billion in 2005 -- more than 20 times what it was four years ago."
+ "Global search advertising revenue, which was $369 million in 2001, is expected to hit $7.9 billion this year, according to research from Piper Jaffray & Co."
+ "An estimated 5 percent to 20 percent of clicks are believed to be fraudulent -- the result of people clicking on ads to drive up advertiser costs or to make a profit for Web site publishers who get a cut of revenue."
+ "According to Piper Jaffray, the cost to acquire a customer is about $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Data for television was not included."
Regarding click fraud, Andrew Goodman notes a scandal-mongering mentality in much of the press about click fraud, and presents his own view on working with the advertising programs of Google and Overture.
The Search Advertising Story and the Quest for Balance (Apr 17)
New Version of MSN Messenger Released by Allison LiAprnn, AP via Yahoo News (April 6)
" The newest version of MSN Messenger instant messaging product, released late Wednesday, allows consumers to download free backgrounds, pictures and other content tied to specific ad campaigns. The hope is that users will then share those downloads with other consumers — providing another boost to advertisers, who pay Microsoft for the privilege."
Google and Yahoo! accused of click fraud collusion By ElectricNews.Net (Apr 6) -- Lawsuit in the United States charging that Google and Yahoo have been colluding to overcharge for click throughs on pay-per-click ads.
"Led by an Arkansas company called Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, the plaintiffs want the lawsuit certified as a class action. They allege that the defendants, which include Google, Yahoo!, FindWhat, Ask Jeeves, America Online and Look Smart, improperly charged advertisers for incidents "click fraud"."
Advertisers pay for each click. Click fraud is the practice of clicking repeatedly on ads to run up the bill of a competitor or other disliked company. Search engines try to control it but do they control it enough?
Victims of pay-per-click ad inflation At the Internet Stock Blog (Mar 18) -- Ad brokers like Yahoo and Google are making more money through higher charges of pay-per-click advertising but the higher costs are a burden on the companies who depend on their ads to get sales. The Internet Stock Blogs examines the effects on several companies. Amazon's marketing expense, as an example, went up 44%.
Microsoft launches into paid search by Stefanie Olsen. Silicon.com (March 16 2005) MSN is about to show its new pay-per-click advertising service, to be called adCenter.
Of interest: "Google fields 35.1 per cent of the searches online, followed by Yahoo at 31.8 per cent and MSN at 16 per cent, according to ComScore qSearch. If the number of searches translates to the percentage of the ad market, MSN generates roughly $1.6bn annually from search, minus the portion shared with Overture."
A New F-Word for Google Search Results By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Mar 8) - new study that shows that people read a web page in a pattern that is the same as the letter F -- " with the eye travelling vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right, as if something caught the participant's attention." People gave more attention to the top 3 organic results declining to onlye 20% for the 10th ranked item. People also look at sponsored ads more when they are at the top of a page than at the side.
Floater ads create 'an arms race' by Jonathan Miller, NY Times via International Herald Tribune (Feb 26) If you were wondering what those new ads that float across a screen and aren't stop by popup blockers (or anything else), they are called floaters - and also overlays or popovers.
"The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease."
Sites using these the most in 2004 according to Nielsen/NetRatings were msn.com, msnbc.com, hotmail.com, espn.com and yahoo.com.
Blogs and Blog Advertising By Peter Figueredo, Target Marketing (March 2005) - Is it worth it to buy context-sensitive cost-per-click advertising for delivery through weblogs? Might be good for e-commerce companies if the ads turn up in successful weblogs.
Of interest: "According to a survey of more than 17,000 blog readers conducted by BlogAds, 61 percent of readers are 30 years of age and older, and 75 percent earn more than $45,000 a year. A surprising 66.7 percent of blog readers have clicked on a blog ad in the past. "
Yahoo to Rename Overture Services Brand AP via Yahoo News (Mar 1) Overture will be renamed Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions in the United States and most international markets.
The arbitrageurs.com -- Commentary: VCs may fuel a future paid-search bubble -- Bambi Francisco, CBS Marketwatch (Mar 1) -- Sees the return of venture-backed startups in "niche or vertical search engines, comparison-shopping engines, or next-generation search engines". They are competing with Google and Yahoo over keywords and then reselling at a higher price - essentially an arbitrage transaction.
"For instance, NexTag, a popular comparison-shopping site, bids up the keywords "DVD player" to be listed as a sponsored link whenever someone searches those terms on Google. NexTag then sells that traffic to companies like Dell Computer".
Gives some examples: Become.com, new comparison shopper; Kayak, travel; Sidestep, also travel.
Very interesting.
The Four Horsemen of Vertical Search, Rob McGann, Clickz (Feb 23)
"The paid search market will more than double from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009, and that growth will be driven by the "four horsemen" of vertical search, according to a new study by JupiterResearch." Retail, financial services, travel, and media and entertainment as the "four horsemen" accounted for 79 percent of spend on paid search in the U.S. in 2004.
"The pricing of paid search advertising is also projected to grow strongly from 2004 to 2009. Revenue will grow from $13.50 per-thousand-queries in 2003 to $28.05 per-thousand in 2009."
Also see Study: Paid search to continue climbing, Dinesh Sharma, Cnet (Feb 23)
AlmondNet Debuts "Post-Search" Search Behavioral Ad Network by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch (Jan 26) How many different ways will advertisers use cookies and how much more in ads will Internet users tolerate?
"AlmondNet is unveiling a new program today to deliver advertising across the web targeted to the topics someone has searched on recently, including queries done on major search engines such as Google and Yahoo."
AlmondNet will partner with ISPs to build profiles of search activities by the people connected through that ISP. If a customer searches for cars (example given by Sullivan) and then goes to a site that has AlmondNet ads, AlmondNet will serve up car-related ads. Essentially AlmondNet will be personalizing ads - in itself, not a bad thing.
Article describes other forms of contextual ads delivered today. The cookies are anonymous - supposedly privacy is not infringed upon.
Online Ads & Search: Looking Back, Looking Forward by Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Jan 17) - Growth of online advertising is outpacing other media. But withint that online advertising there may be some shifts from increased cost-per-click on paid listings, and a slowing of advertising related to local search (though one would have thought that would start to take off with the local search facilities of the search engines.)
Of interest:
"According to Scevak, six out of every seven search engine queries results in a click on organic listings and only one out of seven clicks on paid listings. "
"According to a recently published research paper by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), 81.8% of the $4.087 billion spent last year on search marketing programs in the U.S. and Canada went to paid placement, while only 12.0% went to organic search engine optimization. Another 4.4% was spent on paid inclusion."
If people are ignoring the paid listings then companies should be putting their money into optimizing their web sites - not in buying key words.
LocalSearchGuide.org is to be a who's who of the local search online marketplace. Profiles the leading players and gives some historical perspective.
"... the Yellow Pages Association (www.ypassociation.org), along with supporting partners comScore, SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) and The Kelsey Group, is now offering the Local Search Guide, which profiles IYP, Search Engine and Search Tools companies’ Local Search capabilities, and includes viewpoints, glossaries and other resources. The Local Search Guide is updated frequently to add new companies and reflect changes in the industry. "
SearchTHIS: A Four Point Cautionary Tale By Kevin M. Ryan, iMedia (Nov 30) -- Picks out key warning points for search marketers from the eMarketer White Paper, Top Ten Ways to Make Search Marketing Work For You.
Of interest - search words becoming too expensive - "We may be starting to see a search disaster happening as well. eMarketer cited a Jupiter survey of June, 2003 in which 57 percent of respondents declared that many of their keywords had become too expensive for them and just over half were concerned they were paying too much for keywords.
Consumer backlash coming -- "...but the third revelation from eMarketer suggests there may be a consumer backlash on paid listings coming our way. Citing a survey completed by Intelliseek -- an overwhelming 66 percent majority of surfers distrust search ads."
Consumers going back to bookmarks? -- "The White Paper cites a WebSideStory study in direct navigation that states that entering a URL or using a bookmark as opposed to using a search engine increased 15 percent from 2002 to 2003."
Lycos - Ask Jeeves enter the organic SEO sector (November 23, 2004) Jim Hedger, ISEDB -- Ask Jeeves and Lycos have introduced services to help in optimising search engine results for the "organic" listings (ie non paid). Article describes operations of AJ and Lycos.
"That smaller search engines feel the need to draw revenues by providing organic search optimization services to clients shows how dominant Google, Yahoo and MSN are on the search landscape. Organic website optimization is an important form of mainstream advertising and like almost every other form of mainstream marketing is about manipulation. ... Search engine optimization is about manipulating site content to present information to electronic spiders. When the search firms blur the line between organic and obvious paid-advertising, search engine users have cause for concern. Now that two well known search firms have entered the organic market, that line may become even blurrier, a trend that should worry SEO practitioners."
Search Engine Disclosure: Better, but Still Wanting by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Nov 23) - Consumer WebWatch has revisited the matter of disclosure by search engines of their paid placements. SearchDay summarized the key findings - notably that most of the disclosure headings are difficult to read, meta-search engines are the worst offenders, and the disclosure statements are incomprehensible.
Rating Search Engine Disclosure Practices (Nov 24) Consumer Webwatch looked at The engines were 1stBlaze, AltaVista, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves (also My Search, My Way Search), Search.com, Google, InfoSpace Web Search, Lycos Network, MSN Search, Netscape Search, Overture, Web Search and Yahoo! Search.
They all comply but there is room for improvement. AOL Search was the clearest. Yahoo is clear in showing paid listings but will not disclose which results are from paid inclusion. Infospace marks individual items but faintly and will does not disclose that it uses paid inclusion. Google didn't have a page about disclosure policies.
Full report is at In Search of Disclosure: How Search Engines Alert Consumers to the Presence of Advertising in Search Results Consumer WebWatch (Nov 8)
Will Google Ban Affiliate Bidding? Traffick.com (Nov 16) - helps to explain why there are so many EBay advertisements everytime you run a search.
"So, from the standpoint of the poor user, it looks like too many advertisers are in there choking the system with dictionaries full of keywords that lead users only to a big-company site like eBay. And they're doing so using the keyword replace function for maximum coverage with minimum work. In other words, they're using generic ad copy and hoping to use the automated tool to make it seem somewhat personalized."
Please, Google - do something to stop this.
The free vs. subscription debate Commentary: Did the online ad model win? By Bambi Francisco, CBS.MarketWatch.com (Nov 16) [Registration required] Ratio of online ads to paid-for content is about 10:1.5. ONline ads are growing faster and vastly outweighing subscription fees as a way to make money on the Web. Maybe the Globe and Mail and CanWest will regret moving to the paid models.
New Report: Search Engine Disclosure of Advertising Search Engine Watch Blog (Nov 8) Consumers Union has examined the state of paid advertising on the Internet and published a 82 page report about it. In Search of Disclosure: How Search Engines Alert Consumers to the Presence of Advertising in Search Results [PDF] - This is a lot of reading. Gary Price has an excerpt. Or you can read the executive summary and the recommendations.
Here's what I pulled out.
- paid inclusion is not satisfactorily disclosed. (Is it disclosed at all?)
- meta-search engines don't "disclose paid placement". True - they have PPC engines embedded that don't label results as "sponsored sites". The Infospace family of meta-search engines are big offenders. I do think the Info.com one is better than others that are based on the Infospace metasearch because Sponsored Results are on the right and well marked.
- disclosures are hard to find. Ain't that the truth? Labelling is often in a faint grey colour.
Not noted in the executive summary (but maybe elsewhere) - sponsored listings on the first page are increasing - they may soon outnumber "organic" results. Search engines should be careful. They may kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
Also, how "organic" or natural are the results? Search engine marketers set up popular keywords in the title and by other means to place well in results. They buy hits for those keywords. This is legitimate business, but sometimes it is over the top. Search on Vioxx nsaids "side effects" - there are sure to be -law firms who have optimized to be found with any mention of vioxx.
It's a problem, but Consumer WebWatch is watching out for us.
Search Marketing Beyond Google and Overture y Dana Todd, SearchDay (Nov 4) Report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 2-5, 2004 about multitude of businesses selling pay-per-click ads.
"Google's network currently holds about 53% of the paid listings distribution on the Web, said Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner of Reprise Media, while Overture's networks holds 45%. That leaves only a fractional remainder, which is split between hundreds of Tier Two providers."
Online publishers rail against Google by Jemima Kiss, dot Journalism (Oct 27) Online publishers are not happy with Google especially and search firms in general. At a conference in the UK, Associated New Media managing director Andrew Hart was of the view that "internet search firms are 'parasites' that will eventually kill growth in the online publishing industry". They are worried that the big firms are influencing search results to promote their own sites and squeeze out the independents and smaller players. The Economist, no small publisher itself, had a delegate at the conference.
HighBeam Research Adds Advertising Revenue, Reaches One Million Member Milestone Business Wire (Oct 18) HighBeam Research will be adding targeted advertising to its service that will include serving up ads on searches done through e-Library. Even those who are paid members will see these. And they will get them in email alerts. Will this increase subscriptions or decrease them?
The Geo-Google Threat, 2004 Research and Markets (May 2004) -- abstract from a market research report that examines local paid advertising and the power of the text ad.
News expands paid-search terms Commentary: It's searched, therefore it's worth money by Bambi Francisco. CBS Marketwatch [requires subscription] (Oct 5) -- Marketers have been bidding up keywords from the news, lawyers have been buying the word vioxx. "At last check, that keyword Vioxx is attracting swarms of lawyers and driving the word up to $11.88 on Yahoo's Overture network." Paid search, the pay-per-click type, accounts for 40% of online advertising now. Concludes -- "Indeed, news has and will increasingly ignite advertisements as more people use the Web to get news and information and as marketers take advantage of the real-time nature to capture the big spike in traffic news events create."
Andrew Goodman considers the market for targeted paid listings in Canada while musing on the announcement that Overture is opening an office in Canada. Eh-per-click (Sept 20)
Search Expands Role As Online's Ad Engine By Joe Mandese MediaPost (Sept 20) Online advertising is growing at a rate of around 40% during the past year and in Q1 2004 reached $4.6 billion. Paid search (paid listings) make up about 40% of that, up from 29% a year earlier. Article has a breakdown of online spending by format.
Overture Shifting To Default Broad Match By Danny Sullivan, Searchday (Sep 2) - Overture will be introducing a capability for matching terms on a broad basis rather than responding only to exact matches. Advertisers will be able to target more terms, but they will also pay more.
Although online ad spending may double to $16.1 billion USD by 2009, growth in paid search will be slower. This is expected to slow down growth in Google's revenue as well.
Paid search growth may slow CNet - Reuters (Aug 8) "A new Internet advertising forecast shows slower growth for paid search listings in the next five years, a projection that raises questions about Web search leader Google's prospects as it goes public."
Consumer WebWatch finds Paid Listings Complicate Search for Quality Lawyers Online (July 2004) There are many find-a-lawyer services on the Web but most are mainly yellow pages with no quality checking. Only FindLaw.com and Lawyers.com are"diligent about omitting disbarred attorneys from listings". Even so that's not a recommendation since neither reallly does any performance review. They are marketing sites. One recommendation is to use non-profit referral services that have been screened by state bar associations.
On the other hand, maybe paid inclusion can help in moving content into search results. Zachary Rogers, writing for Clickz (July 19) thinks it is -- Visible and Relevant: A Paid Inclusion Case Study Carlson Hotels has used paid inclusion to make its property-specific content about its hotels more visible.
Guess What -- You Asked For Those Pop-Up Ads Business Week Online (June 28) Adware makes its way to your machine through various means, some of which are related to Yahoo. Yahoo and Claria (Gator) are partners in this. Seems it's very effective. No mention in this article about how people can stop adware from getting a foothold on their computers. (Use Ad-Aware).
Going Beyond FTC Paid Inclusion Disclosure Guidelines by Danny Sullivan. SearchDay (June 17) - argues that search engines should mark the items that are paid inclusion - in part to disabuse people of the notion that sites that pay to be indexed more often get a boost in the rankings.
How Google Took the Work Out of Selling Advertising by James Fallows. New York Times (June 13) - considers Google the leader is selling search-driven ads. "With AdSense, anyone who operates a Web site - a blogger, a community activist, a retailer - installs a bit of code that transfers control of part of each page to Google. Then users who visit the page will see a short list of ads that, according to Google's analysis, represent the most likely match between the subjects discussed there and the advertisers' products - ads for veterinary supplies on a cat fanciers' site, for example." Fallows says that this service completes the publishing revolution on the Web. First people could browse to any part of the world to read content. Blogging made it easier for people to publish. And now even the smallest operator / publisher can get ad revenue just by connecting with Google.
Rita Vine at Sitelines warns searchers that the search shortcuts Yahoo and Google offer (and by extension other search engines) are tied into advertisements. All those search engine shortcuts - like who cares? (June 5) She references an article in Internetnews.com - New Google Shortcuts Tie Into Paid Listings.
But shortcuts do save time and so what if targeted ads come up? Searchers can tell the difference and might find them useful.
Here are some handy shortcuts:
Google: calculations and conversions, getting maps of places in the United States, getting a phone number in the US. Full list of extra features is at Google Web Search Features. Canadians won't have the same need to check US vehicle numbers, or various shipment tracking numbers. But they might want to look up an area code. Where is area code 605?
Yahoo has the largest set: weather, definitions, maps, definitions, conversions and many more. Yahoo Search Shortcuts. Yahoo uses the American Heritage® Dictionary for definitions and the Columbia encylopedia. Several of the travel shortcuts are for the US only - airport conditions, traffic reports. But you can convert yen canadian dollar. And you can get a list of hotels in Hull Quebec through Yahoo Travel. Yahoo can pull up weather iqaluit too.
Ask Jeeves has smart search. Use words like weather or forecast plus the place. Example - weather edmonton. Or key in on the climate -- climate iqaluit. It can do distances too (through the web site How Far Is It?) - distance between ottawa and quebec city.
Advertisements do not interfere with the answers to any of these practical questions and sometimes they can help. Ask Jeeves showed a couple of sites for finding accommodation in Quebec City.
Can't stop the pop-ups by Stephanie Olsen CNEt (June 4) No matter how many popup blockers one has installed as toolbars and firewall security, they still turn up. Olsen explains why and warns of a major battle looming for control of our screens. Some are new developments - like the floater ads that stay on screen for several seconds.
The Paid Inclusion Dinosaur By Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (June 2) - In Part 2 of Sullivan's examination of paid inclusion, Sullivan questions why Yahoo does it. It made sense for Inktomi and Looksmart to have paid inclusion programs because they both provide search results to others (such as MSN) who squeezed them for better deals. Paid inclusion was a way to increase revenue. But Sullivan says -- "Yahoo operates its own popular search site, powered by its own search technology. It can subsidize the cost of providing "free" editorial results through the ads that it offers, just as Google does." Also Sullivan wonders why Yahoo doesn't just label them and boost their ranking - or list them in their own section - if paid -nclusion hits are, as Yahoo maintains, higher quality content.
Google Losing IT's Cool? By: Jim Hedger ISDB.com (May 27) Close look at Google's prospects. Free is what attracts the searchers - "the greatest lossleader ever devised", says Hedger. Advertisers want exposure for the smallest investment possible. Investors want revenue. How will these three co-exist.
Points out that Google has been changed its business model -- "Google has a new business model that seems to stray away from their original intent of building the best information retrieval system ever. With the upswing in Internet marketing, Google is clearly focused on delivering contextual based advertising through the AdWords program. This model has expanded in the past year to cover images and larger ads, including what were once described as banner ads. While they continue to support algorithmic search and continue to offer free-placement (or organic) listings, the real revenue generator is paid-search traffic through AdWords"
Sorting Out SiteMatch By Barry Lloyd. SearchEngineGuide ( April 23, 2004 ) - Examines the workings of Yahoo's SiteMatch - the program that replaced the paid-for-inclusion programs of Altavista, Alltheweb, and Inktomi. The account helps to explain why there are still some differences between Yahoo's search engines. The old PFI programs are being allowed to run out on their respective engines but do not apply to Yahoo. Also, the old Inktomi ranking algorithms are still being used for Hotbot and MSN, while Yahoo (and now Altavista and Alltheweb) use the new. It's hoped (and expected) that Yahoo Search will index sites within weeks, rather than Inktomi's within months.
Barry Lloyd is hopeful that Yahoo will be good for webmasters.
"Yahoo's new search engine has brought some healthy competition to the search engine field. Their fundamentally different way of ranking sites since the changes on Google some months ago have been a lifeline to many on-line businesses. Many observers have applauded their relevance, though others have complained at the ease at which they can be spammed. It is obvious that Yahoo is taking a very pro-active stance against spam (some would say that they are becoming way too harsh), so it is going to be interesting to see how this develops over the next few months. Certainly, few can continue to state that SiteMatch is going to flood the results with "paid spam". The criteria for inclusion are tough."
Natural Search Engine Results- The Great Equalizer by Scott Buresh in ISDB.com (April 22) Natural results, as defined by Buresh, are those whose ranking (or even presence) is not influenced by money. This will include sponsored listings (which are fairly well marked today) and paid-inclusion such as Yahoo's new program. He sees signs that others are trying to differentiate themselves from Yahoo on paid inclusion - Ask Jeeves is dropping their program, Microsoft says it will mark them. Article considers the implications of this for large and small companies - in either case there should be more employment for search engine optimizers.
Google Unveils Targeted Localized Ads by Anick Jesdanun. AP Via Newsday (April 17) -- Google is introducing a new program for advertisers to specify particular areas. A local company can advertise just in its city, a national one can run different ads in different cities. This may apply to search results in Canada as well -- "Advertisers targeting the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have the most options. They can specify cities or metropolitan areas they wish to target. "
Other features - merchant can enter address and a radius, ads can be targeted based on latitude and longitude.
Google to Unblock Trademarked Terms Traffic.com (April 13)
Andrew Goodman, portal and adwords expert, called Stephanie Olsen's article in CNet -
Google plans trademark gambit (April 13) a "wonderfully comprehensive article". Essentially, Google will no longer block the use of keywords in its AdWords program because of trademarks.
From CNet: "When the changes take effect later this month, Google will only review trademark complaints that relate to text appearing in sponsored listings on its Web site and those of its partners."
Goodman has long maintained that using trademarked words is not necessarily an infringement of the trademark. If the consumer isn't confused - and why would they be when looking at ads under the sponsored listings category? - ues of the keywords should be allowed. Goodman covers discussion of the dispute with some humour.
Paid Search Programs Finally Growing Up By Arnaud Fischer, SearchDay (March 31, 2004 ) - Expect to see paid search become more sophisticated. "Two fundamental changes currently underway are blurring the traditional metrics and definitions that have divided paid listing and paid inclusion programs." These are enhanced ROI metrics - concentrate more on return than ranking, and improvements by search engines in linguistic analysis of pages to enhance relevancy.
MSN to shake up search ads by Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com (March 19) "Microsoft's MSN is planning to label its paid-search listings more clearly, a course long advised by the Federal Trade Commission. " Won't happen until July though. When it does, MSN will highlight three of its own text ads at the top as "sponsored results" , and put Overture's on the right. My $.02 - this is not much of an improvement - anything that forces searchers to look at the sponsored results first is annoying.
Search: The Trends by Rebecca Lieb. ClickZ. (March 5) - reports on possible trends in "search as a marketing tool" gleaned from the Search Engine Strategies conference. Local search is one obvious and big direction. There is still life in contextual advertising. Expect trouble with trademarks.
Mamma.com Inc. Announces New Tools Including Geo-Targeting Feature in its Pay-Per-Click Search Solution for All Advertisers CCN Matthews via CBS MarketWatch (March 5) - Mamma.com lets its pay-per-click customers geo-target ads. "The new geo-targeting feature will allow advertisers to target their pay-per-click campaign by selecting one or more countries worldwide as campaigns will only be displayed in the selected target markets. "
Yahoo! goes 'pay for exclusion!' by Mike Grehan. NetImperative (Feb 23) -- Yahoo will be excluding Inktomi paid-inclusion URLs from its new Yahoo index after April 15th and setting up a new paid-inclusion service. Inktomi is still used by MSN and some others. Search engine marketers will need to pay to be included in both.
Search site bans environmental group's ad. AP via USA Today (Feb 12) "... Google has banned the ads of an environmental group protesting a major cruise line's sewage treatment methods, casting a spotlight on editorial policies at the popular Web site's lucrative marketing program. " It raises questions of censorship and favoritism. This follows the trademark infringment lawsuit by American Blind and Wallpaper Factory stating that only they can use the phrases "American wallpaper" and "American blind." There are also problems with displaying ads from unlicensed pharmacies.
How Many Pop-ups Can a Pop-up Stopper Stop? By Brian Livingston, Datamation (Feb 2) - there is a new kind of pop-up that the blockers can't detect. These are "non-streaming full-screen video" done by Unicast. They download in the background and when complete start to play automatically. Thus they take up bandwidth and computer processing. People using dial-up access and on older machines will surely suffer.
"Unicast's video commercials utilize Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 technology, which is included in recent versions of the Redmond company's graphical operating system. The advertising firm says it has commitments from such top-tier advertisers as Pepsi, Honda, and Warner Brothers, and that the ads have been placed on high-traffic sites such as About.com, ESPN, and MSN. "
Anyone for boycotting those sites?
Google Faces Trademark Suite Over Search Ads by Brian Morrissey. DM News (Jan 30) -- American Blind & Wallpaper is suing Google for selling advertising to others on its trademarked items.
"In the case of American Blind, Google acquiesced to a request to remove ads on some of the company's terms, like "American Blind Factory" and "DecorateToday" (the name of the company's Web site), but refused to act on more generic, descriptive search terms such as "blind," "wallpaper" and "factory." In a letter to Google in July 2002, American Blind attorney Susan Greenspon requested Google remove ads for 37 search terms."
For a Fee, Wind Up Atop the Search Heap By BOB TEDESCHI. New York Times (Jan 22) - It may be worth it to buy your own name at Google or Overture. Andrew Goodman of Toronto, an Internet marketing consultant and host of Traffick.com, does it to be distinguished by other Goodmans, dead or alive. Google lets people buy other people's name but not trademarked names. Overture will bar advertisers from buying other people's names.
"As Internet users seek to differentiate themselves from people who share their names, some are buying their way to prominence on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The added exposure comes courtesy of keyword advertising, in which marketers - or common folk, for that matter - bid to have brief advertisements appear atop or beside search results whenever Internet users type in certain words. "
Dueling Searchers in a Quest for Ads By Leslie Walker. Washington Post. January 22, 2004
Google and Yahoo will be battling for advertising dollars in 2004 and they are likely to do it by delivering local advertising.
"Flake, [Gary Flake - head of the new Yahoo Research Lab] however, believes the next few years will produce changes in Web design and breakthroughs in online data mining that could help solve the local search challenge. Matching Web sites -- and ads, for that matter -- to relevant queries is a statistical challenge requiring computer firepower as well as human ingenuity. Future systems may consider more than just the search query and content of Web pages; they might also consult profiles of Web searchers. Amazon.com does this now, in effect compiling and consulting shopping profiles of registered users to determine what to show them. "
Search Guru Danny Sullivan Talks Google By Garrett French, WebProNews (Dec 10, 2003) - reports on Danny Sullivan's keynote speech at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago. Mainly, Sullivan advises all the SEOs in the audience to start paying for listings - "organic listings" alone won't get the traffic.
Has some additional points about the direction of search engines - "invisible tabs"! Search engines will have individual databases for web search, news, images, shopping/products etc. Use of trigger terms will put the searcher into the right zone.
Day of Reckoning in Search Engine Advertising By Christine Churchill, SearchDay (Jan 14) Describes contextual ads and explains why it is important for advertisers to be separate the contextual ads they place from the search-based ads that show with search results. Overture has decoupled the two. How soon will Google follow?
A perfect storm for pay-per-click? by Hans Reimer. CNet News (Jan 13) - sees a perfect storm developing for pey-per-click advertising that leads to lower conversion rates. He says that there is "a subversive undercurrent in the form of PPC affiliates employing "pay to click" personnel to artificially bolster PPC hits, and ultimately, revenue. " People are being recruited to click. This could be as ruinous as spam if it isn't nipped quickly.
Search Shortcuts as Potential Targets for Optimization by
Jason Mills (December 17, 2003 ) TopListings.com - Lists shortcuts at Google and Yahoo. Advises search engine optimizers to use the keyword targets to associate their businesses with these functions.
Tales of Technology: As it has with everything else, the Internet transforms advertising by James H Morris. Post-Gazette.com (Dec 7) -- Buyers and sellers benefit from the new advertising mode on the Internet.
"The Internet is a new communications medium for carrying out commerce. Commerce still needs middle men, but their role is going to drastically change in this new medium."
SuperPages.com Enters Local Search Fray by Brian Morrissey. DM News (Dec 4) -- "Yellow pages publisher Verizon Information Services announced a deal yesterday with paid search provider FindWhat.com to put local paid listings on its SuperPages.com site."
New IE may burst pop-up bubble by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (Nov 24) Microsoft's next IE browser (XP) will have a pop-up blocker.
Of interest: "Mark Ryan, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, estimates that as many as 20 per cent of Web surfers have installed anti-pop-up software, and that the number will be as high as 25 per cent by the end of the year."
"From July to September of this year, pop-up and pop-under advertisements made up 3 per cent of all on-line ads. But in the following three months, they made up 7.4 per cent, according to market research from Nielsen/NetRatings."
Has information on how pop-up blockers work (they pick up on commands to launch a new window), and why they may not work with the pop-ups created by adware programs. Net publishers are looking at new ways to serve ads. We can expect more of those rich-media ads that obliterate a page for a few seconds - and then we'll be looking for software that will block those.
Retailers Rise in Google Rankings as Rivals Cry Foul by Lisa Guernsey. New York Times (Nov 20) - A company called Gift Services is suspected of swarming top ranked search results for gift baskets at Google by using a myriad of interlinked domains. Danny Sullivan says that this problem is true in other industries too -- "particularly as companies encourage affiliates, or online brokers, to sell their products." One gift basket company gave up on getting a good ranking in the search results and became a sponsored link.
To Place Ads, Google Searches For Best Bidders by Leslie Walker. Washington Post (Oct 31) -- Google as a "giant, around-the-clock Internet auction" - about Google's AdSense program
Seeking an Edge Google aims to stay No. 1 in search engines as big-bucks competitors circle around By James M. Pethokoukis USNews.com (Nov 3, 2003)
"Internet users are estimated to execute more than 550 million Web searches globally each day as they quest for information ranging from the whereabouts of old college boyfriends to the latest English premier soccer league standings or The Matrix: Revolutions "spoilers." And, of course, porn. Of those half-billion queries, about a third use Google--far more than rivals Yahoo! (21 percent), MSN (18 percent), and America Online (11 percent). "
Article reviews the high money stakes in the competition between Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Will Microsoft with its deep pockets give Google a knockout blow the way it did Netscape? Maybe Google's talk of going for an IPO is to raise money for the big fight?
Google buys Primedia's Sprinks "Internet search engine snatches media company's online ad service unit for an undisclosed amount." Reuters via CNN Money (Oct 24)
"Internet search engine Google Inc. is buying online ad service Sprinks, taking over a piece of Primedia Inc.'s media empire while wiping out one of its biggest rivals for content-based advertising online. "
"This makes Google the exclusive provider of targeted and search advertising across About.com and most of Primedia's consumer media and magazine Web sites. "
Google removed a competitor in Sprinks and gained distribution through About.com.
French Trademark Ruling Could Have Far-Reaching Effects by Andrew Goodman. Traffick.com (Oct 19)-- Goodman comments on the French court ruling against Google on trademarks in which the court fined Google for allowing advertisers to use trademarked words. He notes in Google's defence that "Advertisers are generally making no claim that they *are* the trademark holder, they're just assuming that their message might be of interest to a user typing a query within a given universe of meaning. "
VeriSign might be bringing SiteFinder back -- VeriSign to revive redirect service by Declan McCullagh. ZDNet (Oct 16)
Are search engines confusing surfers? by Stephanie Olsen. CNet News (Oct 13)
The Federal Trade Commission finds that search engines are doing a better job of labelling paid-placement search results (essentially advertisements activated by search terms) but not paid inclusion - those pages that companies pay to have indexed. Yahoo is a "target of concern" because it owns the main paid inclusion engines - Inktomi, Altavista, and Alltheweb. The Commercial Alert, a consumer watchdog, is asking for full disclosure. Many say that the results that are part of a paid inclusion program should be marked as such.
Internet Search Engine Advertising Shows Major Gains - Term-Targeting Becoming a Killer App For Online Marketing by Tobi Elkin. AdAge.com (October 13, 2003)
Paid search (paid listings) is worth $1.6 billion as estimated by Jupiter Research, and could get to $8 billion by 2008.
Of interest -- "In large measure, paid-search has quietly converted search engines into a new sort of customer mining device, systematically matching hundreds of millions of specific consumer searches each day against advertising campaigns precisely aimed at certain search terms. "
There are 4 billion search-engine searches each month.
Gives the example of participants in the auto industry bidding for words.
Google to Expand Keyword Matching By Brian Morrissey, Silicon Valley (Oct 3) -- "Google notified its 150,000 advertisers on Friday that it would expand its keyword matching to show paid listings on related search terms, while also increasing the performance standards for such ads. " ... " Now, an AdWords customer with the keyword "cashmere sweater" could have broad matches to several related searches, ranging from "cashmere cardigan" to "cashmere turtleneck.""
Net body threatens suit over VeriSign site finder AP via CNN.com (Oct 3) "The Internet's key oversight body [ICANN] threatened legal action Friday to stop a new online search service blamed for disabling junk e-mail filters and networked printers. "
MSN is now using all of Overture's paid listings and showing them in two places on the search-results page. The prime spot is at the top of the search results (three top listings) and is reserved for the most relevant hits. The secondary is in a sidebar on the right. Both are labelled Sponsored Sites. Listings can be demoted to the sidebar if clickthrough rates fall.
MSN might lead with Featured Sites. These get absolute top billing ahead of Sponsored and Web Results.
For example, "polaroid cameras" finds two featured sites from online sales vendors, three sponsored sites - also for buying, and on the side another five or so sites for comparing prices. Who knew that polaroid cameras are still so plentiful?
MSN Expands Overture Ads by Danny Sullivan. SearchDay (Sept 19)
The online ad wars: Competitors snap at Google Matt Marshall NZoom.com (Sep 16) -- Short article with main points about efforts by Google, Overture and Yahoo to get more ad revenue.
Of interest -- "The competition is spurring the market into new directions - and could spawn new rivalries. Some vendors find search advertising so compelling that they're abandoning auction companies like eBay. The development is worth watching, says Safa Rashtchy, analyst at US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, adding that the market created by search could rival the efficiency created by eBay in the long-term. However, he concludes: "It's not an immediate threat.""
Google Steps Into EBay Territory by Anthony Effinger, Bloomberg News. LA Times (Sep 2) - vendors find it cheaper to use AdWords at Google to sell their stuff than through listings at eBay.
Trademarks cast shadow on paid search By Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com
(August 19, 2003) Robert Hatta of Netflix asked experts at the Search Engine Strategies Conference if his firm should block others from using its trademarks in online advertisements at Google and Overture. eBay has already done so.
In July, Consumer WebWatch released a study that showed that surfers can't always distinguish between paid listings (or sponsored listings) and non-commercial results. Sixty percent of the participants didn't know that search engines make money by accepting the listings. Forty-one percent of results chosen by participants were commercial but they didn't know it.
Study: Paid Listings Still Confuse Web Searchers PCWorld via Yahoo News (Aug 22)
False Oracles: Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work Consumer WebWatch.org (June 30)
Expect to see ads on all manner of web sites. Google's AdSense program will make it easier for smaller web sites to host targeted ads and received some of the advertising revenue.
Google ads now self-serve by Paul Festa and Stephanie Olsen. CNet News (Aug 6)
Traffick.com has more on the features from the point of view of a site that is likely to use them. August 7, 2003 - AdSense
If You Liked the Web Page, You'll Love the Ad by Bob Tedeschi. New York Times (August 4, 2003)
Display of paid listings has migrated from search engine results to the pages of online publishers - newspapers, iVillage, and other "content sites". The players are Google, Overture, and Sprinks.
"When serving ads for content sites, both Overture and Google employ technology that infers the topic of a page by scanning for words and phrases, searching through a database of tens of thousands of advertisers, then delivering a relevant text ad. In some cases that is not difficult. For instance, on Weather.com's golf forecast page for Norfolk, Va., Google's service — which it calls AdSense — can deliver ads for marketers who had bid to have their ads appear above Google search results whenever users type "Norfolk Virginia golf courses" or some similar phrase."
Ads can be inappropriate. A story in the New York Post about a murder with body parts put in a suitcase came with an ad for luggage.
Google's service is said to be highly automated, whereas Overture's is assisted by editors. Sprinks uses more "contextual analysis" which may be more topic based. It is expected that as more content sites require registration and some personal information that contextual analysis will be able to take into account the person's profile.