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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Google Tackles Television
Michael Block | October 4th, 2007
You have to hand it to Google; they never quit. Even with the world at its feet and with an unbelievable market share in search, they never rest on their laurels. Even with the best, most intuitive search engine on the planet, they continue to look for ways to make it better. Even with by far the best search advertising platform of the big three firms (including Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter), they never cease researching and developing new ways to shock their clients with their seemingly limitless ingenuity. That’s not to say that Google hasn’t had help. Like a good scholar, Google has learned from history. Many argue that Yahoo! was in a similar situation to Google’s present state before the Internet stock crash and that Yahoo! even survived the ordeal pretty well. Perhaps, they survived too well since a glaring criticism of Yahoo! was that it grew lazy and stagnant, sufficiently pleased by what it had accomplished. This is a mistake that Google will not be making anytime soon. With varying degrees of success, Google has expanded beyond the medium of search into more conventional media of advertising. Through your standard Google AdWords interface, you can advertise to people not only on search engines, but also in blogs, on content sites, in newspapers and even with audio ads on the radio. Google has never missed an opportunity to use its trove of wealth and human talent to try and capitalize beyond its normal aegis of search. Now, Continue reading…
Yahoo! and the Search for Intuitive Design
Theodore Cohen | September 21st, 2007
Intuitively and simply designed products and interfaces are the “end all, be all” in business. Businesses live and die based on this functionality. In this regard, Yahoo! has seemingly missed the boat on their sponsored search advertising interface. The interface that Yahoo! employs isn’t “awful” by any means, but it does seem to lack intuitive design. The consistently top performing products and companies are always those that look at their customers and try to imagine their quintessential needs and wants. They are able to synthesize this with powerful features, yielding a stellar good. Perfect examples of this would be Google AdWords and Apple’s iPod. Both products perform exceptionally with customers because they offer so much flexibility and such ease of use, while mitigating much of the technical jargon and difficult procedures that their competitors sometimes incorporate. Regarding Yahoo!’s oversights, we must first turn to their bidding system. In Yahoo!, when you reach the portion of the sponsored advertising campaign creation process that has to do with setting keyword bids, you are prompted with a graph that attempts to detail an estimated amount of clicks, impressions and so on. Yahoo! also suggests a generally too-high starting bid amount. In order to correct the bid, it requires that you change the bid amount and hit an “update†button, otherwise your new price settings are not applied. Perhaps Yahoo! was trying to take the guesswork out of bidding and trying to help novice advertisers achieve better visibility. If so, I disagree with the Continue reading…
Phone Tracking… Can You Hear Me Now?
Mike Stone | September 12th, 2007
So if you are anything like me, you are neurotic about your Paid Search campaigns and all metrics associated with the account performance of your search campaign. I need to know all relevant data at all times. Not only do I find that I am searching user footprints on my site, I am curious as to all possible search strings that generate visits and most importantly, the terms that lead to conversions. Lately, I am encountering increasingly more users who are obsessed with their search data like me, save one big difference; they are not tracking phone calls. I find this to be a very interesting trend. The constant evolution of the Paid Search market has created the need for a much savvier advertiser. Users have a stronger need to carefully watch analytics, conversions, and other metrics in order to maximize on the effectiveness of their campaigns. On a daily basis I talk to these types of individuals who are obsessed with metrics, yet when I ask about cost per call tracking, they all draw a blank. Tracking calls to keywords is a crucial step in maximizing the value in any search campaign. Phone calls can often be much more valuable than the lead form conversions and for a number of online marketers, make up a significant portion of total sales. At Wpromote, tracking both online as well as phone conversions is absolutely key to evaluating the performance of a campaign, and we have built this functionality into our search Continue reading…
How Google Trounced Yahoo! in Search Engine Advertising
Mike Mothner | March 19th, 2007
On the side, I do some consulting to the financial services industry. Basically, investment firms want to talk to agencies and big advertisers “on the front lines” to find out the current state of the search industry to ultimately try to gauge when to buy and sell those stocks and related industry stocks. Anyhow, aside from “What percent is your client spend up or down this quarter?”, the most common question that I get is this: “We know that Google makes more money from search than Yahoo, but really, why is that?” That, my friends, is a downright fantastic question, and the answer truly eludes (or is deemed too “nitty gritty”) the media that covers the search industry. So here goes my answer. First off, the background of the question is important. Both Yahoo and Google have huge audiences, but even adjusting for their search engine market share something is amiss. By the most recent estimates by Comscore, Google has about a 47.4% market share to Yahoo’s 28.5%. So given a world where you only put dollars into Google and Yahoo, it would be fair to assume that of a $75 budget, we would spend somewhere around $47 in Google and $28 in Yahoo. Put differently, we would expect that for every dollar we put into Yahoo we would spend $1.68 in Google. However, these are far from reality. Across a random sample of Wpromote’s clients in February 2007, we spent over $3.50 in Google for every $1 we spent Continue reading…
