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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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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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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