:: Media Viper ::

Search marketing resources

It has been announced that Google will soon advise Advertisers where their ads are run across the Adsense Publisher Network. This move gives advertisers some previously missing information to help the advertiser decide where their ad money is best spent.

You may recall Google allowed publishers to purchase ads on targeted websites in April 2005, however advertisers till this point were left out in the cold as Google only fed the amount of impressions and clicks to the advertisers.

Once all of the newly offered features are completely intergrated Adveretisers will be able to pull a CSV within the Google reporting tools and will be supplied a detailed list of where the ads are running.

The new reporting is in beta at this point and should be in full swing by the second quarter of this year. This move is one Advertisers have been demanding so that they may control where their ads are displayed, a move aimed at quality control of advertisers brands.

To me this is a move aimed also at killing off Spammers and MFA (Made for Adsense) websites. What better way for Google to clean up their index by having Advertisers decide where their ads are published??

What do you think?

E-mail Marketing

Ever wonder how people make money with email lists?

Did you know e-mail marketing has some of the best ROI available?

Did you know e-mail response rates hit over 30%?

30% = 3 out of 7 customers respond to the offer!!

Where have you found better conversion percentages?

No where!!! There are not many to be had and finding those that did would be like finding a needle in a hay stack!

While we all hate spam, US surveys show that consumers enjoy receiving product information in their emails. New studies & research from Quris has shown that 62% of study particpants were very curious or eager to read the permission based email sent to them.

Think creating a list is hard??

Email addresses are actually very easy to gather one quick & effective method is through the use of promotions

Your company can vastly improve the amount of website traffic by attaching links to you site(s) from your emails and in the signature file. ( A personal fave of mine!)

Response rates can be up to 3 times higher than traditional direct marketing methods.

Email marketing in the US will account for approximately 71,000 jobs.

Growth is e-mail marketing is set at 8-10% annually historically and projected into the future as well.

Here is the most important part ROI for email marketing is $57.25 for every dollar spent.

The ROI of all non-email online marketing is $22.52, less than half that of e-mail marketing.

So how do you build a list you say?

Find out how at this link!!

E-mail marketing resources

E-mail marketing advice

Google gave me a nice bite yesterday and I had meant to post my disdain about it but decided to wait and let the sting heal a bit. As you may know Google launched a enterprise version of its Web applications including Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and a customizable home page builder.

For those not familiar with the Google Enterprise it allows webmasters like you and I to have our business e-mail and now other applications hosted on Googles’ server. Really it’s a way for Google to display ads to my e-mail list, users of my domain and myself.

The business enterprise presentation or Google Apps Premier Edition delivers a new interface shown in the images (click to enlarge) which show the dashboard interface Google has developed.

The new offering of bundled services includes additional e-mail storage a nice bundle of administrative and business integration tools. Definitely competing with some other services that are available.

Here is the bite…this was at one time free, now there is a fee of $50 per user account, per year. While expecting Google to integrate Docs & Spreadsheets into its Apps for Domain bundle, which allows webmasters to customize the Google applications for our own websites and domains, I had no idea there would be a fee charged.

Well I did have a sort of idea but they could have sent an e-mail to let webmasters know about the planned offerings and associated charges.

So while Google portends to be a more “open” Google, it still has quite a few closed door sessions.

Here is some important Pay Per Click Marketing information that pay per click marketers and advertisers should know, as well as Adsense publishers whose income is affected by Googles moves within Adwords.

Google.com will make changes to the Adwords Algorithm next week when the company adjusts the calculations it uses for advertisers quality score to determine the minimum bid formula.

Google in looking to expand it’s new open-G world of working with advertisers has come up with an idea to publish data on minimum bids of all keywords within the advertisers ad groups.

Google is quoted as saying their changes:” will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads,”

From a post over at the Adwords Blog : “We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.”

This will finally put a stop to hype marketers like P Marshall and the inane practice of chasing 5000 long tail keywords. This is one area where I typically see a good deal of clients failing with their campaigns.

Googles way of cleaning up the spam!

I’ve read the articles and forum posts as well as occassional blog posts on how personalized search is going to effectively end SEO101 as we know it. Here is the bite pun intended

You have to log in to your account with Google for personalization. Who wants an extra step added to search??? Wheres the KISS? Ohh Google can’t do that otherwise those comp sci degrees will seem a waste.

I was originally going to name this How The Yellow Book Proves Personalized Search Wrong. But I liked the new title better giving the ending as this is nothing personal against personalized search…I just don’t see it as the SEO Killer (number 132)

How the telephone book proves Google personalized search is nothing to fret over, and Why many search engine marketers are wrong about personalized search.

According to Google’s Web Help Center,

“Personalized Search is part of Google’s ongoing effort to make your search experience more relevant to you. Using Personalized Search, you can:

* Get the results most relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for in the past

* View and manage your past searches, including the webpages, images, news headlines and Froogle results you’ve clicked on

* Create bookmarks you can access from any computer

One search engine marketer whose writings I read and someone who I feel knows more than most is Jim Hedger, and while I think he is great I think he went the wrong way see Jim feels that personalized search is the end to the usefulness of the old school SEO techniques.

“the advent of personalized results makes the standard website ranking report somewhat useless” was what Jim said in an article recently.

However there is only one slight problem with this thinking and that is the telephone book. Yes the white and yellow page telephone books with millions of residents and businesses phone numbers inside which can be found by anyone.

You are going to say that the telephone book is no longer relevant…it’s something your parents used, and you do not know where the one you have is, or you throw it away when it’s delivered perhaps.

That’s all good except one thing many seem to forget and that is history is a great teacher of the future,

You see I need not look in the telephone book for the number to my friends or family, in fact after several decades I can still remember the very first phone number of my childhood due to having to have memorized it back then.

I don’t need to look up the number to my favorite pizza shop, my favorite concert venue, where I like to buy my clothing, or shop for music and movies, nor to my favorite places to dine.

We do not typically search for what we know…..we search for what we do not know. Be it the results of the recent Super Bowl or how to install a ceiling fan in the den. This is what search is all about, information we do not know,

I do not need to search for topics on SEO or Search Marketing as I know them very well, the new news on these areas is delivered to me via Google alerts or I can set up an RSS reader and pull RSS feeds from the sites and topics I need to stay abreast of.

What I do need information on is one of my passions and that is a muscle car. A 1988 Monte Carlo SS. I love this car and the particular style. It is becoming more and more rare as time goes by and the upkeep and restoration is a way for me to find my balance.

When I look for a part such as the new rear springs I put on as the old ones felt like I ran over a speed bump at 65 mph when in reality it was an anthill at 5mph.

This is when I needed to do a search as I wanted to find the best parts, and others experience with them. Some parts cannot be found at the local automotive parts stores, and so I need to order online and have them delivered, this is when search is most important to me.

Another aspect is bookmarks, and once I have found a site I am sure I will find useful again I bookmark it and can get there without needing to do a search.

In fact once I know the website or company name, I can simply type that alone into any internet browser and be taken directly to the website, so for example if you type in the word ‘jegs’ you will be taken to http://www.jegs.com the website where I order most of my parts.

While writing this, I never once needed to do a search, as I said earlier, search is not for what we know, it’s for the millions of things we do not know.

SEO ranking results are even more important in the age of personalization.