Microsoft and Yahoo! have received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union.
“Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.”
According to Microsoft, the combined search may be implemented before the 2010 holiday season.
Once completed, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns in both Yahoo and Bing.
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There is a heated discussion going on at WebMasterWorld about Google sending out emails threatening an Adwords ban if bad quality landing pages are submitted often.
Since Google provides only vague definitions about quality, it is difficult for advertisers to really understand any such new “rule”.
It is also possible that this entire episode is because of a software hitch at Google (the emails are automated messages).
Read more at Webmasterworld!
On the other hand, this could also mean Google getting rid of all those questionale “me too” advertisements created by affiliates.
You may also be interested in an earlier post made here…
Pay Per Click – Why Trying To Duplicate Other Campaigns is a Very Bad Idea!
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Recently a number of products have surfaced that allow users to find the advertisements and keywords used by top Adword advertisers. The idea is that once you know their keywords, you can simply start a campaign with the same keywords and wait for the money to start flowing in.
Unfortunately things don’t work like that in real life. If you start a Google Adword campaign by duplicating someone else’s campaign, you will soon see something very similar to the following.
Yes, you can try increasing the bids. After a few hours these messages will be back demanding more! Soon you will find yourself paying $10 or more per click!
Your campaign will cause the bids to go up for every one bidding on the same keywords. After a while you will cancel your ads because of high expenses and no return. The original advertisers will go back to where they were.
Successful Adword campaigns are not built in a day. These are the result of painstaking effort, analysis and tracking. More importantly you also need to offer something valuable to the site visitor. The original advertisers will be paying a lot less per click than you because their advertisements have proved their worth.
Here is a quote from Google.
“Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.”
So think twice before trying to duplicate someone else’s Adword campaign.
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The increased irrelevance of keyword suggestion tools does not mean that they are useless. Keyword suggestion toolsare very much required. But in the new scenario, continuously monitoring the performance of your web pages and making good use of site analytics become very important.
A large number of keyword research software tools and scripts have proliferated in the last few years. Many of them create an impression that finding useful keywords is as simple as pressing a button. Unfortunately this is simply not the case.
Use Your Brain When Doing Keyword Research
The best way to find good keywords is to use the available search engine supplied resources like
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool
- Google Adwords Traffic Estimator
- Google Search Based Tool
- Google Trends
- Google insights for search
- Microsoft adCenter labs keyword tools
Spend some time analyzing the keyword phrases. Create additional keyword phrases based on what you are trying to offer your customer. Think more like the person who is doing the search and try to see if your website answers his or her questions.
You can make use of our free Good Keywords v3 software to manage your keyword research using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Make Keyword Research an ongoing Process
Even after you have found the right keywords and setup your pages, monitor the results. See what each visitor does after hitting your site. You could make use of services that provide click stream views of vistors to your site and study what they do. Make changes as required so that you get the results you want.
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An oft-repeated question we receive is about the accuracy of keyword suggestion tools. This topic has been discussed before. Anyway it needs to be revisited because we now have to consider not only the accuracy but also the relevance of keyword suggestion tools.
Keyword Suggestion Tools are slowly Losing Their Relevance
Why?
Because it is no longer easy to attach a monetizable reason to many of the searches that take place. Nowadays it is very normal to see huge number of searches that appear to be completely relevant but ultimately lead to nothing.
Reasons? many…
- Idle searches. The number of people using the net is increasing day by day. People now search simply because they have nothing else to do. They search, look at the site for a few seconds and go away.
- Make Money Schemes – There are so many make money schemes on the net that many of the searches are simply people looking for niche market ideas.
- Automated tools and scripts – These simply allow people to plug in just one word and these tools then go on to generate hundreds of additional words. Then all these words are searched contributing to inflated search volumes.
- Outsourced work -This is very noticeable if you spend some time on Google insights for search. Google insights for search allows you to “compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties”. You will see large number of searches from countries that are probably not your target market making the global search volume counts irrelevant (and local search volume counts inaccurate).
- Data collection services – These are companies that simply accumulate keyword and advertiser related data with the intent to sell it to others. A simple search will reveal a number of services that provide information on Google advertisers. They sell historical data that contain the advertisement texts, keywords that various sites bid on and more. All these data accumulation involve millions of searches!
Continued in Keyword Research – The Importance of Analytics and Smart Monitoring
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Inside Adwords had an interesting post a few days back about conversion rates and ad positions. Check it out if you missed it.
“We have used a statistical model to account for these … found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad. For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions. In other words, an ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position, would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position…”
Read more… Conversion rates don’t vary much by position.
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There are some interesting news snippets about Google from the Search Engine Strategies, 2009 conference. Internet news reports…
“Keywords work very, very well, but we think we can do better,” Nicholas Fox, the business product management director for Google AdWords.
and…
Google estimated in 2006 that there were 47 types of queries for “cashmere sweater,” but by 2008, that number had grown to 73.
Here is the full report.
Google Looks Beyond Keywords
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As part of a research we generated and tabulated SEO related real world data for a number of competitive keyword phrases using SEO Lab for Mac. The two most striking observations we noticed are…
- Very few sites rank in all 3 search engines
- Most sites rank in at least 2 search engines
- Most advertisers (adword) do not rank well organically
We will soon publish the entire data as a special report. Anyway, here are some interesting data snippets for few keyword phrases (US-English, Market region).
| Keyword |
SEO Services |
| Unique domains in top 100 results of Google, Yahoo, Bing |
234 |
| .COM Domains |
200 |
| .NET Domains |
13 |
| Domains that are ranked in all 3 SEs |
6 |
| Domains that contain a hyphen (-) |
18 |
| Keyword |
Make Money |
| Unique domains in top 100 results of Google, Yahoo, Bing |
235 |
| .COM Domains |
205 |
| .NET Domains |
13 |
| Domains that are ranked in all 3 SEs |
9 |
| Domains that contain a hyphen (-) |
23 |
| Keyword |
Weight Loss |
| Unique domains in top 100 results of Google, Yahoo, Bing |
171 |
| .COM Domains |
150 |
| .NET Domains |
2 |
| Domains that are ranked in all 3 SEs |
6 |
| Domains that contain a hyphen (-) |
10 |
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The Keyword Builder tab in SEO Lab Professional contains a filter option that will help you extract useful keywords from large lists. You can use it to filter and highlight keywords
- based on number of words in the keyword phrase
- containing specified words at the start, end, middle or whole of the keyword phrase
You can specify more than one word to look for and filter.
Once you have highlighted the required keywords, use one of the export options to save the keywords to a file or copy to Windows clipboard.
Keyword Builder also includes options to clean, modify and multiply keyword phrases. You can even generate misspelled words, add Google matching options (exact, phrase match, etc) and much more.
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Google has launched Google For Advertisers. If you advertise on Google or plan to do so in the future, you should bookmark the URL and make periodic visits.
The Marketing Cycle features separate sections on
-
Defining Strategy
-
Creating Ads
-
Planning and Buying Media
-
Optimizing the Campaigns
Google Business Channel
Google also has a YouTube channel that covers Google Advertising and other business opportunities available through Google. You can watch various webinars and videos there.
Inside Adwords has a blog post about Google For Advertisers.
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