Search Results
August 31, 2007
Search marketing interfaces across the globe can rest easier with their newly designed interfaces. Ok… maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But both Yahoo! and Google have announced changes to their competing search marketing platforms. Yahoo! is now sending out notifications when ad quality scores drop. Every 30 days your existing quality scores will be compared the previous 30 day period’s. If they’ve dropped… you’ll get an email. You can also check the Account Summary tab in Panama’s admin to see these scores whenever you want. If you need some help coming up with the perfect ad copy, Yahoo! has also made the copy of competing advertising available for you to look at. I think that feature has been around for a little while… but they say it’s easier to use now. Finally, Panama now gives you the option to save up to 45 customized reports per user. If you think you’ll be running the same reports over and over again, this handy feature will let you save the reports you want to run again… and look at them anytime in the future without having to reconfigure anything. The changes at Google are more about putting on a pretty face. Google has updated the AdWords Report Center interface to look more like Google Analytics. In fact… it looks just like Analytics. In addition, the main reports page has been simplified to make finding information much easier.
August 21, 2007
If you ask any successful business what drives their sales, you’ll most likely get an earful of numerous factors: advertising, the product, customer service, branding, etc. You may even hear Google (or search engines in general) thrown in, especially when it comes to Internet-based companies. All of these things contribute to a successful business. No one aspect can really be targeted as THE driving force for a company’s sales. Because the sales process is so complex and intertwined, it’s often hard for companies to put a finger on what’s happening when sales begin to slip. When I read Barry Welford’s “Google Rankings Drive Sales - SEO Expectations” I couldn’t help but think back to my years in sales. Welford received a call from an online business owner who was convinced that dropping two places in Google was the sole reason his sales dropped 20%. Welford wisely recognized that this drop in sales was most likely caused by more than a two-place drop. When he asked the caller about other site stats, there were none to be had - this website owner didn’t really study any analytics data. He simply assumed Google was to blame for his drop in sales. I’ve talked about this before, but it warrants mentioning again. While it’s true that a drop in search engine rankings can have an impact on your business, that drop usually happens for a reason:
I could go on and on. There are literally dozens of reasons a company could see a drop in sales. More often than not, the drop in search rank is not the cause of the lost sales - it’s an indicator that something isn’t right with the business. Search algos can change on the drop of a hat. That’s why creating a business that’s dependent on Google (or any other search engine) is just a recipe for disaster. Your website should be able to survive without Google. If you’re building brand awareness, engaging customers and finding ways to keep them in touch with your company, working out link strategies, and turning out a good product that people tell their friends about, you should be fine without Google. So instead of blaming an algorithm on your company’s drop in sales, take a look inward and figure out what could have caused the change. Invest the time you would otherwise spend trying to over-optimize your site to compensate for a drop in rank into studying analytical data and finding ways to create a better user experience. Google may decide to kick you out completely some day. If your business would go under as a result… you’ve got bigger problems than a couple of positions in rank.
August 15, 2007
In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for August 15, 2007:
After receiving what the originator of this thread calls “some backlash”, Google appears to have changed the wording of their description of link exchanges and reciprocal links. Don’t get excited just yet, though. The clarification is one word: excessive. So “excessive” link exchanges and reciprocal links are bad. And since excessive is such a specific word, we all know what that means. Haha. More discussion is going on at WebmasterWorld.
How did this organization lift ROI 30%? By adding an email component to their existing postal mail campaign. Even though they spent more money getting their word about their fund-raising event out, their return was still 30% higher because of the great success of the email campaign. Three times as many people who received the email signed up as opposed to those who only received the postal mail. Clickthrough rates averaged 18% and open rates averaged 6.5%. I’d say that certainly proves the “email marketing is dead” myth is just that - a myth!
Ever wish you could have the latest Internet usage trends right at your fingertips? To be honest, this was possible before today - if you wanted to monitor several sources and look for updates yourself. But this new widget takes some of the work out of the picture… and makes it easy to see Hitwise streaming data feeds right on your desktop. The widget runs on Yahoo!’s Widget Engine and links to Hitwise To Go data on popular websites, search trends, and brands. [Via Web Analytics World] For kicks, check out Google Blogoscoped’s “Software Progress” post. It’s a comparison of some “technology” from days gone by compared to current offerings from Google. I especially love the ad for an 80 MB hard drive for “under $12K”. Yowsa.
August 02, 2007
Every so often we like to share some of the successes others are experiencing online. In particular, we like to highlight examples of folks doing the types of things we talk about here and the results they get. As usual, Internet Retailer is a great place to find such stories:
As I’ve said in the past, one of the best ways to learn and come up with ideas for your own site is to look at what others have done. In this batch of success stories we’ve got increased conversions, massive sales, repeat business, successful use of analytics data and contests that require their own servers because of huge traffic numbers. If you ask me… those are all good things.
July 24, 2007
In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 24, 2007:
The suggestion here is for Google to add labels or indicators to peaks in traffic that would show what was causing the surge in traffic. Maybe a certain referrer suddenly spikes in traffic (like when you get dugg). Maybe a certain piece of content begins to grab a bunch of links. I think it’s a great idea and one that I’m sure Google could work out. I wouldn’t mind seeing the same kind of label for valleys as well as peaks.
Google is changing the way it handles hyphens and underscores when its crawler encounters them. Previously, hyphens were seen as word separators and underscores were not. With the change in place, both would be treated as word separators. For example: under the old way, internet-marketing-monitor would be crawled as “internet marketing monitor” and internet_marketing_monitor would be crawled as “internetmarketingmonitor”. Not so any more. Both examples would be crawled as “internet marketing monitor”. If you ask me, it never made sense for Google to treat underscores any differently in the first place. If I want something to get index as “claypot” I’ll just type “claypot”. Why would “clay_pot” ever mean “claypot”? Don’t forget to check out our new Firefox SEO & Webmaster’s Bundle of extensions for, you guessed it… Firefox! It’s a quick, easy way to try out a dozen Firefox extensions that could just make your life a lot easier!
July 23, 2007
In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 23, 2007:
Google Analytics is great for a quick, day-by-day overview of traffic. It’s also great for getting into the nitty-gritty of the how, where, when, and what of your site’s traffic. But as Darren Rowse shows us, it’s also a great took for comparing traffic from different periods of time. Curious to see how your site is performing now as opposed to this time last year? Or last month? Or last week? Rowse not only shows you how to generate the report, but also talks about the types of information that can be gleaned from a comparison of traffic.
Two things are changing in the online advertising world: 1) more people are coming online to advertise; 2) more people are looking for options outside of Google for online advertising. Ok… there’s a lot more than that changing in the online advertising. And a lot of the people looking for other ways to advertise aren’t doing so exclusively of Google - they’re looking for multi-prong, integrated advertising and marketing on a variety of Internet properties. Blog sponsorship is quickly becoming a popular way for advertisers and get their messages to the masses. Unlike advertising in the strictest sense of the word, sponsorship is a more intimate arrangement. And as MarketingSherpa Content Director Anne Holland points out, the relationship between bloggers and companies they write about should be dealt with differently than “the rest of the public”. An influential blog can quite literally hurt a company badly. Ask Apple. Sponsorship is not only a scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours financial arrangement, it also helps open the lines of communication between your company and the popular bloggers in your market.
So what forms of marketing have the best ROI, you ask? According to a couple of studies cited by eMarketer, direct mail and email tend to garner the most return. Furthermore, 31.5% of the companies involved in one of the studies said that they had not embraced consumer-generated media (CGM) because there was no clear ROI associated with it. I find it ironic that the same study suggests that 6.5% of responding companies didn’t embrace CGM because they didn’t want consumers that close to their businesses. Haha. They want us to get close enough to use their stuff… just not close enough to have an opinion on it! But I digress. The best way to know what’s going to work well for your organization is to try everything and measure the return. Sometimes that’s not quite as easily said as done. But creative marketing requires equally as creative tracking, right? Another work week is now underway. It’s ok to be a little sad. But on the bright side, the dreaded Monday is already on the way out!
July 23, 2007
Google’s recent privacy snafus must be a bigger deal than the search company is letting on. Why? Because Mountain View’s competitors have all joined the privacy train and started making changes to the way they handle our information. Are they all making changes to try to one-up Google? Are they trying to avoid the government probing Google is currently undergoing on two continents? Whatever the reason, the search companies have hit the ground running:
So just to recap, here are the major privacy changes made in the past few weeks across all of the search engines:
In addition to announcing policy changes, Microsoft has joined with Ask.com to issue an industry-wide call for the development of standard privacy practices among search engines. It’s curious that Google and Yahoo! weren’t included in the call… but that might have been intentional. It sure looks good for the underdogs to call out the big boys and apply a little pressure. Regardless of the motive, these developments should be welcome signs of change to every Internet user. Even though I think Ask.com is the only search engine going far enough by giving users complete control and making anonymous search possible, I’m glad to see that the other search engines are all working on ways to limit the information they collect and store. To be fair, Google was the first of the search engines to make such changes. While some of the other search engines have gone a little farther in response, Google deserves credit for starting all of this. Now if only Google could play a little catch-up and implement something like AskEraser. But that’s not likely to ever happen. For those who would like to impose their own limits on Google’s data-mining practices, CustomizeGoogle is a nice Firefox extension that lets you limit some of the information Google collects:
More discussion of search privacy announcements at Techmeme |
|
