Archive for April, 2008
Free stuff ranking about you – hurt adwords advertising
I have seen many people advertise their information based products in Google adwords or other PPC advertising programme but in Search engines like Google many free stuff tend to rank better than the paid ads. So does Google worry about it . I would say no. People like free stuff much more than paid stuff they want to visit free websites and get their necessary stuff than buying online.
When something is sold that is already available for free online people tend to go get them free instead of buying them. This is the nature of Google users and google is very well aware of it. For them Customer satisfaction is the priority and more the customers are satisfied better its for their advertising programme so I am sure Google is not worried about free stuff ranking about paid adwords advertising.
PPC Blogger
Yahoo changed Minimum bid value – yahoo updates bid value
Recently yahoo has made changes to the minimum bid value you a user can bid for their PPC program. Before it was 0.10 $ standard for most of the bids but now it is not anymore that value. Your bidding depends on the quality of the ads and the number of click throughs it attracts. If the user likes the ad and if it results in more clickthroughs then your site will attact a much lower bid.
Also the value of the keyword matters when it comes to bid value. If the number of advertisers are more and if they are willing to pay more for that keyword then the minimum bid value for that keyword will be changed,
PPC Blog Jeff
Urchin Analytics software out of beta
I am sure if you used Adwords before you should have definitely used Google analytics. Google analytics is google hosted version of Urchin a popular Analytics software which Google acquired few years back. Its a very successful online tracking software which provides a useful user friendly platform to check the validity of your results.
Urchin had been running for a long time as a beta version. Google has a tradition of running their softwares for a long time in beta mode to get user satisfaction and once they get positive feedback they will make bring out of beta,
Urchin is a hosted software which Google analytics is Google hosted. You can download Urchin and install it on your server and you and use it to monitor your traffic and logs real time unlimited on many sites. Urchine costs 3000$ and I am sure its worth the cost.
According to official Google Analytics Blog,
“Urchin formed the basis of Google Analytics, released in 2005. But, while Google Analytics is a Google-hosted service, Urchin is software that you run on your own servers. This makes Urchin ideal for certain applications. You might use it if you:
want to analyze your firewall-protected content, such as an intranet
have 5 years’ worth of old server log data to analyze
need to know if your site’s visitors are getting “Page Not Found” (404) errors
need to have your site’s traffic data audited by a third party
need to create custom reports or integrate with other tools, like a CRM system
need to integrate your e-commerce logs directly with Urchin
“
PPC Management Team,
Chocolate and PPC – what do you learn from it
MSN adcenter blog has posted a very good insight on the keyword chocolate how it is searched who searches more, demographics etc.
“What’s the story of “chocolate”? As learned from data freely available to all adCenter users
There are more searches for Chocolate in February than any other month, but there are notable peaks throughout the year in June and October (a demonstration of appropriate year-round appreciation for the subject). Find this data in Monthly Traffic
Ads for “chocolate” in an average position of 2 have a higher CTR than other positions. Find this data in Monetization
Women tend to search for “chocolate” more than men, with 64.27% probability from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08. Find this data in Demographic
Most searches including the term “chocolate” skewed female from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08. Find this data in Demographic
The sweet spot for “chocolate” searchers from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08 are those aged 35-50. Find this data in Demographic
People in California, Texas, and New York searched more for “chocolate” than other states from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08. Find this data in Geographic
Campaigns including the keyword “chocolate” are very focused to chocolate as a food and not focused on chocolate in all its other iterations and meanings. Find this data in Keyword Suggestion, Campaign Association
Searches including the term “chocolate” demonstrate the many facets of the word, as a food, a name, a musical group, a breed description, a color, an ingredient, etc- Find this data in Keyword Suggestion, Contained
How can you use this information to improve your marketing efforts?
Understanding historical valleys and peaks enables better budget planning and campaign planning for both online and offline efforts.
Analyzing position and associated CTR will help to anticipate traffic, budget and potential interest in your terms and products
Researching keyword demographic data can help you hone your marketing message to the audience most likely to be searching for your terms. This is also a way to hone offline messages according to the audience you are attempting to reach — by answering their conversation in a manner similar to the way they began it with you.
Geographic and Demographic data gleaned from search can help you cross validate your offline message content to ensure you are speaking to the audience you intend to.
Specifically for “chocolate” there may be opportunity to expand this to campaigns reaching beyond the core food — primarily around ingredients.
Identify possible negative keywords by reviewing terms likely to include your core term.”
Alexa screws up its ranking algorithm – makes ranking change
Recently we saw alexa make a major change to the way the rank their sites. In my opinion their current ranking system doesn’t work and its worse than before. The new ranking is not something that takes the whole world as a picture it mostly sees users from US to judge the traffic to a site. We compare the current results with few of the sites we own / monitor and all sites that rank for US and getting lot of US traffic are pushed higher while sites that gets ton of Global traffic and lesser US traffic are pushed down.
So what even alexa did or tried to do has screwed up their total index IMO. Either they need to go back to their old results or they need to fix a lot of things before the new results work better.
Though Alexa results are skewed lot of new webmasters or site owners gauge that as a important way of judging the important of a website so if alexa is going to reward US sites over other country sites then I fear it will never be any more a place to visit.
alexa.com/site/company/announcement
Yahoo kicks of with a new search engine crawler
Yahoo crawler team have come out with a new crawler that will crawl the web in a more sophisticated way. Yahoo Slup 3.0 is the new version of yahoo’s search engine indexing crawler that has been introduced recently for crawling the web. Yahoo Search engine is the 2nd most important search engine only next to Google and its very important we give attention to yahoo search rankings.
Yahoo has done a major crawler infrastructure update and this is causing massive indexing in major sites. Things should be settling down very soon but yahoo has reported new crawler activity from a different set of IPs for many sites.
According to yahoo the same derivatives in robots.txt for New Yahoo slup 3.0 will work,
“The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, ‘Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.’ Existing
robots.txt directives for ‘Slurp’ or ‘Yahoo! Slurp’ will continue to work, but
if you have directives specific to ‘Slurp/2.0,’ they won’t be recognized by the
new crawler (though usage of the ‘Slurp/2.0’ user-agent is very rare on the web,
so you won’t likely be affected). We recommend specifying the shorter version
of: User-agent: Slurp. “
Official statement from Yahoo search news blog
Competitor keywords bidding is worth the effort and risk,
There are lot of advantages on bidding on your competitor keywords. Bidding on the competition’s keywords will give an immediate targeted exposure especially for new websites. New websites find it difficult to make profits from PPC since most of the ads they participate will be costly and they need to pay a hefty amount for it. Bidding on competitor keywords will make that job much easier.
Though Google has a tough stance on bidding on competitor’s keywords especially keywords that are Trademarked by the competitor still they don’t deny a good user experience. If they feel some thing is good for their users they don’t hesitate to do it. As per their policy if a user is satisfied seeing a competitor ad then mostly they allow it. I have personally experienced this when we advertise with Google PPC.
You can also enable benchmarking service for adwords which will allow you to compare your site with competitors.
According to Google Analytics support
“Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.
This service is located under the “Visitors” section of your reports. Select “Benchmarking (Beta)” to view this report. Please note that it will take up to two weeks for the data to appear since it is being categorized and collected for your reports”
PPC Blog Team
AdBrite’s Open Targeting Exchange
Adbrite has recently introduced a concept which should revolutionize the future of PPC advertising. Open Target Exchange system delivers superior yield and advertiser effectiveness by leveraging multiple targeting methods and algorithms, and allowing them to compete for the right to match advertisements to publisher web pages.
Adbrite gives the opportunity to bring multiple algorithms into the pool and make them compete with each other, this gives a change for advertisers and publishers to select the most relevant ads to be displayed.
Adbrite has partnered with Lucid Media (formerly Entrieva) and Personifi for targeted advertising.
Online retail sales to cross 200$ billion in 2008.
According to a survey conducted by Internet analysis firm Forrester Research for Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation trade group online spending will raise from 174$ billion last year to 200$ Billion in 2008. This excludes air travel spending. Though an other survey says most of the online buyers do a lot of research and tend to buy offline.
Personally I do it that way most of the time if I want to buy a computer related item I go to Ebay , amazon and other shopping comparision sites to compare sites, Finally when I am convinced with the pricing I would like to see the product like so I go to places like Best Buy, Fry’s etc the electronic items I need.
There are negative effects due to housing slump , a recent report which showed lower job rate, raise in gas and good prices but still people are willing to spend money online which is a very good sign. Many companies have invested on providing users with the best search experience possible.
Online deals are bound to go down in the arfuture according NYtimes
“But those shoppers looking for a bevy of free online shipping deals may not find them as plentiful as they did last year. The study, which surveyed 125 online retailers in February and March, showed that merchants are less interested in using such promotions this year. While 85 percent of online retailers said they used some shipping incentive in the past year, just 35 percent said they would focus more on these types of deals in 2008.”
PPC team,
Yahoo – Yhoo – willing to play more with MSFT ( microsoft )
Yahoo Inc has started playing games with MSFT to increase the bid or a possible higher sellout. Microsoft has offered 31$ per share for Yahoo which rates it to around 44 billion now Yahoo has planned to partner with Google to deliver Adwords sponsored results besides yahoo’s search results.
This looks like a desperate attempt by yahoo to make MSFT offer a higher bid for them.,
According to Financial express:
Yahoo announced on Wednesday a test to outsource Web search advertising to
Google Inc. Sources say the test is part of a planned three-way alliance to
combine Yahoo with Time Warner Inc’s AOL instead of Microsoft Corp.
If there is a possible merger with AOL then Yahoo will be a much lower brand. AOL is already struggling by itself I dont think they will make Yahoo a successful business if the merger happens.
So what should Yahoo do? I personally feel Yahoo should be sold to MSFT since Google is too dominant in Search industry now. That’s not the best thing since competition always makes better goods to be delivered to end customers.
PPC Blog Team