PromotionWorld
Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. “Google, regardless of it’s [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals,” he says. “It’s important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process.”
For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. In contrast, Google trumps Yahoo when it comes to users aged 45+. So if you’re positioning a product for the younger set, “there’s still a sizeable audience to be reached through Yahoo,” Henige says.
Meanwhile, in terms of spending power, Google beat out Yahoo with searchers that had spent more than $500 online–and tended to attract searchers from the “affluent suburbia” and “upscale America” brackets. So if your goals are built around driving sales of big ticket items, “gearing your search engine marketing plan towards Google, at least initially, may be a good place to start,” Henige says.
The New York Times
Google is partnering with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane to distribute two-minute episodes of a new cartoon, “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” through its AdSense advertising system. The search giant will syndicate the program to thousands of Web sites that typically attract young men. Instead of static ads, clips of “Cavalcade” will appear where AdWords ads usually go on these sites.
Advertising, of course, will be incorporated into the clips in a variety of ways, including prerolls, banners, or a simple “brought to you by” note appearing at the beginning of each clip. For more money, MacFarlane has been working with advertisers to animate original commercials for “Cavalcade.” While none of the launch advertisers are being revealed, MacFarlane and Google are both saying that several deals are among the largest ever for Google’s 5-year-old advertising system. Google refers to the new service as the Google Content Network. “Cavalcade” carries a multimillion-dollar production price tag.
MacFarlane described the installments to The Times as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.” As part of the deal, MacFarlane will receive a percentage of the ad revenue from the 50 two-minute episodes.
Google passed Yahoo in its share of monthly visitors in the United States for the first time this April, buoyed by growth in search and YouTube videos, according to ComScore statistics released Thursday.
However, underscoring the variability of this sort of measurement, which extrapolates overall data from the usage of a “panel” of users at home and work, ComScore rival Nielsen Online released its own data as well with some different results. Although it also showed Google as No. 1 in terms of unique users, it said Google passed Yahoo way back in January 2007.
ComScore said Google sites had 141.1 million unique visitors in April, a tad ahead of Yahoo’s 140.6 million. Microsoft was in third at 121.2 million, with AOL at 111.3 million.
Nielsen’s data showed Google at 128.2 million, Microsoft at 122.1 million, and Yahoo at 117.1 million.
Nielsen also provides information on time spent at the sites, though. There, Yahoo leads its rivals with 3 hours and 9 minutes per month, but AOL owner Time Warner leads Yahoo at 3 hours 40 minutes per month.
Microsoft’s usage was 2 hours and 17 minutes, and Google was 1 hour and 47 minutes, Nielsen said.
BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine weighs in on Google’s YouTube dilemma. Whereas AdWords and AdSense “are both simple, easily automated, and can scale to just about infinity,” Fine points out that ads on YouTube cannot be automated as easily. And while just about anyone can afford to create and run an AdWords campaign without a salesforce, YouTube ads cost more and usually require the use of an ad agency, thus limiting its customer pool to larger advertisers.
Fine says there’s now a greater feeling of urgency inside the Googleplex that the online video giant needs to start contributing to the company’s bottom line. But Tim Armstrong, Google’s top U.S. ad-sales executive, says the company made huge strides at YouTube in the last quarter. “It takes longer to bring in a YouTube dollar than it does to bring in a search dollar,” Armstrong says. “Can you make [that process] more efficient? We think ‘yes’…we’re making nice progress.”
The need for automation is a big problem, says Dave Morgan, founder of the ad network Tacoda (now owned by AOL). He points out that display ads are the most successful ad format for video, but these still require a human sales force. Meanwhile, YouTube execs point out that one of their key new ad formats, the overlay-which places ads over a portion of clips without disrupting the video-has been available for less than a year. In the end, Fine finds few answers to his question of whether YouTube can grow to AdSense-like proportions.
Search Engine Journal
Can Google analyze and rank photos as it does with text? Two of the company’s scientists presented a paper at the International WWW Conference in Beijing last week that will allegedly remove Google’s dependence on the alt text accompanying a picture, allowing the engine to rank images based solely on their content.
The process, called VisualRank, uses an algorithm that combines image-recognition software with techniques for determining which images look most similar to one another, resulting in a ranking that doesn’t require text. If the process works, this could mean humans would no longer be required to provide metadata in order to describe photos to search engines.
Google Webmaster Central
So a hacker or competitor has penetrated your site’s source code and installed malicious scripts or programs. The first step is to get your site offline (temporarily) as fast as possible so that you don’t infect visitors unnecessarily. Speed may be a problem if you’re using a shared hosting service, so try using a 503 status code in the meantime, to keep the engine’s spiders from crawling. The Google Webmaster Tools URL Removal tool can also help with preventing incoming traffic.
The next step is to figure out what the hacker was after. Was it consumer or employee PII? Was it your proprietary shopping cart script? Check your server logs for any modified, uploaded or otherwise suspicious file activities.
Once you’ve assessed the situation, reinstall your OS–preferably from a secure, trusted site or disc. After the fresh reinstallation, use the latest backup you have to restore your site–but make sure that the backup is clean and free of compromised content. Change your passwords, and if your site was offline, take the steps to get it back online and work on getting the engines to start indexing it again.
Promotion World
So you snagged a top spot on Google for a particular keyword–only to slip down a few days later and see some random upstart in your place. Think something’s gone wrong with your links, your content or your robots.txt file? Could be. But it could just be the Google Everflux–or the constant refreshing of the giant’s index.
“Lately I have been noticing a lot of jumping in the top listings. Links out of nowhere are appearing, links being dropped and my own links moving up and down much too quickly for my comfort,” says Titus Hoskins. “Even six months ago the Google main index seemed to be a whole lot more stable than it is now.”
Matt Cutts acknowledged the Google Everflux idea himself in an early 2007 blog post, saying that the refresh that typically happened once every few weeks was now likely happening on a daily basis. To keep up with the changes, Hoskins says that you need to keep building quality links and content daily–with a special nod to social bookmarking sites.
“No matter what warp-speed Google finally decides upon, valuable content is still the key to getting top rankings in any search engine,” Hoskins says. “Adding fresh, valuable relevant content to your sites each day will keep them in the picture.”
PPC Hero
According to Amber Benedict, there are two main reasons why you should run AdWords Search Query Reports–to gain insights on new keywords and negative keywords.
“The search query report will give you a list of actual search queries that customers are typing in the search bar to trigger your ad,” Benedict says. “It’s good to know this information especially if you find some keywords that aren’t currently in your account.” These rogue queries were most likely triggered by your broad match keywords–and you can rank higher on, and more precisely target, these keywords if you incorporate them directly into a campaign.
The same goes for negative keywords, as the reports help you discover random terms that your ads are showing up for–terms that may not be relevant to your product or service set, and are possibly generating costly, non-converting clicks. For example, “If you don’t offer natural or organic dog food, then you should add ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ to your negative keyword list. This is a great way to qualify your traffic, decrease spend and increase conversions,” Benedict says.