October 2010
1 post
What Twitter Can Learn From Google (and Groupon)
Over the past few weeks, there’s been much discussion about Groupon and whether its incredible success is coming at the expense of the small businesses that have been running deals through its service. A number of past customers have stated that their promotions were so “successful,” they nearly went out of business. There were three main reasons for this:
Most were unprepared...
April 2010
1 post
Is the Social Media Opportunity Slipping Away From...
Last month, I tweeted that: Twitter’s coming ad platform is going to create quite a bit of tension between digital agencies and their search-specific counterparts. A few people asked me to elaborate on that point and given that Twitter unveiled its Promoted Tweets product this week, it seems like a good time to explain what I meant. Ad agency execs will be among the first to admit that...
January 2010
1 post
Killing Two Birds: Why Profiles Aren't Just Key to...
They certainly picked a questionable day to make the announcement, but as of Wednesday, Google Social Search is available to all Google users and it’s definitely a big deal. Marshall Kirkpatrick probably summed up the reason why best by saying: This is a very big step. What’s your portal to the Internet: Google’s algorithmic search of the Web at large, or your social circle...
May 2009
1 post
Lesson From Google: Corp Accounts May Not Be...
Often when an online start-up’s revenue model is unclear to some or most people, the immediate assumption is that the answer must be corporate licenses or professional accounts. This has been the discussion around Twitter for some time and now I’ve been reading the speculation about Bit.ly as well. This came into focus for me recently when I re-read a Business Week article from 2000...
March 2009
3 posts
Google Piggybacks Twitter Search, Gets Closer to...
There is lots of talk today about Ad Age’s article “Media Giants Want to Top Google Results” which focuses on big media companies being annoyed that they aren’t getting higher rankings in Google. While I agree that Google generally does a pretty poor job of ranking news stories, I think the issue isn’t Google’s so much as it the result of poor SEO. But that’s a topic for another day. What is far...
Facebook May Be Traffic Driver, but Won't Reap...
Why Social Media is Complementary to SEM I’m a big believer in the notion that search marketing and social-media marketing go hand in hand with one another. I’ve seen firsthand how they interact on search results pages and how insights from one channel can have an impact on the marketing efforts for both. What does seem odd to me is that some marketers and observers seem to view search...
Losing Control Can Be Good For Your Brand and For...
Social media is proving very complicated for marketers to navigate. Thus far, in the relatively short history of the medium, there is a lack of agreement on such basics as what “Social Media Marketing” actually is, how success should be measured – even whether or not marketers are welcome in social networks at all. But, with the incredible growth of social media properties marketers are eager to...
January 2009
1 post
Does Twitter Represent the Future of Search? Or is...
An interesting online debate caught my attention this past weekend. It started with Danny Sullivan’s Why Don’t Google & Yahoo Offer Twitter Search? Danny’s point is that people are increasingly turning to Twitter — rather than Google and Yahoo — when looking for information on breaking news. This is a trend we highlighted in our 2009 predictions post at the end of last year. For proof of...
April 2008
1 post
Send In The 'Clouds'
In less than a decade, search engine marketing has grown from a little understood and even derided concept (“who would ever want to pay to be in search results?”) into the single biggest sector in online advertising. With all that change and upheaval, it’s only natural for advertisers to start asking: What’s next for search? In many ways, when you ask that question, you...
September 2007
1 post
The BusinessWeek Debate
Douglas McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St. and Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka have been debating the reasons why BusinessWeek has not been able to replicate its offline success in the online world (according to comScore, BusinessWeek.com trails other finance sites, including Forbes, TheStreet, Morningstar, Bloomberg, CNBC, and Reuters, in monthly page views). For those who haven’t been keeping score...
June 2007
2 posts
Don’t Just Consider the ‘Last Click’
According to a new study released by the Atlas Institute, 90% of conversions are driven by overlapping ads across multiple sites rather than by the search ad that leads to the last click. All too frequently, said Atlas, credit for the sale is inappropriately given to search.
“Right now when you look at how advertisers are evaluating their campaigns, when a sale appears on their Web site, they...
Blame It (and Everything Else) on Quality Score
This week’s SMX Conference featured a panel called “Inside the Auction Black Box.” Not surprisingly, most of the panelist’s presentations – and nearly all of the questions from the audience – focused on the search marketing community’s collective inability to understand exactly how Google’s Quality Score (and all the associated mechanics of the ad ranking system) works. Questions ranged from “Why...
May 2007
1 post
History Lesson For Mahalo
Jason Calcanis officially launched his “people-powered search engine,” Mahalo, yesterday.
“Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You...
March 2007
1 post
Panama’s Indirect Impact: Will We Finally See a...
On Monday, Comscore released data on the short-term impact of Panama on Yahoo’s performance. From the release, “ComScore data show that the recent introduction of Yahoo!’s new search marketing ranking model is already having a positive impact on the click-through rates for Yahoo’s search advertising.” They report that click-through rates on paid search ads have risen by 9% since Panama’s official...
January 2007
2 posts
Yahoo Fixes Minimum Bids in UK and Europe
A recent thread on WebmasterWorld highlights the fact that Yahoo has apparently lowered some of its minimum bids in the UK and Europe from £0.10 to £0.05. Readers of SearchViews will recall that I’ve encouraged Yahoo to drop its minimum CPC on a number of past occasions. This is a no-brainer decision for several reasons, not the least of which is because Yahoo will undoubtedly generate incremental...
Hey Yahoo!, How Low Can You Go?
Well, I promised I wouldn’t tell Yahoo what to do when I posted several weeks ago, but as Panama moves closer to becoming a reality, I felt it would be an appropriate time to revisit some thoughts I previously shared about Yahoo’s minimum cost-per-click. I, like many others, believe that the release of Panama (specifically the pending algorithm change) will help Yahoo more effectively monetize its...
December 2006
1 post
What Yahoo *Should Not* Do
Now that their re-org has been announced and Panama is scheduled for a March release, there’s been much discussion about what Yahoo should do next. Rather than add to that list, I want to point out the one thing they absolutely should not do – attempt to compete with Google for syndication across content sites. I’ve read that suggestion in any number of places over the past week or so, most...
January 2006
1 post
Quality Score KO’s KPI
Yesterday, Fathom Online released its Keyword Price Index (KPI) for December 2005. According to the report, cost-per-clicks dropped 1% during Q4 of ‘05 and 16% overall in the past year - a “downward spiral” in keyword prices, according to MediaPost. With that in mind, Dan Grossman attempts to answer the question Fathom’s report has led many people to ask - specifically; why does Google’s stock...
December 2005
1 post
Can Money Buy Microsoft Love?
Like many in this industry, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the different ways MSN can pose a legitimate threat to the dominance of Google and Yahoo in the years ahead. While there are undoubtedly numerous others, here are four different approaches they could take (or have already taken). Evolve the Marketplace There’s no disputing that paid search has been on a tear for the past few years....
November 2005
2 posts
Google, Heal Thyself
While I’ve worked for a number of “internet” companies with varying business models over the past 11 years, one thing has remained consistent - I always get to spend some percentage of Thanksgiving Day trying to explain what I do for a living to friends and/or family. This year was no different. What better way is there to answer the usual list of questions about search marketing, I thought (”What...
Hear No Evil, Say No Evil, But Believe People are...
It seems as though everyone’s favorite topic these days is “The Long Tail.” And while I’m a little burned out on all the discussion about it myself, the case could be made that I’m really no exception.
After all, in my most recent SearchViews entry, I simultaneously applauded and questioned Yahoo Search Marketing’s decision to access the long tail of advertisers by eliminating the $20 monthly...
October 2005
2 posts
Yahoo Chases its Tail
In what was a seemingly minor development this past week, Yahoo Search Marketing announced that they have dropped the $20 monthly minimum spending requirement associated with their Sponsored Search products. This change makes YSM’s budget policy consistent with Google’s and eliminates one of the reasons why “smaller” advertisers without substantial search marketing budgets may have elected to...
Memo to David Cohen: Don’t Hate - Innovate
I’ll give David Cohen the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was simply trying to ruffle some feathers when he titled his most recent ClickZ article, “I Hate Search.” But while the title may be a bit overstated, I don’t doubt that the frustrations David touches on in his column are real. And I’m sure that he speaks not only for himself, but for a high percentage of “large, multinational,...
April 2005
1 post
The Third Evolution of Interactive Media
In my previous post, Death of the SEMs - Greatly Exaggerated?, I responded to the position many had taken that says the days of the standalone SEM firm are numbered. After reading my post, you probably agreed that the SEMs do provide a set of services above and beyond what the engines could ever offer - not to mention that it’s still, and will always be, a bad idea to share back-end conversion...
March 2005
1 post
Death of the SEMs - Greatly Exaggerated?
There’s been some recent discussion about the long-term viability of the search marketing firm. A quote from analyst Jay MacDonald of DeSilva & Phillips last week particularly ruffled our feathers, when he predicted that the search engine marketing (SEM) business “won’t exist in three years.” Thankfully (for the sake of rational thought), that turned out to be a misquote, or at least an...