Local Marketing Guide
There’s a great guide on how to do local business marketing and search at LocallyType.com. Well worth checking out to get a start on local search.
FaceBook Serving Up AdSense?
Back in August of 2006, FaceBook made a deal with MSN for exclusive third party ads. Today, on the spot where Facebook Flyers usually go (below the vertical left menu), I caught one impression of Google AdSense. Huh? What? I wish I would’ve taken a screenshot, but I didn’t get a chance to, and I haven’t been able to catch it since.
What’s going on here? We already know FaceBook is one of the worst advertising platforms in terms of ctr rates, but is MSN testing out Google AdSense now? Or is the partnership breaking down - because MSN can’t deliver publishers, or because FaceBook’s traffic is just too low quality?
Google Adsense/AdWords Launches Pay-Per-Action
Jen from JenSense has a good summary of Google’s new Pay-Per-Action program.
Catching up on the last few days of news stories, Google AdSense has launched their new pay per action program for AdWords advertisers, meaning that publishers can now earn referral money through the AdSense program. The program is in beta for both advertisers & publishers, and AdSense publishers can apply to be a part of the beta, as can AdWords advertisers.
As you will remember, Google first began testing pay per action ads last summer.
Google Suggest Promotes Piracy?
Or so a Belgian company named ServersCheck argued in a claim made May 2006. Google won this one, but I’m not so sure it should have. All the claimant wanted was for Google not to suggest “ServersCheck Cracks” or “ServersCheck Serials” when searching for “ServersCheck”, without any financial damages, making it one of the most reasonable lawsuits against Google so far (unlike the KinderStart case).
A Belgian court dismissed a lawsuit filed by a company that said a feature for Google Inc.’s search engine offers up password-cracking tools and serial numbers to unlock their software.
ServersCheck BVBA, based in Leuven, Belgium, charged that Google’s Suggest feature could drive users who were interested in their network monitoring software to pirated versions, said Maarten Van Laere, CEO.
The lawsuit, filed in May 2006, sought to make Google modify Suggest to not offer up piracy-related terms but did not seek financial damages.
The question as to whether Google should filter out this kind of suggest is obvious to me: absolutely. It’s one thing to provide information people are specifically looking for, it’s another to “suggest” illegal activities when looking for legitimate products. However, should Google be held legally responsible for making sure that this doesn’t occur?
ABC: Great WebTV Gets Screwed Up
Creating a product that is worthy of being spoken about to friends is the best kind of marketing there is. Giving people more options to spread is even better.
ABC has done both, creating the highly addictive Lost, and being forethinking enough to allow people to watch online at their convenience, so that they don’t have to watch at exactly 10pm on Wednesdays. Because no matter how addicting their show is, people still have lives, and they have BitTorrent and YouTube.
So ABC did the smart thing and monetized it by putting streaming TV episodes with commercials online. No extra installs needing, no plugins (other than flash). Then it messed up.
I go to watch yesterdays episode earlier this evening and suddenly ABC.com demands you give some demographic data - name, year of birth, and sex. All right, all right, fair enough. Then they demand I install a plugin. GRRR, but I really need my Lost fix, so I go ahead and accept, and Firefox freezes. I’m addicted so I restart my browser and try again. Freeze.
I figure it may be a plugin complication, as I have a decent amount installed, so then I try it on my other computer, which has a virtually unmodified Firefox. Freeze again. I assume they were just idiots and didn’t test for Firefox (which is a terrible mistake), and so after dinner I launch the evil Internet Explorer. Now I have to register with my email and password and full DOB, in addition to the previous information, but it doesn’t freeze.
And what do I get for this new plugin that they claim is for my own good? The same exact player I had before. Except now it only plays on my computer screen, and not the 32″ TV set it’s attached to. Yes, I know that’s not that huge, but I’m in a dorm room, so it looks massive. My girlfriend still complains that it’s too big.
There are several lessons to this:
- Don’t offer your customers something and then take it away, make it worse, or mess it up entirely
- Do testing before you launch your products on multiple platforms, and if you’re a big company, don’t modify on the fly
- Don’t make video any more difficult than it needs to be. Almost everyone has flash, so just use a flash player
ABC, hear me out. I like what you’ve been doing, and you’re gaining brand loyalty with me. Don’t mess it up by breaking things that are already working!
On Good Band Sites: Your Thoughts?
Hey guys,
I’ve been researching finding good band sites to make suggestions for a client, and unfortunately, they are few and far between. Just in terms of layout, most are really, really bad, like RedHotChiliPeppers.com, Alanis.com or the aforementioned Jessica Simpson site. However, I do like Keane’s site, because it’s clean, intuitive, and has personality (and has the added bonus of being spiderable). Moby’s is a bit dull, but at least it’s understandable and doesn’t have random butterflies flittering everywhere.
Looking at it from a non-webmaster or SEO standpoint, as I know many of you are in that profession, what do you look for in a band site? What band sites do you like, and what ones are complete crap? What’s the info that you want when you visit the first time, and subsequent times?
Epic Records - Atrocious Use of Adsense
Since music downloading has destroyed CD sales, Epic has resorted to putting up AdSense on some of its artists’ websites. Not only are most of the sites flash based, heavy, counter-intuitive, and, for the most part, really shitty (as is almost any musician/band site in the industry), Epic has decided to put AdSense on some of them as well. This includes Jennifer Lopez and (this one is painful) Jessica Simpson - see thumbnail.
Why would you stick an ad in prime visual real estate? Especially when the websites purpose is to sell the ARTIST (and her CD’s, incidentally). Here are just a few things wrong:
- If you’re trying to sell a product, DON’T monetize with advertising
- If you’ve made a flash site that’s supposed to be pretty, DON’T destroy the design with an ad designed to integrate with text content.
- Don’t put it it prime visual real estate.
- Don’t make sites entirely in flash. Please. There’s no good reason for it.
That’s about it. End rant.
Google’s PlusBox Officially Announced
Google’s PlusBox has now been officially announced. It was originally brought to my attention by Jonah Stein, and mentioned in this PlusBox post, where I analyzed whether it’s beneficial for the internet as a whole. In the end, it’s good for Google, good for users, but bad for websites who’s bread and butter is providing basic information that comes with PlusBox, which is currently stock info and Google Map directions for businesses.
Google vs. KinderStart - Winner: Google
It’s a good day for Google, as KinderStart was defeated in the legal battle it started. Basically, KinderStart was unhappy that it went from ranking well (using black-hat SEO techniques) to not ranking at all, so it did what any good American would do - sue. And it lost, preventing it from becoming the McDonald’s Hot Coffee case of the web world.
Bruce Clay summed it up well:
Fogel’s ruling read, in part:
“While Yu has brought a novel challenge to a major corporation, it is apparent that to some extent he has overreached in doing so…Yu had a professional responsibility to refrain from filing such allegations if he did not have appropriate supporting evidence.”
That last line is the kicker! Not only was the case thrown out for being unmerited, but the judge found the whole thing so frivolous that he’s allowing Google to collect attorney fees from KinderStart. Huzzah!
…
Something we often try to explain to clients is that, for better or worse, ranking in Google, or any of the other search engines, is a privilege, not a right. You don’t get to start in the big game simply because you showed up. You have to earn it. It goes back to the Bruce-ism that search engine optimization isn’t about making a pig fly. It’s about genetically re-engineering a site so that it becomes an eagle. Google rewards eagles; KinderStart is a mutated pig. (Please don’t sue me for defamation.) That’s why they’re not ranking well.
Other good related links: Search Engine Land (links to past articles) and Matt Cutt’s.
Yahoo! Publisher VS. Google Adsense - Experimental Results
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been running a test on one of my small websites comparing Google Adsense to Yahoo! Publisher. The website receives a couple hundred visitors a day, has few repeat visitors, and is related to phones and calling. It’s a one page website, with two 468×60 ad spots on it. The majority of traffic is from StumbleUpon and random “fun”-related websites.
In this experiment, a script randomly rotated Yahoo! and Google ads whenever the page was loaded (Google and Yahoo! ads never appeared at the same time). I threw out the data of the first few days to allow for Yahoo! to stabilize, as AdSense had already been on the site. No special settings were used for either set of ads; Publisher’s option to self-target ads was not used. This report is based on the last 7 day of activity.
Ad Impressions
As for the results: Google showed 1609 page impressions (meaning 3218 ad impressions, since there are two ads per page). Yahoo! showed 2935 ad impressions, which is notably less and also an odd number. Considering that every page shows 2 ads, it should be impossible to have an odd number of ad impressions. As for the lower number, this could be due to simple randomness, but a ~10% difference is a large amount for simple chance to create. I’m a little sketched out by Yahoo!’s reporting capabilities, and this isn’t a good thing.
Ad Relevancy
As for the relevancy of ads, AdSense wins hands down. Take a look for yourself:
Google Adsense
Yahoo! Publisher
As you can see, Google Adsense has 4 of 4 related ads, with additional text. In Yahoo! Publisher, only 1 of the 4 ads are even remotely related, and no additional text is shown. This is likely due to an issue of advertiser volume, but it also hurts CTR rates, as seen next.
Click-Through RatesÂ
Adsense had a per-ad CTR rate of 1.3%. Publisher had a CTR of .3%. Ouch. Google wins this one as well, although this problem will solve itself once more advertisers start working with Yahoo!. In the end, Google had 42 clicks and Yahoo! had 10 clicks.
Total Money Made
Now this is the most important section for most people. Who ended up making more money? The average CPC of the caller area is relatively low, so this hurt Google’s CPC. The lack of Yahoo!’s targeting actually increased the CPC and increased it’s return. Without further ado, I present the results:
- Google: $6.74
- Yahoo!: $6.54
Yahoo! loses by a bit. Ouch. Sorry Yahoo!, between the lack of contextually topical advertising and the low CTR, I’m going to have to argue AdSense is still a better result, and a better service for customers.
Winner: Google AdSense
Round Table Discussion on Link Building Strategies
Huge post on Sugar Rae’s blog about link building strategies. 10 questions, answers from
- Eric Ward, the Link Moses behind URL Wire
- Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
- Roger Montti, the VP of Verticals at Best of the Web
- Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl and SEO Class
- Rae Hoffman of Sugarrae and SEO Class
Questions:
Question One: What are the factors you would take into
account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link
broker or seller)?Question Two: In sectors where links are particularly tough to come by (retail, B2B in boring industries, etc.), what are content tactics you’ve taken to appeal to relevant sites in those industries (specific examples would rock)?
Question Three: What is the current climate with paid links, and how can I navigate the paid links landscape so that I come out smelling like a rose on the other side?
Question Four: Automating the link acquisition process: How far do you recommend going with it? What are the benefits and pitfalls of automation?
Question Five: Name 5 specific techniques (queries, tools, process, or starting points) you would use to get links for a statewide real estate agent.
Question Six: What are the top 3 over-rated and under-rated criteria
for determining how valuable an individual link will potentially be to
your site’s search engine rankings?Question Seven: If you were in control of the search engine algorithm at Google, what are the top three changes you would make specific to how Google values/counts links?
Question Eight: What’s the most common mistake you see people making in their link building activities?
Question Nine: How do you think that nofollow links and redirected links are treated by the various search engines and do you see any value in obtaining these types of links?
Question Ten: So many people complain about competitors who are ranking solely on reciprocal links. Do you believe reciprocal links still works as a complete strategy or do you believe age, trust and grandfathering (for lack of a better word) are taken into account? How important do you feel age is to a link?
Success Found in Google Radio and Print Ads
It appears Google is doing well with its cross-medium advertising.
AdAge claims that both publishers and advertisers have had good responses using the programs.
At The Seattle Times, the test has already produced six-figure incremental ad revenue, said Mike Lemke, the paper’s senior VP-sales and marketing. “After the test, we think that it’s a viable new channel that meets the specific needs of certain advertisers who probably would not otherwise give our products a try, just because they’re either out of market or they don’t tend to use newspapers.”
…
EHealth spent $100,000 on newspaper ads in 12 markets including Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Chicago. “We specifically designed the test so we could measure lift in website traffic,” Mr. Telkamp said. “We are very pleased with the results. We definitely felt that the platform made buying print media across a broad array of alternatives convenient. It was easy to enter, modify and place bids. Plus, we were able to upload our ads to the platform, so no additional work was required. The platform’s tracking tool was also very good.”
…
Eric Mastel, president of Max Media in Virginia Beach, Va., was a skeptic when he signed a deal two years ago with dMarc Broadcasting — a company Google bought in January 2006 for its automated radio-advertising platform. But after he tested the system in two small stations in North Carolina, it impressed him with its efficiency and, even better, by delivering ad rates triple that of the regular networks in the market.
Good words all around. Let’s see more.
Facebook Gets Worst Advertising Vote
Valleywag recently voted Facebook as the worst advertising platform, consistently showing clickthrough rates of .04% or less. From personal experience as well, it’s also a terrible marketing tool for virabait.
Facebook is a great tool, but it’s not a great marketing tool. Sorry guys.
Blog Bloat
I’ve been away for the last five days. I come back to find 200+ posts to read from my subscribed feeds (and I’m not subscribed to that many). Ack. 90% of these are junk, repeats, rephrased articles, and blah. 9% are news. 1% is quality.
Why is there so much crap out there? The blogosphere isn’t an ideal publication frame unfortunately - it’s great for news or timely items. Anything else, I really believe a traditional style website would be more useful, because then you can organize the information more efficiently and clean out the bloat.
The blogosphere, however, rewards frequent posting. In fact, posting less than 3 times a week will cost you readers. And posting more, as long as 1 out of 10 times it’s a worthwhile post, will get you more readers and more visitors.
I use my blog as a personal bookmarking tool, in addition to a platform. However, the stuff that appears on the front page (and feed) is only what I believe is worth reading by you. The rest of the stuff is thoughts, news, posts, that are relevant to the many category topics - I treat them more as tags, and will eventually only have a few top level categories once the content level increases. If you want to know more deeply about a topic, you’ll find info about it in those categories.
This is a self-indulgent rant. Blogs aren’t a fad, but it’s still an immature medium, with a “Hey! Look at me, I’m blogging!”-vibe. It’ll be nice once we all grow up.
Google’s New Policy on Search Results Being Indexed
And the answer is “No.” A new policy was just added:
 “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.â€
Social Media Marketing: HUGE Guide
SEOmoz put together a MASSIVE guide on the top 30 social media marketing sites.
1. Digg 16. Flickr 2. Del.icio.us 17. WikiHow 3. Reddit 18. BlueDot 4. Technorati 19. StyleHive 5. Squidoo 20. JotSpot 6. Netscape 21. Wetpaint 7. LinkedIn 22. Shadows 8. Newsvine 23. Yahoo! 360 9. Wikipedia 24. Furl 10. Ma.gnolia 25. Ning 11. StumbleUpon 26. Frappr 12. Shoutwire 27. The Best Stuff In The World 13. Facebook 28. MySpace 14. 43 Things 29. Yahoo! Answers 15. YourElevatorPitch 30. Rdiculous
I’m definitely going to have to spend some time looking at all the info in this article.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 24 hours
Super Affiliate Marketing Blog made a great post explaining how to affiliate market in 24 hours or less. Good stuff - I read it and I like it. I can’t say I’ve delved into the affiliate market arena yet, but I may do so as a result of this post.
So word has it that I haven’t made many good posts lately that help people make cash. Well, I agree, so here’s how you can make some bank quickly and easily without breaking the bank too. Let’s take a quick look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing and see how underrated it is and how you can seriously make some cash without getting too wrapped up and hung up on the usual things that stop you from moving forward.
10e20’s on Making the Most of Paid Search
Tamar of 10e20 wrote a really great summary of how to do paid search. It goes over common myths, questions, strategies, mistakes - anything and everything. It’s extremely comprehensive for a single article. Well done, and a great read!
Introduction
When considering paid search, it’s really important to set some goals. As you can tell, I’m very big on goal orientation. Some of these goals can be:
- Better targeting (keywords and position)
- Better messaging (ad copy/description and landing page)
- Lower cost/reduce waste
- Increase conversions
- Improve ROI
- Measure success
PlusBox is Google’s New Weapon
Jonah Stein of SEOmoz recently took a look at the effect of Google’s new PlusBox.
PlusBox is a new plus sign that appears next to search results and shows additional information related to the query, such as stock prices.
Will this deprive users of additional traffic? Yes. Will it provide users with a better search engine experience? Yes. If this process continues, then all basic queries will eventually be answered by Google.
Will this be better for the internet? Perhaps. Many websites will lose significant amounts of traffic, and people will be forced to create more unique and advanced content. In any case, Google’s content advancement threatens many more basic websites and will rearrange the nature of the internet itself.
Goodbye to You, MyBlogLog
I like the idea of MyBlogLog. It mimics the non-virtual world - many connections are made or strengthened by running into people at the grocery store or movie theatre.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been coded very securely (thanks to Shoemoney for pointing some exploits out, for which he got banned temporarily). It’s prone to spamming, and only provides marginal benefits. Really, it only worked because everybody was excited about the idea and checking it out, but in the end it just doesn’t give any real value.
The fact that it tracks all clicks made on my site is also sketchy. To top it off, I had the following error on my site today:
<b>Warning</b>: mysql_connect() [<a href=’function.mysql-connect’>function.mysql-connect</a>]: Host ‘p2.mybloglog.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’ in <b>/home/myblogpub/public_html/comm2.php</b> on line <b>390</b>
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like getting errors on my site. Hence, MyBlogLog will be leaving my site. Maybe someday you’ll return, but only once you’ve matured. Bye-bye, MyBlogLog!
More Proof .com’s are Best
Recently, Kev from SEOptimise ran a test comparing two identical ads, one pointing to a .com domain, another to a .co.uk version of the same domain:
The .com version shows a much higher CTR rate, but more importantly, a much higher conversion rate as well. He saved 1 pound per conversion as a result.
This test was run in the UK (so people shouldn’t distrust the .co.uk domain), and Kev plans to run it in other countries as well.
This just shows how much more trust is associated with a .com.
Sex Sells! Referral Traffic from “Sex” Keyword?
I was looking at my traffic stats earlier, when I noticed something unusual. Take a look:
AWstats is annoying in that it doesn’t tell you which search engine sent you this, or from what page. So I dug into my logs, and I found this as the referrer:
http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=sex&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP
Now, we all know the Live! search engine is still far from perfect, but why is it sending me traffic from the keyword “sex“? Unfortunately, this link doesn’t work, so I can’t tell exactly how this one person found my site through this search, but if anyone knows what FORM=LVSP stands for, I’d like to know, because this blog has nothing to do with sex.
That’s just more proof the Live! isn’t going to be competition anytime soon.
Why MS Still Doesn’t Get It, and Google Still Does
Google’s not going away for a long while as the top search. Why? It’s still got it. MSN, the #3 ranked engine, still doesn’t.
MSN recently filed a patent for removing duplicate search results, including removing organic results if the same page or site appears in the paid section. I have a feeling this is a “feature” that will never see the light of day because of how absolutely idiotic it is. I know why they’re doing this: the bottom line. It makes sense - if the organic listing is removed, people will be more likely to click on the paid listing, and M$ makes more money, right?
Wrong. Any decent search marketer with good, quality sites will immediately pull all money out of AdCenter because it’ll remove their natural ranking. And natural rankings are better because 1) they’re free and 2) they’re more trustworthy.
Once all these guys have pulled their money out, cost-per-click will drop drastically, meaning that the bottom for AdCenter earnings for publishers will drop out and they’ll be looking at a penny-per-click. Ouch. MS would, in one fell motion, blow the brains out of its entire ad operation.
On the other hand, Google just filed a patent for allowing people to remove pages from search results, and using this information to determine spam pages and affect ranking. That’s smart. Let the masses do the work of finding bad pages for you, and people have an incentive to do it.
When I run into a bad, spammy page, I don’t ever want to run into it again, so it would make sense spend the few extra seconds to remove it from my personalized search. Additionally, pages that deceive me in the search results would also earn my wrath. This new Google option would allow me to vent my anger by knocking the page out of my own listings, and putting a vote against it in the grand scale of the index.
Of course, there is the possibility of abuse, but I have faith that Google will have a stringent enough system in place to make it difficult, and have enough human fall-backs to catch the few cases that fall through the cracks.
Google: 1. MS: 0.
Digg’s Diggers Dugg Digging Digg’s Grave (or Paying Your Way to the Front)
Of course, credibility is an important thing in any business, and especially one where you’re trusted to provide good information. Digg has been having credibility issues for a while now with rumors of Diggers getting paid to Digg articles, and it just got smashed in the face with a battering ram.
Here was the experiment: Annalee Newitz decided she would try an experiment and write an article about it. She would create one of the worst blogs ever - it’s at http://www.crowdhacking.com/blog/, not even going to give it nofollowed-link-love.
And then she would hire a Digg promotion company to promote it. For $100, she hit the front page (and incidentally, came up with some of the best link-bait I’ve seen in a while). Here’s a quote from Adelson saying Digg can’t be gamed, but obviously this experiment proves that wrong:
If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”
So what can we learn? Digg can be gamed. Gaming Digg can get you a lot of link love. More generally, uncovering hard fact that proves rumors gets you lots of link love.
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