Not that anyone was proposing that sex doesn’t sell, but it is amazing to compare the Alexa ranks of the mainstream news web sites with that oft-ignored side of the web, which we can euphemistically call “adult-related entertainment”.

For those that don’t know Alexa is a convenient web measurement tool that ranks the popularity of sites on the internet. It is by no means 100% accurate, and is skewed by the demographics of those that use the Alexa Toolbar. Irregardless, comparing the Alexa rank of two sites does give a solid idea of which gets more visitors.
So, that all said, do people use the web for porn or news? Let’s spend some time on the most recent Alexa top 500 list and compare the rankings of top news sites versus top porn sites. Warning: you may find the results unsettling!

• LATimes.com (#1307) gets demolished by RealityKings.com (#315)
• The venerable NYTimes.com (#202) is edged out by PornoTube.com (#194)
• USAToday.com? WSJ.com? CBS.com? NBC.com? FoxNews.com? DrudgeReport.com? Not even close. Not even the highest of them (USAtoday.com at #850) comes remotely close to BangBros1.com at #186.
• Okay, maybe people are getting their news at aggregators such as Digg.com (#105). They are doing well, but not as well as Megarotic.com (#76).
• All right, we need some sanity here; what is the highest ranked news site in the rankings? Am I just glossing over the big players? Fine. CNN.com is the highest ranked news site at #81. That’s pretty great, but sadly they get edged out by YouPorn.com which pulls an astounding #73.

Just to make sure Alexa is not unnaturally favoring porn here, let’s take a quick look at the estimated monthly visitors at Compete.com (another ranking service, which shows actual traffic numbers and is amazingly accurate when we have compared numbers to our statistics of our internal properties). Compete is only showing visits by the US audience, so we do see interesting differences. However, despite a generally better showing by the news contingent in the US (apparently Youporn, Pornotube and Megarotic skew quite international), we still see:

• LA Times (2.2 million) is more than doubled by RealityKings.com
• Wall Street Journal and Fox News combined had fewer total visitors than the good ole’ Bang Bros. And not a bit fewer. Try 1.5 million fewer total visits.

What cracks me up most about these incredible numbers is how swept under the rug America and the world’s love of porn is in the very mainstream press we are looking at. It seems each week I read about the social phenomenon that is Digg, about the overhaul of USA Today’s web site, about the new blogging forays of the NY Times and new social networks and search engines that nobody is using, all while ignoring any discussion of what is apparently open in your other browser tab. What, did I just hear a “Don’t look at me!”? Fine, no finger pointing here. But don’t be bashful of the facts: for every person that visited the venerable New York Times this week, another was checking out this week’s offerings over at the Bang Bros. And I am willing to bet a pretty penny those are not mutually exclusive groups. Oh, to be the Google Toolbar…

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Today is an exciting day! In a true testament to how terrific a team we have here at Wpromote, we have been named to the esteemed Inc 500 list fo 2007, which honors the fastest growing private companies in America. Our ranking for 2007 is 62 and marks our first (though hopefully not our last) appearance on the Inc 500 list. Additionally, I was lucky enough to be profiled as one of the youngest CEO’s with companies in the Inc 500.

Beyond being 62 overall, we were also ranked 5th in the Los Angeles region and number one overall for search marketing firms, which we are tremendously proud of.

So to all of the team here at Wpromote, congratulations! This is a well deserved accolade. And to all of our valued clients, we would not be here without you.

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So in writing my previous post about eBay’s trademark bidding, I noticed something interesting: eBay does not rank as highly as one would expect for auction-related keywords in Google.

To me, this is somewhat shocking. eBay is synonymous with auctions, even used as a verb (”just eBay that!”), and yet, by looking at Google’s search results, one would now know this. Here are some of eBay’s rankings

• “online auctions” - #6
• “computer auctions” - #9
• “auction” - #6
• “auctions” - #71

Granted, being on the first page for “online auctions” is nothing to scoff at, but this is eBay! They *are* online auctions. uBid is #1 for this term, though most users have never heard of or used uBid I would imagine. I would guess that eBay is expending no effort at SEO, and uBid is making a major push. However, this points to the vulnerability of Google’s ranking algorithm. I don’t think that anyone would argue that uBid is a more relevant or respected resource than eBay for “online auctions”, which is the fundamental basis for how Google’s algorithm ranks sites: relevance and respect.

For the keyword “auctions”, for which eBay ranks on the 7th page, this is nothing less than incorrect, and I cannot fathom how Google’s algorithm is computing that result.

Altogether it boils down to the fact that SEO is not dead (despite cries around the web over the years that this is the case), and that eBay, in what might have been misplaced trust in the Google algorithm or a tad bit of arrogance, is losing out on what rightfully “should be” their top search engine rankings.

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I came across something today that I found intriguing; eBay, obviously a huge advertiser on Google AdWords, is bidding on the keyword “ebay”. That alone is not strange; most every advertiser with a known brand choose to bid on their name, even though they are most likely tops in the organic (free) search result.

Quite simply, they more real estate on a search results page that you control, the better. If you are eBay, you do not want users heading off towards Amazon or another retailer to make a purchase, thus purchasing the top spot for your brand name is usually always worth the cost.

What made this interesting in this case is that eBay sites take up basically every organic listing on the page (with the exception of the omnipresent Wikipedia entry, which is not going to be taking business from eBay), and none of eBay’s competitors are advertising on the paid results for their brand. With tens of thousands of clicks per day I have no doubt, this means to me that eBay is paying quite a bit for advertising on their brand name, paying for clicks that in this particular case they would undoubtedly end up getting for free.

This could be an oversight, or it could be that their ad budget is so big that this is a drop in the bucket, or it could be a defensive move, as not advertising under the term ‘ebay’ could invite competitors or affiliates to do so.

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Companies suing Google for allowing competitors to place ads triggered by their trademarked keywords is nothing new; Geico famously did so in 2004, followed by Rescuecom, JTS Tax, Jews for Jesus, Cash ‘n Go among others. Some were settled out of court, but generally the judges have ruled in favor of Google.

Google’s trademark policy is that competitors may bid on trademark keywords, but they may not use the trademark in their ad creatives. Coke can bid on the keyword Pepsi, HP can bid on the keyword Thinkpad, etc. The argument is that this is analogous to a pizza joint standing out front of another pizza joint down the street handing out coupons on the sidewalk; adversarial, but not illegal, and nobody is confusing the two pizza places or purporting to be the other. If you do a Google search for “wpromote” you will see a handful of competitors all bidding on our trademark.

Trademark holders don’t like this for several reasons:

1. They have spent time and money establishing their brand, sometimes decades and many billions of dollars. So in the well-publicized Geico lawsuit, they were not happy at all that they would spend millions on TV ads, only to have people use Google to find the Geico website and potentially end up losing the client to a competitor who would just advertise on Google under the “geico” keyword.
2. To help combat users going to a competitors site (or even a shopping comparison site, or a retailer’s, for example), companies then generally spend money on paid search for their trademarked keyword to defend against the competitors coming up under their name; it’s just another piece of real estate on the page that links to you. However, to have to spend a lot of money just to guide users to your site that have already expressed that they want to find is a tough pill for companies to swallow. Thus the barrage of lawsuits.

Anyhow, Google’s legal team will be back at it again as yesterday American Airlines filed suit against Google for trademark infringement in what looks like a similar complaint as Geico and the others. This is interesting because American Airlines has deep pockets and apparently is prepared to take this lawsuit all the way. It will be interesting to see how this transpires!

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Last week, Google announced a change to their AdRank formula pertaining to “top placement” positions (i.e. the banner text spots at the top of the search results page, versus the links down the right side of the page.

Not surprisingly, these premium spots above the organic results receive higher click-thru rates and considerably more traffic — albeit at a higher cost — than the links in on the right column of the page. Many users do not even differentiate between the paid and organic results in these spots and simply associate the “ads on the right” with paid links.

Anyhow, the change, as announced on Google’s Inside Adwords blog, is a bit cryptic and we received little additional information from our reps over at the Googleplex. This has sparked a bit of debate internally at Wpromote about what exactly will be the net result of these changes. Google’s ambiguous explanation:

“The key change to the formula will be how we consider price. Today’s formula considers an ad’s Quality Score and actual cost-per-click (CPC). The improved formula will still heavily weight Quality Score, but instead of actual CPC, it will consider an ad’s maximum CPC.”

Here is what we know. Presently, there is a combination of quality score and your CPC that determines whether or not a particular keyword and ad combination is “banner-worthy” as we call it here. This CPC that you pay is a penny more than the cost that it would take to outrank the next highest advertiser. This is a bit tricky because it is not a pure auction model, so what you pay per click does not relate directly to what the advertiser above or below you is actually paying. It is the bid that must be paid based on your quality score (which is a composite of your keyword’s CTR, the history of your ad, display URL, landing page quality and a myriad of other “relevance” factors). The bottom line though is that if you bid let’s say $1.00 for a keyword it may require an actual cost of $.50 to rank above the next advertiser. The next advertiser may be paying more than you or less due to all of the other relevance factors. So the problem here is that you may not get to show in the banner because it only took $.50 to outrank the advertiser below you, but the formula to qualify to show up in the banner would require a bid of $.75, for example. Google hits on this issue:

“Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in a top position.”

So Google’s change will essentially allow more ads to show in the banner by taking into account what your Max CPC is, or what you are *willing* to pay, regardless of what it would take to simply outrank the advertiser below you. Google will not show you what this bid is, but will most likely begin to show more ads in the banner if your Max CPC bid is significantly higher than your actual CPC.

What are the take-aways here? This is under debate right now, but here are my beliefs:

• Google will ultimately show more ads in the banner. Instead of seeing two ads in the banner, you may see up to 4. Also with niche keywords with only a single advertiser, this is almost always never given “banner-worthiness” and is relegated to the top spot on the right. More ads in the banner combined with higher prices per click means one thing for Google: More revenue. There is no debate of this fact.
• For advertisers whose ads are already coming up in the banner or who bid lower down on the right side of the page, I do not anticipate seeing much effect.
• For advertisers who consistently appear not in the banner but high on the right side of the page, I believe that they will potentially see a move of their ad to the banner (generally good thing) but a significant jump in their cost paid per click (bad thing) and a big jump in clicks due to that banner placement. Whether or not this is good or bad depends on if the advertiser will benefit for a higher volume of clicks but at a higher price. Many times, I believe that the answer will be no, but time will tell.

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In traditional media, you might place radio ads, billboard ads, print ads and do promotional events. At the end of the day, at best you track the increase in sales and claim it all was a success. Maybe the billboards were worthless, maybe the promotions were driving all of the increase. Maybe you test removing each one to over time find out what works. More likely, you pat yourself on the back for the sales increase and continue with all of the advertising.

This is the dilemma that drove retailing pioneer John Wanamaker to famously quip “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half.”

Enter search engine marketing promising that enigmatic trait in advertising: accountability. Suddenly we were able to promise advertisers the unique ability (the closest in traditional media would be direct marketing) to track every dollar that was spent and exactly what it generated in revenue. While this proved to be a major factor in the meteoric growth of search engine marketing, it was a double-edged sword. Suddenly, search marketers were held to a higher standard of accountability than traditional advertising.

To a certain extent this is just fine, and the results spoke for themselves. However, as the market has become more competitive and advertisers more sophisticated, we needed to identify those benefits that search marketing brings that are not tracked directly to online sales. The first step was tying in phone call tracking to our search marketing efforts, so we can show exactly the number of calls in addition to leads or sales that were generated in a specified period of time. Basically, a unique phone number shows up on the client’s website if they came from an ad that we generated, and we track all of these calls.

Beyond online sales, leads and the phone calls, things get a little more vague. Specifically, there was the belief that the search engine marketing we were doing were impacting off-line — and therefore un-trackable — sales. But with little ability to provide these numbers, we are forced to rely on overall trends and logic, which is a departure from the accountability that made search marketing work.

This dilemma is why we love studies like the one released this week by Yahoo and comScore as reported by SearchEngineLand, which essentially support the claim that search advertising has a strong influence on generating off-line sales. It is definitely worth a read, but the take-away is that users that were exposed to search engine advertising spent considerably more off-line than those that didn’t. So those dollars spend on search actually do even more good than the ROI numbers would indicate. The amount of course will vary widely across verticals, but clearly any business with an off-line component is seeing results in search that inherently will skew lower than the actual total benefit of search advertising.

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