Going to SMX West!! Woot! :)
Hello World! 
We’re going to SMX West next week – and we’re speaking at a few awesome sessions!
Register to attend if you haven’t already, it’s going to be a blast!
The sessions we are speaking at:
Advanced Landing Page Strategies
Analyzing & Converting Paid Search Traffic
Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet one and all!
Aaaand We’re Back! :)
We apologize for the delay in blogging we have had over the past couple months.
Thank you loyal followers for sticking around – you will not be disappointed this year! Watch for some cool stuff coming up this month and throughout 2009.
Happy New Year to all of our readers and visitors!!
Read MoreStudy Shows Online Shoppers Spending Less This Season
comScore, Inc. recently announced that online shopping is in decline for the first time in at least seven years. While online sales are only down 4% from this time last year, at a turbulent time in world economics, news of a downturn in online purchases may not come as a surprise to many.
“With consumer confidence low and disposable income tight, the first weeks of November have been very disappointing,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
However, comScore forecasts that there will still be growth this holiday season, and that the online marketplace will recover somewhat in the next few months.
“Assuming the stock market doesn’t deteriorate materially during the season and that there is no apocalyptic news of major financial institutions, manufacturers or retailers failing, we should see online spending growth inch back towards positive as we get deeper into the season,” Fulgoni said.
comScore, Inc. calls itself a global information provider. “comScore maintains massive proprietary databases that provide a continuous, real-time measurement of the myriad ways in which the Internet is used and the wide variety of activities that are occurring online.
Mission-critical information relating to both offline and online activities is collected through comScore’s innovative use of the Internet as a timely and powerful data collection medium.
comScore’s products and services are utilized by many of the world’s leading corporations to better understand, leverage and profit from the rapidly evolving worldwide Web.”
What does this mean for PPC managers and online advertisers? Well, if you’re an agency you may have already seen your clients’ budgets decrease with the sliding economy. If you’re an advertiser or a storefront you may be seeing more “window shoppers” and less sales. Even if you haven’t experienced any of these things, now is a good time to make sure you’re running a tight ship PPC-wise. Try targeting transactional keywords, listing your prices in your ads, and tailoring your landing pages to holiday traffic. You may have fewer chances to grab your share of online purchases right now, which means you need to optimize for maximum effectiveness.
Read MoreHow To Use Google’s New Search-based Keyword Tool
Google AdWords announced Tuesday that it has launched a new keyword tool which will help advertisers target more keywords that searchers could use to find their sites. This search-based tool starts at advertisers’ web pages and works backwards, identifying keywords and phrases that are frequently searched by Google users that may be relevant to the advertisers’ site. Advertisers may then add these keywords to their AdWords campaigns or optimize for these terms in order to garner more organic search visits.
We’ll walk you through how to use this new tool right now:
- Access the Search-based Keyword Tool by visiting this link: http://www.google.com/sktool/
- Enter the URL of the page you want to base your query on in the first box – i.e. the page you want to generate more keywords for.
- Enter keywords or phrases that you’d like to be part of the suggested terms in the second box. In the example below, we put “UFO” and “alien” in this box because we wanted to generate keywords that included those words:
- Now the cool part. Google now generates two lists for you. One is a list of keyword phrases related to the URL that was input. The other is a list of keyword phrases related to the search words you input. If this URL was linked to our AdWords account, the tool would have made sure to exclude any keywords we are already targeting!
- Now you can analyze these results and decide what do with the information. In this case, it looks like the owners of the website should not only advertise on some new keywords, but also might look into expanding its product line beyond alien stickers and t-shirts, perhaps adding some PC games, toys, and skateboards. As an added help, Google tells you how many searches these terms get on a monthly basis, how much ad competition there is, and how much they suggest you bid on each keyword or phrase.
(click to enlarge)
If you haven’t tried the new Search-based Keyword Tool yet, you ought to give it a shot. Tools like this can be invaluable to PPC managers and SEOs, not to mention webmasters and in-house marketing teams.
Read MoreGoogle Product Search Plus Box In Alpha
A new product is in early testing stages on Google. The product test is by invite only, but it is a feature that may dramatically affect search engine results in the future, especially paid search advertising.
Selected AdWords advertisers are having a line show up below their ad in search results that says “+Show Products from [Advertiser] for [search query].” When clicked, this link expands to a box with three product images, complete with title, price, and description. The box takes up a very large portion of the screen, bumping the next results far below.
A Google AdWords rep confirmed in a message to us that the name of this feature is the “Product Search Plux Box,” and that the alpha test involves a very limited number of advertisers and is closed to additional participants at this time. The Google team may decide to re-open the test to additional advertisers in the future, but for now only those advertisers that were previously invited are able to participate in the test.
We were personally unable to replicate search results that featured the Product Search Plus box, but Search Engine Land posted a couple of screenshots a few weeks ago that we took the liberty to draw on:
It appears that the advertisers involved use GoogleCheckout, but it is unclear whether these products come from Google Base. Search Engine Land speculated that they do not.
Questions we have are: Can anyone out there find examples of the Product Search Plus Box out there? Can any of you replicate this? Also, are there similar results coming up with local adwords listings of some kind?
Read MoreThe Yahoo/Google Ad Deal Is Off
Google announced today that it will be discontinuing the paid search advertising deal that has been brewing between the search giant and one of its chief competitors, Yahoo, for the past several months. The abandonment of this partnership could mean the loss of millions of dollars in potential revenue.
Antitrust investigations by the U.S. government are cited as responsible for giving Google “cold feet” even after the magnitude of the partnership agreement was scaled back significantly last week.
Chief legal officer at Google, David Drummond, wrote, “After four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement.”
Now that the agreement is off, it appears that the U.S. government will be discontinuing its antitrust investigation.
Assistant Attorney General, Thomas O. Barnett, said to the New York Times, “The companies’ decision to abandon their agreement eliminates the competitive concerns identified during our investigation and eliminates the need to file an enforcement action . . . The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition — lower prices, better service and greater innovation.”
Yahoo’s stock shares are trading at around $14 today, and there is speculation that in light of these events a similar offer from Microsoft’s previous one of a buyout for $33/share may again be brought to the table.
Read More