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Dec

16

Good Read on SEM Tools

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Online Marketing, Search, SEM - Paid Search | 2 Comments 

In a recent Search Engine Land article, blogger Brad Geddes spotlighted Seven Incredibly Valuable But Underused Free Tools For PPC Marketers. Check it out! It’s worth a read. It includes insights about some great free SEM tools, such as Acquisio—a platform for optimizing pay-per-click campaigns—and Google Sets, which can help you maximize the effectiveness of your ad copy. Checking Thesaurus.com with the Google keyword tool is also a really good idea for keyword expansion.

To read my blog posts on the topic, see Essential SEM & SEO Tools and my notes from SMX Advanced.

Nov

3

Google Ogles Local Advertisers, Experiments with Flat-Fee Ads

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Enhanced Clicks, Interesting Companies, Lead Generation, Online Marketing, SEM - Paid Search | Leave a Comment 

Yahoo! News recently reported, “The Internet search leader last week began trials of a new ad service in San Francisco and San Diego that lets small local businesses pay a flat monthly fee for an ad on Google.” This new Google service, called Local Listing Ads, combines with Google Maps to direct the consumer to the business. According to the Local Listing Ads FAQ, “Payment for Local Listing Ads is a flat monthly fee. This fee varies by the location of your business, and the business category you choose.” Prior to this program’s launch, Google’s search advertisers were required to bid on keywords.

Based on Google’s experiment, it appears they agree with us at Reply.com that the acquisition of locally-targeted consumer online traffic is too complicated, too expensive, and too imprecise. Reply! has been focused on solving this problem for years.

Removing keywords is part of the solution, but for most businesses that target local consumers, geo-targeting is a major issue that Google’s solution does not solve. In fact, IP targeting is wrong 30-50% of the time. That poor targeting creates tremendous inefficiency and wasted spend. You still need keyword management to maximize volume.

Reply.com’s Marketplace better serves local advertisers by offering:

  • Auction-based pricing
  • Precise, user-submitted location and category
  • Comprehensive segmentation
  • Controls over price, volume, and quality

With Reply!’s Enhanced Clicks™, all you have to do is set a bid price and location. You pay NOTHING unless you actually win the bid for a particular click, and you are guaranteed to receive that traffic. Reply! already has the clicks, so your winning bid guarantees you get the traffic you’re looking for.

Google provides the traffic platform, and Reply.com is the conduit to making them a real solution for locally-targeted traffic. This makes Google more easily digestible for local advertisers. Reply.com also helps Google address a market that has otherwise been slow to bring their ad dollars online.

Reply.com optimizes locally-targeted advertisers’ online spend; major search engines do not. Reply.com built a platform that offers advertisers of all sizes Google-like capabilities, without keywords or text ads, while offering perfect geo-targeting. In five minutes, an advertiser can sign up and start receiving perfectly-targeted Enhanced Clicks™ or leads. Also, Reply! is the only company to help advertisers recover their investment by exchanging poorly-targeted traffic through an online, real-time exchange. The exchange empowers advertisers by giving them the ability to monetize unwanted traffic, recover wasted ad spend, and maximize ROI.

For more information on Google’s new Local Listing Ads, see Google Lures Local Advertisers by Subverting Its Own Search Policies and Google Creates A New, Simplified Ad Unit for Local Business.

Oct

6

Reply! Flourishes As US Internet Ad Revenue Takes A 5.3% Dip

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Online Marketing, Research, Search, SEM - Paid Search | Leave a Comment 

The IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers released US Internet advertising stats for the first half of 2009. US Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion, a 5.3% decline from the same period in 2008. 2008 was the peek for Internet advertising in the US, with $23.4 billion in total revenues, up from $6 billion in 2002.

Search accounts for 47% of the total ($5.1 billion), up from 44% 1H ’08. Display ads, classified listings, lead generation and email accounts for 34%, 10%, 7% and 1%, respectively. Retailers comprised the most substantial spending category, with a 20% market share.



Top 10 ad-selling companies accounted for 71% of total revenues in the second quarter of 2009.

  • 11th: 25th – 11% of revenues for the second quarter of 2009.
  • 26th: 50th – 7 percent in the second quarter of 2009.

  • Industry revenue concentration remains high.
  • Performance based pricing has maintained a strong sequential growth rate and is growing at the expense of CPM/Impression based pricing.
  • Traffic is highly concentrated in the top 10 – 50 sites; everyone else is a traffic reseller.

Lead Generation revenues accounted for 7% of the 2009 second-quarter revenues or $361 million, down 10 percentfrom the $402 million (7 percent) reported in the second-quarter of 2008.

While lead generation was down for the industry, Reply! has posted over 50 percent revenue growth for the six-month period ending June 30, 2009 compared to a year ago in the Automotive and Real Estate categories, and has experienced increasing profitability over the last six consecutive quarters. Reply!’s growth can be partially attributed to its recently-launched advertiser-side exchange that efficiently allows for monetization of poorly-targeted traffic acquired from any online channel. Advertisers can quickly recover wasted online spend by making it available to buyers through Reply!’s platform.

For more information about Reply!’s success during this challenging time for the industry, read our recent press releases:Reply! Grows at Unprecedented Rate, Rips Beta Off Its Marketplace, Reply.com Brings on Board Top Real Estate Firms, Reply.com Launches Home Improvement.

Reply.com’s Marketplace and Exchange offer highly-efficient, locally-targeted consumer acquisition opportunities for large, sophisticated advertisers—as well as individual service providers—on a per-lead or per-Enhanced Click™ basis.

The full report is available here (as a pdf) and below.


IAB-Ad-Revenue-Six-Month-2009

Aug

7

Essential SEM & SEO Tools

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under SEM - Paid Search | 4 Comments 

We always get asked our opinion on cool / essential SEM & SEO tools. Well, here is our list.

Google website optimizer
What it does: Free multivariate and A/B testing tool, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates
Cost– Free
services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Google Analytics
What it does – Free analytics program
Cost – Free
www.google.com/analytics/

Google Base

What it does – Helps searchers find products you sell, allows you to easily submit all types of online and offline content which Google will make searchable.
Cost – Free
base.google.com/

WordTracker
What it does: Provides new keyword ideas
Cost – $299 a year
www.wordtracker.com
** Other Tools for keyword research:
* Microsoft’s adCenter Labs keyword forecast
* Trellian’s free search term suggestion tool
* Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool
* SpyFu – useful for tracking competitors
* Compete.com & SpyFu.com

Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool
What it does – Provides quick traffic estimates of keywords

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Google Trends
What it does – Show trends in search popularity.
Cost – Free
www.google.com/trends

Google Sitemap Generator
What it does: Quickly spiders sites and creates XML sitemaps that adhere to the standards set forth at www.sitemaps.org
Cost – Free
www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

SEOdigger.com
What it does: Competitive ranking report tool, shows ranking history in Google
Cost – Free
www.seodigger.com

TouchGraph
What it does: Provides visual link maps from Google “similar pages”
Cost – Free
www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

Yahoo! Site Explorer
What it does: Shows accurate picture of back links and indexed pages
Cost – Free
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

SEO Toolbar
What it does: Provides data on sites in one easy place through your Firefox browser. Turn images and CSS on/off, disable javascript, and many more.See full feature list at: tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Cost – Free
tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

Trellian’s Keyword Discovery
What it does: Provides keyword ideas and aids in brainstorming and provides popularity numbers from multiple databases and shows seasonal trends
Cost – $69.95 monthly
www.keyworddiscovery.com

We Build Pages’ Toolset
What it does: Free Internet Marketing and SEO Tools, backlink and anchor text checker, Class C Backlink analyzer, keyword density analysis tool, spider viewer,
Cost – Free
www.webuildpages.com/tools/default.htm

Deep Link Ratio Checker
What it does: This tool was created to analyze how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines. We can use this tool to compare the DLRs for the best ranking sites for a search phrase.
Cost – Free
www.webuildpages.com

WebConfs.com KW Density Checker
What it does: Checks keyword frequency at the page level, Tag cloud
Cost – Free
webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

VeriClix
What it does: Real-time pay per click reporting, auditing and fraud monitoring
Cost – Free
www.vericlix.com

Web Position 4
What it does: Checks natural search engines rankings
Cost – $149/5 domains; $389/unlimited domains
www.webposition.com

OptiLink
What it does: Checks natural search engines rankings, incoming link popularity, Link text (keyword ratio), Keyword density,
Google PageRank rating.
Cost – $149
www.optilinksoftware.com

Advanced Web Ranking
What it does: Search engine ranking software that emulates, manual search through each search engine to produce reliable and accurate website positioning reports.
Cost – $99-$399
www.advancedwebranking.com

Advanced Link Manager
What it does: Allows you to see how your website links evolve in time. You can compare the evolution of your site with the
evolution of your competitors using data from the most popular search engines.
Cost: – $59-$149
www.advancedlinkmanager.com

CombineWords.com
What it does: Keyword list expansion tool
Cost – Free
www.combinewords.com

SEO Quake
What it does: Extension for both Firefox and IE that provides a quick look at many SE parameters, including backlinks,
indexed pages, Alexa rank, quick DomainTools.com. Also allows for downloading of SERPS into Excel with many data points.
Cost – Free
www.seoquake.com/?sln=en

Quintura
What it does: Visual search engine navigation tool that extracts keywords from search results and builds a word cloud.
Cost – Free
www.quintura.com/

Archive.org
What it does: Historical web page archive
Cost – Free
www.archive.org

Other Cool Tools
# Twitscoop (trending on topics in real-time)
# Twitvolume – allows head-to-head comparisons
# SiteVolume – visually tracks how often word appears in social media sites (Digg, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, etc.)
# Twitbeep – like Google, alters for Twitter, updates hourly, sends you email
# Twhirl – allows you to track and monitor keywords
# Wikipedia tools
# Wikirank – shows popular trends on Wikipedia with trending topics
# 99Designs.com – connects clients needing design work such as logo designs, business cards, or web sites.
# ODesk.com & eLance.com – Simplify the process of finding, managing, and paying for resources like: web programming, writing and translation, admin support, sales and marketing, finance, legal, etc.
# Izea.com – Pay-per-post blogging. If you would like to use the power of bloggin and social media to drive in-bound links and awareness, consider using these guys… pretty cool.

Jul

29

Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal: Important Details

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Search, SEM - Paid Search | Leave a Comment 

  • Microsoft will power Yahoo Search (paid and organic).
  • Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide sales force for both companies’ advertisers.
  • Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide sales force for premium search advertisers.
  • Microsoft’s AdCenter platform will provide self-serve advertising for both companies.
  • Prices for all search ads will be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
  • Future battles:
    • Google AdWords vs. Microsoft AdCenter
    • Google AdSense vs. Microsoft PubCenter
  • Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo!
  • Appears Yahoo is exiting search in a material way.
  • Yahoo expects to fully implement the combined effort within 24 months of regulatory approval (early 2010).

WOW & WOW

Jul

20

Yahoo’s Earnings – Good, Bad and Ugly

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Online Marketing, Research, Search, SEM - Paid Search | Leave a Comment 

Yahoo’s Earnings. The good, bad and ugly.

  • Rev: $1.573 billion (down 13%)
  • Pageviews up 7%
  • Search revenues down 15%
  • display revenues down 14%
  • Yahoo’s net income rose 8 percent to $141 M.
  • Operating income fell 17 percent to $101 M.
  • Yahoo’s search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites declined 15 % to $359M .
  • Yahoo announced a deal with AT&T to sell local online ads.
  • Yahoo mail developing an initiative around improving the ad experience for consumers. They call some of their ads a detriment that cheapens the Yahoo brand.

Well– where does that leave us… MicroHoo anyone?  according to Techcrunch, sources say a search deal is imminent. but Yahoo may be pushing for an acquisition. To me, both sides need the  search deal to create a meaningful competitor to Google.  Microsoft reports earnings on Thursday.

Yhoo Q209 Earnings Presentation Final
View more documents from guest25211b.

Jul

17

Google’s CPCs drop 13% Y/Y!!!

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under SEM - Paid Search | Leave a Comment 

According to Jefferies, Google delivered in-line 2Q results with 15% growth in paid clicks but a 13% decline in CPCs y/y. WOW — a drop in CPCs — who would have thunk it!!! Paid click growth was 15% Y/Y. Surprisingly, pricing (CPC) showed a sequential uplift of 5% vs. our flattish expectation, and indicates that pricing seems to have troughed in 1Q vs. our expectation of 3Q. Higher CPCs mean a higher level of keyword bidding and/or improved monetization. On a Y/Y basis, CPCs were still down 13%.

To see their earnings presentation, please review the full post.

Jul

17

MicroHoo or Bing + Yahoo Display?

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Click Marketplace, Lead Generation, SEM - Paid Search | Leave a Comment 

Reuters is saying that Microsoft and Yahoo are close to the never-ending search / online advertising deal and that it may be announced next week. For those of us that follow the industry, the two companies have been talking for over a year. What I find interesting is that with or without Bing’s $100M offline advertising budget Google’s dominance is not being challenged. I am sure it will take time to penetrate Google’s search share and perhaps a combined MicroHoo attempt could be the fuel to make it happen. Google has about a 65% search share and MicroHoo would have about a 28% share — that is interesting.

As reported, the current discussions revolve around Microsoft paying “several billion dollars to take over Yahoo’s search advertising business with guaranteed payments to Yahoo,” but Yahoo is likely to maintain their display advertising business. For context, Yahoo is scheduled to report quarterly results next Tuesday, and Microsoft on Thursday – good timing for an announcement – huh?

I wonder why Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IAC, AOL, etc have not embraced lead generation as a third revenue stream after search and display?  Or why, all the companies have not addressed the significant inefficiencies that result from geo-targeting on their platforms.  Here are some of our thoughts.

Jun

2

SMX Advanced – Seattle Day 1

Posted by Brian Bowman
Filed Under Online Marketing, SEM - Paid Search, Tradeshows | Leave a Comment 

I am attending the SMX Advanced tradeshow and wanted to provide some semi-live updates from the show.

Notes from the panel on “Keyword Research Artistry”

Speakers

  • Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
  • Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI Services
  • Taylor Pratt, Search Marketing Specialist, nFusion

Site Search

  • Need to add site search to any site for which you want help with keyword research from UGC
  • Tie-in site search into Google analytics
  • Easy way to show all keywords being used on the site

Keyword Trend Tools

  • Google
    • Google Trends – provides view into the mind of the surfer
    • Google Insights tool – provides keywords with regional interest, plus a section for top searches and rising searches

Searches

  • Google Hot Trends – enter any date and it will show you hot topics for that date
  • Google Search Options – appears on the left side of Google, allows you to explore search topics, and shows you related searches
  • WonderWheel
  • Yahoo Buzz – up and coming events with rising popularity
  • Facebook lexicon – tool to follow trends in words in Facebook walls
  • Twitter Keyword Tools – poor right now but many tools are coming. It is important to monitor brand and keywords on social

Media Sites

  • Twitscoop (trending on topics in real-time)
  • Twitvolume – allows head-to-head comparisons
  • SiteVolume – visually tracks how often word appears in social media sites (Digg, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, etc.)
  • Twitbeep – like Google, alters for Twitter, updates hourly, sends you email
  • Twhirl – allows you to track and monitor keywords
  • Wikipedia tools
  • Wikirank – shows popular trends on Wikipedia with trending topics
  • Wikipedia article statistics
  • VisWiki
  • EyePlorer
  • How to beat affiliate marketing’s large CPCs
  • Longtail research technique
  • Find UGC sites with deep content and just read them
  • SEOmoz’s TermExtractor Tool
  • Hidden market for keywords: Compete.com & SpyFu.com
  • Have robot extract sidebars and anchor tags
  • How to select keywords for expansion
  • Search volume – how much traffic is there?
  • Relevance – is your site relevant for the keywords?
  • Competition – can you realistically get to position 1-3?
  • Raven SEO Tools
  • Google Suggest
  • SEOBook Keyword List Generator

On to the next session.

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