Is Vic There?

Google has announced that it has acquired grandcentral.com - a (USA service) company that manages your voice communications and lets you have one personal phone number for life (I think).

Having a personal phone number, owned by you rather than your provider is of course a great idea if you get all the functionality you need. Wasn’t there a UK personal phone number company sometime ago offering 07000 numbers or something (I’m not up on my phone technology)? Makes alot of sense to me so long as it all works correctly.

I’m guessing that google will want to turn this service into yet another ad platform - maybe they’ll be able to contextualise your voice messages and insert audio ads between them? Privacy issues abound!

Is Vic There? Showing my age a little I suppose. 80’s band Department S

Quality Score Frustrations

Sometimes I encounter great frustration with the google adwords quality score. On the assumption that I pay less for a higher ad position when my quality score for a keyword phrase is great I obviously want to see great against each keyword phrase.

So for example, lets say I’m doing some ppc on Kenny Dalglish (yep, I’m a Reds fan and we just lost!). In adwords I’ve got my campaign and ad set up and raring to go. Lets say the target url is footyjunction.com/liverpool/kenny.htm

What I just don’t get is why my phrase “kennydalglish” scores great but “kenny dalglish” is just ok even though “kennydalglish” does not appear anywhere in the page or links to it. Furthermore, “keith dalglish” scores great but keith doesn’t get a mention anywhere.

I just don’t get it and it’s very frustrating. Answers on a postcard please!

Search Marketing Adwords

Dave Naylor. Bigmouth

I subscribe to both the Dave Naylor and Andrew Girdwood blog feeds.

Dave Naylor has just posted about links from the bigmouthmedia homepage being, in his opinion, spammy because they are hidden. Andrew Girdwood is (I believe), head of search at bigmouthmedia and a strong advocate of using no-follow, avoiding spammy techniques and paid links.

It’ll be interesting to see how Andrew replies to Daves’ post.

Search Marketing Dave Naylor bigmouthmedia

Adwords Now Show On MySpace

I might be a little slow on the uptake but I’ve just found out that adwords ads will now appear over on MySpace. Adwords Support confirm this includes both the search network and the content network. Some WebmasterWorld contributors have been expressing their opinions about this.

Search Marketing Google Adwords

Buy A Bank On ebay!

Another example of not-so relevant adwords adverts that send you to ebay:

Bank America
Find Bank America!
Buy Bank America on eBay
www.ebay.co.uk

I was searching on some banking phrases and up popped the above ad (I’ve removed the hyper-link). Now I didn’t click the ad ‘cos I’m not looking to buy a big bank this month but I’ve no doubt the landing page is worthy of a corking quality score.

Nice to know that I can bid on such things in ebay. I wonder if they’ll accept a postal order?

Search Marketing

Paid Links Are Detectable True/False?

Spotted an interesting debate on the topic of whether paid for links could be made undetectable. Matt Cutts posted his own view on this matter by suggesting that it is possible for spam detectors such as himself to identify paid-for links. To counter this, Rand Fishkin disagrees that all paid links are in fact detectable. I won’t repeat the arguements for and against - just read the posts and see what you think.

I’m siding with Rand rather than Matt on this one. How can google and the others tell when a site owner has accepted a payment on the quiet (as in, doesn’t promote the opportunity for paid-for links on the site) for a link to someones site? Off topic links might raise an eyebrow perhaps. A change in url destination (from Mr A’s site to Mrs B’s site) could be detected I guess - but there’d have to be suspicions in the first instance wouldn’t there?

I’ve never even considered paying for a one way link by the way.

Search Marketing seomoz Matt Cutts

5p Bids On Yahoo! Appear

Further to my post last week about lower minimum bids I’m now starting to see 5p minimums on several of my keyword phrases in Yahoo. Not quite as great as it sounds because on a proportion of these I was already bidding in excess of the old 10p minimum.

My ‘meols’ test is still showing as 10p minimum though so maybe the complete keyword database (or whatever it is that they need to tweak) has not yet been fully updated?

So Where Are The 5p Bids In Yahoo?

Following on from my previous post about lower yahoo bids, the new lower, minimum bids went live this morning.

And guess what? Not one of my existing keywords has attracted the minimum 5p bid! This seems most odd to me as some of these keywords are really niche stock. You can see what the minimum bid is for a new keyword when you add. But again, every keyword I’ve tried so far attracts a minimum bid of 10p.

For example, I live near a place called Meols. So, go to ‘add listings’ and enter meols. Suggested search volume is 11. Minimum bid? Yep, 10p.

I’ve contacted the customer support line and the chap confirmed that:

• 5p minimum bids are now live
• they are not account specific
• revisions to keywords are being loaded in batches, so at some future date a keyword currently showing as 10p min could subsequently show 5p min.
• expect to see adjustments to minimum bidding over time

Maybe I need to be looking in different keyword areas? But if everyone struggles to find the 5p bids then Yahoo will have quite a few slightly disappointed PPC’ers.

Search Marketing Yahoo

Does Google Love or Loath Me?

Andrew Girdwood has a thought provoking post relating to the possibility of Google eventually entering my world - the world of affiliate marketing.

It’s often suggested that Google isn’t too keen on affiliate marketers - a suggestion that I don’t actually agree with. Sure, I’m more than a little peeved when my highly ranked page disappears from view in the search results (it’s not a nice experience). Yes, some of the minimum bids in adwords can take your breath away. Experienced affiliates are still sometimes flummoxed by the bidding mechanism. But ultimately, I believe that Google plans for the long term and attempts to keep the user experience at the forefront of it’s business plans.

Of course, I’m a user of Google too and I want a slick user experience. I use it for search, mail, blogging, feed reading (I just adore Google Reader), spreadsheets, etc, etc. I can understand why Google attempts to remove duplicate content (in affiliate sites) from the search results - I don’t want to see the same content in the first 10 results. Sensible approach, even if it has affected my affiliate work !

As a publisher of it’s contextual ads I also earn revenue from Google. It’s a system that works well - sophisticated, but easy to use and implement. As an advertiser using Adwords, Yahoo! and MSN I can honestly say that Adwords is streets ahead of the other two in terms of functionality and even more-so, usability. Though I’d kind of expect MSN & Yahoo to much improve their current offerings in this area and then maybe they’ll push Adwords a little more than they do right now.

Now I’m guessing Google earns a substantial amount of revenue from affiliates (via advertising costs) so why would they want to banish them? On the contrary, if Google does decide to compete with the likes of TradeDoubler, CJ, OMG and the rest here in the UK and internationally then I’d suggest that the networks should be worrying more than the affiliates just now. Google may well take more of a shine to affiliate marketers. It’s worth recalling of course that reports (and here), indicate that Google has previously trialled a CPA system - so maybe it is a case of when rather than if.

Affiliates have the targeted content websites sitting there and the PPC campaigns up and running and it’s not too difficult (normally) to swap over the promotion a merchants CPA offering from network A to network B. If Google had the right mix of merchant CPA programmes to promote then I’d certainly be interested. Presumably it’d tie-in with Adsense so therefore the publisher payment services etc are already in place. I’d imagine there’d be some cross-over with Adwords for detailed reporting too (though some publishers might not want this). Perhaps google checkout would figure in this mix too?

Merchants brand bidding guidelines would be interesting!

Affiliate Marketing Google

Cheaper PPC In Yahoo!

In (perhaps) an attempt to win over some support from some not-so-happy adwords advertisers Yahoo Search Marketing UK (I still think of it as Overture - rebranding hasn’t worked on me yet!) has announced that the new minimum variable bid will halve to £0.05 from 19-Jan-07. The email I received goes on to state:

The Minimum Bid for each click vary by search term and starts from £0.05. Please note that as the minimum bid depends on the specific search term, certain keywords will have a variable minimum bid of £0.05 and others a variable minimum bid of £0.10.

I guess that could mean that popular search phrases will still cost a minimum of £0.10? Still, for those of us targetting a lot of long-tail phrases this could still result in a decent percentage saving on the month-end bill.

Affiliate Marketing Search Marketing

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