Last week I had the pleasure of presenting, alongside Dana Todd, the preliminary findings from the SEMPO State of the Market Survey at Search Engine Strategies New York. Despite being the last day of the show, a respectable number of people showed up to see where the market is heading in a very uncertain economy. The survey of 867 advertisers and agencies was conducted by Radar Research and administrated by Intellisurvey Inc. In the interests of full disclosure, I sit on the board of SEMPO.
Google is now offering a new demographic bidding feature for AdWords advertisers. According to a Google AdWords blog entry posted on Friday, this new feature enables advertisers to modify their bids or restrict their ads' visibility "based on the age and gender of the users" who see the ads on participating sites within the Google content network.
Microsoft, Google and AOL are getting ready to meet with New York assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat from Westchester County, to discuss a privacy bill that he is developing, which could have strong implications for the online advertising industry. "The bill is very broad and it would make a lot of legitimate practices illegal. [It] would basically make ad networks illegal," said Mike Zaneis, VP of public policy at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).
Citing the goal of improving users' online experience, Google announced earlier this month that it will soon start incorporating landing page load time as a factor in its quality score for AdWords. Google's quality score influences an ad's position on Google and the Google network. It's also used to calculate a keyword's minimum bid.
Nationally, Internet yellow pages (IYP) have seen significant increases in search traffic, due in part to new strategic partnerships between companies, according to a recent study by ComScore.
Gordon McLeod, president of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, spoke at Wednesday morning's keynote session at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, sharing insights about the network's efforts to grow its site traffic and search presence.
Both on and offline, consumers often ask others for recommendations when making purchasing decisions. For that reason, among others, more companies are utilizing social media tactics to further their brands online, said Pauline Ores, senior marketing manager of social media engagement at IBM, at a panel at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.
Pay-per-click search network ABCSearch has acquired Aftervote.com, a social search engine, for an undisclosed sum. ABCSearch will re-launch a revamped and re-named version of the site on June 1, said Daniel Yomtobian, president and CEO of Sherman Oaks, CA-based ABCSearch. Yomtobian declined to say what the name of the new site will be.
In the online marketing world, a lot of time and resources are spent driving traffic to a Web site or landing page. You analyze campaign performance with almost religious fervor in order to extract the last penny of revenue and profit possible from each Internet visitor. But all of your hard work comes down to the few precious moments that the Internet visitors spend on your landing page.
The DMNews Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing
John Squire, SVP, product strategy, Coremetrics Inc. March 24, 2008
Getting the balance between paid search and natural search right can be a delicate operation. Get it wrong and you can waste precious marketing dollars. Get it right and you'll reap maximum rewards in terms of conversion and sales. Keep it right and you'll be the envy of the marketing organization.
