Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

The long anticipated GBuy has been announced they're actually calling it Google Checkout, which probably makes more sense the way they're positioning the product. The Google Blog outlines some of the key features of the new product including the ability to checkout from multiple stores with a single login (sounds like a combination of Paypal and MS Passport). Adwords ads by sites accepting Google Checkout will have a little icon next to them. There had been some rumors and speculation about those icons being included in the natural results, which I knew would not be the case. I figured this is how they would implement the little icon.

Also, I didn't notice it on the Google Blog, but ClickZ talks about Google not charging any transaction fees for 10 times the amount spent on Adwords ads. Here's what they say:

Additionally, AdWords advertisers will receive free payment processing for sales of up to 10 times their monthly spending. A company spending $1,000 in one month for AdWords would receive $10,000 worth of free payment processing the next month. Beyond that, or for non-advertisers, the charge will be $0.20 and two percent of the sale per transaction.

They've got a bunch of companies (big brands) already on board. I think the free processing for Adwords advertisers will get a lot of merchants to join very quickly. If the checkout process is smooth and users love it, even more will jump on the bandwagon.

If you're new to web analytics, or even if you have been digging through analytics reports for a while, you could benefit from this great article on basic web analytics. It's an interview with Avinash Kaushik (never heard of him, but he gives good advice). He suggests six key reports that everyone should run for their sites. I also liked the final point he makes about understanding which keywords are making you money. This is an important piece that many ppc advertisers don't pay close enough attention to and they end up spending way too much money on ppc advertising.

(thanks, Paul for pointing me to this article)

BTW-this is labeled as part 1, so part 2 should be coming soon...

Just read about a new report over on the Analtyics blog that shows you your CTR and Conversion rate based on the position of your ads. Could be a pretty useful feature. Google thinks it's great because it will get people to bid for the top positions, but it could prove useful in analyzing the effectiveness of ads based on their positions on the page.

They also mentioned that they're opening the floodgates on new signups, which I was actually going to mention that I'd noticed recently with new analytics getting invite codes very quickly (within a few days).

More good stuff about eye tracking and web design from Gord Hotchkiss.

This article on ClickZ talks about an eye-tracking study that shows people largely ignore banner ads and look more at text ads than banners. Well, duh...isn't that why Google's such a hot shot--they figured that out a while ago. I guess it doesn't hurt to have some eye-tracking data to back it up.

Yahoo Answers is pretty cool. There are other answers websites out ther, but I think what makes this one work is the sheer volume of Yahoo users that are always online answering questions. Sometimes you'll get a lot of junk answers, but there are also a lot of legitimately good answers being given. I think the points system works as an incentive to answer well so your response will be picked as the best answer.

Yahoo just launched a Ask the Planet campaign to advertise their new offering. Every day they have a different prize--today's prize is a 3 oz bar of gold. To enter the contest you just have to answer a question in the selected category of the day. Today's category is business and finance. The more you enter, the more chances to win. It's really a genius idea for generating tons and tons of content in whatever categories they choose to highlight. The promo is linked from the homepage, but I first noticed it mentioned in the DMNews.

I think he's over-simplifying matters when he writes about Passive vs. Active SEO. The reason there hasn't been a lot of distinction between the two is because there is A LOT of overlap between the two. There are many sites that have a ton of great content that the search engines would love to index, but they are invisible to the search engines due to poor link popularity or inaccessible internal linking within the site itself. Seth also talks about using different people for the content and link building aspects of the site. It's always a good idea to specialize, but it's also possible for a good SEO to handle both parts of the equation.

Also, I think it's a little misleading to call the on-site stuff "passive" and the other "active" because there's nothing passive about ACTIVELY writing content and improving your own site. It takes a lot of work and could be considered more "active" than the link building. Especially when done right, good content will draw a lot of "passive" links to your site, so it makes it hard to really draw a line between the two as active and passive.

This is a good thing...and about time.

Google has just launched a blog for Google Analytics. Not much there, yet, but I'm sure it will be a good source of the latest news and enhancements for Google Analytics.

Google will now allow you to schedule when your ads will appear this could prove useful for businesses that have higher conversion rates at certain times of day or days of the week. This feature is now live on Adwords, but you have to enable it in your account to try it out. To enable ad scheduling, go to "Edit Campaign Settings" for the Adwords campaign you want to be able to schedule ad delivery for. This is a cool new feature, but I wonder how many people really know when their best clicks are coming in? I don't think Google offers conversion stats by time/day. Perhaps they will add that now that they offer this dayparting ad delivery feature.

Google has launched a specialized search for searching US Government docs the new gov search is available at http://usgov.google.com. It's a good strategy by Google to expand their search offerings into vertical areas like this. You could have probably gotten similar results from an advanced search by filtering TLD, but real people don't know how to do advanced searches. By narrowing the web by domain or format (ie blog search, news search, image search), you make it easier for people to find what they're looking for.

I got an email from Meg over at Ebay last week, this week Eric Schmidt at Google had this to day about Net Neutrality. I agree that we should make our voice known about the issue. I wrote my congressman to let him know that I think we need to keep the 'Net free and open. Go to http://www.itsournet.org/ and let 'em know how you feel about the issue.

This tool from Google lets you sync your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, cookies across multiple computers. Some people might freak out that this is another attempt by Google to rule the world. It may be, but don't you hate it when you're working from home and you can't remember that password that you really need and it's stored in the saved passwords on your computer at work? This tool could come in really handy for just such a situation and many others, I'm sure.

Anybody who follows Matt Cutts' blog might get a kick out of this contest from ShoeMoney

Apparently MSN is hiring people to hand pick the best search results when their algo doesn't cut the mustard. This is the first time I've heard of anything like this going on and being publicly admitted. I don't completely understand how it works, sounds like it's happening realtime (applicants need to type over 149 words/minute). Hmm. Yeah, I don't get it but it's interesting.

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Update: The more I think about this, more harder time I have believing this is for real. Yeah, it's on the MSN site, but could this be some kind of joke, or better yet, a massive link bait scheme. Or could it have just been a delinquent MSN staffer messing with us? I think we will soon find out this is not for real.

I saw a link on Yahoo's homepage to try out their all new homepage. It looks really familiar maybe because it's such a common looking layout and design...hmmm. Anyway, it gave me problems when I clicked on that link in Firefox, but works fine in IE. It says it should work in Firefox 1.5, which is what I have, but obviously it doesn't work...anyway, nothing too phenomenal about the new Yahoo homepage. Just changing it up, I guess.

A interesting article from the NYTimes about Internet use among the over 50 crowd. They're not so computer illiterate after all...

Anyone who's using CJ for any affiliate marketing (as a publisher) is probably aware of the recent announcement by our friends at CJ about discontinuing standard text links as an option for publishers in favor of javascript links. If you're like me and think this is a bad idea, you can sign this petition. I signed it. If we get enough support, hopefully they'll reconsider their plans.

I went to the Utah Bloggers conference tonight. Seemed like a very good turnout. Around 150 attendees. Gotta love the free food and t-shirts. Thanks guys!

I know a lot of people weren't able to make it and I'm sure there were a lot more local bloggers that weren't even aware of the event. They talked about making this a semi-annual event. They even mentioned the possibility of making it a full-day or two-day event. That might be kind of cool.

The panel was very good. After brief intros, they basically opened it up to questions. I thought the panelists spent too much time answering each question. I would have liked them to get through more questions, but these are bloggers we're talking about. They've always got a lot to say!

I found it interesting that the issue of SEO, PageRank and Google Juice came up a few times. I think it's a big issue for bloggers--well, really any site owner. How do I get more traffic to this site?

I met a few people there, but had to take off before meeting a lot of new people. Maybe next time. It's kind of weird meeting bloggers in person anyway. In a strange way it's kind of a let down after reading their blog and thinking these people are super-human. Then you meet them and they're chubby and balding and seem like a regular guy just like you. On the bright side, it helps to remind me that these bloggers are normal people that just happen to write interesting things on their blogs. For many people, blogging has made geeks into rockstars. Blogging is better than reality TV for making celebrities out of nobodies.

Phil Windley (one of the panelists) even mentioned that before he started blogging, he never got invited to speak anywhere, now they're knocking down his door to have him speak--all because of his blogging expertise.

Very few non-bloggers really understand what the heck a blog is, much less write one. It's really cool to be a geek right now and what's geekier than blogging? Let's be honest, most bloggers are geeks. That's just the way it is, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you're not a geek before you start blogging, you'll turn into one...that's just the way it is. Maybe that's why there are so few female bloggers in Utah, women just aren't geeky enough to take the time to blog. Or maybe it's just that all the women bloggers in Utah are too cool to show up at the event, or just have more important ways to spend their Tuesday evening.

Looks like reports on the conference are starting to show up already. Many more to come, I'm sure.

A great post about duplicate content from Todd. Very good stuff.

Looks like one of the Fools found out about click fraud and kind of goes off on Google about it. The guy greatly exaggerates the state of search result quality and several of his other points. He's obviously taking an extreme point of view in an attempt to garner a lot of attention from bloggers, media, whoever. I'm sure it will work, too. Everyone loves google, so what better way to get some attention that to slam Google. Click fraud is a lot worse at the second tier search engines, and even Yahoo has at LEAST as much click fraud going on (as a percentage), but it's not going to get any attention to bash on Yahoo or Ah-ha. You gotta go after the big lug that everyone loves--in this case, Google.

All the hype aside, the guy may have a point about the click fraud issue. I've been a long time believer that the search engines have a big problem with click fraud and they're in a state of denial because they're afraid of how much revenue it would cost them if they cut it out completely. I believe they do the best they can to combat click fraud, but they have to know a lot of it goes on undetected. Can the pinheads at Google, Yahoo and MSN catch up to the fraudsters or even get ahead of them someday? I have my doubts...

A blog post from Danny Sullivan shows Google Nearing 60% Of Queries In US according to Hitwise. His side-by-side comparison of the three major rating services is also very insightful. The exact percentages vary somewhat, but the overall leader and top two contenders are quite clear across the board in all three.

I finally got the latest issue of Search Marketing Standard magazine. Everyone else has had theirs for a while, but mine got lost in the mail due to my moving offices and homes in the past couple months. It looks like a pretty good magazine. It's quite thin, but probably due mostly to being so new that there aren't a lot of advertisers yet. I haven't read all the articles yet, but there are some that look good, like the interview of adwords guru Perry Marshall. It kind of reminds me of the first few issues of Revenue magazine (for affiliate marketing). That magazine was seriously lacking in any real, useful content. Over time they got better and seem to have gotten in touch with the industry a lot more. I hope this search marketing mag improves the same way. It's a difficult task to keep it current in this industry that is constantly changing and there are thousands of bloggers spewing out the latest news as it happens. I doubt a magazine will ever be the venue for the current news, but I think there is a place for a search marketing magazine. If nothing else, it could open non-search marketing people's eyes to what search is all about.

Google Maps offers their own mashup of Google maps and travel destinations highlighting eco-friendly travel spots and providers. They teamed up with Earth Day Network.

TechCrunch reports on the announcement of Ask.com's new blog search engine.

Apparently Google has replaced the Froogle Merchant center with Google Base. Not sure yet what this means, but I assume it's just a change in how/where you upload your Froogle product feeds. Report from ZDNet

More info from Google