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SearchLine, brought to you by DIRECT and Multichannel Merchant Magazines, is a weekly e-newsletter devoted to best practices in search engine marketing with regular reporting on the tools and technology necessary to do the job. Each Issue Covers Three Main Components:
To sign up for SearchLine, click here. For sponsorship information, please contact William Camaraza at 305-448-6168 or Elizabeth O'Connor at 203-358-4391.
SearchLine: Best Practices, Analytics & Tools for Search Engine Marketers
Religious Jewelry Puts Faith in Pay-per-click
Sep 21, 2007 8:53 AM, By Larry Riggs After selling various types of jewelry through sites like Amazon and Shop.com, Troy Lemaire decided to start his own Web site, putting faith into a very specific niche—religious jewelry. ...
Looking beyond the Click to Customer Engagement
Sep 21, 2007 8:50 AM, By Brian Quinton Once upon a time, Web analytics was a fairly straightforward proposition. You kept track of a few leading indicators such as traffic, ad clickthroughs, page views and sales or other conversions (however you defined them), and you got a pretty good picture of how well your site was ticking over. ...
Tailoring the Landing to the Search
Sep 21, 2007 8:45 AM, By Brian Quinton From search and display ads to e-mail campaigns, print ads, direct-response TV and even direct mail, direct marketers are driving prospects to the Web in increasing numbers. But who’s building all the landing pages those prospects are pulling up to? ...
Reunion.com Wrings Sales Out of Neglected Keywords
Sep 6, 2007 9:28 AM, By Brian Quinton Analysts say that everyone’s contact list decays by about 30% a year. From big events like divorce, death, relocation and job changes down to obstacles as trivial as new cell phone numbers or altered e-mail addresses, life is constantly throwing up roadblocks to keep people from making contact with one another. And you can add faulty Web searches to that list. ...
B-to-B Seller Opens Up to Customers
Sep 6, 2007 9:24 AM, By Brian Quinton How does a business-to-business enterprise retool to increase its appeal to consumers? When Brandon Whildin joined Dekalb, Ill.-based Diamond Tour Golf as director of marketing about three years ago, the company had almost no Web presence. ...
With Sales at Stake, Steak Seller Opts for Search
Sep 6, 2007 9:06 AM, By Brian Quinton You might not think of a beef retailer as a hotbed of advanced technological thought. But Nebraska-based Omaha Steaks can lay claim to being at the forefront of a number of trends in both marketing and technology. ...
Making the Mobile Optimization Call
Aug 23, 2007 11:22 AM, By Brian Quinton Apple is projecting that it can sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. And if the company can do for smart phones what it did for MP3 players, this may turn out to be the year Web operators get really interested in optimizing their sites for discovery and display by mobile devices. According to Cindy Krum, senior search optimization analyst for Denver-based Blue Moon Works, the time is now to start thinking about how your site shows up in mobile. ...
The Positives of Negative Matching
Aug 23, 2007 11:12 AM, By Brian Quinton Search marketing is a potent tool: sometimes too potent. Sometimes your keywords call out to searchers who have very little to do with your product, service or content. Consider the unfortunate vacation marketer whose keywords include “cruise”. How do you make sure your ads appear only when searchers are looking for Caribbean getaways and not “Tom Cruise” or “cruise missiles”? ...
SEO Spices Salt Seller’s Sales
Aug 23, 2007 11:06 AM, By Larry Riggs Mark Zoske has used search engine optimization to turn a passion for salt into a $3.5 million-a-year online business catering not only to consumers, small stores and major grocery chains but also to the spa crowd and even people suffering from psoriasis. ...
CafePress Ties Blog Tags to Ads
Aug 16, 2007 10:55 AM, By Brian Quinton Imagine for a moment that you want to market 25 million different products online. Now imagine that many of those products are timely items strongly linked to events in the news. Finally, imagine that you have to add almost a million new products a week to your line—not to mention taking 1 million out. How do you get all those things up on the Web in the most efficient manner? ...
The Web Analytics behind an E-card
Aug 16, 2007 10:51 AM, By Brian Quinton The Internet has done a lot to change both Americans’ buying habits and the way we relate to each other: e-mail rather than letters or phone calls, sending gifts online rather than using the mails, and so on. American Greetings Interactive, the online subsidiary of Cleveland-based card maker American Greetings, has built its business on the prospect that those two trends will intersect. The company counts on the fact that the right mix of personalized message and Flash animation will get us to use our desktop PCs to send our heartfelt sentiments out into cyberspace. ...
Search Helps Golfers Hit the Links
Aug 16, 2007 10:43 AM, By Brian Quinton Want to know how to stumble upon a new ctegory ripe for vertical search? Just find something lots of people are always looking for, identify some group of advertisers who want to reach them, and build a platform that bring the two together. Done and done. ...
Putting Some “Global” in Local Mobile Search
Aug 9, 2007 12:56 AM, By Brian Quinton With all the talk about the magical things users will be able to do with their mobile phones, from watching TV to surfing the Web, developers may have lost sight of the thing most people are likely to want their handsets to do most often: help them find their way to goods and services they need when they’re out of the house. ...
Fright Catalog Revamps Search
Aug 9, 2007 12:52 AM, By Brian Quinton We’re coming into the height of the crazy season for Fright Catalog, a multichannel retailer of gross-out garb and creepy costumes. The Worcester, MA-based costume house bills itself as the “Halloween Superstore”, and a trip to their Web site—or a look at their catalog—is a nightmarish shopping spree for psychotics. ...
Extreme Site Search Makeover
Aug 9, 2007 12:47 AM, By Brian Quinton If anyone knows remodeling, it’s a construction equipment site. So it’s not surprising that when NorthernTool.com decided to make substantial alterations in their Web presence, they knew enough to reach for the proper tools: automated data feeds and on-site search optimization. ...
Search and Display Work Well Together
Aug 1, 2007 2:13 AM, By7 Brian Quinton Using both sponsored search ads and display advertising produces a better conversion rate than using either channel by itself, according to a study from digital marketing firm Atlas, a subsidiary of aQuantive. ...
Bazaarvoice Taps the Passionate Consumer
Aug 1, 2007 2:07 AM, By Brian Quinton For Sam Decker, the epiphany came when he was struggling with a volcano of slime. More specifically, it was a HotWheels Slimecano racing set, bought on Amazon.com as a Christmas present for his children, and it was a bear to put together on Christmas Eve. The pieces wouldn’t fit properly, and the river of slime refused to ooze. “I tried everything I could, both with and without the directions, and it just wouldn’t work,” Decker says. ...
Jingle Pay-per-call Works a Little ServiceMagic
Aug 1, 2007 2:04 AM, By Brian Quinton The people ServiceMagic serves are busy folks: carpenters contractors, landscapers, plumbers, dry wallers, house cleaners and other home-improvement professionals who want to market their services to owners in their service areas. To do that, ServiceMagic has called on the marketing help of Jingle Networks, the company that operates the Free411 mobile directory service. ...
AOL Plans to Buy Behavioral Targeter Tacoda
Jul 25, 2007 1:31 PM, By Brian Quinton AOL announced yesterday that it will purchase behavioral ad targeting company Tacoda Networks and run it as an independent subsidiary. ...
Google Stirs up the Airwaves
Jul 25, 2007 1:28 PM, By Brian Quinton Google’s long been considered a market disrupter for the changes it has rung in online advertising. But the search giant is now proposing to raise some hell among the companies that buy portions of the wireless spectrum managed by the Federal Communications Commission—and the established players are not taking the threat lightly. ...
E-mail on iPhone? Don’t U Worry-- Yet
Jul 25, 2007 1:24 PM, By Brian Quinton Visions of crowds lined up outside Apple stores panting to get their hands on an iPhone got you fretting over readying your marketing efforts for the mobile future? Rest easy on one score: Mobile or not, you probably won’t need to change your e-mail marketing tactics for a long while. ...
Yahoo! Puts Its Targeting Smarts on Display
Jul 18, 2007 11:41 AM, By Brian Quinton No one’s saying Yahoo! has conceded the search marketing race to Google, but the second largest search engine has lately been doing all it can to leverage its current lead-horse status in another online ad channel: display ads. ...
Two New Suits May Make Google Pant
Jul 18, 2007 11:37 AM, By Brian Quinton Google’s being drawn into court again in two lawsuits—one in the U.S., another far abroad-- that could influence how the company conducts its pay-per-click advertising business. ...
Religious Jewelry Site Puts Faith in Pay-per-click
Jul 18, 2007 11:32 AM, By Larry Riggs After selling various types of jewelry through sites like Amazon and Shop.com, Troy Lemaire decided to start his own Web site, putting faith into a very specific niche—religious jewelry. ...
Smoothing the Way for Online Video Ads
Jul 11, 2007 7:15 AM, By Brian Quinton Video content is flowing onto the Web, and the video-watching audience is growing correspondingly. So it's not surprising that direct marketers are showing interest in attaching ads to that content and reaching this online audience. ...
SEM Done Sideways
Jul 11, 2007 7:12 AM, By Brian Quinton What do you do if the product or service you’re trying to sell is so unique or unprecedented that people don’t know how to search for it? ...
It’s Quigo for Time, and a Good Time for Quigo
Jun 27, 2007 1:32 PM, By Brian Quinton Contextual ad network Quigo logged its largest client win to date yesterday with the announcement that it will deliver pay-per-click ads to all of the Time Inc. online properties. ...
Yahoo! Ad Change: Did Millard Jump or Was She Pushed?
Jun 27, 2007 1:30 PM, By Brian Quinton Yahoo announced last weekend that it will merge its search and display advertising sales teams in the U.S. in an effort to streamline media buys for customers who want to advertise in a variety of formats, from search and graphical ads to videos. ...
Supplement Seller Tries a Dose of Vitamin S-E-M
Jun 27, 2007 1:24 PM, By Larry Riggs Back in 1999, Cincinnati entrepreneur Al Alexander ran the Paramount fitness center, where he also sold vitamins on the side. But he started receiving customer complaints that they could buy the products elsewhere for cheaper prices. That led Alexander in 2001 to open Supplements To Go (www.supplementstogo.com) ...
Foundering Yahoo! Reaches out to Co-founder
Jun 20, 2007 12:20 PM, By Brian Quinton Bringing a founder back into the fold seems to have done well for Apple and is at least being given a chance to work at Dell. Now Yahoo! has joined the ranks of those companies looking to a once and future leader for guidance through tough times. ...
EBay to Google: It’s Your Party, but We’ll Fly if We Want to
Jun 20, 2007 12:16 PM, By Brian Quinton A ploy to promote Google’s Checkout automated payment system has led auction Web site eBay to pull its Google search advertising, depriving Google of its largest single AdWords client. ...
Yahoo!: The Quality Goes in, or the Price Goes Down
Jun 13, 2007 11:43 AM, By Brian Quinton The publisher networks operated by the big search engines—and for that matter, most contextual networks owned by anyone—have gotten a reputation as somewhat murky environments where advertisers can’t be sure what sites are delivering their ads or how well those placements are performing. As a result, some marketers have shied away from advertising on Google’s AdSense network or the Yahoo! Publisher Network while contextual networks like Quigo Technologies that offer greater transparency are picking up business. ...
SendTec Takes to TV Spots in Search of Search Customers
Jun 13, 2007 11:39 AM, By Brian Quinton How can you tell search marketing has gone main stream? Well, it might be the moonshot prices the engines have offered for recent acquisitions such as Doubleclick and aQuantive. Or you could note, as The Times Online did last month, that Google, a company that went public less than three years ago, now has greater capitalization than McDonald’s and Walt Disney combined. Or you could point to the fact that search marketing is now being sold through TV spots. ...
Mobile Campus Puts Local Ads on Student Phones
Jun 13, 2007 11:37 AM, By Brian Quinton In mobile marketing, it’s all about adding value. A Harris Interactive poll last fall found that 26% of users will accept ads on their cell phones if they also get free applications that make their lives easier or more interesting. A company called Mobile Campus is adding that kind of value college by college, offering universities a free text-messaging platform to send SMS info about classes, sports teams and campus organizations. In return, Mobile gets the right to market, lightly and politely, to those students who opt in. ...
Ask.com Puts Ads in Context
Jun 6, 2007 6:07 AM, By Brian Quinton What with its current buying spree and the recent comScore finding that Google’s share of search grew to just a skosh under 50% in April while all its competitors declined, it’s easy to see Google as virtually unstoppable. But Ask.com believes it’s found a chink in at least a portion of Google’s armor. ...
Looking beyond the Click to Customer Engagement
Jun 6, 2007 5:58 AM, By Brian Quinton Once upon a time, Web analytics was a fairly straightforward proposition. You kept track of a few leading indicators such as traffic, ad clickthroughs, page views and sales or other conversions (however you defined them), and you got a pretty good picture of how well your site was ticking over. But that’s all changed now. Today Web operators who want to get a real handle on their site’s performance need to watch a lot more gauges and dials. ...
Celtic Bank Customizes Landing Pages to Suit Leads
Jun 6, 2007 5:54 AM, By Brian Quinton From search and display ads to e-mail campaigns, print ads, direct-response TV and even direct mail, direct marketers are driving prospects to the Web in increasing numbers. But who’s building all the landing pages those prospects are pulling up to? The front end of a marketing campaign can often be put together easily, says Joseph Rizzo, president of Herndon VA-based iNeoMarketing. “A Google AdWords campaign can be up and running amateurishly in about half an hour, or about two hours with a little more care. But a marketer creating a landing page has to go to IT, to the database administrator and to the Webmaster to coordinate all these activities. It’s complex.” ...
Google’s New Search: Universal, and Far from Remote
May 30, 2007 10:10 AM, By Brian Quinton Google’s made a major change in the way it displays its general search results. And while the impact may at first be small, the significance of that change will grow over time and eventually ripple through the very concept of optimizing Web pages for search. At least, that’s how it looks now. ...
Autobytel Tricks Out New Shopping Site for Car Owners
May 30, 2007 10:07 AM, By Brian Quinton Autobytel, one of the pioneering sites that hooked up new car shoppers and dealers in the mid-1990s, has launched a new one-stop Web shop aimed not just at auto seekers but at anyone with automotive needs—and tailored to the needs of the advertisers, both national and local, who want to reach that motoring market. ...
Looking for GPS in Local Mobile Search
May 30, 2007 9:52 AM, By Brian Quinton With all the talk about the magical things users will be able to do with their mobile phones, from watching TV to surfing the Web, developers may have lost sight of the thing most people are likely to want their handsets to do most often: help them find their way to goods and services they need when they’re out of the house. But mobile carrier Sprint Nextel and online directory provider InfoSpace have launched an innovative product that can fill that gap, and in a way that most users should find pretty friendly. ...
A Few Words in Praise of Affiliate Marketing
May 23, 2007 1:21 PM In the annals of love-hate relationships, search marketers and affiliates are right up there with the classic ambivalent couples: Hamlet and Ophelia, Han Solo and Princess Leia, or King Kong and Faye Wray. The realization that each partner can be useful to the other often isn’t enough to dispel the suspicion that the partnership is unfairly skewed. Much the way search advertisers and affiliate networks have regarded each other for some while now... ...
Google, American Blinds Get Ready to Rumble over Trademark Keywords
May 23, 2007 1:18 PM, By Brian Quinton The online advertising industry is moving fast these days. But apparently that doesn’t oblige the legal system to keep pace. Case in point: the lawsuit by American Blind & Wallpaper Factory against Google for alleged trademark infringement, which may finally get to go before a jury this November…almost four years after it was filed. ...
Travelzoo Gives Keyword Campaigns a First-Class Upgrade
May 23, 2007 1:14 PM, By Brian Quinton Internet media company Travelzoo runs a big Web site that draws big traffic. The Travelzoo.com property publishes trip and lodging deals from more than 600 travel suppliers, and 11 million members in the U.S. , U.K. Germany and Canada access those deals for free through the site’s newsletter, e-mail subscriptions or the on-site Super Search vertical search engine. ...
Local.com Plays with the Big Boys
May 17, 2007 10:02 AM, By Brian Quinton As CEO Heath Clarke explains it, Local.com occupies a space between the two largest groups involved in local online search, and enjoys an advantage over each. ...
Web 2.0, Online Ads Can Spread Malware: Google
May 17, 2007 9:55 AM, By Brian Quinton At times it seems as if doing business on the Web means living with risk, for users and marketers alike. Threats come up and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about the viability of a channel (spam in all its forms), the accuracy of baseline metrics (click fraud, cookie deletion) or the integrity of e-commerce (data protection). In some cases, more or less acceptable solutions are found. More likely, the bad actors simply move on to the next more lucrative scam. ...
Microsites Are Becoming a Macro Idea
May 17, 2007 9:52 AM, By Brian Quinton Bill Hanekamp is a huge fan of small Web sites. Technically, they’re called microsites—small, self-contained Web destinations that are separate from a company’s primary site, have their own distinct URLs, and consist entirely of content focused on a particular product or service. ...
ScanAlert Sells Security, Consumer Trust --but Not Links!
May 9, 2007 2:03 PM, By Brian Quinton Everyone’s interested in improving their search visibility, whether it’s raising the position of a pay-per-click ad or turning up higher in organic search results. But that drive for enhanced positioning can sometimes lead companies to overstate the effects their products and services can have on Web customers’ search performance. That seems to have been the case for ScanAlert, a Napa CA-based Internet security company that tests e-commerce sites for vulnerabilities and issues its Hacker Safe certification. ...
Medio Pitches On-Deck Mobile Search and Ads
May 9, 2007 1:59 PM, By Brian Quinton Speaking at a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt summed up his vision of his company’s future in a pithy three-word mantra: “Mobile, mobile, mobile.” Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have all attracted a lot of attention in the last few months with their efforts to expand their search business into the mobile world. But among the many factors that make search on a phone different from doing so on a desktop, one in particular may complicate life for the Big Three engines: the wireless carriers as gatekeepers of mobile services. ...
Calendars.com Optimizes Campaigns, Bids
May 2, 2007 9:31 AM, By Brian Quinton For a business that’s built around time, Calendars.com doesn’t have much of it. “It’s an extremely seasonal business,” says Hilarie Pozesky, president and CEO of Hilarie Pozesky Consulting, which handles online advertising for the online seller. “Calendars.com does about 85% of its business between the end of October and the end of January. We really have just a few weeks out of the year to sell, and we need to be on top of our marketing.” ...
It’s All about the Landing Page, Baby
May 2, 2007 9:28 AM, By Brian Quinton Prospective parents are accustomed to lots of tests: for the health of the baby, for its gender, and for the mother’s wellness. And so when BabyCenter.com, a content site aimed at parents-to-be, wanted to optimize to drive search traffic, it took a leaf from that baby book and did some testing of its own. ...
Ready for Syndication Soon?
May 2, 2007 9:26 AM, By Brian Quinton RSS may stand for “Really Simple Syndication” (among other, less descriptive things), but there’s still nothing simple about selling the automated Web feed processes to either Web publishers or advertisers. ...
More Light, Less Heat on Click Fraud at SES
Apr 25, 2007 12:45 PM, By Brian Quinton In past meetings of the Search Engine Strategies conferences, the session on click fraud has often resembled a steel-cage grudge match, with representatives from click-auditing firms and SEM agencies bantering with spokespeople for the major search engines. By comparison, the session at SES New York earlier this month was more like Wimbledon than the World Wrestling Federation. ...
AdGooRoo Makes You a Competitive Force
Apr 25, 2007 12:42 PM, By Brian Quinton Search advertisers are becoming increasingly hungry for competitive intelligence. As paid search takes its place alongside more traditional marketing media, players feel the need for a comparative tool such as radio’s Arbitron or TV’s Nielsen ratings: something to indicate how well, or how poorly, your campaigns are being viewed—and how that performance stacks up to your rivals’ efforts. One service company has come up with what it considers a unique way to survey the competitive search landscape. ...
After GooTube, Another Big Payout for GoogleClick
Apr 18, 2007 1:12 PM, By Brian Quinton Search power Google announced last Friday that it will pay $3.1 billion in cash to acquire Web ad platform DoubleClick from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which bought the company almost two years ago for about one third the price and then sold off portions of it. ...
No Earnings Joy Yet from Yahoo!’s Panama
Apr 18, 2007 1:08 PM, By Brian Quinton Observers who were hoping for good news right away from Yahoo!’s Panama rollout were disappointed yesterday when the company reported that Q1 2007 profits were off 11% from the same time last year. ...
Questions, Ire Rise from Utah’s “Do Not Bid” Trademark Law
Apr 18, 2007 1:05 PM, By Brian Quinton A little-noticed bill passed by the Utah legislature in February will let businesses based in that state enter their trademarks into a state registry and police their use as triggers for search marketing to Utah residents. ...
Search Marketing When Nobody’s Searching
Apr 12, 2007 2:36 AM, By Brian Quinton What do you do if the product or service you’re trying to sell is so unique or unprecedented that people don’t know how to search for it? ...
Holiday Search Means Front-Loaded Spending: Performics
Apr 12, 2007 2:31 AM, By Brian Quinton For going on two years now, Performics, the search marketing agency owned by DoubleClick, has been reporting a quarterly index of what it calls the Performics 50, a basket of 50 actively managed client search marketing accounts from a range of industries. It’s an interesting and revealing look at the true cost involved in search marketing, and the latest report, covering the final quarter of 2006, finds that those costs grew rapidly in the run-up to the last holiday shopping season—substantially ahead of any corresponding increase in sales. ...
Users Open Up to Pandora’s Music Search
Apr 12, 2007 2:27 AM, By Brian Quinton Sometimes, search runs the risk of taking itself much too seriously. If you yearn to put some glide back into your online stride, it might be time to turn to Pandora, a music search site that basically wants to be your college roommate. ...
Google Readies for Action
Apr 4, 2007 12:47 PM, By Brian Quinton In the beginning, there was cost per impression: You, the online marketer, paid for the audience of a Web page. And it was good for the publishers, but only okay for the advertisers, because you couldn’t be sure those people were actively interested in your ad. ...
MyNewPlace Feels at Home in Online Rentals
Apr 4, 2007 12:44 PM, By Brian Quinton Like everything else in the consumer universe, the search for a good apartment is getting more digitally rich with every passing moving day. One of the most innovative, MyNewPlace.com, came out of beta form almost a year ago, co-founded by current CEO John Helm and technology vice president Kenneth Cluff. ...
For Wedding Site, Enhanced Search Is Bliss
Apr 4, 2007 12:40 PM, By Brian Quinton Shirley Tan has stayed true to her first match in e-commerce—mostly. She set up the AmericanBridal.com Web site in 1996 after tiring of long hours spent assembling a paper catalog for her business selling wedding favors and bridal party gifts, along with other nuptial necessities. Quickly realizing that she didn’t know much about e-commerce (“It was 1996—nobody knew what they were doing,” she explains), Tan signed on with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions to get Internet retail necessities such as store design software, shopping cart and online marketing assistance. ...
The Somewhat-More-Visible Search Engines
Mar 28, 2007 11:39 AM, By Brian Quinton The great click fraud debate hasn’t gone away, but it has entered a new phase, thanks largely to new efforts by Google and Yahoo! to add some visibility into advertisers’ results and to the overall performance of their pay-per-click ad networks. ...
Checking the Weather in Panama
Mar 28, 2007 11:35 AM, By Brian Quinton both Yahoo! and Google have announced initiatives this months that they say will give advertisers a better view of the true scope of click fraud on their networks. In Yahoo!’s case, that enhanced visibility may be all the more important because early returns suggest that the new Panama search marketing platform is a hit and might have a positive impact on company ad revenues. After all, when you’ve got an ad product that seems to be cleared for takeoff, you want to fill all the potholes on the runway. ...
Search Helps Small Marketer Bead and Feather Her Nest
Mar 28, 2007 11:33 AM, By Larry Riggs It all started back in 2000, when Stephanie White rediscovered a childhood pastime of making jewelry with beads. This, she thought, might be a good idea for an online business. ...
Turn, Turn, Turn.com to Cost-per-Action
Mar 21, 2007 1:00 PM, By Brian Quinton Search marketing was founded on the rock of cost-per-click, but lately large chunks of that rock seem to be eroding or turning slippery with moss, thanks to click fraud fears. As a result, both search marketing power Google and other smaller online ad players are trying out new models that earn revenue not from clicks but through other performance milestones. ...
Is Your Campaign Ready for Society?
Mar 21, 2007 12:57 PM, By Brian Quinton Nothing in the online advertising space has attracted more attention recently than the phenomenon of social networking. And judging by the audience numbers for these online communities, nothing probably could. ...
Quigo Makes Waves in the Contextual World
Mar 14, 2007 2:59 PM, By Brian Quinton According to marketing research firm eMarketer, advertisers will spend about 13% of their online ad budget on contextual ads in 2007 and almost 43% on paid search ads. But the Online Publishers Association found that the Web audience in January 2007 spent only 4.7% of its online time conducting searches, and about 45% of its time looking at content. Why the disconnect, and what does it have to do with the content-targeting ad platform from Quigo Technologies? ...
For WhenU, the Time May Be Now
Mar 14, 2007 2:57 PM, By Brian Quinton When he came on board as head of the WhenU behavioral ad network in October 2004, CEO Bill Day took on dual roles. Within his company, he has served as a new broom that swept out many of the practices that had earned WhenU a reputation as an adware scam factory, conducting drive-by downloads to users’ browsers and serving pop-ups and other ads without permission. ...
Site Search Swings a Big Bat at Sports Site
Mar 14, 2007 2:53 PM, By Brian Quinton People outgrow the things that seemed crucially important when they were kids: building models, collecting baseball cards, riding horses or skateboards. Putting aside the question of whether that’s a good thing, the same can be said of companies. Sometimes the platforms and features that served them well at start-up just don’t satisfy their needs as they mature. That was the case with Beckett Media, a sports publishing company that struck gold selling sports trading cards and collectibles on the Web. ...
Building the Online Sales Lot
Mar 7, 2007 1:01 PM, By Brian Quinton The accepted wisdom in selling cars is that customers start looking for their next ride the moment they drive their current purchase off the lot. Maybe so, but the Internet and its research possibilities have added focus to the last eight to 12 weeks of that decision process, making that the most crucial time in which to reach the prospect and convert him or her from a digital tire-kicker to a showroom visitor. ...
House Shoppers Turn to Web to Locate, Locate, Locate
Mar 7, 2007 12:54 PM, By Brian Quinton Applying search technology to the residential brokerage industry both makes tremendous sense from the consumer’s angle and offers some jeopardy to the established ways that real estate agencies have conducted their business. While both large and local real estate brokerages have been fairly quick to bring their businesses online, their Web sites can often be less than helpful to searchers looking for shelter. ...
Adify Puts Publishers, Marketers in the Driver’s Seat
Mar 7, 2007 12:49 PM, By Brian Quinton Back in 1996, when the Web was still a novel advertising medium, Larry Braitman, Rick Thompson and Russ Fradin came together to found ad network Flycast Communications, one of the first networks to aggregate low-cost ad inventory across thousands of different Web sites. Within three years, they sold that network to CMGI for almost $700 million. Now online advertising is firmly in the main stream, and the Flycast trio is back in business with another online network. ...
A Gaggle of Google Updates
Feb 28, 2007 1:21 PM, By Brian Quinton Those marketers who are up for a good algorithm chase should lace up their Adidas: Google’s on the move again. ...
Budgets, Branding and the State of Search
Feb 28, 2007 1:17 PM, By Brian Quinton Search engine marketing was a $9.4 billion budget item for North American companies last year, according to the latest edition of a report issued annually by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. The figure represents a 62% increase over the $5.75 spent on search in 2005. ...
In Testing, Keep the Baby, Change the Bathwater
Feb 28, 2007 1:14 PM, By Brian Quinton Prospective parents are accustomed to lots of tests: for the health of the baby, for its gender, and for the mother’s wellness. And so when BabyCenter.com, a content site aimed at parents-to-be, wanted to optimize to drive search traffic, it took a leaf from that baby book and did some testing of its own. ...
Google Gets Personal: Should You Care?
Feb 21, 2007 1:03 PM, By Brian Quinton What if you had to optimize your Web site to suit not one Google search algorithm but 100 million subtly different ones? That nightmare scenario was raised pretty quickly by an announcement from Google in early February that it was finally ready to bring out of beta a unified platform for tailoring natural search results to users’ preferences by looking at their past search behaviors, among other criteria. ...
AdCenter Labs Wants to Lend You Its Tools
Feb 21, 2007 12:58 PM, By Brian Quinton The “Web 2.0” moniker is pretty flexible in its connotations, but one thing it does seem to represent is an emphasis on collaboration and consumer participation in a site or service. If that’s true, then Microsoft has gone all Web 2.0 with the new set of tools it’s developing for Web advertisers at the adCenter Labs site. ...
Smoothing the Path for Online Video Ads
Feb 21, 2007 12:53 PM, By Brian Quinton Video content is flowing onto the Web, and the video-watching audience is growing correspondingly. So it's not surprising that direct marketers are showing interest in attaching ads to that content and reaching this online audience. ...
Making the Mobile Optimization Call
Feb 14, 2007 12:38 PM, By Brian Quinton If Apple's iPhone can do for smart phones what its iPod did for MP3 players, this may turn out to be the year Web operators get really interested in optimizing their sites for discovery and display by mobile devices. And according to Cindy Krum, senior search optimization analyst for Denver-based Blue Moon Works, the time is now to start thinking about how your site shows up in mobile. ...
Build a Better Valentine’s Day? It Takes Time
Feb 14, 2007 12:35 PM, By Brian Quinton If real life mirrored sitcom clichés, spouses and sweethearts would knock out their Valentine’s Day shopping with a wilted rose and some chalky chocolates bought at the local convenience store late in the evening of Feb. 14. But according to a study just released by search marketing firm OneUpWeb, love is in the air surprisingly early for online Valentine’s Day shoppers. ...
Search Marketing All Part of Design at TattooFinder
Feb 14, 2007 12:31 PM, By Larry Riggs TattooFinder.com hopes expansion of search engine marketing, a discount program with design studios and viral marketing will help double the size of its business to $2 million this year. ...
Bowl Ads Still Neglect Basic SEM Blocking and Tackling
Feb 7, 2007 12:30 PM, By Brian Quinton Ninety million people sat down to watch a lot of commercials last Sunday night, and a football game broke out. That small distraction didn’t stop advertisers from doing more search marketing than ever against their Bowl TV spots ...
A Dearth of Search among Big-Box Retailers
Feb 7, 2007 12:27 PM, By Brian Quinton If you’re a small- to mid-sized e-commerce site trying to compete with large multi-channel multi-brand retailers, take heart: As long as you manage an active search marketing campaign that takes in both pay-per-click ads and organic optimization, you’re probably doing better than they are at getting found online. ...
Long-Tail Optimization—Hold the Brands
Feb 7, 2007 12:20 PM, By Brian Quinton You know you should be optimizing for natural search.But knowing that something can be a help is a far cry from being able to accurately estimate the benefit your site can get from thorough search engine optimization (SEO). Visualizing that boost is particularly difficult for large Web retailer sites with tens of thousands of pages. Madison WI-based SEO firm NetConcepts set out last year to make that optimization incentive easier to see. ...
MIVA Makes Some Smooth Moves
Jan 31, 2007 12:53 PM, By Brian Quinton How do you compete with the advertising networks run by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and the like? One possible way might be to offer ad products that they don’t. Another might be to integrate those products into a platform that could attract a wide range of Web publishers, giving your network a unique reach advantage. And where those big general networks are mostly horizontal, you might also want go vertical, building in some targeting capabilities, to let advertisers access users who are more highly qualified and might convert at better-than-average rates. Those are some of the tactics that the MIVA ad network has deployed over the last two weeks, right up to today’s launch of the MIVA Precision Network. ...
For Dedicated Physicians, a Dedicated Search
Jan 31, 2007 12:49 PM, By Brian Quinton Last fall, the world got a bemused chuckle at the news that a team of doctors used Google to come up with the right diagnosis for a majority of 26 difficult medical cases. But in reality, practicing physicians find Google, or any general search engine, difficult to use for research simply because they do contain so much data, and so much of it is aimed at non-professional audiences. ...
Searching for the Retail Value of SEM
Jan 31, 2007 12:44 PM, By Cam Balzer, Performics Search engine marketing (SEM) does more than deliver immediate online transactions. It generates in-store transactions too. A 2005 research from the Dieringer Research Group revealed that more than 80 million U.S. consumers a year make offline purchases after researching online; most bought more than what they researched once they got into the store. But most marketers still need a hard number to work with to factor offline demand into campaign metrics. ...
Yahoo! to Flip Panama Quality Switch on Feb. 5
Jan 24, 2007 1:02 PM, By Brian Quinton In an announcement that caught many search marketing advertisers and professionals by surprise, Yahoo! energized a conference call about its Q4 results yesterday by declaring that it will give Project Panama, its new search-ad platform, a full launch ahead of schedule. ...
Does Yahoo! Have the Answer for Mobile Search?
Jan 24, 2007 12:57 PM, By Brian Quinton Mobile marketing is going to depend on making the mobile Internet easier to access. Handsets are going to have to get easier to use; carriers are going to have to make data plans easier to understand; and Web sites are going to have to get easier to read and use on the small, small screen. In fact, to get its constituency above the current 11% of U.S. cell phone owners, the mobile Internet is going to have to become more navigable altogether. Yahoo! is banking on an enhanced suite of mobile apps and a new dedicated mobile search function to do just that. ...
SEO Helps MyFavoriteCity Deliver the Local Goods
Jan 24, 2007 12:53 PM, By Larry Riggs Dave Deasy spent several years running online and small business-oriented programs for Hewlett Packard and America Online. In 2003, he left the high-pressure corporate life to try his own hand at running a small business. Deasy founded MyFavoriteCity.com, which sells gift baskets and souvenirs from about 20 cities around the country. ...
A Look Back at the Next Holiday Season
Jan 17, 2007 1:05 PM, By Brian Quinton You’ve got about eight months to get your holiday 2007 search campaign in shape. Are you psyched? If not, no one could blame you. But it’s probably a good idea to examine some of the stats from the season just ended in order to optimize your online marketing performance next December. ...
Oodle Classifieds—Now with Market Efficiency!
Jan 17, 2007 12:56 PM, By Brian Quinton If you or a loved one are addicted to the classified-ad section of your local paper, you know the syndrome. Users spend a lot of time in research mode, checking listings simply to figure out what constitutes a good deal on that Mazda Miata or two-bedroom rental of their dreams. Online classified-ad aggregator Oodle has realized this and has introduced the Oodle Index, a comprehensive real-time, locally-based price gauge for some of the most popular categories of ads it offers. ...
Storable Listings from eStara Plug Directory Leaks
Jan 17, 2007 12:52 PM, By Brian Quinton Call-based conversion enhancer eStara announced this week that it has launched a new Save & Send feature that will let users send online directory and classified listings or search results via text message, Skype IP voice, e-mail or fax. ...
Panama without Tears
Jan 10, 2007 1:02 PM, By Brian Quinton If you’re a search marketer, chances are you’ve just run through the last items on your post-holiday To Do list. Got those keyword bid prices down again to pre-Black Friday levels? Check. Swapped out the “free shipping” and “no-hassle return” ads for creative about gift card redemption? Done. Migrated your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to the new Panama platform? Ummm… ...
Omniture Gets It Together with Applications
Jan 10, 2007 12:59 PM, By Brian Quinton Web analytics is getting its act together. In fact, it’s been doing so for a while now, starting with the integration of Web data into a unified, single-view dashboard. That was soon followed by the introduction of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allowed other data handlers, from CRM programs and e-mail platforms to search marketing tools and site search, to tap into and use the Internet metrics that Web analytics could provide. ...
Marketers Speak Out on Search Arbitrage
Jan 10, 2007 12:55 PM, By Brian Quinton How big a problem is search arbitrage—and how effective are the measures the search networks, especially Google, have deployed to combat it? Two marketers talk about their experiences. And one suggests that the cure might actually be worse than the disease. ...
Turn Ad Network Automates for Action
Jan 3, 2007 10:12 AM, By Brian Quinton Search marketing was founded on the rock of cost-per-click, but lately large chunks of that rock seem to be eroding or turning slippery with moss, thanks to click fraud fears. As a result, both search marketing power Google and other smaller online ad players are trying out new models that earn revenue not from clicks but through other performance milestones. ...
MyRatePlan.com the Right Call for Phone Services Seekers
Jan 3, 2007 10:07 AM, By Brian Quinton NASA and the Nobel Prize committee may be faced with more complex calculations, but for most of us, figuring out the best deal in a cell phone/ wireless plan combination in our local area comes about as close as we ever get to higher mathematics. But visitors seeking a roadmap through the wireless dark can turn to a consumer Web site, MyRatePlan.com, that consolidates information about available cell plans and handsets into a searchable database that users can access. ...
One StepUp for Local Search
Jan 3, 2007 10:03 AM, By Brian Quinton San Francisco-based StepUp, founded in 2004, offers a software solution that makes it easy for small local retailers to link their product information to Internet sites via StepUp’s own hosted database. For that service, the company charges those merchants a monthly subscription fee that can be as low as $50 per category per location—a price that’s comfortable for retailers and comparable to the cost of Yellow Pages advertising. ... |
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