Top 5 Most Common Paid Search Pitfalls

By Hannah Kimuyu PPC Media Director, EMEA Search marketing has seen explosive growth since its birth, and owes its rapid adoption by marketers to the increasing volume of consumers that use search as part of their every day lives. Its main role has always been to help the consumer find relevant products, services or information via the web. With user attention almost solely focused on the results on the first page, it stands to reason that being on page one on a major search engine should produce a significant amount of qualified traffic, sales and of course a strong revenue stream. The quickest route to that revenue stream is Paid Search, also known as pay per click (PPC) paid for listings or pay for promotion marketing. At present in the UK there are four main search networks - Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Adcenter and Miva all offering paid search... Read full article

The New Google Patent & The War on Link Spam

By Andreas Pouros Managing Director, SEO Google filed a new patent on the 26th April entitled ‘Document Scoring based on Document Inception date’. The patent, authored primarily by Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, is Google’s latest patent aimed at protecting the methods they employ, or plan to employ, to better rank websites in their search results. The patent is important as it comes at a time where Google is finding it increasingly difficult to establish a robust way of dealing with the paid-for links phenomenon that has resulted in Google losing some control over the integrity of their results in recent months. Essentially, Google declared war this month against websites that were purchasing links to directly improve their rankings in its search results. Buying links that point to a site works in raising that site’s rankings because a major part of Google’s algorithms analyse links as if they were... Read full article

Can eBay "Auction Off" Google?

By Julia Boorstin Source: cnbc.com eBay wants to auction anything and everything, and now it's using its auction technology to create an efficient ad sales system to compete with Google , which dominates the online ad sales space. Starting today, eBay is going to begin brokering radio advertisements. Working with Bid4Spots (quite the obvious name) some 2,300 radio stations will auction airtime through eBay media marketplace. eBay profits by taking a piece from advertisers payments. This puts eBay directly into competition with Google's dMarc Broadcasting. In April, Google announced plans to sell ads on 674 Clear Channel radio stations. Since Google's also aiming to bring its ad technology to print ads, will eBay follow? Online ads may be the fastest-growing part of the ad business, but the online business of selling offline ads is bigger than ever. Last year eBay began using its Media Marketplace website to try to sell... Read full article

Google ban gambling ads

Source: ecommercetimes.com Google has stunned the gaming community by prohibiting all forms of gambling advertising on AdWords, including bingo and play-for-fun sites. The ruling, which came into effect on Tuesday, stops companies using AdWords if they promote online casinos, sportsbooks, lotteries (except State lotteries), bingo or poker sites. Websites that provide tips, odds and handicapping or software facilitating online casinos and gambling are also now banned from advertising. So too are affiliates with the primary purpose of driving traffic to gambling sites, gambling-related ebooks, play-for-fun sites and gambling tutorial sites. In a similar but less dramatic move, Yahoo! restricted gambling ads from 28 May, forbidding ads with incentives like 'play now' in the copy to appear in its paid search listings. "It's an incredibly shortsighted move," said Paul Hugget, online -mar-keting manager at online sports betting firm Blue Square, of Google's decision. "This is proof that there's a nega-tive stigma... Read full article

One Engine is Not Enough! Study by InfoSpace Reveals Vastly Different Results from Top Search Engines

Findings Reinforce the Value of Metasearch Engine Dogpile.com to Find More Useful Results on the Web Source: marketwatch.com infoSpace Inc. a leading developer of proprietary metasearch technologies, today unveiled the results from a study that evaluated search results from the four leading search engines. The study reveals that search engines deliver results that are dramatically different from one another. In fact, first page results on Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live (formerly MSN Search) and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) overlap less than one percent. With search engines producing such differing results, the study illustrates the value of metasearch and Dogpile.com, which returns the top results from each of these leading search engines to provide users with the most relevant and useful information. "This study reinforces what we at InfoSpace have long known - often users do not find the results they need with any single search engine. Metasearch offers the most robust... Read full article

Ask.com overhauls search service

By: Greg Sterling Source: searchengineland.com Chris Sherman once compared Ask.com to Apple. Ask CEO Jim Lanzone remarked to me that he liked the comparison because it spoke to quality and innovativeness. Indeed, among the top-tier search engines Ask has arguably been the most innovative. In one sense it has to be. Without that effort it might lose hold on the roughly 5 percent search market share it currently has. But the site has never gotten the notice and usage that Lanzone feels is justified. That may change with the introduction of the new Ask -– "Ask 3D." The company is touting the release as a "major leap forward" for search. A bold three-panel interface (taken from the experimental Ask X) integrates more multimedia content, including images, videos, music files, as well as more structured text-based content. It also offers a battery of impressive features – new and existing – to... Read full article

UK leads the way for European online ad spending

Source: emarketer.com Display ads are popular on the Continent. Online advertising spending within the 13 countries of the IAB Europe network was Eur8.003 billion ($10.08 billion) in 2006, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe's "Pan-European Online Advertising Spend" study, analyzed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The Uk accounted for the largest share of European online ad spending, at 39% of the total. Germany accounted for 22%, France for 15% and the Netherlands for 7%. Alain Heureux of IAB Europe said, "These figures demonstrate without any doubt the significance of the European online advertising industry." Nearly a third of online advertising spend in 2006 was on all forms of display advertising, 45% on search advertising, 22% on classifieds and directories and 1.6% on e-mail marketing. In 2007, eMarketer estimates advertisers will spend $7.5 billion to reach all Western Europeans, up 25% from $6.0 billion in 2006. Online advertising in the UK will... Read full article

Online Marketing 2007 Survey Reveals Dramatic Increase in Online Spend

Source: PromotionWorld.com Commitment to online marketing spend has increased dramatically over the past year, according to the results of a survey carried out by the Online Marketing show (OMS), which takes place at the Business Design Centre, London on 26th - 27th June. One in five respondents now spend more than half of their total marketing budgets online - almost double that of the previous year. This is good news for agencies with 47% of respondents indicating they plan to work with a digital agency in the next 12 months. 61% of those surveyed indicated that online marketing provides the most accountable return on investment than any other form of marketing spend. Despite this, the greatest educational need amongst respondents was effective tracking, and 40% of respondents said they were having trouble integrating their offline and online marketing. Email marketing, banner advertising, paid search and search engine optimisation were the... Read full article

eBay pulls ads from Google ad network

By: Juan Carlos Perez Source: news.yahoo.com eBay has pulled all of its paid search ads from Google's AdWords network in the U.S., an eyebrow-raising move likely to be interpreted in the industry as a sign of deteriorating relations between the two Internet giants. However, eBay has kept its AdWords campaigns outside of the U.S., eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said Wednesday. Durzy characterized the decision to pull the U.S. Google ads as an instance in a continued experiment eBay does to determine the best allocation of its advertising and marketing budget. However, a source familiar with the situation said the move is an angry reaction by eBay's management to Google's decision to hold a protest party concurrent with the start of eBay Live, the company's annual conference for merchants. Google has been reaching out to media to promote the party, aimed at eBay merchants who are upset that eBay doesn't allow... Read full article

Distilling Universal Search

Source: searchenginewatch.com Welcome to a brave new world…again. Google announces universal search. Once again, we are treated to another paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering, mind-blowing, “OMG – have you seen this!!!” Google announcement. In fact, Google’s new product releases appear at such a rate that the pundits are barely able to keep up. Worse yet, the race to be the first to publish frequently leaves us with coverage that carries no sense of history and scant analysis of the significance. When Google announced universal search critics latched onto something that has been done a dozen times before by other engines. Never mind the fact that it has been tested in one form or another with the “OneBox” on Google for some time now. I am not sure what is actually new. According to a Google blog, the idea was apparently proposed in 2001. With six years of releases and numerous new vertical searches,... Read full article