 Some Firms Funneling More Dollars To AdCenter At YSM's Expense
Search Engine Roundtable
With a keen eye on the search industry forums, Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick) has uncovered what may become a major paid search marketing trend--some advertisers are starting to spend more with Microsoft's adCenter than Yahoo Search Marketing .
Schwartz posts excerpts of two PPC specialist posts in the WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch forums, respectively, detailing how their adCenter budgets have gone up in recent months, completely at the expense of their YSM budgets. The shifts have occurred due to increases in adCenter campaign traffic and conversions, as well as what one specialist called "the collapse in price at YSM."
"Wow, the tide is turning and it seems like Microsoft is well on their way to beating Yahoo at the search ad business," Schwartz says. "But is it because Microsoft is doing something right or because Yahoo is doing something wrong?" - Read the whole story... Two Search Metrics You Should Pay Attention To
MarketingSherpa
MarketingSherpa recently surveyed marketers about their most under-used campaign performance metrics when it came to search, and found that conversions and ROI came out on top.
Over 40% of marketers said that they didn't track conversions (23%) or ROI (20%) for their search campaigns. It seems that while search has been lauded as one of the most accountable ad channels, a significant number of companies are not maximizing the ability to track it to actual sales (or other conversion action).
"With prices rising steadily, marketers who evaluate search against tangible KPIs will be the ones who will optimize and balance their spending," the report said. - Read the whole story... Didit Snags Major Hotelier Account
DM News
Leading Interactive Reservations, LLC, parent company of the Leading Hotels of the World brand, has chosen Didit to handle its search marketing efforts. The hotelier, which operates more than 430 properties worldwide, spends roughly $200,000 on paid search per month.
Prior to choosing Didit from a roster of agencies, the company was attempting (and failing) to manage campaigns for over 150,000 keywords in-house, according to Tim Peter, Leading Interactive Reservations' managing director.
Didit's team will focus on helping the hotelier's search campaign generate more reservations. "We want to break out and target the campaign bet¬ter and find pockets where performance will increase," said Gerry Bavaro, Didit's vice president of client services. - Read the whole story... Proof Of The Google Algorithm's Blind Trust In Wikipedia
Graywolf's SEO Blog
Michael Gray takes Google to task on its seemingly unequivocal acceptance of Wikipedia pages as authoritative sources of info for search queries. Since the giant recently included all the Tour de France cities in its Street View roster, Gray ran a search for all 37 city keywords (sans accent, American-style) and found that an English Wikipedia entry came up as the first result in a whopping 25. Wikipedia entries actually showed up as at least one of the first ten results for all 37.
What's most intriguing is that 13 of the Wikipedia entries were stubs or non-entries at all. In fact, for keywords like "Cerilly" and Lavelanet," the stub entries were actually the very first result.
"The standard Google answer when any SEO complains about Wikipedia SERP dominance is 'Regular users like Wikipedia,"' Gray says. "To the Google engineers who want to stand behind that, I propose the following question 'Do regular users like completely empty, nearly empty, or almost useless pages?"' - Read the whole story... A Host Of Campaign KPIs
SEO Space
Determining which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track is a key aspect of running an effective search campaign, so Jody Nimetz serves up a list of 40 possible stats to track. "As the online world matures and you continue to measure your online success, have you looked at your key performance indicators to see if there are any changes in how you measure your online success?" Nimetz says.
For example, e-commerce sites might analyze cost per visitor or average order size/value. Bloggers may gauge average subscription length and average subscriber base. A marketer can also choose to track the conversion path, ratio of new to returning visitors, length of visit, as well as calls to a unique 800 number. - Read the whole story... |
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