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Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system...optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google's yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don't yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.

To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator - a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.

Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.

Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google's products, our calculator is starting out in beta :D

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There are a lot of parallels between Google AdWords and SEO, and a lot of the beginner mistakes are the same for both traffic acquisition strategies. I figured it would be worth outlining some of the most common ones to help save you money on your search engine marketing campaigns.

1. Weak Domain Name
2. All Search Traffic Driven to Homepage
3. No Link Building
4. All Links to the Homepage
5. No Link Anchor Text Variation
6. No Focus on Quality
7. Lacking On Page Optimization
8. No Site Structure
9. Site With No Value Add
10. Competitive Saturated Market With Inadequate Budget
11. Picking a Market for 1
12. Pick a Market Which Does Not Monetize
13. Over-Aggressive Monetization From Day 1
14. What Other Common SEM Errors do You See?

1. Weak Domain Name

Google AdWords

When I interviewed Perry Marshall about AdWords he recommended split testing URLs because the URL can and does have a major impact on your ad clickthrough rate.

Since Google factors click-through rate (CTR) into their quality scores, anything that influences CTR influences your click prices. And while competitors can and will steal your AdWords ad copy, they CAN'T steal your domain name.

SEO

There are many potential errors that can be made with domain names. Two of the more common errors are creating a domain name that is impossible to remember and creating a name that restricts expansion.

Recommendations

Some people feel the need to limit their domain name budget to $10, but it is a foolish strategy. Almost every piece of marketing you do will be influenced by your domain name. Your domain name has limited recurring costs associated with it, but can represent a huge recurring market advantage or disadvantage. Yeah for CreditCards.com, and boo for cheapest-online-apply-credit-cards-and-loans.info.

1. If you are using Google AdWords for a new product or a non-branded product then test clickthrough rates across multiple domain names.
2. Make sure your domain name allows you to expand as needed. This is sorta an error I made early on with this site...I had no idea how successful the site would become when I started it and did not anticipate us creating the #1 SEO training program back when I thought of selling an ebook.
3. Avoid names that are impossible to remember. If you intend to create something that is easy to market online and offline then your domain name must pass the phone test, which typically means avoiding hyphens & numbers. This is especially true if you are trying to build a big brand.
4. If you feel your company may expand internationally it is best to buy any matching domain extensions where you might intend to eventually do business.
5. Exact match domain names can create a big SEO advantage if you can afford them - since some engines may give them a relevancy boost and your domain name influences the anchor text people use when they link at your website.

2. All Search Traffic Driven to Homepage

Google AdWords

1 page can only be relevant for a certain sector of search queries. In an efficient market anyone who directs all traffic to the homepage will lose a lot of money.

Every additional click you force users to make has some amount of slippage. When using Google AdWords / pay per click marketing a small change in conversion rates can be the difference between sustained profits and sustained losses.

SEO

It is sorta impossible to make a page "optimized" for hundreds or thousands of popular keywords because eventually after you add enough different keywords in the page copy it ends up reading bad and it harms conversion rates.

With SEO efforts mis-directing traffic is not as obvious as it is with AdWords because you don't have to pay for every click. But giving users an irrelevant experience still means you are throwing money away and only operating at a fraction of your potential.

Recommendations

With the prevalence of Google (and web search in general) every page of your site is the front door. We navigate via search. So map out keywords against URLs and try to offer the most relevant user experience whenever possible.

Observe how we map out core keywords, variations, and modifiers.

Some Google AdWords advertisers take perceived relevancy one step further and use the search query to help define the page content through the use of keyword insertion into their page copy and/or altering the page based on geographic information based on your computer's IP address.

3. No Link Building

Google AdWords

The equivalent of links to AdWords is keywords in your AdWords account. If you only advertise on 1 or 2 keywords you miss out on a large stream of relevant traffic.

SEO

If you build it they will come is simply not true in the search game. If it was easy to rank for competitive keywords without links then few companies would buy AdWords ads. You can't typically rank a new site until you have some level of awareness. Search engines follow people. Links are seen as votes of trust.

Recommendations

With AdWords, don't just bid on 1 keyword. Look for additional relevant variations that make sense. If you don't mind splashing out $50 you can also look at what competing sites are advertising on using SEM Rush, Keyword Spy, SpyFu, and/or KeyCompete. There are so many new tools popping up in this market segment that I have not had the time to review them all.

For SEO, download SEO for Firefox and the SEO Toolbar and look at how many links competing sites have and how many domain names those links come from. You will likely need to build some number of links in the range of what competing sites have (from a similar set of sites) to rank. Today is the perfect day to start building links. And yesterday was even better. ;)

4. All Links to the Homepage

Google AdWords

Since you are buying the links from the search engines based on keyword, this problem would be corrected by solving issue #2.

SEO

A variation of the above thinking. Most quality sites have useful content somewhere that people link to editorially. If all your links point at the homepage then that means you are not using anchor text from external links to boost your internal page ranks. In most markets that creates a big loss considering that some of those pages would get a lot of traffic with just a few more deep links which would yield higher rankings.

Recommendations

Search is a winner take most market. Analyze your traffic patterns, rankings, and target keywords to ensure you are promoting key pages. Look at top competing sites and keyword ranking values to gain additional insights.

Create linkworthy content that people would want to link at and push market it. The objective (vs self-interested) viewpoint here is "if you did not own your site what is unique about it that would make you want to visit it every week and/or recommend it to a friend?"

5. No Link Anchor Text Variation (or AdWords Ad Copy Variation)

Google AdWords

You shouldn't use the exact same ad copy on all of your keywords. You should segment it out by trying to understand user demand and create compelling advertising text that is relevant to the search query, relevant to the user demand, and relevant to your landing page. If you use a single generic boilerplate ad copy you are loosing a lot of money because your ad will not look as relevant as some of the top competing ads.

SEO

When people link to things naturally there tends to be some variation involved. If all your inbound links say "my keywords" then that can look suspicious...particularly if you are buying lots of links.

Recommendations

With AdWords, at a minimum you would want to use dynamic keyword insertion. But if you sell a lot of different products then you should try to find a way to match up small groups of relevant keywords against a set of ad copy. Make your core keywords stand out on their own, and be willing to be somewhat less descriptive with low search volume backfill keywords.

With SEO you should try to mix up your link anchor text when you are manually building links. If you create original compelling content that people want to link at (and push market it to the right audience) then that will also pull in natural anchor text.

6. No Focus on Quality

Google AdWords

Some advertisers are compelled to go after "cheap" clicks. But some of the more expensive keywords are expensive because they are associated with significant and valuable consumer demand.

SEO

Google algorithms estimate the probability of a new site being quality or low quality. If you start off with 2,000+ "free" directory links you align your site with sites that are often of lower quality. Similarly, if you try to promote watered down or average content then few people will be receptive to those efforts.

Recommendations

There is nothing wrong with buying cheap traffic, but make sure you track the business value you get from that traffic. If you buy "cheap" traffic from 3rd tier ad networks and/or keywords without any commercial intent those will not build your business anywhere near as well as developing a solid traffic stream from valuable industry keywords on leading search engines.

Start your link building efforts with quality links first. As your site gets more trusted you can fill in some lower quality links as well, but you don't want to do it first, and you don't want to do it in bulk.

When you decide to do push marketing for link building make sure the content you are promoting is unique, original, useful, compelling, & citation-worthy.

7. Lacking On Page Optimization

Google AdWords

Quality user experience and usability are crucial to converting well. When users come from search to your site they are switching channels. The more cues you can give them that they are in the right place (like relevant page headings + navigation) the higher your conversion rates and visitor value should be.

SEO

For really competitive queries links are crucial, but you can rank for many less competitive keywords and keyword variations without lots of links (because there is much less competition for those keywords). And even if you have lots of links, it is still typically hard to rank for keyword phrases that are not in your page copy.

Recommendations

With Google AdWords you can reach many of the stray searchers by using a combination of phrase match and broad match, and then using negative match to filter out irrelevant searches.

For every person searching for "seo" or "sem" there are probably 10 people searching for more obscure queries like "how do I promote my business on Google?" You can see how our page about link building ranks for hundreds of related keywords.

This is probably the single most powerful graphic explaination of why having lots of useful on-page content:

With SEO you can reach a lot of the searchers by using alternate word forms, alternate word orders, related phrases, and keyword modifiers in your content.

8. No Site Structure

Google AdWords

If your AdWords ad campaigns are not well organized then you are likely losing money. A strong site structure also helps ensure that your AdWords account has a strong structure, which can aid profitability.

SEO

If your site is not structured well then...

• navigation will likely be hard or confusing
• some of your key pages may not get much of your link authority
• some of your unimportant pages may accumulate a lot of your link authority

Recommendations

Most successful websites have a structure in which key pages which are mapped out against user demand and search volume.

• Create separate AdWords campaigns based on goals. Perhaps you can have campaigns for brand related searches, seasonal offers, public relations, campaigns that are based on ROI metrics, and even backfill campaigns like misspellings.
• Some content management systems (CMS) have major errors with duplicate content and site structure issues. A review of that topic is beyond the scope of this article, but search for the name of the CMS and SEO prior to implementing it to verify there are no serious issues and/or that there are easy fixes on the market.
• Set up site categories and sub-categories that are aligned against the keywords people use to search for your products and services.
• If you blog (or publish content regularly) reference older related materials when relevant.
• If your content is in a database you can use automated contextual links to help fix some site structural issues and redistribute PageRank down toward lower pages in your site structure.

9. Site With No Value Add

Google AdWords

If your site does not add much value it can be quite hard to sustain profit margins in the AdWords market. Affiliates routinely copy the work of each other and drive up click prices, which kills profit margins.

SEO

My very first profitable website was a no value add website that I got some spammy links for. The site did make thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions (a gift from God at the time), but that income was only made ***because*** I was a bad speller and misspelled some casino brand names back before search engines integrated spell correcting aggressivley. Such a site would simply go nowhere today.

Google often considers sites without value add to be unneeded duplication and/or spam. If you ever get a chance to read some of the Google Remote Quality Rater Documents you can see what Google believes is associated with "value add."

Recommendations

• In competitive AdWords markets competing businesses are forced to keep improving their business processes and efficiencies to be able to afford increasing bids from competing businesses.
• If you have a lower lifetime customer value than competing businesses you may eventually be driven out of the market.
• With some seedy affiliate offers in many cases the only people with sustained profit margins are basically those who are surprisingly sleazier than the rest of the market or those who are barely breaking even themselves, but are using their blog to build a downstream of followers that they get commissions from.
• Some (perhaps most?) affiliate networks ***will*** shave your commissions AND steal your keyword list if you send them the data.
• If you don't have a value add and want to play catch up in a competitive SEO market you need to have some sort of competitive advantage (be it nepotism, domain name, market experience, etc.).
• Making paid things freely available, creating useful software or tools, and having deeper & better editorial are 3 great ways to add value and win marketshare.

10. Competitive Saturated Market With Inadequate Budget

Google AdWords

In some markets it is hard to compete buying traffic without having a strong brand. If Geico pays Google $30 a click, but only pays affiliates $10 per lead then there is no way an affiliate can compete against Geico on the core industry keywords like auto insurance.

SEO

Want to rank for hotels and insurance? Me too. But I am uncertain if I have the resources to do it from scratch in a lasting manner given the algorithmic trends promoting well branded business and how corporations are increasing their SEO budgets.

Recommendations

• Have big ideas, but set reasonable goals, and measure progress.
• Do the math in advanced to estimate how much you can afford to pay for a click.
• Pick and chose your spots in the Google AdWords market. If after you do significant testing and optimization a word is still losing money consider dropping it.
• Try to pick a market position you feel you can dominate. The #20 result for "insurance" produces traffic worth ~ $0. The #2 or #3 result for "pet insurance" yields much more.
• Make at least 1 incremental improvement to your web business everyday.
• Aggressively re-invest early profits into growing your website and building a moat.

11. Picking a Market for 1

Google AdWords & SEO

If there is no demand for an idea then it is quite hard to create demand through search engine marketing. Search engine marketing works best when it captures existing demand.

Recommendations

• Keyword research tools can give you estimates of search volume.
• Since AdWords is so much quicker and easier to test than building a full site and implementing an SEO campaign, you can use AdWords to test market demand and interest for an offer before spending money building and marketing a full website.
• It can be good to be out front of trends (as one of the easiest ways to win a market is to be the first person in it), but just as easily you can go after an established high money market with your own original spin or angle.

12. Pick a Market Which Does Not Monetize

Google AdWords

If similar competing business models have much higher visitor value you may have to change your business model to compete. Some low earning business models might simply be precluded from participating in the AdWords market in a meaningful way.

SEO

There is nothing wrong with building a site about a topic you are passionate about and interested in without knowing how well it will monetize, but if you are trying to build a business you should pick something with a high enough visitor value to create enough profit potential to make it worth the time and money investment.

Recommendations

If you are planning on participating in the AdWords market, but have a low margin business then you should look for ways to increase profit margins, customer order size, and lifetime customer value.

If you run an editorial site it can be a good idea to under-monetize off the start to build market momentum without people viewing you as a competitor, but it can be hard to bolt on a business model if you have spent a lot of time servicing the wrong market segments.

13. Over-Aggressive Monetization From Day 1

Google AdWords

If you are buying traffic there is no problem with trying to monetize it. But most website visitors will not convert.

SEO

Sell in line text links & have pop ups? Is ever other post an affiliate link? If so, why would anyone want to subscribe to an ad stream when there are many useful alternatives to look at?

Recommendations

• Since most website visitors will not convert to paying customers on the first visit, you should look to establish a relationship with them by giving them a free offer and/or some reason to come back to your website. You can see the offer we make at the bottom of our pages and on our join now page.
• Existing leading trusted sites that have built up a following benefit from cumulative advantage. If your site is brand new and driven by editorial content it is a good idea to give away more value than you capture. Under-monetize until you build enough market momentum to make your rankings stick even when you do monetize.
• Consider monetizing some areas of your site more aggressively while not monetizing other sectors of your site, but instead using them for public relations and link building.

14. What Other Common SEM Errors do You See?

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Imagine selling web traffic as a commodity in a blind auction, while touting its value based on the traffic being targeted, relevant, precise, and trackable. Then imagine taking away the default keyword tool on the internet that has been written about in thousands of marketing books, ebooks, and web pages - and replacing it with nothing. Then imagine signing up some seedy publishing partners that run clickbots against your highest value keywords, and giving them the lion's share of the click "value" on those keywords. Then imagine not making it easy for advertisers to opt out of that "traffic." Then imagine editing your advertisers accounts without their permission to alter ad text and keywords, and only informing some of them about the changes sometime after they take place...with 1 in 5 rejecting the changes!

So inefficient and sloppy. They can call that account optimization, but only in an Orwellian sense. Why not give advertisers the tools to do optimization themselves?

Google offers about a half-dozen public keyword tools, makes it easy to filter out bad traffic, has way more volume, offers enterprise level analytics for free, and does not edit your keywords and ad copy against your permission. Is it any wonder Yahoo! managed to lose hundreds of millions of dollars last quarter, while Google keeps exceeding market expectations - even during a recession?

I just hope that when Yahoo! gets bought out by Microsoft that they keep Site Explorer around for us SEOs, and don't do us as poorly as they did their advertisers. ;)

[update: Danny Sullivan also covered this issue.]

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Recently one of our AdSense sites had a lot of poor ads on it that we filtered out, but it is hard to keep up with all the new ones. Some of them are so bad that you know they are junk just by looking at the URL.

Danny recently highlighted how Ask.com is becoming a big arbitrage play, but I am seeing lots of arbitrage ads from smaller advertisers as well...ones that would have been filtered out of Google a year or two ago (unbranded sites, cheesy universal subdomains, subdomains of subdomains, .info thin content sites, sites which act as a portal that link to domain lander pages that use a 0 for the o in the domain name, Overture feed sites, adsense sites with robotic content, etc etc etc) are now showing up for many Google searches. Google has begun running their own arbitrage ads for things like credit cards and car insurance. Some people have even noticed graphical ads selling people and sites distributing spyware.

To appreciate how bad this is here are a couple examples...

• On one major keyword I saw all but one ad being from an unbranded thin arbitrage site.
• On one search I clicked from Google into an arbitrage site that lists links to niche domains with domain holder pages. On those domains there were Overture advertiser links. I clicked one of those and ended up on a site that was a thin crappy AdSense arbitrage site. That AdSense ad I clicked on landed me on another domain lander page powered by Overture. That domain lander page had ads on it for the domain name I just came from...and then I fully appreciated the absurdity of it all!

I could make a video showing examples, but did not want to out people. I just find it lame that Google polices organic results so aggressively and then let their ad network devolve this far this fast. They were pretty strong 6 months ago.

I suspect that Google is trying to goose revenues for this quarter (or is trying to use the downturn to be aggressive with experimentation). I can't think of any other reasons why they would have done such a major retracement on their quality score algorithm and click arbitrage front. Essentially they are paying people to generate garbage AND eat up a lot of their revenue while providing zero value in the transactions.

Have you been seeing a sharp rise in garbitrage?

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I recently had an email chat with Alden DoRosario from Chitika about the recent rapid growth of their ad network. They have been aggressively signing up bloggers and other independent publishers, and are now getting over 2 billion monthly impressions, with their behaviorally targeted Premium ads getting hundreds of millions of monthly search driven impressions, putting their search distribution network on par with Ask.com.

How their premium ad network works is they target the ads to be relevant to search query that sent traffic to the publisher's site, thus even if the ads are not shown on a search page they still are seen by searchers right after they search and click through to the site.

Alden gave me a link for a $75 bonus code for any publisher that makes $75 in commissions before the end of October. Publishers are paid 60% of the ad click value, with the house getting 40%. I just added their ads to my mom's weight loss blog. It looks like their ad network is not quite as deep as Google's but they do well for higher volume search queries.

Most search engines are a backbone for an ad network, but it is hard to build query volume for a new search engine. Just look at how few people have used Wikia Search in spite of endless hype. Wikia Search got a couple million lifetime searches whereas Chitika gets billions of monthly ad impressions.

Most people do not feel they have a search problem, but many publishers feel their content could be monetized better. If you didn't have huge search distribution how would you create a search ad network? If an ad network grows big enough do you think they could do it the other way around, using their ad network distribution as a backbone to start a search engine?

Disclaimer: The free $75 bonus is an affiliate link, but when I chatted with Chitika I pushed hard to get publishers the best payout bonus and longest payout bonus period possible rather than focusing on trying to maximize my commissions.

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I created a new training module talking about how language in new industries changes over time, how you can track change, and how you can take advantage of structural changes. I made the first 1/3 of it freely available, but the action items are for subscribers only.

I am still trying to figure out how to balance creating premium members only content and publish many posts to the blog. Which of the following ideas do you like best?

• make one out of every few freely available forever
• make a portion freely available forever
• make new content freely available in its entirety and then make it exclusive after a week or some other period of time

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The WSJ reported that Google and Yahoo! have inked a non-exclusive ad deal

Yahoo said it will display some ads sold by Google in an agreement estimated to generate $800 million in annual revenue. In the first 12 months following implementation, Yahoo expects the deal to generate an estimated $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow.

Both companies have agreed to "delay implementing the deal for up to three and a half months while regulators review it." The deal can be terminated at any point in time, but if it is terminated within 24 months Yahoo! will owe Google $250 million.

The partnership is only for the US and Canadian markets, but expands beyond Yahoo!'s search results into Yahoo! content ads and even the syndicated Yahoo! Publisher Network. Given Yahoo!'s poor ad relevancy and that they are reselling Google ads, how will the Yahoo! Publisher Network ever gain marketshare from AdSense?

Beyond the incremental revenue stream, this also gives Google another opportunity to spy on web users who use their largest competitor - allowing Google to get a better view of the average web user and making it easier for Google to clone and beat Yahoo! in any market where Yahoo! leads.

Here is Google's take, and the full Yahoo! press release is below

Yahoo! to Strengthen Competitive Position in Online Advertising Through Non-Exclusive Agreement With Google
Thursday June 12, 6:16 pm ET

Agreement Advances Yahoo!'s Open Strategy; Enhances Ability to Compete in Converging Search and Display Marketplace

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Google Inc. that will enhance its ability to compete in the converging search and display marketplace, advancing the company’s open strategy. The agreement enables Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google alongside Yahoo!’s search results and on some of its web properties in the United States and Canada. The agreement is non-exclusive, giving Yahoo! the ability to display paid search results from Google, other third parties, and Yahoo!’s own Panama marketplace.

Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which – and the pages on which – Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. Yahoo! will define its users’ experience and will determine the number and placement of the results provided by Google and the mix of paid results provided by Panama, Google or other providers. The agreement applies to paid search and content match and does not apply to algorithmic search. The agreement also applies to current partners in Yahoo’s publisher network.

Yahoo! CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang said, “We believe that the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry. Our strategies are specifically designed to capitalize on this convergence -- and this agreement helps us move them forward in a significant way. It also represents an important next step in our open strategy, building on the progress we have already made in advancing a more open marketplace.”

“This agreement provides a source of funds to both deliver financial value to stockholders from search monetization and to invest in our broader strategy to transform display advertising and advance our starting point objectives with users,” said Yahoo! President Sue Decker. “It enhances competition by promoting our ability to compete in the marketplace where we are especially well positioned: in the convergence of search and display.”

Agreement Provides Attractive Economics and Enhances Search Monetization

Yahoo! believes that this agreement will enable the Company to better monetize Yahoo!’s search inventory in the United States and Canada. At current monetization rates, this is an approximately $800 million annual revenue opportunity. In the first 12 months following implementation, Yahoo! expects the agreement to generate an estimated $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow.

The agreement will enhance Yahoo!’s ability to achieve its goal to grow operating cash flow significantly, while at the same time providing flexibility to continue to invest in ongoing initiatives such as algorithmic search innovation and search and display advertising platforms. It gives Yahoo! complete flexibility to continue to use its Panama paid search results.

Significant Benefits Will Flow to Users, Advertisers, Publishers and Employees

Users will also benefit from Yahoo!’s ability to invest incremental operating cash flow in ongoing improvements to its search services, building upon recent major innovations such as Search Assist and SearchMonkey. Advertisers will continue to benefit from multiple marketplace alternatives including Panama, Google and others. Publishers will benefit from a winning combination of distribution, monetization and services to help them grow their businesses. The financial benefits will enable Yahoo! to broaden the scope of its investments and initiatives, enhancing Yahoo!’s ability to offer attractive career opportunities to its employees.

Terms of the Agreement

The agreement will enable Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google's AdSense™ for Search and AdSense™ for Content services next to Yahoo!’s internally generated paid search and algorithmic search results. Yahoo may also run Google-supplied ads on non-search Yahoo web properties, as well as on current members of its partner network. The agreement has a term of up to ten years: a four-year initial term and two, three-year renewals at Yahoo!’s option. It applies to Yahoo!’s operations in the U.S. and Canada only. Advertisers will continue to pay Yahoo! directly for clicks served by Yahoo! from Yahoo!’s Panama and Content Match marketplaces. Advertisers will pay Google directly for each click on Google paid search results appearing on Yahoo! owned and operated network or certain affiliate sites. Google will share a percentage of such revenue with Yahoo!.

In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users.

The agreement allows either party to terminate the agreement in the event of a change in control of either party. The agreement also requires Yahoo! to pay a termination fee if the agreement is terminated as a result of a change in control that occurs within 24 months. The termination fee is $250 million, subject to reduction by 50 percent of revenues earned by Google under the agreement.

Although Google and Yahoo! are not required to receive regulatory approval of the deal before implementing it, the companies have voluntarily agreed to delay implementation for up to three and a half months while the U.S. Department of Justice reviews the arrangement.

Goldman, Sachs & Co., Lehman Brothers and Moelis & Company are acting as financial advisors to Yahoo!. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is acting as legal advisor to Yahoo!, and Munger Tolles & Olson LLP is acting as counsel to the outside directors of Yahoo!.

Yahoo! will host a conference call to discuss the agreement with Google at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time today. To listen to the call live, please dial 877-391-6847 (reservation number 70308474#). A live audiocast of the conference call can be accessed through the Company's Investor Relations website at http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/index.cfm. In addition, an archive of the audiocast can be accessed through the same link. An audio replay of the call will be available following the conference call by calling 888-286-8010 (reservation number 84138579).

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AdWords has become a black box beyond the means of many small advertisers. To help some advertisers automate their accounts tools like free conversion tracking and CPA based bidding have came about. But all the tools that help enhance the perceived value of search ads and the value of conversions does nothing for brand ads or the other ads people see before searching and buying.

Content ads, which were relatively expensive when AdSense first came out, have seen their price drop over the years as

• advertisers adjusted content bids downward
• smart pricing reduces prices (again, again, and again)
• quality scores that drives out arbitrage ads
• the clickable region has got smaller

The value of many publishing based business models has aggressively eroded as

• publishing markets get saturated
• AdSense has replaced direct ad sales for many sites
• Google keeps discounting the price (and perceived value) of non-search ads
• Google's search based ads get conversion credit for demand created by other ads

Google claims their success is just because they are simply better than the competition and they have been doing search longer (that second claim is untrue - Yahoo! owns Inktomi and AltaVista, which have both been doing search longer than Google). The truth is they have a huge advantage in network effects, have advertising believe that their inventory is worth more than it is, and that other online ads are worth less than they are. It is going to be hard to create a viable competitor unless the metrics for measuring value are changed.

Microsoft's answer to this is called Engagement Mapping, yet another black box, but one that aims to share part of the ad credit with display ads (clicked or not) instead of tying most of the ad value to the search based conversion. Publishers would clearly benefit from this, but if it is hard to get advertisers to buy AdSense ads on Google (where Google essentially giving away the ads) how hard will it be to get advertisers to buy in on this? Perhaps big brands will use it, but smaller companies will not be interested.

If Microsoft does not own a big piece of the search market, another big hurdle is how will they advertisers trust this model without giving Microsoft their analytics data?

How might this pricing model change online publishing (for better or worse)?

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I recently bought a few AdWords ads for Microsoft adCenter's affiliate program. These links were direct affiliate links that headed directly to Microsoft - the searcher never touched my site.

Compare the following 3 AdWords ad campaigns

The first campaign is a strategic one, where I do not mind losing money if it increases usage, which may lead to more links (and better organic rankings) over time. But that second campaign, with a similar number of clicks, never even touches my site and still has a baseline conversion rate and conversion cost similar to the strategic ad group.

Truth be told those conversion sample sizes are so small that it is hard to draw concrete evidence from them, but if I was telling myself that some of the ad sales caused by that strategic ad campaign help subsidize at least some of the cost, then I might be operating under a false pretense. Some of those conversions may have happened anyway.

That third ad campaign consists largely of brand related keywords and a few other somewhat related terms. Notice how the conversion rate is higher. Microsoft recently published research that brand related search terms tend to convert better than twice as well as non-brand terms.

Why is this important? As Google controls an increasing large piece of the online advertiser pie, if you use their analytics, many of those conversions THEY track are falsely tied to their ads. They would have happened even if you were not buying AdWords ads. As far as brand related conversions go, conversions tied to brand phrases typically are not incremental, which means those would have happened even if you were not buying AdWords ads.

You can use direct conversions as a proxy for the value of advertisements, but if you have a large ad campaign and a well known brand, you are likely buying brand exposure more than direct conversions, even if you control your spend on using a CPA metric.

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Laziness is Beyond Your Control

Everyone, at least on some levels, is lazy. I work my ass off, but am still lazy about doing things I do not enjoy doing. If my wife asks me to wash the dishes the hand of God strikes upon me a mean streak of laziness. It is outside my control, I swear ;)

Right now I am trying to write a sales letter, which has made me lazy, and instead made me want to write this post.

Laziness Leads to Productivity Gains

I don't like having to think some things through too much if they can be automated. And so tools like keyword list generators are made.

I recently found a sweet affiliate program in a field where no other affiliates existed. For the right keywords, click value was about $12 a click, and I was paying like 60 cents a click. With under an hour of work, I made hundreds of dollars in daily profit with virtually no effort.

Find Something You Love And Make it Your Own

I just logged in today and saw that my conversion stats dropped to virtually nothing over the past couple days. Odd. So then I searched, and like 10 affiliates (or, more likely, 1 competing affiliate 10 times) launched ads showing for many of the keywords I bid on, with many of them stealing my exact ad copy - word for word. They loved my ad copy and made it their own.

Slimming Profit Margins

Bidding Wars Reduce Profits

So what is the solution? Maybe I increase my bids again. But then they will increase their bids again. A bigger and bigger piece of the profits get shipped to Google, while these clowns and I eventually compete for crumbs. One of the reasons Google does not care if others steal your ad copy (or all the content on your website) is because at the end of the day they know it erodes the value of copyright and creates a bidding war that deposits more money in their bank account.

Quick Paydays

PPC affiliate marketing and arbitrage works that way, where you find a payday, hold it for a few weeks or a few months, then someone competes and the profit margins drop, unless you have a higher visitor value it keeps costing you more time to make less, until the opportunity cost exceeds your profit potential, and then you are off hunting for the next big idea. Competitive forces make it hard for this strategy to build long-term value unless you are operating in a small market or are using a technique that is pretty dirty.

Super Affiliate Secrets

One of my friend that was doing well with PPC affiliate stuff got up to about $1,000 a day of profit for an affiliate network. He ran it for about a year, then his affiliate network decided that they would find something they love and make it their own - they cloned his account and he is now making $0 for uncovering all the great keywords for them.

If you don't own the supply chain or have a distribution chain that is hard to replicate your competitors consist of

• other affiliates
• the search engines
• quality scores and algorithmic changes
• the companies you affiliate with
• anyone else interested in the keyword you are buying

SEO Loves Your Profit Margins

This is why I like SEO so much more than PPC. Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships. We are afraid of failure, afraid of success, and afraid that we are investing too much in one place. But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can't just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul. In many cases, knowing SEO well means having capital, time, passion, and a lot of marketing knowledge.

Emotionally Engaged Brand Evangelists

Off the top of your head, how many people or brands in the SEO space can you think of? How many give you some sort of emotional response? How many helped you change your life for the better? Even in some of the most competitive and most saturated marketplaces there is not much real competition.

Thanks for the Laziness, PPC Affiliate Dude!

SEO separates out real businesses from 95% of the people buying PPC ads. The guy stealing ad copy is too lazy to compete at that level. I'll enjoy the logarithmic growth in profits (which have been at least doubling every year) while he keeps stealing table-scraps from Google and other affiliates until his accounts get banned.

Find Something You Love And Make it Your Own!

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I put a Microsoft AdCenter affiliate ad in the sidebar of the blog.

I generally do not like putting too many ads on this site, but...

• their traffic converts well because it is such a clean source (no dirty clickfarm syndication partners)
• I recently fell in love with Microsoft's Ad Intelligence tool. If you have not tried it yet I urge you to try it. This post and this video offer a review of some of the features
• $50 in free clicks is a great offer for search marketers who have yet to try Microsoft's ad platform
• I think the web is healthier if Google has some competition, and Yahoo no longer attempts to compete

Are you against affiliate ads? Have you tried AdCenter or the Ad Intelligence tool yet?

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To be honest, I have used the "scam or not" angle before when trying to pull in traffic for something and have called stuff a "scam" when I did not like it, but I have never called something a scam right before trying to sell it.

Is this a common affiliate technique? Would you allow it? Does it bring in skeptics that never would have bought? Or does it taint the brand too much?

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Ad Intelligence is a new cutting edge keyword tool from Microsoft which will probably force Google and Yahoo to make better keyword tools. All of this data is free during the beta test as long as you have a Microsoft AdCenter account (you can set one up for $5, and get free ad money using the below coupon) and a copy of Microsoft Excel 2007 (the Ad Intelligence link below allows you to download a free trial of Excel).

Get Started Today

Step 1: Create Your Microsoft AdCenter Account

Use the following AdCenter promotion code. Sign up today and get $75 in free clicks at Microsoft AdCenter. Try Microsoft adCenter for free* with a $75 credit for paid search clicks.

Step 2: Download Excel Trial & Ad Intelligence Plug-in

Download and install both here.

Example Keyword Data

Some samples of the kinds of data you can get from Microsoft Ad Intelligence:

keyword ad data

related keywords to advertise on

spiky keywords (recently hot search volume)

URL related keywords (site related key words)

Background Data Information Reviewed

Here are some of the sweet features of Microsoft Ad Intelligence:

• Keyword wizard: Allows you to extract keywords based on a list of keyword in excel, a given vertical, or a given URL. Then it allows you to generate an expanded keyword list based on category similarity, keyword bidding association, or keywords containing the core keyword. Then it allows you to export an output of estimated search volume, clicks, ad position, ad CTR, and click cost for a given date range and match type.
• keyword extraction: Extract keywords based on an input URL. Can set maximum keywords from 1 to 100, and can set a minimum confidence level of relevancy.
• keyword suggestion: suggest keywords based on aggregate advertiser behavior, keywords containing the core keyword, or keywords that are deemed to be similar based on category similarity
• search buzz: Top category keywords based on 22 core categories and about a couple hundred subcategories. The spiky tool uses the same categories but is focused on spiky keywords, and includes spiky index, spike start date, and spike end date. You can also set it to "all verticals" to discover leading overall spiky keywords or leading common search queries.
• monthly traffic: Monthly search volumes for keywords, and forecasts for the next 3 months. Also offers a daily search volume option.
• keyword categorization: Identifies categories that a keyword belongs to.
• geographic: Shows the geographic breakdown of a search query.
• demographic: Shows date range and male vs female breakdown stats of keywords.
• monetization: Allows you to view ad impressions, ad clicks, CTR, and CPC by category.
• advanced algorithms: Allows you to change date ranges and other variables for the above tools.

Try it Today

Step 1: Create Your Microsoft Ad Center Advertiser Account

Open your account using the linked to Microsoft AdCenter coupon / promo code. Try Microsoft adCenter for free* with a $75 credit for paid search clicks.

Step 2: Download Excel Trial & Ad Intelligence Plugin

Download and install both here.

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DaveN, well known for SEO, published stats about how PPC ads aided organic conversions. Andrew Goodman's firm, well known to focus on paid search, now does SEO too. It seems the PPC vs SEO debate has been quiet for a year or more. Hopefully this puts a fork in it.

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Two chocolate companies advertised similar products via pay per click ads. One wasted thousands of dollars while the other grew their business.

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Jen noticed that Google's Kim Malone announced that in the next couple months AdWords will start displaying content targeted ad locations.

Google AdSense pays most publishers crumbs for their ad space. People who are running AdSense ads are willing to sell ads. And sites that have AdSense ads on them are probably actively managed.

Is there a better way to get a list of relevant pages to acquire links from than to run a content targeted AdSense ad campaign and ping those webmasters?

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I got my invite to beta test Clickriver today. Yippie. I already set up my account, so lets see how long it takes Amazon to start showing my ads for things like my name and search engine optimization.

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SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

Answer: PPC ads go through redirects, so they do not count toward your link popularity, but there are other ways to tie together PPC ads and organic search placement. Search engines claim there is no direct linkage between buying ads and ranking, but they only talk in ideals because it helps reinforce their worldview and help them make more money.

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Why are companies that do not currently carry the Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation 3 bidding on those terms to send customers to pages that do not have the product? Why is it that their landing pages do not offer the option to sign up for priority notification when they become available? How many 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars are these people wasting?

People are getting shot waiting for Playstation 3 systems, and then you have these huge retailers bidding on the associated keywords to throw the traffic away and remind potential customers that they are sold out of the product. Sorta bizzare at both ends, eh?

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I just found this great offer for search advertisers. Well worth a look if you are trying to get traffic to your website. Here is a free $200 Microsoft Ad Center promotional code.

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Not sure how much it is for, but Google is giving out more free AdWords coupons.

Update: Barry says the AdWords coupons are $50 each, but unfortunately they are expired now. All is not lost though!

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Yahoo! announced they are launching their new Panama platform. In response, Google quietly announced they are launching a free multivariable testing program which ties in with AdWords.

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Yahoo! tends to be a bit more cautious than Google when it comes to allowing trademark related ads. That significantly suppresses their earnings because brand related search queries are often some of the most targeted, most commercial, highest converting, and most expensive keywords.

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Google AdWords updated their landing page quality scoring algorithm. I have got quite a bit of email on the issue, although people are still working through what all Google is doing.

In much the same way to how Google has clearly stated their hatred for low quality affiliate sites in the organic SERPs some of that pure hate is crossing over into their AdWords relevancy algorithms, where they are looking at the landing page quality (and other factors) and squeezing the margins on many business models.

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SER recently mentioned Microsoft AdCenter dynamic text.

Microsoft AdCenter dynamic text is similar to Google's AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion, but also allows you to set other variable ad copy driven off the keyword inclusion. For example:

Keyword / Dynamic text parameters
"sedans" / 5% off
"SUVs" / 7% off

When you are ready to build your ad, you will enter "All {keyword} {param2} as the ad title. When a user queries "sedans," the ad that appears will be "All sedans 5% off."

Microsoft's dynamic text also allows you to use {param1} to drive your ad URL and / or landing page.

AdCenter FAQs here.

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It looks like Yahoo! was waiting for MSN to dump them before rolling out their new PPC product. MSN dumped them last week, and today Yahoo! is already launching their shiny new PPC system.

The new system is going to be rolled out in stages. This stage is mostly about improving the underlying data and analytics platform. On the 17th of May they intend to announce the new PPC relevancy algorithm. In the third quarter they also plan on integrating analytics that will allow you to buy and track ads on Google or MSN as well.

More news and likely a bit of discussion at TW.

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Via WMW comes news that MSN has completely dumped Yahoo! as a PPC provider and anyone can now sign up for Microsoft AdCenter.

MSN has little traffic compared to Google or Yahoo!, but has more controls than other top PPC providers. While their service is new their traffic should be cheaper than buying similar traffic from Yahoo! or Google.

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Recently someone published a funny rant video about Google AdWords arbitrage. Google began killing off that market last July, when they started quality based minimum bids. Today Google furthered that mission, by announcing they will be showing less broad matched AdWords ads on queries they deem to be informational.

Their initial post was clear as mud, but Danny got some clarification.

With Google opening up their keyword tool and offering their search suggest service on the toolbar while killing off some of the underpriced informational query inventory many commercial terms will grow more competitive.

They are trying to keep ads as relevant as possible to prevent AdWords ad blindness.

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Sometimes you do not even need to test a pay per click search engine to know there isn't much value there. In much the same way you can determine the quality of a directory by the sites listed there, you can also determine the (lack of) value of a PPC engine by looking at the sites listed there.

Check out these LookSmart ads:

• Mesothelioma

• PPC
• SEO
• Home Loans

And then look at this search result:

• they throw tribal fusion pop up ads at site visitors.

• they sell off target banner ads at the top of the search results.
• they don't even have good ad placement on their own site, putting dumb banners and pop up ads front and center - making users hunt for the ads.
• what is up with the dumb blue triangle on the left? It points at nothing.

If they sell trashy off topic ads front and center on their own site what does that do for advertiser or publisher trust in their ad network?

Dumb. Really.

They couldn't even keep Zeal, their free volunteer directory, running with their own ads OR Google's ads (due largely to ignorant ad placement / integration).

They may be able to leverage all of their content to make some sort of a content play, but they would probably gain more credibility if they stopped selling ads directly and / or got rid of pop ups and integrated the ads appropriately into their search results (ie: place off topic banners AFTER the relevant ads).

And they probably would do better in other engines if they cleaned up their URLs and page titles a bit. They probably cut off 50% to 75% of their traffic with their current URLs, page titles, spreading their content over many domains with poor internal link structure, and marking it hard to get back to the root site from some of the sub sites.

Combine that with making their own ad market less efficient due to poor ad placement of the relevant ads and scaring off visitors with pop ups and you can see how the margin based network business they are running is doing less than stellar.

It might be different if they didn't also own a search engine, but how can they be so not clued up?

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Danny points at a SEW thread noting that starting next month Yahoo! will no longer allow competing businesses to bid on trademark phrases:

"On March 1, 2006, Yahoo! Search Marketing will modify its editorial guidelines regarding the use of keywords containing trademarks. Previously, we allowed competitive advertising by allowing advertisers to bid on third-party trademarks if those advertisers offered detailed comparative information about the trademark owner's products or services in comparison to the competitive products and services that were offered or promoted on the advertiser's site.

In order to more easily deliver quality user experiences when users search on terms that are trademarks, Yahoo! Search Marketing has determined that we will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks."

Trademark terms are some of the most valuable words in the search space. While this move may not be surprising given Yahoo!'s past activities, will this move cause other engines to change their policies? How will this policy effect comparison sites which offer many brands on the landing page? Is Yahoo! trying to commoditize the search marketplace to help them make more money away from search?

They still support typosquatting and cracking sites away from search, but may that be coming to an end too? The recent Perfect 10 vs Google lawsuit points to newtwork quality becoming a more important issue.

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Rand reports on OR being an ignored as an ad targeting word in Google AdWords.

Pretty bad deal for those using their keyword selection for regional Oregon AdWords campaigns.

I don't do as many power searches as I should, but today I noticed that when I searched for "blah" or "fla" Google ignored the boolean function until I capitalized the term. Can't they trust that a capitalized OR stands for something in the ads too?

I think Rand's post about OR is a good example of how just being around and experiencing SEO or SEM teaches you many tricks, problems and ideas that most would not naturally think of before playing around in the field.

Perhaps if Oregon becomes part of Baja Canada Google will not have to worry about this problem. If CA and WA stop working as intended then we will know Google is trying to send a hint, and adjust our ads to target Baja CA.

Google has been involved in political redistricting in the past.

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In How to Become the Doctor for a Famous Rock Band Clifton Sewell tells the whole world (including his competitors) that AdWords are currently under priced in his vertical.

The doctors have been running paid ads on Google for four months now, under terms such as "San Francisco Doctor". They're spending roughly 50 cents per click for top positions and their total monthly spend is about $500. "We get about 20-30 new patients a month from it, so we're happy," said Clifton.

Next month part 2 of the series will be out, where Clifton bitches about how AdWords is ineffective due to being hyper competitive.

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I have not been able to get a screenshot, but at WMW Vegas I noticed that when Baked Jaked was looking at Google search results for [Gwen Stefani Tickets] that their were Google AdWords ads at the top, right, and bottom.

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This search showed one of the longer AdWords creatives.

I refreshed the Google search 3 times and saw that ad live as well on the third go.

Already 3 ads at the top sometimes, and now longer ad copy tested in some of the other ad slots. Initial thoughts:

• those really don't fit on the sidebar. Maybe at the top, but they look screwy on the right 14% of the screen.

• got to imagine those hog the CTR from the ads around them for sticking out so much

noticed at SearchGuild

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AdWords Quality Based Minimum Bids:
have gone into effect. useful for those generic terms or low volume terms that used to get arbitrarily disabled, as well as terms that were slightly unprofitable at 5 cents a click.

AdSense:
has a new blog (from JenSense)

They also are beta testing allowing publishers to define user profiles for ad targeting.

PPC Trademark Law:
US courts say it is fine to use a trademark term to trigger ads, but not OK to use trademark terms in ad copy.

Miva vs Yahoo!:
patent dispute solved for $8 million, which is far cheaper than what Google paid, although Miva is forced to give Yahoo! an undisclused cut in future earnings as well.

Yahoo! Search Marketing:

• details of their upcomming ppc ad system

• Yahoo! is offering a new certified affiliate program

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Pay Per Click:

• Google beta testing longer AdWords ad descriptions (up to 200 characters).

• MSN to ramp up beta testing of MSN Keywords. Their ad copy specs will match Google's original 25 characters in the title & 70 characters in the description.
• apply to beta test Yahoo!'s publisher ads
• Ask Jeeves recently said they will show less pay per click ads. (Although they have also reported this in the past.)

We the United Spammers of Engines:
stuntdubl offers reinclusion request tips

Why the Desktop is So Important:
targeted marketing - Yahoo! sending email marketing based on data returned from the Yahoo! Toolbar.
Mozilla Corporation getting donation love from Google

Internet Stocks are Hot:
Baidu raises IPO price:

Baidu.com sold 4.04 million shares at $27 each, according to a person familiar with the transaction. The price was higher than the $23 to $25 range the Beijing-based company outlined in an Aug. 3 filing with U.S. regulators.

Amazon and eBay have both rose sharply recently.

The Sound of Search:
Yahoo! announced their audio search

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Much of this post was stolen from NickW ;)

SEO Book Review:
NickW reviews SEO Book. That is about the most thoughtful review I have seen of any book or software or anything like that in a long time. Thanks for the killer review and suggestions Nick!

Danny Sullivan:
Now has a show on Webmaster Radio and posts daily archives on Search Engine Watch.

Fairly interesting to see that in the last year and a half Search Engine Watch changed from a site that was primarily driven by articles and email newsletters to a site that also has a forum, a blog, and a daily podcast.

It is easy to get stuck with a format because it is easy to do what worked in the past, but the fact that Danny's publishing mechanisms evolve so much should be a reminder to those in strong market positions afraid of changing formats. GrayWolf suggested that I make ebook updates available via RSS and others have asked why I have not made a printed version yet.

Ask Jeeves PPC:
Ask Jeeves to sell their top 3 ad positions internally, if they will make more cash from them than selling Google AdWords ads (factoring in both CPC and clickthrough rate). They will also syndicate these ads onto other sites including Dogpile, Search.com, and Search123.

Surely some of the quicker selling ads will be travel related ones, since IAC has a ton of potential selling ad space across it's various properties including Expedia, Hotels.com, and the like.

Widgets:
Yahoo! owns the market.

With search being so profitable you can bet that niche companies which create products that make it easy to access data or may drive traffic are going to be bought up quickly and have their products given away.

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Smaller search networks can not compete with the big boys in building advertisers, users, and monetizing traffic. Hence they have to rely on gimicks and low quality publishing partners to get any exposure.

Joe Holcomb, a former executive at BlowSearch, was recently canned:

The “official” reason for my termination from BlowSearch was “Company Financial Crisis / Downsizing”.

He did a bunch to try to pump up the issue of click fraud and promote BlowSearch as a nearly fraud free network, but most of that was just marketing spin. They were using white label MyGeek services:

How was this a gimmick? Well, I used two of the services in the MyGeek back end and promoted it as a partial solution to click fraud. The manual IP blocking became “Competitor IP Blocking” and the publisher selection page became the “Traffic Source Selection” system. This all served to help the advertiser to achieve better ROI and really answered two of the biggest problems the search engine industry has been harping on (me included) for a long time now. Giving the advertiser the ability to choose and protect their ad investment.

Of course Joe just got a bad deal, and thus is going to have reason to paint a negative picture, but traffic tends to consolidate (just look at the share price of Google vs Miva) and the only way to break into a hyper competitive market is to create something uniquely innovative:

There was a post over at sew recently, some guy whining that he was getting beat silly in the serps by some old established sites. He was whining that they were doing x and so was he, they were doing y and so was he, they were doing z and so was he.

He didn't have the right attitude to succeed on the web. When you go up against those big established sites you really have to be committed and go the extra mile. If you want to world champion you have to fight the best in their own back yard, its no use being as good or even a little better, you have to knock them spark out to get the decision. - NFFC

No matter how you spin it, BlowSearch was not some amazingly new blow your hair back website. Heck they were spinning up something that was nothing more than a white label feed.

You can fake people for a bit, but eventually your source shows.

Joe also talked about his Click Defender idea, which the company never apparently believed in as much as he did. A while ago I called him out on the ClickDefender.com domain content being a joke, and apparently the owners of BlowSearch thought the same.

Interesting to see another blogger blog that they lost their job. I certainly noticed some of the marketing spin he created to help boost BlowSearch, and althoug I doubt they have much mindshare it will be interesting to see how quickly BlowSearch loses it.

From my short experience crossing with Joe online he at least seems like a good marketer, and someone should want to hire him for that. Best of luck Joe.

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Just logged into AdWords and found the following:

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

Not sure if it was causing too many customer support queries or the technology was a failure or what, but Google is dropping the in trial, on hold, and slowed AdWords account statuses. Ads will simply be active or inactive.

Google states the following about the pending change:

• The keyword statuses normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled will be replaced with active (triggering ads) or inactive (not triggering ads). In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don't meet our performance requirements and your ads appear rarely for your keywords.

• New keywords will no longer be disabled or have a minimum clickthrough rate (CTR) threshold. Instead, your keyword will trigger ads as long as it has a high enough Quality Score (determined by your keyword's CTR, relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors) and maximum CPC.
• Ad Rank, or the position of your ad, will continue to be based on the maximum CPC and quality (now called the Quality Score).
• Remember: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the CPC required to trigger ads, and vice versa.
• You can move an inactive keyword to an active state and show ads by (1) improving its Quality Score through optimization, or (2) increasing its maximum CPC to the minimum bid recommended by the system.

It will be interesting to see if using higher bids allows you to run ads with low relevancy scores for fairly generic terms. If it does it may mean that at least for a short period of time there may be a good number of underpriced terms (depending how high Google makes the minimum suggested bids to tax the poor relevancy - currently AdWords defaults to a 5 cent minimum or whatever some other low amount in other currencies).

It is sorta interesting to see because this is clearly Google moving away from keeping ads relevant and may cause sooner text ad blindness (similarly to how people became blind to banner ads). Google recently allowed people to pay to run untargeted ads on partner sites via CPM ad sales. The fact that Google is willing to accept low relevancy ads on it's own site should really show that Google wants to be all nearly all things related to internet advertising.

Many people did have complaints with good words getting disabled before trial, so this new system will help accomidate them, while allowing bulk upload of relevant longer search queries and taxing away the profits from the buy dead children at eBay and other off topic bulk eBay ads.

Searchday is running an article about the new AdWords change where they state:

Pegging minimum bids to a quality score that considers all of these factors effectively eliminates Google's previous de facto minimum bids. For ads that receive a high quality score, Kamangar said the minimum bid as little as a penny. Conversely, for ads that receive a low quality prediction, the new minimum bid could be higher than the previous minimum of five cents.

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Danny pointed at MarketingExperiment's recent piece on click fraud (free registration required).

They tried click fraud on test campaigns, clicking 10 times on each. Below is the number of clicks Google charged for from each test set:

Individual clicking on the ad: 0
Individual clicking on the ad with Anonymizer: 1
Clicking on the ad with a different computer, same IP address: 1
Clicking on the ad with a different computer, different IP address: 1

They mentioned impression fraud and looked at alleged click faud in three real accounts, which showed that fraud tended to increase as click cost rose.

They also gave tips on how to avoid click fraud or minimize its effects. The article is worth a peak if you plan on swimming in the PPC market. They also have a 50 minute audio I have only listened to a few minutes of.

I am not sure why they did not test other engines as well. They should have at least done Overture. It would be interesting to compare how various engines fight (or do not fight) click fraud.

Whoever is big in the click fraud prevention market should really use some a / b / c comparison testing as the cheap marketing opportunity that it is.

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Search Engine Lowdown is sponsored by LookSmart, and in their advertisement post it sounds as though Andy is endorsing their service:

If you want quality traffic at a lower cost than other leading pay-per-click search marketing programs, check out their LookListing service.

I guess quality is a broad word, with many meanings, but from my experiences that post sounds a bit economical with the truth.

Ocassionally I have thought about taking advertisers on this site, but it would take a lot of money for me to say nice things about LookSmart's traffic quality.

If LookSmart believed in their own products would they be displaying AdSense ads on their sites like FindArticles and Zeal? When I just checked even LookSmart itself was serving up AdSense ads.

From your internal testing does LookSmart provide quality traffic cheaper than leading pay-per-click search marketing programs? If their network traffic quality is high then why do they need to outsource their ad sales to Google? In spite of contextual ad click fraud why are some people willing to bid more on AdSense than on LookSmart?

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So I have content match turned on with Overture, and with my recent post about click fraud, it appears they are trying to make me a liar. One of the terms in my account is Improve Search Engine Rankings. My Overture content match usually costs me about $20 a month total, across a large number of words. In the last week I spent over $75 on that single term, at 44 cents a click, while my ad was in 3^RD position. Whats up with that?

I understand they enable certain terms on certain partner sites, but I just can't believe that traffic was legitimate.

I have not seen much sketchiness with their regular search product, just their content match on that specific term. Since it never really made any sales Overture content match has now been disabled :)

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Another class action click fraud lawsuit:

Google (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) and its top rival, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), have declined to say what percentage of clicks would fall under click fraud. The figure most cited by independent firms that track the practice is around 20 percent.

Scott Boyenger, chief executive of Colorado-based Click Defense, said in an e-mail that his company's tracking system has detected click fraud rates of as high as 38 percent. The company sells software to prevent click fraud.

Joe Holcomb, from BlowSearch, also states the 38% is not unrealistic.

A few things which discourage AdWords click fraud:

• If you click a competing ad on Google you make that ad more relevant to the search query. Google discounts their click price to make up for their higher relevancy.

• By clicking on a competing ad on Google you increase your own ad costs since you must bid higher to make up for your lower ad relevancy.

There are hundreds of millions of searches each day. No way 38% of the ad clicks are fraudulent AND not detected by the engines.

Recently, at the New Orleans WMW conferences I spoke with some people who told me they intentionally clicked their own AdWords ads just to try to keep them relevant and ranking.

Those preaching about the doom caused by click fraud are not telling the whole story.

To me, doing click fraud is about the same as complaining about people ranking above you. It is a waste of energy and builds little to no longterm value. Why? You will always have competitors.

Worrying about competitors instead of focusing on building your own business and parnerships while they are busy building their business means you are falling behind. If you are spending a ton of money on PPC ads it makes sense to track it, but click fraud should not be a primary business focus if you are trying to build a legitimate long term business.

Content publishers have more incentive to do click fraud since they get a cut of the revenues, but that is why most smart people do not bid sky high on content ads. For how cheap the branding effects are, I am usually stoked just to break even on content ads. If that means I am paying for a little click fraud oh well.

Danny Sullivan posted the click fraud complaint here (18 page PDF).

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So AdRoar recently sent out an email that starts with:

We have recently seen many articles discussing pay per click "click fraud" in relation to the major search providers Google and Overture. Please see the articles referenced below.

By its design, advertisers on AdRoar cannot be subject to "click fraud". This is primarily due to the fact that almost all popunder creatives are shown using contextual software. Since this is not accessible to third parties, it cannot be defrauded.

We urge you to test AdRoar against your current PPC provider to see the vastly better ROI's available. Click here to see how now! Firther information about AdRoar is below the referenced articles.

How Orwellian is that? A small ad provider with a fairly open publishing partnership talking about fraud being virtually impossible with their service.

If I can't do click fraud can I still do impression fraud? How is your service better than AdSense ad targeting which lets me chose the sites my ads are published on?

The larger picture is does AdRoar have any quality traffic, and where does it come from. For them to attack the credibility of Google and Yahoo! to push their product seems bizarre.

In the same email they also promote their ad publishing service offering 60% payout. Weird.

Crazy Dayz I Sayz.

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Not sure if this is new, but I just logging into Overture today and I noticed a bid to position option, where they state:

Choose the desired position for your Standard Match listings. Your Max Bid will be set $0.01 above the Max Bid of the advertiser currently in that position. If you'd like to set a limit on your cost per click to attain this position, enter it in the box next to "No Max Bid to exceed" and you will be given the best position available for that price.

It allows you to set your max bid and bid for postion 1 through 5.

You can still bid using the regular old max bid format, but it interesting to see some of the third party bid management type functionality integrated directly into the bid management systems. Bidding to position is only possible for the Standard match type.

This new feature moreless integrates bid jamming right into the ad management console, simply state you want to rank 1 position below your fiercest competitors and crank the bid price way up.

Of course this will also encourage click fraud. By factoring clickthrough rate into click cost AdWords helps ensure relevancy and combat some of the potential click fraud. Sorta amazing to see that Overture has not been more proactive in using CTR.

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The East Bay Business Times published an article named Jeeves, others trashed for sponsored links, about how search engines do not label their ads properly:

Indeed, the quality of search results has steadily increased. That's due to better search technology and to reforms resulting from pressure from the Federal Trade Commission and groups such as Consumer Reports.

Wow, talk about a pat on the back article. Search quality evolved because of these groups? Search evolved because Overture proved it could provide strong revenues and Google proved it could be done cheaply & highly profitably on the back of those evil ads.

The competition for the ad dollars, userbase, and purest data set have been what has driven it from there.

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Why Does Google Lie to SEOs?
asks Stuntdubl

OptiLink:
Leslie Rhode created a new seo blog, and a new Mastering PageRank video. His OptiLink was one of the first SEO tools I bought and one of the few I ever found useful, although the advancing algorithms are making link analysis harder than it was a short time ago.

Say Cheese:
the demise of a brand - a Kodak moment.

Mirago's Context Stream:
new AdSense competitor spotted.

Spammy Directory Links:
Have still seen them working decent in Google, although I am sure that will eventually change.

About 3 months ago a friend launched a brand spanking new site on an expensive topic which already ranks in the top 30 for a well known short query. The site ranked there before being listed in DMOZ.

Other than a Yahoo! Directory link only a few links from on topic sites or sites that would be well trusted by an algorithm such as TrustRank.

Most of the links popularity comes from general directories. The site also has sitewide outbound links to a couple industry hub resources. Most other sites in the field are not well topically connected and are powered by fake hubs and the like.

Cory Rudl:
Ken McCarthy posted a in memory page with a 1 hour MP3 audio clip of Corey from February 2001, which is well worth a listen to anyone new to internet marketing.

Become.com:
Their search service now comes with a new search suggestion / keyword research tool. Similar to how Snap works, except instead of showing queries which start with your term it shows querries which contain your term. from TW

PPC:
MarketingSherpa best practices - How Autobytel Ramped Up to 150,000 PPC Search Campaigns : 5 Best Practices in Campaign Management. from GotAds

Fear, Greed, & Social Software:
article by Ross Mayfield

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FindWhat and Espotting are being renamed Miva. Very rarely do I disagree with AussieWebmaster, but he said:

They have decided to take a completely new name so neither party could feel the upper hand in the relationship. Smart move in my opinion.

Many people in the know still recommended FindWhat. I think about a year ago I remembered Dana Todd saying FindWhat is almost like a tier 1.5 engine instead of a tier two engine (although there has probably been further market consolidation since then).

FindWhat drives nowhere near as much traffic as Google or Yahoo! / Overture, but they still have a few decent partnerships.

There are lots of posts out there telling people they may want to try FindWhat. On the other end of the spectrum you have people saying LookSmart is the worst traffic they have ever bought. Most smaller pay per click search engines could correctly be renamed pay per click fraud search engines.

So you take what is a somewhat clean search engine, which recently cut it's income heavily to get rid of bad partners and you give it a brand new name out in the wild which will make all the old recommending posts sound outdated or incorrect.

Sure FindWhat has had a bit of a bad rap for its stock price getting ahead of itself and the Miva Merchant buyout not leading to as many advertisers as desired, but the stock buyers and market price will eventually follow the value created.

Investors have a longer memory than webmasters, and based on FindWhat's market capitalization not many people are buying it.

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Sounds like a marketing product name, eh? Actually this is a link to a research paper Orion mentioned, a 20 page PDF about AdWords and Generalized On-Line Matching, which covers the idea of allowing search services to extract the maximum ad revenue out of advertisers.

One problem current search related ad systems have is that after one advertiser exhausts their budget the competing sites may get ads below their fair market value.

If a college student wanted to get a job at Google you could bet that writing a research paper about making AdWords more profitable would be a good idea :)

In related news...
AdWords Smart Keyword Evaluation Tool:
Sometimes without human review it disables some exceptionally well targeted terms even before you get a chance to display your ads. That is not so smart, as it frustrates advertisers and prevents them from selling part of their inventory.

You can't know how well an ad will perform based on past advertising experience since so much of Google's ad space is full of "Buy dead animal at eBay" type ads.

Why Disabling Some Generic Term Makes more Money:
I advertise one product line on Overture where part of the name is an acronym. I can use that acronym to make a decent number of sales on Overture for a good sum of money. If I want to advertise for that term on Google AdWords, even with like 20 negative keywords (filtering out unrelated traffic), the term consistantly gets shut off, despite getting a clickthrough near their minimum rate and converting exceptionally well.

Then again, maybe Google does not want me to get those conversions for a nickel. In how broad search engines allow you to advertise they are also trying to control the way searchers search. If a person searches for a short acronym Google would prefer that person to give them more data, so they can gain a better understanding of what the person wants, and deliver more targeted and hopefully more expensive advertising.

In my example for targeted terms I pay over 10 times as much per click, which really sucks since the acronym had a conversion rate higher than the campaign does.

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So the people suing the major search engines for click fraud issues created a website.

With the money that is going to be needed in that sort of a case you would have thought they could have made an attractive professional looking site, but you would be wrong. They even have (not so) flashy "click here" banners.

From their press release:

"What we'd like is for http://www.LostClicks.com to become an electronic meeting place for advertisers and individuals who are concerned about pay-per- click (PPC) fraud," says attorney Joel Fineberg of Dallas, who represents online advertisers in the class action lawsuit. "It's very important that all of us share information because we're dealing with a new technology and a new challenge. The more people who visit the site, the more knowledge we can all gain."

Sending what visitors I can. They are surely in for an expensive battle. Wonder why don't they have a blog, forum, or anything that would encourage community activity? They probably could have put a bit more effort in on that front.

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Corporate Search:
Google launches desktop search app for businesses

Google Inc. on Wednesday launched a corporate version of its desktop search application. The Google Desktop Search for Enterprise allows employees at companies to search for information on their computers. The free, downloadable application is based on its desktop search tools introduced last year. Google said it collaborated with IBM on the program, which is able to search IBM Lotus Notes messages, among other features.

AdWords Blog:
Cornwall notices a new AdWords blog.

Yahoo! VOIP:
new (Beta) Messenger allows calling over the web from messenger to messenger

Media RSS:
info from Yahoo!

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Huge news for the beaten down FWHT stock, which was recently down to 4.07 from it's 52 week high of 23.94, gained about 10% on the day.

A judge declared a mistrial in a patent infringement lawsuit between Yahoo Inc. and FindWhat.com Inc. after a jury failed to reach a decision on all of the issues in the case, FindWhat.com said on Thursday.

In a note to clients on Wednesday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan said the most likely outcome of the case would be a modest out-of-court settlement. He estimated that FindWhat could settle the case for around $7 million to $8 million.

Rohan said some investors had worried that a ruling against FindWhat in the case could wipe out the majority of the company's $50 million cash balance.

Most of the second tier search stocks are fading into irrelevance. Maybe this will help FWHT hang on a little longer. Also noted eariler today:

FindWhat.com noted the judge has yet to rule on the issue of whether the patent is unenforceable because of inequitable conduct committed by Overture. A hearing on the inequitable conduct issue and other motions that could impact the ultimate outcome of the case is currently scheduled for June 24, 2005.

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Search Engine Spam Workshop:
List of some of the presented papers. I will likely review some of those pretty soon.

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

more from Seth

Mobile Social Software:
Google buys Dodgeball.com. see also: The Significance of "Social Software"

New Google PR Blog:
Marrissa Mayer's blog

If Search Engines Could Read Your Mind:
an interesting article by Chris Sherman. here is an exerpt:

We'd much rather waste time scanning results and clicking back and forth among less-than-useful pages than craft a really good query or use search refinement tools.

But while we're doing this, the search engines are observing our behavior, and learning from our fumbling activities.

SEO Press Releases:
a fun one :)

The relevance of "relevance":

• thread at SEW

• NanoContext
• RustyBrick rates search relevancy, although the data might be biased by the people who take the test (likely SEOs) here are some early results

Yahoo! Music:

Visitors to Yahoo's Music Unlimited will pay $6.99 a month for access to Yahoo's 1-million-song library. That's less than half what Napster and Real Networks' Rhapsody charge for similar services that permit the transfer of songs to portable music players. source

FindWhat:
down to $4.30 per share. other small search providers continue to hurt as well.

Gooooogle:
outgrowing coolness and forgetting their core products?

War a theme for everything?
New UK based search blog by Neutralize: Search Engine War. BTW, the new Legos Star Wars video game is amazing.

Time Management:
Creative Commons flash file

SEO Multitool:
GoLexa (sorta like a combination of Google & Alexa data with links to other stuff like WhoIs & IP Address) from Fantomaster

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Privacy:
Google Web Accelerator takes your data, and shares it with others?

Block Google Accelerator:
courtesy Fantomaster

Click Fraud:
search engines leave advertisers in the cold lurch. Lurch is a cool word.

Block that Channel:
Google AdSense allows channel blocking

Stop:
Collaborate and listen, Ice is back with his brand new edition SEO Inc, being cool like Vanilla Ice, sends out a cease and desist letter.

New SEO Tool:
SEO Browser

Audio Search:Sounds like Yahoo! may be first to market

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Easy to Compare:
Wal Mart & Google, except that Google has a strong brand.

Blogs:
more than a spit fight

Death of Newspapers:
The future of journalism

AdWords Spying:
GoogSpy looks scrapes hundreds of thousands of searches from Google to determine who is bidding on what terms. The idea is killer, but the implementation is a bit lacking. Link found from ThreadWatch.

Google AdSense in RSS:
alpha testing

RSS Spamming:
RSS Injector

Niche Tips:
an old WMW thread

Book:
Steven Berlin Johnson, one of my favorite authors, announced the release of Everything Bad Is Good for You

Boston:
Search Engine Meeting, reviewed

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Not sure if many host companies are advertising for common errors at other hosts which their hosting packages support, but I would be willing to bet DOMXML hosting and DOM XML hosting and other similar derivative keywords are cheap ads - at least they looked it a few minutes ago.

Probably not a ton of traffic, but well targeted leads.

Just an idea for those stuck in that hyper competitive market. Not saying that I think people should sell hosting on the cheap, just that there might be some unsold inventory.

BTW, I have not got much feedback about Hub Finder yet. Apparently the host where it was hosted stopped supporting it.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: domxml_open_mem

There is another copy here and here, and you can place the source code on your site if you want (change index.txt to index.php). Do you like it, or think it sucks, or...?

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Google offers free link AdWords coupons:

• Qualified Google Advertising Professionals receive sets of five credits worth $100 each.

• Non-Qualified Google Advertising Professionals receive sets of three credits worth $50 each.

It also looks like there is a yearly quota of 60 credits. As you sign up more accounts I believe you earn more credits.

You also can link to your qualified profile page, although many SEOs do not see the program as being worthwhile with Google poaching clients from some qualified professionals.

I also find it amusing that the links on the profile page asking these questions

• How can I tell if a professional is really Qualified?

• Who has access to AdWords and client manager account information?

are broken links. hehehe. Shows they must have threw this idea together in a hurry or they must not think much of the program.

Google sure is trying to create a lot of buzz before reporting their quarterly results.

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Clickity click click click...

In the past few days there have been a great number of articles, posts, and threads about click fraud. Today I woke up with an inbox that had a few emails about click fraud.

[update: Fantomaster found a blog about ClickFraud]

eMarketer says Click Fraud Is Starting to Scare Marketers

Advertisers should be able to opt in or out of advertising on specific sites.

Joe Holcomb, SVP at BlowSearch, recently wrote these articles:

• The Middle Market Search Engines Need To Grow Up - talks about some of the errors with smaller PPC search engines.

• Pay Per Click Advertising Fraud - The Inside Story - paints click fraud as a massive problem of scale.
• Pay Per Click Advertising Fraud - The Inside Story - Part II - more of a promotional piece about BlowSearch technologies.

Scott Blum, of Buy.com also has some type of click fraud patent.

News Losing Ad Revenue:
Despite the claims of PPC fraud Wall Street Journal was hit by lower ad spend, and yet financial ads account for 20% of online ads.

[update 2: Gary Stein found this 15 minute real audio file about the death of mass media advertising.]

This Wall Street Journal article (sub req) talks about Yahoo's small and nimble new search service which is outpacing most of the giants. Even Rupert Murdock knows he is behind the curve.

Other PPC News:
Yahoo! Buys Brazilian PPC Search Network

Google is testing placing a third ad in the premium position. BAD CALL. Andrew Goodman also feels their bid optimizer is a bad call.

ThreadWatch finds sites about cheap clicks and expensive clicks.

The Dow Jones Industrial average is down 4% in the last 3 days. Yahoo! will be announcing quarterly results Tuesday & Google will be announcing their Q1 2005 results Thursday.

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What's the Google Budget Optimizer(TM) tool?

The Google Budget Optimizerâ„¢ campaign management tool automatically adjusts your keyword Max CPCs on your behalf. All you need to do is set a target budget, and the Budget Optimizer will actively seek out the most clicks possible within that budget.

The Budget Optimizer helps you reach your target spend every month without requiring a lot of work on your part. You can save time, eliminate the guesswork related to setting your CPCs, and enhance your return on investment.

(Please note that the goal of the Budget Optimizer is simply to help you receive the highest number of clicks possible within your budget. The Budget Optimizer will not help you achieve a specific ad position.)

They certainly are going out of their way to make the ads as "self serve" as they possibly can. I do not manage many AdWords campaigns so I probably am not the best person to test this out, but it would be interesting to hear what effect this tool actually has on ROI.

With how far off Google is with day to day search volume / ad clickthrough suggestions it is interesting that they think people will trust a system which automatically adjusts bids for them based on a metric other than ROI. Of course some marketers do not want to share ROI data with Google.

I also believe that if a campaign is self funding there is no reason to put an arbitrary budget cap on it. Buy as many ads as you profitably can.

I am guessing that if you enable this feature you will want to enable it in ad groups where the keyword max CPCs and lead values are similar.

Mikkel spoke out against the use of budgeting tools recently (as older ones overspent on CPC), so it will be interesting to see if this one actually delivers on its claims.

A while back Danny Sullivan said search engines want to sell traffic on a per lead basis more than a per term basis, and clearly this is a step in that direction.

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From the WSJ (sub req):

A group of advertisers quietly filed a lawsuit in February against Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other Internet companies in a potentially important legal test of those companies' liability for a form of online-advertising fraud.

The plaintiffs, led by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles LLC, a Texarkana, Ark., retailer, allege that the Internet companies knowingly overcharged for advertisements they sold and conspired with each other to continue doing so. The plaintiffs are seeking to have their suit, which hasn't received widespread attention, certified as a class action.

The also named AOL, Ask, Disney, Lycos, LookSmart, and FindWhat in the suit.

The search engines have antifraud systems and sometimes issue refunds for bogus clicks. But they decline to comment in detail on the scope of the problem, exactly how they are fighting it, and any specific instances of click fraud, in part because they don't want to tip off fraudsters. That has fed some advertisers' fears that the problem is bigger than the search companies acknowledge. Estimates of click fraud run as high as 20% of all clicks on search ads.

Yahoo! has been making a strong run in the stock market for the last week, and Google is valued at 49 billion. Nobody has really challenged this issue yet. If this gets pushed it could get rather ugly quick for search stocks. Google makes 99% of their income from ads.

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The Go Network:
is to Go from Google to Overture

Black Hat:
PPC Techniques. First time I have seen an article about Black Hat PPC. Good stuff Mikkel.

I do understand the reasons as they want to know what pages they send users to but why on earth does Google have to reset my hard earned high CTR if all I change is an added tracking parameter? In any case, I am not going to pay for it!

The simple solution is to set-up some kind of layer between you and them so the URL you use is actually not the one that shows the content.

Content, Content, Content:
A couple newerish (is that a word) products aim to help people grab or create loads of content. I have yet to use any of these.

• Article Equalizer - pulls articles from various content sources. I think he also created traffic equalizer, rss equalizer, and many other equalizer products. Wonder if he will eventually release the ultimate equalier suite. ;)

• AdSense Gold - evidently comes with thousands of articles
• ArticleBot - rewrites articles using grammar rules, allows you to dynamically reorganize SERPs, can mix up content and create many readable articles from a given seed set
• Yahoo! Creative Commons search - seach for content that can be freely used
• some people translate and then untranslate content.
• how not to steal content 101

LinkExplore:
reviewed

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Happy Easter all.

I just got back from eating way too much food :(

While digesting it...

I thought about looking up how to spell gluttony and noticed that Google only shows two ads for the proper spelling and no ads for glutony.

Overture only appears to have one ad.

Does this term have any value to various dieting products or services? Maybe. Maybe not.

Kinda weird to see the fact that almost nobody is currently testing the market though, eh?

The No S Diet is advertising on Google AdWords and looks cool.

Its kinda funny that the site does not have much of a business model since thier advice is free and

Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain "the solicitation of funds and do not display tax-exempt status".

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Frank Watson has a scathing post about some of the dumb ideas which have been floating about over at Yahoo!.

"We do not see Google and MSN as our competition," Tom HockSteatter said today, "we look at offline media as our competitors."

...

Right now no new SEM/Analytics companies are being allowed in, or the "not no, not now" response. Though he did not confirm it, more pointedly he did not deny that the existing SEM/Analytics/Tracking partners would soon be pushed out as well. "I won't say if existing agreements will continue."

I hope Kevin over at Did-It, the guys at Atlas and KeywordMax et al are ready for this.

...

"We have a strategic position for the web going forward", Tom HockSteatter said.

So did LookSmart and when MSN left that engine it rapidly feel to the side. I hope the Yahoo stock does not fall as heavily as that of LookSmart come announcement day.

With newspapers trying to buy their way into the web why is Yahoo! trying to move backwards?

Their clunky Overture interface, sporatic outages, contempt for analytics, and impending loss of MSN sure could make for a rather sticky situation.

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Words of Wisdom from somewhere in Kentucky:
The more layovers you have the greater your chance of getting screwed.

Grr, I hate Delta!!!

Well at least I got to hang out with Patrick Gavin for a bit tonight. He is always fun to talk with :)

French Court Says Google Ads Smell Bad:
Perhaps those were not the words they used, but Google lost the appeal and they want Google to pay up for trademark related ads.

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Yahoo! to join blogging fray

MSN adCenter is apparently being tested in France and Singapore first. they will be giving people more demographics and search details than the other engines do. more at
Cnet Asia
Investor's Business Daily

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Ad Links by Google:
Peter D shows new AdSense change

Google Local Business Center:
wonder if the Yellow pages are feeling yellow? Andrew Goodman has the details. for now US only.

Wonder What Google thinks?
of a free product that strips out their published ads for the user

their response to autolink thusfur has been nothing short of pathetic. nice job Mark.

Ask Jeeves also recently created a FireFox toolbar.

Google Sandbox:
Does the sandbox only affect phrases containing popular words?
found on ThreadWatch

I have recently seen a site under a month old rank for some rather short query sets.

New SEO / SEM Blogs:
maybe not new, but at least new to me.
Got Ads? - seems to be more focused on the ad / ppc side of the search game. have not read it a ton yet but have seen John contribute many good posts on Andrew Goodman's SEM 2.0
Wolf Howl - should have mentioned and found this one a while ago as multiple friends have recommended it to me. his most recent post references Flatland, so it must be a cool blog :)

the conference I am at:
ended today. I could blog about a bunch of stuff but now find myself headed toward the closing party, which I suspect may give me more stuff to blog about.

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MSN to start beta testing their own ppc ad network Wednesday, March 16 2005.

Andy Beal thinks it will be better than AdWords and Gary Price states that the official word will come out tomorrow, but that the system may not be fully integrated for 6 to 12 months.

I would just like to say that the MSN ad sales person I spoke to yesterday who told me Overture sometime in 2006 may have not been giving me the best info he could have ;)

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There is no PPC pricing bubble

New link exchange network. seems like a hybrid between the Digital Point's COOP link exchange network and some other link exchange sites.
What link exchange software or programs do you find useful?

More free webmaster tools. Google Dance tool and others.

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I think I see a similar thread about once a month or so. What small engine provides underpriced traffic?

Many people tend to be stuck on a product or service or marketing angle. We tend to view these as good and then place our problems on others.

• Overture and AdWords are too expensive.

• blah doesn't provide enough traffic.
• blah has too low of traffic quality.
• etc.

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AdSense and AdWords shakeup:

• Dear AdWords, Whatever you did yesterday... thread about increased traffic quantity and improved ROI

• Very bad two days AdSense earning thread. some people complain and others say their earnings are better than ever.
• Botnets strangle Google Adwords campaigns

found on ThreadWatch

SearchGuild birthday awards:
fun stuff

I was nominated but was beat out by Orion. a real shame that I do not know more about fractal spam and semantic co-occurance...

Free Link Renting Guide:
Patrick Gavin offers free link renting tips (PDF link)

Complacency:
Tim Converse (from Yahoo!) calls out Marissa Mayer (from Google). I am sure there are lots of fun dialogs between the various engines employees.

Ask Jeeves:
creates their obligitory blog.

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Google have launched their Google AdWords API. From their introduction page:

Google's free AdWords API service lets developers engineer computer programs that interact directly with the AdWords server. With the applications created, advertisers and third parties can more efficiently - and creatively - manage their large AdWords accounts and campaigns.

Flexible and Functional
What can you do with the AdWords API? This all depends on your programming genius and clients' advertising needs. Some possibilities might include:

• Generating automatic keyword, ad text, URL, and custom reports

• Integrating AdWords data with databases, such as inventory systems
• Developing additional tools and applications to help you manage accounts

It works in many language and its quota limits will be based on the size and spend of your account. You need a My Client Center account to sign up. Here is some of their support questions.

coverage at

• WebmasterWorld

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Search Engine Watch Blog
• ThreadWatch
  
• Search Engine Lowdown

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AdSense Premium Publishers:
can boost CTR by 500% when compared to regular AdSense publishers. Looks like I need to make about a million posts, get a few hundred thousand links, throw AdSense ads on my site, and then give it a try real quick...

Overture : Only for the Big Guys?
Not so. One of my friends told me that he was recently cold called by an Overture ad rep interested in placing ads on his somewhat new site.

Placing Porn in Your Own Comments:
Not that long ago I saw a blog rank for a rather gross porn related term (was trying to gross a friend out) and I got to thinking, now that there is the rel=nofollow you really could get away with just saying that you were too lazy to moderate your old comments and re engineer old pages to rank well for many many many many adult terms (I accidentally rank for some by accidentally using occasional foul language).

How could search engines know the difference between a blogger who is lazy with comment deletion and one who is intentionally marketing that way? When blogs naturally rank for random things it could be really easy to make good bank with a false blog set up cleanly using the NoFollow comment effect.

A Third of Shoppers:
often shop the web and buy at the store

Metcalfe’s Law:
eBay took a beating in the stock market recently due to slower growth. After a ton of brokerage firms downgraded eBay Legg Mason gave them an upgrade.

More Networking Questions:
FCC chairman Powell resigned...wonder who's next? and how that will effect the web? It is amazing how many people in the administration have resigned. Surely a sign that something isn't right.

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Another SEO Conference:
Lots of good stuff at Threadwatch, including the announcement that ThreadWatch to have a free SEO conference end of May.

Google Loses Trademark Case in France:
A French court has ruled that Google must refrain from using the trademarks of European resort chain Le Meridian Hotels and Resorts to trigger keyword ads.

DMOZ Lists Directories: Rubber Stamped & WebAtlas...
Were both recently listed in DMOZ.

Peter D gets help from "the man" himself, and quickly finds that you can't be a successful person in the SEO space without having at least 1 hate thread from the fine folks at IHU.

In spite of Doug's whining to DMOZ Rubberstamped is still listed.

Stop the Spread of Viral Linkage Data:
Link Condom...the WikiPedia is one of the first sites to adopt the new policy :(

AdWords Changes to Come:
Google to Give AdWords API to Advertisers
Google is about to unveil a completely revamped Adwords/Adsense program to counter inroads from competitors such as Kanoodle

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Eating Your Own Crap:
Fractal Spam - search engines may be known to like their own search results...at least for a while.

Overture Direct Traffic Center:
Some big advertisers are not too impressed with the reporting delays and clunky interface.

SEM Cares? SEMPO Cares? or is it Nobody Cares?
SEM Cares perhaps too little, too late for Barbara and others to put out the good word? The domain name sounds a bit Orewellian, which almost makse it sound like maybe nobody cares.

Free Culture Stuff:
A few good links from ThreadWatch's thread about big blue Open Sourcing 500 patents.

Patented European webshop
Software patents – Obstacles to software development by Richard Stallman

Chatter:
There is also chatter that Google may be dropping some spammed out subdomains from some competitive keywords in some of their data centers.

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Home Page of the Day:
Jon Kleinberg - he worked on lots of the underlying theory that created the hubs and authority ranking system which eventually led to Teoma.

He has all kinds of cool PDFs on his site such as Maximizing the Spread of Influence through a Social Network - cool stuff. If I were better at math and network theory stuff his home page would be a virtual candy store.

Interesting & Awaiting Results:
fathom is conducting a link title attribute test

Undersold ad space
Anna Kournikova on advertising...er, advertising on Anna Kournikova

Illigitimate ad space:
Bush Administration Invents 'News' and Pays Journalist

Hosed Ad Space:
Kraft WHITE American Cheese - AdWords ad targeting problems :(

Really, I am not a Slimeball Ads:
Ken Lay starts advertising on AdWords. Interesting what the other AdWords ads say about him too.

Meta "ingnore this part of the page" tag:
I can't really see it coming anytime soon, but some want to push the idea.

MSN Beta to ramp up testing:
MSN Beta to ramp up testing

Developing a Directory?
The Don'ts of Directory Development offers tips to help you get your directory off the ground.

ESearch Online E Search Online ApexSearch Apex Search (look out):
another SEO firm out of Vegas that is allegedly cold calling people.

• apexesearch seems like a scam

• anyone have feeback on apexesearch

I did not find any legitimate backlinks into the apexesearch site. The only one I found in Google was from a forum solicitation by a guy by the name of Sincity

Sincity would like to offer you...

• Big money for account executives - work anywhere in the country
  http://www.greensheet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=905&forum=7&0

• High Risk Banking
  http://www.greensheet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=896&forum=9&1

• SEO Services http://www.greensheet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=8866&forum=10&0

In that forum post it states:

real results refferences provided in business since 1996 no cusomer complaints EVER!!!!

and yet its registration details state

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: APEXESEARCH.COM
Created on: 20-Apr-04

Domain Name: E-SEARCHONLINE.COM
Created on: 22-Dec-04

I did not see any meaningful company information on their company information page either http://www.apexesearch.com/info.htm. Some people are wondering if this firm has anything to do with Traffic Power. If any SEO calls you up out of the blue trying to tell you that you MUST buy something TODAY then odds are they are NOT worth buying from. Cold calls = crap. Traffic

How Not to Make Friends:
Promote your services in others forums while trashing their business model in your own forum.

How can a person wanting to set up an automated link network say that people should not be able to buy links by PageRank?

How Not to Make Friends...Part 2:
For a while the name of the SEO firm that wanted RustyBrick to link to them was posted in this rant thread.

One time some guy with a big mouth emailed me about how great his firm was and felt that for that reason he felt he deserved a link from my site. I also had a hunch that when another well known firm told me to add them to my SEO forums page that they were spamming me. Not too long ago I got an email from an express link building firm which used "stuff" as the the email title. I wonder how many people use these same shoddy techniques to "promote" (or otherwise destroy the brand of) their clients sites?

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Google sent out an email stating that they will now only display 1 advertisement per URL per keyword. Additionally people no longer need to signify their ads are affiliate ads since there is only one ad per URL.

They multiply CTR * max bid to determine the effective ad rank, and the top ad rank for any URL will be the ad that is displayed.

Lots of dynamic keyword insertion noise (such as eBay affiliates) have been ruining the relevancy of their ads so this one step they are taking to try to keep them relevant.

This change will have no effect of white label affiliate sites since they are on their own separate URLs. Some people will probably also find ways to bounce their affiliate ads to get around this change.

The email they sent out is in the extended entry.

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Google vs Geico:
Huge news for many marketers, Google won.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that there was not enough evidence of trademark violation to bar Google from displaying rival insurers when computer users search the word "GEICO."

Search Engine Filiters:
Three was a good thread on SEW forums about search engine filters. A couple people defaced the original thread with useless garbage, but ThreadWatch's coverage is a great read.

Search Engine Strategies:
I was going to attend, but decided not to at the last minute...anyhow, if you want coverage RustyBrick is posting about many of the sessions here...he may not be blogging the event though ;)

Funny:
GoogleGuy reviews a non-profit site: (really funny)

I'd recommend that he remove all links to these aggressive sites, and then send an email to us requesting reinclusion.

(found on ThreadWatch)

Google Suggest:
DaveN has opened up his scraper for public use.

MSN Desktop Search:
launched, & integrated into the MSN toolbar.

Search Stats:
ClickZ writes about a recent ComScore search survey

Of those consumers who converted on a trademark keyword, 91 percent did so after starting with a different term type. A full 80 percent started with a generic search term. Trademark searches, meanwhile, accounted for 20 percent of all online searches.

As for conversions, an estimated 92 percent of all computing and consumer electronics purchases occur offline. Meanwhile, 7 percent of conversions occur in the form of latent conversions. Only 1 percent of conversions occur in the same session online.

Google Library:
Google to digitize lots and lots of books...

Late to the Party:
Ask Jeeves desktop search

Brits Behind the Curve on Spam?
Nearly a quarter of all online UK consumers (23%) have purchased some form of goods or services from a spam email, according to new research. I wonder if thats why many of the UK SEOs are so good at what they do ;)

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AdSense Changes:
URL Channels
New Languages
No AdSense ads on sites promoting or selling tobacco or prescription drugs

Affiliate Marketer Doom:
Google to allow only 1 affiliate / advertiser per landing page.

The Wrong Metrics:
Some webmasters are buying SEO services based on top ten rankings or number of pages indexed. While they may be interesting figures what really matters is targeted traffic and more importantly: sales. (found on ThreadWatch)

Picture Perfect:
or maybe not... Google's Picasas hacked. if you have PHPBB installed make sure you upgrade to a new version and have the server admin check for shady stuff. If you have been hacked you will want to change your MySQL passwords and whatnot.

Advertising is Evil:
Jakob Nielson looks at some of the worst ways to advertise on the web.

More Yahoo!:
Tim Converse (part 2)

That Little Blue Pill:
I wrote an article which attempts to answer the question Should I sell Off Topic Links?
While you are debating the topic find Viagra on sale here.

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Google is using predictive modeling to try to help serve up more of your ads.

New AdWords Status Ratings
In the past Google stated ads were strong, moderate, or at risk. The new ratings are normal, in trial, or on hold.

How the New AdWords System Works
If Google has enough keyword data from prior ads on your keywords and it indicates that your ad should perform well Google will start your ads off in normal distribution. If they have inadequate data on your keyword then they will give the predicted CTR a small boost to help start you off in normal.

If past ads for the same keywords show that the ad is not likely to perform well then the ad will start off "on trial." Your account can only have a limited number of on trial keywords in it at any given time. They'll continue showing the "on trial" ads until they are statistically confident their CTR is below or above 0.5%.

If you have more than the max alotment of words which are expected not to perform well then the additional ads will go into the "on hold" category. The on hold ads will be tested based in the order of expected clickthrough rate.

More info on the Google AdWords Changes

• Keyword Evaluation Flow

• Three Keyword Evaluation Examples
• Improved AdWords Minimum CTR and Performance Monitoring
• Additionally at SEW Forums AussieWebmaster stated that Google is running a beta of an API for tracking companies.

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From Froogle Newsletter Volume 4...

Ad Automator
Froogle merchants with over 1000 products who are also AdWords advertisers are invited to try out the beta release of our new ad-producing technology, the ad automator.

The ad automator uses sophisticated technology to automatically create and target AdWords ads based on structured data feeds, which are nearly identical to the data feeds you submit to Froogle. You’ll be able to create keyword-less data feed campaigns in your existing AdWords account while investing minimal time and effort. Simply send us your feeds, and the ad automator will automatically generate targeted AdWords ads that begin showing right away. You’ll be able to:

• Leverage the product copy you’ve already written for your site
• Generate specific, high-CTR ads with no additional work

• Increase the number of queries on which your ads appear

The ad automator provides added coverage by targeting queries that may have been overlooked in your keyword campaign. The ads produced are highly relevant and precisely targeted to the user’s search query.

If you’re a merchant and advertiser who’d like to take advantage of Google’s ad automator, please drop us a line at automator-signup@google.com. Please include your AdWords account number in your note.

Ad Automator if / when done correctly will be huge...

a couple other new features...
Merchant Ratings:
Google does not store its own rating system, but pulls together aggregate ratings score and snippets of customer reviews from third party sites.

Compare Prices
Allows you to compare the prices for a specific item in many stores. It is still under development, but already works well for ISBN's or UPC's.

You can see both features when searching for 0130957011... or other good books by # :)

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Starting in October, we're introducing "Budget smoothing", another new feature in which the Overture system makes adjustments to the frequency in which your listings are displayed based on the depletion of your specified budget amount. For example, if you have budgeted €100,00 a day, our system will display your listings just enough so that you receive clicks that will total approximately €100,00 for the day. The smoothing feature also regulates the display of your listings so that you receive clicks throughout the day, rather than burning through your budgeted amount in just a few hours.

From Overture Germany (not yet sure when the global rollout will occur. Will likely know soon...)

thanks to AussieWebmaster @ SEW forums

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Overture's new system will simply allow a choice between exact and broad matching. ...Overture advertisers were to be informed today about the change. ... An exact date for it hasn't been announced, but Overture says it will happen in the next few weeks.

Search Engine Watch has a good article explaining the new Overture broad match move. Basically the change makes gaining greater search volume easier, but more expensive.

time to go update my ebook, and about 20 pages of my websites...

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From Overture Customer Email:

Phrase and Broad match types help you attract more customers by displaying your listings for a wider variety of relevant searches on Web sites. We are pleased to announce that Yahoo! now displays Phrase match type ads.

Weird how they talk about broad match there at the begining and then state that Yahoo! now shows phrase (and mention nothing about broad match ads on Yahoo!). Its a step in the right direction though if they are to extend out their ad delivery to more search queries.

Overture

• Exact Match: only shows up when the exact word / phrase is searched for.

• Phrase Match: shown on any search query that has that exact phrase in it.
• Broad Match: shown when the words are anywhere in the query (can even be separated). also shows for many similar type terms.

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Borrell Associates estimate the PPC ad spend this year for 210 US metro areas. Free downloadable XLS spreadsheet.

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What is Google AdWord Generator?
Jeff Alderson of Xybercode recently created a new Google AdWords tool.

His tool helps you create Google AdWords ads from a prepopulated set of successful marketing phrases. Google AdWord Generator takes a list of over 5,000 sales terms in 65 categories and creates various AdWords ads on the fly.

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Learn About Google AdWords Contextual Ads

Free 9 minute video offering tips on how to use Google AdWords contextual advertising. The video describes briefly some of the technology behind how the Google AdWords contextual ad network works.

A couple of the more interesting ideas covered in this video:

• the Contextual ads are not based on a single keyword, but the keyword list associated with a specific adgroup.

• In addition the adgroup creatives play are also used to help understand what ads to display.
• Max PPC and clickthrough rate also play into the order of the ads displayed.
• You want to use well themed keyword adgroups to help ensure your ads are delivered properly. Including generic words like laptop can make it harder for Google to understand what your adgroup is trying to sell.
• Using appropriate campaign negative keywords can also help further target your ads.
• Smart pricing helps reduce the cost of the ad based on Google's predicted value of the click.

Good ideas that were not covered:

• While many people find smart pricing to be effective you may also want to manually ensure proper price discounting by disabling content syndication on your search adgroups and then create lower priced adgroups with content syndication enabled.

Google AdWords contextual advertisingfrequently asked questions

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Overture recently released a free "how to" PDF manual to help Overture account managers get the most out of their account. The Overture Advertiser Workbook comes with 7 chapters and an appendix.

One rant / complaint I have is that each section is its own download :(

Some other people have said it is rather basic info. I have not read the whole thing yet, but at its current price it is probably worth a glance.

thanks to Andrew. oops, wrong one. thanks to Andrew

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What is Overture Search Optimizer?

Search Optimizer users will be able to automate search campaigns based on those response metrics. It also lets marketers develop "watch lists" of keywords or campaigns and run campaigns only during certain times of the day. It will suggest potential keywords that could meet a marketer's business objectives. Marketers also can sort campaigns based on business objectives to see which are underperforming. source: DM News

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At the NYC SES conference JupiterMedia stated that 5 out of 6 commercial purchases which originate from search originate from the free (or organic) side.

Recently Atlas DMT released a PDF report titled The Atlas Rank Report: How Search Engine Rank Impacts Traffic which showed how the clickthrough rates breakdown within pay per click ads.
(thanks to Danny)

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Google has launched a new feature to its AdWords program which aims to improve the relevancy of their AdWords product. The new role out will start out being tested on broad match ads which appear on Google.com. ...

New! Improved targeting for your ads.
Recent improvements to AdWords ad quality will help Google show the most relevant ads to the most targeted audience possible.

How is Ad Relevance Determined?

Our ad quality improvements will help us be more precise in identifying the most relevant ads for a particular query, which may mean more clicks for some ads and fewer clicks for others.

For example, an advertiser specializing in Alaskan cruises may have selected cruises (broad-matched) for their campaign. Previously, this keyword may have been disabled due to poor performance on more popular queries such as Hawaiian cruises. Instead of disabling all broad match variations of cruises, we will now show this ad for specific query variations that are more relevant to the ad, such as Alaskan cruises.

Which ads or keywords will be affected by these relevance changes?

Recent improvements to promote ad relevance within the AdWords system will apply to advertisers in all countries and all languages. While these changes will initially only affect broad-matched keywords for ads shown on Google.com, future improvements will include other keyword matching options and Google Network sites and products.

more questions (with many repeat answers) at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=131&hl=en_US

hat tip to Optimize Online @ Search Engine Watch Forums

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Overture is rolling out Local Match today. Local Match ads will appear in the same places on search engine results pages (SERPS) that their normal pay per click a (Precision Match) ads do.

Local Match will allow you to set a custom display radius around your business from .5 to 100 miles. When users within your chosen region click on your ad it brings up a map display of your business location. You must have a business location to participate in Overture's Local Match program.

With Local Match there is no monthly minimum spend and businesses are not required to have a website. The minimum cost per click is 10 cents, it costs $20 to open an account, and you do not need to be a client of Overture's other services to sign up with Local Match.

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Want to try AdWords?
Know nothing about AdWords?
Know nothing about marketing?
Don't want to pay an SEO to set up your AdWords account?

Thats ok. Google still wants you to advertise. They will even set your account up for you. Potential Google clients welcome to Google JumpStart. Google JumpStart charges a one time $299 fee which is credited toward your account.

Will they usually error on the side of profit or will they be conservative with your bid price and keyword selection?

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My SEO Book PPC Accounts

So I have been having decent returns with Google AdWords (free £50 bonus) and my orders have went up noticeably since I started using Overture recently ($10 signup bonus)...though I do not get near the click volume I do with Google AdWords...I assume this is because most people interested in buying books about SEO are more likely to use Google & maybe I still need to add a few hundred to few thousand more keywords to my Overture account).

FindWhat & Customer Conversion (for them)

So I signed up for my FindWhat ($5 signup bonus) account and they had a couple features I really liked (such as bid by position).

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Google launches keyword based contextual based banner advertising.

Effect on Other Companies:

• If Google can get many of their AdSense publishers to sign up for this then they will have access to one of the largest, most targeted contextual based banner programs on the web.

• Interactive media agencies and webmasters may be able to do nearly all of their advertising at Google. Exceptions:
  • Overture still will be used by many due to it's large distribution network.

  • Link buyers will obviously not be able to buy links through Google...
• Google can no longer in any way shape or form claim to be "just a technology company." This move cements their position as a large media company.
• DoubleClick's stock is down 1% on the day (last I checked...this move by Google has to make their CEO cringe!).

Google AdWords Images:
Google Images AdWords FAQ's Here.
Google AdSense: What's New

Google AdWords Sizes: You may choose from four standard ad sizes: Banner (468 x 60), Leaderboard (728 x 90), Inline Rectangle (300 x 250), and Skyscraper (120 x 600). Sizes may be adjusted slightly to display the "Ads by Google" tagline.

Example Google Ads

Placing Image Ads on Google:
"At this time, we won't show image ads on Google. The initial launch of image ads is focused on sites already showing graphical ads. Because Google image ads are targeted specifically to a page's content, advertisers showing ads on these sites would realize the greatest benefit. (Please note that a content site publisher must opt in to the image ads program before your image ads may appear on his or her site.)"

How Does Google Know When to Display Image Ads?
If your image ad is more relevant, it will appear. If not, your text ad may appear in its place. This targeting model ensures you're reaching your prospects with the most effective ads.

Will Google Put Image Ads on My Site?
Google AdSense publishers can chose to opt in to graphic ads. Graphic ads will not automatically appear on AdSense publishers websites. You can choose to run image ads by simply selecting the image ads checkbox from the Ad Preference page of your AdSense account. Or, set your preference at a page level by selecting the type of ads you'd like to show when generating your ad code.

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Quite literally, Google AdWords to Add Words.

Stefanie Olsen notes that Google is preparing a new tool that will automate keyword list generation. Google will spider web pages of large advertisers to determine relevant keywords for each page.

This tool will save large companies hundreds or thousands of hours of campaign maintenance.

I realize Google needs to automate portions of it's ad service to maximize revenues, but this tool will be a huge disappointment in my eyes.

Why I Think This AdWords Tool Will Suck

• Google already places broad match terms before exact match terms. This does not allow smarter, smaller, hard working advertisers as much benefit as Overture does for doing deep keyword research. I have one client who does exceptionally well with Overture, but finds Google AdWords prohibitively expensive for this reason.

• This new tool will allow fat, and lazy advertizers to automatically lock out competition throughout the AdWords system.
• The automation will likely have many errors which decrease ad relevancy.

I hope Google will continue to add other features such as the local advertising feature to help small businesses compete in such a competitive landscape.

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So I was setting up a Google campaign for my brand new SEO Index website. Essentially it is a directory of SEO tools and things like that. When I entered "SEO" into the Google AdWords Keyword Sandbox it stated
Here are additional keywords to consider:

search engine optimization
rankings
lesbianas
anal
positioning
pageoneresults
定義
relatos
lee
follar
advantage
firms
buscador
amater
...

If Google is that far off in determining what exact words are in the same community as the words you are buying, then odds are your user does not know exactly what he wants either. The words you are buying may not be targeted enough...

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Google has been beta testing it's local AdWords ad program for a decent number of months. Originally the product was primarily set to test a few state level and metropolitin level ad display networks.

Now there are a whole boatload of additional options. Instead of selecting a metropolitin area you can type in what specific towns you want your ads to appear in or how far away from your business the ads appear. These changes are highly important for helping small businesses compete and improving the relevancy of ads.

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Google has recently changed it's trademark policy to allow people to bid on trademark phrases of companies within the US and Canada. Inside the US and Canada they will not allow trademark terms to appear in the ad copy. Outside those areas the will check ad text and keyword.

There has not yet been any clear statement in what the valid trademark laws are on the internet. With the advent of <iframe>'s and paid ads triggered by keywords the waters are sure to be muddy for an exceptionally long time...perhaps indefinitely.

Trademark owners should still be able to protect their trademarks via the autmated price system of Google. Trademark terms showing up in ads will warrent greater clickthrough rates since their terms will appear bolded. This will cause the prices to be reduced as these clickthrough rates are factored into click price. Your competitors will be required to spend much more to have their ad compete.

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Kanoodle has launched their new contextual based ad program which offers far greater control of ad placement (as compared to other contextual based networks) from any and all angles.

Interested in placing ContextTarget ads on your site?
Read more or sign up for Kanoodle ContextTarget.

Interested in buying ContextTarget ads?
ContextTarget financial ads (as shown on CBS Marketwatch) have a minimum bid of 50 cents, other categories may have different prices. Here is the ContextTarget FAQ page, and Shari Thurow recently did a review of the Kanoodle Context program.

If smaller companies like Kanoodle can add enough features and distribution they will force larger pay per click search engines to follow suit.

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Who Cares?
GoGuides recently acquired Links2Go. On the GoGuides home page:

We are pleased to announce that in a deal with the former search engine Links2go, Inc we have acquired full ownership in their name links2go. GoGuides will issue a press release in the near future detailing our development plans for www.links2go.com. Links2goTM

Holly Mamma!
Dallas Mavericks owner reports he owns 6% of the outstanding shares of the meta search engine Mamma.com and their stock price goes up by over 20%. Where is the mathematical logic in that?

Hear no Evil, See No Evil
The new Norton Personal Firewall blocks not only pop-ups, but also paid listings on major search engines. What are the odds pay per click search engine stud Kevin Lee is not happy?

Unlike pop-ups that are despised almost universally (resulting in the proliferation of pop-up-blocking software and toolbars), paid search listings are often more relevant than spam-filled algorithmic search results. Maybe the Norton team will wake up when a whole bunch of Norton Personal Firewall purchasers call tech support wondering where those relevant links went.

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Ouch to GoClick

I have stated time and time again that it is a good idea to work with larger and more developed technology companies when dealing with pay per click distribution. I have got many emails from people saying the second tier pay per click search engines have given them a raw deal one way or another.

What is the problem with pay per click?

When you go with a smaller network you generally have a lower quality of traffic and slower feedback loops. You will not be sure if the problem is your site or the pay per click network. The wrong pay per click partner can hurt you on both the distribution of ads for your site or on your site.

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Neat-O
Even with my limited experience in the ad world I have been able to reduce AdWords cost per customer acquisition from over $70 to under $5.

Longwinded
I feel I could write a ton of tips on ad writing, but that would just read like an ad...

One ad problem that frequently is a complete bust is that people fail to offer a consistant message throughout the sales process.

The ad copy shoud match the consumer intent.
When the consumer clicks through to the page it should be obvious that they are in the right spot. The page copy needs to match what that ad promissed.

Customer benifits like Free shipping may improve your click through rate, but an order processing fee of $1.99 may allienate your users at the shopping cart. Consistancy builds trust. It allows you to lock in customers and increase profits down the road. The web is all about building a reputation and delivering on your promises.

Shorthand
An effective ad campaign is consistant from begining to end.

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A few days back I stated that the new Verizon SuperPages would be a much more functional idea if they also added the pay per click dutch auction model to their category priced listings. Today they did. SuperPages is to use FindWhat to suppliment its local listings with national and local pay per click ads.

FindWhat also recently purchased Comet Systems.

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Many webmasters have complained that Google AdSense was limiting their design ability. Google has came to answer these people with new ad formats.

Instead of the basic 4 AdSense layouts there are now 10 AdSense layouts to chose from. View the new Google AdSense layouts.

Google AdSense also supports new languages: Dutch and Portuguese

Aaron Schwartz's Google Weblog had his home page down. When you searched for it the first post that came up was his post that says he is killing the Google Weblog and is now going to craft an Overture Blog, from March of last year...I saw this at like 2 in the morning when I was tired and did not realize it was from last March. Many others syndicated this too :)
That shows the power of a funny blog post.

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Many of the Yellow Pages type companies are learning that their content has value online.

On March the 1st SuperPages, Verizon's Internet Yellow Pages website, will launch a redesigned website which includes pay per click advertising. Duncan Parry previews the PPC product that will be on offer and asks James Palma, Directory of Strategy, how SuperPages aims to sell PPC advertising to local businesses. - from PayPerClickAnalysis.com article

• Verison is planning on charging by category to help business save time.

• The associated prices will weed out much of the advertising from the smaller unique competitors who are the ones that actually add the true value to the Verison SuperPages site.
• A much better way to price it would be to sell as a hybrid. Offer the category listings, and also sell keyword listings in a Dutch auction. Assuming they could place the direct matches about their category listings, this would increase the quality of their product and allow them to sell more ad space.

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SearchFeed Fraud

Ouch, that sounds hard doesn't it? Earlier today over at SearchGuild a new member claimed SearchFeed is not fairly compensating its affiliates.

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Local Search Down Under

Sensis was recently featured in an article which shows how powerful they are in the Australlian advertising market. They believe they will be able to compete with Google for product search due to their strong ability to integrate location with the product.

"The Yellow Pages is a search book. We don't call it that because it's not trendy."

"Our biggest differentiator (from Google) is we have all this local content. So if (you) go to Google today and search for a restaurant in Kew, you might get two restaurants."

Sensis currently combines search results from whitepages.com.au, yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com.au, and cityseach.com.au.

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Google has an ad policy which prohibits criticizing other groups or companies. Recently Oceana tested Google's ad policy by placing AdWords ads critical of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

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As far as Google AdWords Goes there are three main book or reports on the subject that I know of. I recently wrote my SEO Book and am starting to advertise it on Google AdWords.

I have already read Andrew Goodman's Google AdWords: 21 Pay-Per-Click Campaign Secrets Your Competition Doesn't Know twice, and think it is one of the best search engine reports on the market. ($69)

The other two main reports reports out there are the one created by Perry Marshall and Chris Carpender's Google Cash. I looked at the Google Cash one and saw that they are adding the Perry Marshall report in as an added bonus and are selling the Google Cash package cheaper than his report alone.

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"On Wednesday, the search company will open its advertising service, called AdWords, in two dialects of Chinese: simplified and traditional."

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People use the phrase Search Engine Wars so many times that it's a joke. I think wars are no laughing matter, but the excessive use of "search engine wars" is somewhat excessive and funny.

I feel leftout though, as I have not used the phrase "search engine wars" before this post. I figured that all battles have local fronts. Thus I am extending the "search engine wars" message to the local battle fields.

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Finally "FindWhat said shareholders of privately-held Espotting would get 7 million shares of FindWhat stock and about $20 million in cash. FindWhat said the total deal values Espotting at about $170 million based on last Friday's closing stock prices"
(from Rueters)

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Bad luck brought to you by the letter L.

Room for Rent Lycos is renting some of its office space to cut costs. (no relation to the movie)

Shedding Shares LookSmart is not looking very smart...at least their stock is well, um, falling (like the London bridge)

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List of major world wide pay per click search engines.

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Yesterday over at SearchEngineJournal they wrote about LookSmart. Here is part of the interview from the email they quoted

ACL: Where are LookListings distributed?

TM: LookSmart has always provided a highly relevant search product, and therefore attracts quality distribution partners.

It is always fun when a speaker gets just enough corporate speak in there to show you that they are programmed chat bots.

"LookSmart has always provided a highly relevant search product"
Why again did greedy MSN drop your listings?

Why is Overture taking over most of your business in Australia?

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Yahoo Shopping is abandoning its 3.5% revenue share model. They are leaving it in the cart!

What is Yahoo! doing? Yahoo! is switching Yahoo! shopping to a pay per click model.

Why would Yahoo! do that? This places more competitive market advantages in Yahoo!'s favor. They will get a larger share of revenue since sites which have poor conversion rates will not be able to compete.

I liked Yahoo! Shopping the way it was... They are requiring all current participants to sign up for the new program by March 1st.

Why should I switch to the new Yahoo! Shopping model? They are giving away free clicks for the month of February to those who switch to the new program policies.

After the free trial month Yahoo! Shopping will be offering clicks at a 20% discount for an undisclosed amount of time. More details in the general anouncement and Product Submit FAQs

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Ouch! Their CEO has steped down and their workforce has been choped in half.

Artistic, not so much garbage origami but more Just Paper Roses.

Snappy "TELSTRA snapped up local operations of LookSmart yesterday, barely a week after the shrinking Australian internet pioneer lost the customer that delivered two-thirds of its revenue."

Telestra is also the owner of popular the local search website and technology behind Citysearch.

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In a big fight between Google and Overture ads are spreading through the web.

Kelkoo, the third largest European shopping site, is to carry AdWords ads.

Overture is to display ads on Net Temps job portal, and they resigned a multi year deal with Wanadoo (Europe's #2 ISP).

Caution parady sites are fighting for their share of the pie. Everyone knows about YouHo, but Booble has came out of nowhere!

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Some recent articles ("Google's House of Cards" "A Perfect Storm for Pay Per Click") have been saying that the ROI for paid advertising is going away. It has been. It was not very competitive a few years ago, but now with over 150,000 people in the market you need to be more effective to extract profits from a campaign.

I honestly think many of the articles are suggested / written by people who want to make their own jobs easier and make more money while doing it. Some articles may even be written to scare away competition or drive leads to firms who provide the services.

In the past a sloppy website with low conversion rates was ok because there was little competition. Now some areas are requiring a smooth ad, which is well targeted, that leads to a smooth site, which has great usability, and is customer centric. In essence the shakeup of the organic listings and the rising costs of pay per click ads are forcing websites (and the internet as a whole) to be more functional.

There are few mediums which have feedback as rapid as AdWords does. Pay per click is here to stay. Those who know how to use it will make a ton of money.

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Just another tip on improving conversion rates with Google AdWords. When search words appear in a Google ad they are bolded. A good way to improve click through rate (and thus lower price per click) is to place keywords in the ad.

Sometimes it may not be practical to create 100 different ads and 100 different groupings. If you have similar terms which can use the same creative description, but you would like to have the title dynamically match searched keywords you can.

The syntaxt for Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion is {keyword: }

When you create the AdWords creative place {keyword: } in the first line and then fill out the rest of the creative like normal. Automatically your title will match the search terms which will improve click through rates. Please note that Google does not want this feature used on search terms which are mis spelled or otherwise break their ad policies.

When you use {keyword: } make sure you place a keyword after it so that search terms which may be too long or are not processed correctly still have an ad to show. I know this because I had one of my Google AdWords ads disapproved for not doing this. For me I would probably use something like {keyword:SEO Book}.

Some people will want to try this with a huge catalog of products and will lose money in the process. When products are widely varying you want to send the person to the specific page for that product so you must specify that as well.

This technique is likely to be most profitable to those who use it on smaller niche specific areas...the whole thing that makes Google so appealing is that you can customize every aspect of your ad and track every cent spent from begining to end.

Dynamic keyword insertion capitalization:
{keyword:} will make the title small
{KeyWord:} will capitalize all the words in the Google AdWords ad title.

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In "Google's House of Cards" Nate Elliot states that the lowering quality of clicks from AdSense ads is erroding the ROI on AdWord accounts. He believes a second set of bids should be applied to AdSense ads which allow advertisers to bid on those ads at fair market value (less than the price of other ads).

While it may be a bit more work for the search engine marketers, Google already has this feature.

Set up your account and ucheck "the content sites in Google's network" box. This will disable content sites.

Set up a second account (with your lower bid prices) and enable the content sites.

Sure its a little more work, but why should Google harm itself and its content providers to provide a feature which is already there?

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The biggest gripe most people have with Google AdWords is that niche specific products must compete for market share with general merchandise using the broad match feature. Overture places exact matches above broad match ads.
Its seems Overture is going another step further to make its product more user friendly. Later this month Overture will allow seperate bidding for its Content Match product. While implementing this change they will also remove the 20% discount they initially offered and are expanding the product throughout the Yahoo! network.

Open an Overture account today and get a $50 signup bonus.

Thanks to Michael Wong

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Some of the top pay per click firms (such as Did It) control their clients accounts by disabling them for portions of the day where the clicks would not be effective. Kanoodle announced the release of Autoscheduler which automates this process.

"The product, AutoScheduler, is offered by Kanoodle.com at no additional cost to advertisers. It saves money, the company says, because advertisers aren't charged for the periods when their keywords are inactive."

As these simple add on technologies advance we can start to see how marketing is getting smarter and targeting is becoming easier.

old Kanoodle news:
Kanoodle recently announced that it recieved a round of VC funding and has hired 3 top Sprinks executives. Kanoodle also soon will debut its Kontext program which aims to rival Google AdSense.

Try a free $5 Kanoodle account today!

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Kanoodle recently aquired 3 former Sprinks executives. With a new round of vc funding and the new employees Kanoodle wants to fight with the big fish. Kanoodle is to be offering a content matching program similar to AdSense.

View the Kanoodle press release.

Kanoodle already has a partner network of Dogpile, Metacrawler, Webcrawler, Cnet Search, and Galaxy (which include over 1 Billion monthly searches.)

Open a free Kanoodle account with $5 credit.

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Why you should know a little about Pay Per Click I tend to put things together in my head sometimes. I recently saw some anti Howard Dean marketing attempting to link him to Osama Bin Laden. I also saw that the first week of ads costed $230,000.

My curiosity was then sparked by the recent situation with Sadam. I looked and saw nobody was paying for "Sadam Captured" on Overture yet, and there was only 1 ad displayed for "Sadam Captured" on Google AdWords.

Those people wasting all that money on mass media could be buying ads at a way cheaper rate... (which leads me to believe they are funded by a rich special interest group).

Of the three ads on Google for the word "Saddam" one of them was for a penis patch. Surely some other companies could be profiting off of this search.

Many strong businesses can be designed around ideas in which the marketing is integrated with a product that can be produced on the fly. That is why I recommend that you should know at least a small amount about pay per click even if you outsource it. Here are some of my tips, and my favorite search engine marketing report.
Google AdWords Tips
Pay Per Click Tips
21 Techniques to Maximize your ROI on Google AdWords ($69)

I do not try to perform much pay per click search engine marketing myself, but here is a list of some of the best in the business and a few friends who do.

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Ah Ha rebrands itself as Enance Interactive. The new website is located at http://www.enhance.com/

Try a free $10 bid credit signup bonus for trying out the new Enhance Interactive pay per click search engine.

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