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March 16, 2005

According to CNET (via SEOBook - hat tip) MSN adCenter will be tested in France and Singapore.

Maybe they want to launch in the US when it's ready and so avoid negative press / analyst coverage. Or maybe they are trialling it in the US too.

Speculation is it will offer more demographic and search details than the other PPCs: a logical progression and one Yahoo could follow using Yahoo user profile data amongst other sources.

CNET suggests other keyword-triggered advertising buys (banners, rich media, contextual text links etc) will be available through the same interface.

There's a conference for MSN 's biggest advertising clients in the US right now, so expect a Bill Gates / Steve Ballmer double act on paid search....more to follow.

Posted by duncan at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

More specualtion on MSN - this time the rumour is they will put their own PPC advertising program into beta testing.

Bloomberg are reporting that an official beta will be announced tomorrow (16th March).

Their sources are, well, vague to say the least. But if not tomorrow, then sometime soon...

Gary Price at SEWatch has said that MSN isn't commenting today, but that the official word will come out tomorrow - and Ggary and Danny at SEWatch are normally pretty accurate.

But don't start adding MSN into your PPC budgets just yet - this will be a beta test, US only. I suspect this will be for a limited number of "big" advertisers (so that'll be eBay, then) and agencies with search expertise (Did-It.com, KeywordRankings.com etc). Overture ads will fill the spaces, no doubt.

MSN's contract with Overture lasts until June 2006 - but I suspect the terms allow MSN to use Overture to fill space their own advertisers haven't bought (a backfill deal) and the "buy out" cost is well within Microsoft's budget if they decide to end the relationship completely before June 2006.

Posted by duncan at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2005

Yahoo's toolbar now detects RSS feeds on a page - see the official blog entry.

And with Overture trialling PPC adverts in RSS feeds, you can see where Yahoo might be going with monetising their pushing of RSS...not to mention the attractive uniqueness of this feature currently.

Posted by duncan at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2005

Nielsen//NetRatings recently releases a "MegaView Search Report" for the UK that shows that the size of a search engines audience isn't the only useful metric.

They measured click through rate and found that sites with smaller audiences sometimes have higher CTRs that big-name search engines; Tiscali (an ISP that uses Overture) was 4th in terms of CTRs (beating MSN, Lycos, AOL and Ask amongst other) but 12th in terms of the number of unique searches at the site.

Conclusion: don't just focus on the big 4 search engines; make sure you know who the partners of the PPC engines are. One of them might account for a high percentage of your PPC clicks, and be an excellent choice as a direct partner (assuming the clicks convert at a decent rate).

Of course if you have full click and ROI tracking in place alongside website analytics, you know this already, right?

Posted by duncan at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

We've all seen eBay adverts on Google for searches that make no sense to eBay as a business. Today I saw the best result yet -

Pierre Omidyar Sale
New & used Pierre Omidyar.
Check out the deals now!
www.eBay.com

(so for Pierre Omidyar)

That's right, you can buy eBay's founder on eBay - new or used! Start bidding now and you too can own your own dot com billionaire - or maybe you can "buy him now".

Somebody should explain the phrase "overkill" to eBay when it comes to buying up keywords...and ask them why the ad is linked to search results for "pierre by". Odd.

Sarcasm aside, I wonder what damage these adverts do both Google and eBay in the eyes on the searching public. They make Adwords results look less relevant, and so deter searchers from considering clicking on links in this screen area (and so any Adwords results) in future.

For eBay, they just look silly at times, and in bad taste alongside some searches. I wonder what impact this has, over time, on perceptions of their brand.

Posted by duncan at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

There's an overview of click fraud on Wired.com, based on SES New York.

Nothing amazing in the article, except the idea of reporting credit card transactions that paid for traffic you suspect of including fraudulent clicks as a fraudulent charge to your credit card company.

Presumably the idea behind this is that you agreed to pay for "real" traffic when you gave the PPC engine your credit card details, and they have broken their agreement with you by providing fraudulent traffic.

Can't see the credit card companies touching that with a barge pole myself...

Posted by duncan at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

There's been lots of speculation floating about on forums and blogs this week about that Overture (OK, Yahoo Search Marketing Services as it's going to be known) are launching a rival to Google's contextual advertising network AdSense.

There's a URL live at Yahoo.com that looks like the potential home of this - http://publisher.yahoo.com - you can fill in a form for more information. They ask for the number of page views of your site, but the form will submit OK if you enter "private" or "n/a".

It's no surprise that Yahoo will do this; Overture have some partners displaying contextual ads already (Like the Guardian newspaper in the UK) and are trialling contextual adverts in RSS feeds (details here). Overture product manager Ken Rudman has Overture ads on his blog. They look a lot like Adsense, surprisingly. I kinda hoped for something more original (although I have no idea what, exactly).

Yahoo already show contextual adverts next to some Geocities pages - like this one about holiday villas - and on content pages on the Yahoo site itself: for example this travel guide about London features Overture ads for London hotels.

Now add to this the likelyhood of Yahoo offering a blog tool alongside GeoCities webspace (they already offer one in Japan)

From these properties Yahoo already have a large, diverse network to show contextual adverts; so expanding this to 3rd parties won't be that hard (once the technology and capacity is in place).

In fact Yahoo might have an advantage over Google here; they have years of experience of running advertising across their own content in multiple territories unlike content-free Google; Google is gaining this experience via the AdSense network and GMail. So Google is playing catch up.

Add in the fact Overture has licensed Quigo's contextual advertising technology and they have all the pieces of the jigsaw.

Now they just need to win partners. Here they might have an advantage too; they can offer relevant, editorially-led adverts because they have human editors checking adverts (OK, they do make mistakes) before they go live, unlike Google. Adwords adverts can be irrelevant to the page in question at times; if Yahoo can provide a better solution, then it may be more attractive to website owners - especially those that hold themsleves to a high editorial standard.

Side point: Google are apparently trying to improve the relevancy of adverts by providing more control to publishers, for example providing more functionality to control which adverts are served on which pages.

Posted by duncan at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

An overview of the pros/cons of contextual advertising from Clickz. Good to see Andrew Goodman in there - a man to listen to.

I covered contextual here a little while ago.

Posted by duncan at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Online ad spend to reach $16.1bn by 2009 according to Jupiter Research.

Posted by duncan at 05:43 PM

DealGroup Media has caught the rebranding virus, just like Overture and some UK SEM companies.

Netimperative - Dealgroup undergoes rebrand

Posted by duncan at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

Five years ago the dot com bubble went pop - Dotcom shares still spook investors (BBC News).

Many investors are (understandably) still cautious about Internet companies and there has been some talk about a "paid listings bubble", esp. since Yahoo, Google and FindWhat have seen falls in their share prices

It looks to me like investors calming down after the paid search hype of some analysts and expressing understandable caution.

But let's reflect on the fact that search and companies like Google, Yahoo etc have generated value for shareholders, their partners and SEM professionals via the phenomenal growth of PPC - and with personlisation, RSS, local search and mobile platforms all developing quickly, there are many more intersting times to come...

Posted by duncan at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

The butler has a new best friend - the Lycos dog. Ask will power non-advertising (i.e. natural) searches on Lycos.com in future (press release here).

Significance:

- Yahoo lost the deal (Yahoo's Overture bought FAST web search, who powered Lycos.com) Not a massive blow for the big Y.

- Ask are building a distribution network, adding to their acquisition of IHS and existing deals with CNET and some meta search engines etc.

- As this grows, will they be happy to keep on sharing ad revenue across multiple sites with Google? Or will they build a PPC? Or buy a small PPC engine for it's technology, people and advertiser base, and run those PPC listings (with AdWords appearing only when there are no advertisers to keep revenues up)?

Coupled with the MSN speculation, it's been an interesting day (all because the SES New York conference is on now, of course).

Posted by duncan at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)

According to Search Engine Watch, Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel expects MSN to stop using Overture and run it's own PPC advertising program.

It's been rumoured before and is no surprise; MSN can't be happy adding to Yahoo's bottom line.

MSN did extend their Overture contract; but I suspect there will be an easy get out clause.

We shall see....

Posted by duncan at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

Confirmation of my earlier post: Overture Services To Become Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions (press release).

So the rebranding virus has crossed from the UK to the US...

Posted by duncan at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)

According to the LA Times, anyway.

Posted by duncan at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)