Click Fraud Reaches New Heights

Via MarketingVOX - Click Forensics reports increased levels of PPC click fraud during Q4 of 2006. They've set up a separate site at clickfraudindex.com to report click fraud levels according to their traffic and measurement tools. According to their report, they're reporting over 14% average click fraud across all industries.

I've heard figures all across the board for click fraud, and I tend to believe the higher numbers more than the lower, but it's hard to prove click fraud and even harder to catch the perpetrators. There's so much money being made by fraudsters, they're going to keep coming up with ways to beat the system until the incentive to continue their fraudulent practices disappears.

New, Search By Voice Search Engine

Nelson just showed me a cool new search engine called Midomi that lets you search by voice. It's a search engine for songs, sung by regular people. The ones I heard weren't too great, but the concept is very cool and the search worked really well when I sang or hummed the tune. Not so well when I whistled, but considering how off-tune I sing (and hum for that matter), it's amazing it was able to pull up the right song. It also lets you search with good old-fashioned text, but how boring is that when you can search by voice? It's kind of like karaoke meet search. I'm not sure what their business model is (adverting, maybe), but I could see this really catching on.

Anyway, it's a fun, new way to search, so check it out at midomi.com.

YSM Becoming Google Clone

I remember not too long ago when Yahoo (or was it just Overture back then?) sued Google for infringing on their patent regarding ppc search. I don't remember what happened with that whole deal, but obviously it didn't hurt Google at all. I think it must have been dismissed or settled or something...anyway, fast forward a few years and Yahoo is quickly becoming a near duplicate of Google's Adwords system. Every change they make brings them closer in line with Google. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, either. I always thought Google's system was easier to use, more intuitive and just better. Here's the latest from an email I got this morning about a change in Yahoo's ranking methodology:

On February 5, 2007, we are introducing a new ranking model in the U.S. that considers an ad's quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help you spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for your business.

Here's a quick summary of this important change:

Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007.

This will replace the current method, in which ads are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position).

This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads.

By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.

What is "Ad Quality"?
Ad quality is determined by:

• The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
  
• The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.
  
• Overall ad quality is displayed in a graphical form by the quality index.
  

If I was in charge of sending out this email, here's what it would have said:

Yo! Yahoo Search Marketing here. We know you've always liked Google's advertising system a lot better than you like ours (even though we did invent ppc advertising), so we decided to switch it up and make our ad management system just like theirs. If you still don't like it, too bad, but at least you can't complain about it anymore because we're just like Google. So there. Oh, and if you have any questions, consult Google's help center since it covers our system now since we just copied theirs. Thank you for your money business.

New SEO Blog from Nelson James

One of my employees, Nelson, just started a new SEO blog called Search Banter. It's literally a week old, but he's already got some good stuff on there, so go check it out if you're interested in search marketing news and tips. Nelson's a smart guy and I look forward to his insight into the world of SEO.

SearchBanter.com

p.s. I guess this means I'm officially back from my blogging vacation

Greetings for Google Earth Geeks

If you've spent more than a few minutes messing with Google Earth you're a geek. In fact, if you're reading this blog, chances are you're a geek. Well since you're a geek, you might like to send a geek greeting like this from GeoGreeting.com. They use Google earth images of buildings that look like letters. Sweet! I'm sending one to mom!

Lots o' search marketing blogs

Lee Odden posted a list of the blogs he reads...or at least the ones he knows about and has looked at once. From the looks of the size of this list, I think I was the only search-related blog left off, but it's still a pretty good list. You'll never have time to read all these blogs (there's like 250 of them), but scan the list and see if you notice any that sound interesting and check them out. I've heard of the majority of them and read a lot of 'em from time to time. I don't think every single one of these is must read, but there's definitely some good stuff in there, so check it out.

Happy New Year!

Yeah, I know it's already the 3rd of January, but I figured it's still not too late to wish everyone a happy new year. I love this time of year because it's like we get a chance to start over and set new goals and aspirations for the new year. I hope you're setting some high goals for yourself and you business this new year.

I've got some great ideas for new blog posts this year...so stay tuned. For now, posting will still be light for a while as I get my plans for the new year all worked out and try to get things done before I head out on vacation in Hawaii next week. This vacation has been 10 years in the works, well at least I've been planning on it for the last 10 years. When I got married, I promised my wife I would take her to Hawaii for our 10 year anniversary and we just had our 10th anniversary last week, so it's time for me to pay up. Aloha!!!