My Web Design Source’s blog

Google Launches New Tool For Advertisers

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:31:03 -0700

Google has unveiled a system that will make it easier for online advertisers to find websites that can help reach their target audience. 'Ad Planner' is currently in testing and only available to selected customers, but the plan is to eventually make it available to everyone free of charge.

Google's new stud should be remarkably simple to use, as advertisers simply type in details of their target demographic and some examples of websites they already know appeal to that audience.

The system then returns a list of the best matches, along with details of the overall audience for each site and more specific details such as how the audience splits into groups based on age, gender, and location. The system is specifically designed for advertisers and media planners, and allows users to save the results in a spreadsheet format so they can easily use them in reports for clients. (Source: blogspot.com)

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GOOGLE'S TWO REVOLUTIONS

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:29:55 -0700

THE GOAL IS TO HAVE EVERYTHING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS, INSTANTLY AVAILABLE TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO SEE IT.

If it weren't for the war, and the terrorism and the election, 2004 might well be remembered as the Year of Search. Maybe it will anyway. If we get through these rocky times with civilization's underpinnings intact, our descendants, swimming in total information, might be required to memorize the date of last August's Google IPO as a cultural milestone. Except that in the post-Google era, memorization will be obsolete, because even the most obscure fact will be instantly retrievable.

Google's IPO is important not because of the billions of bucks involved, but as a symbol of the impact of the two revolutions its founders fomented. Most of us are already making use of the first one, involving the life-changing feedback that comes from a query in the Google search field (or those of its increasingly competitive rivals). This is just an appetizer of the feast to come as search systems attempt to encompass every bit of data generated by humanity. When Amazon.com began its groundbreaking "Search Inside the Book" program, allowing users to find any passage in hundreds of thousands of tomes, I noted that it marked the transition to a new era of history. After a few thousand years or so of an earlier era, when people were recording their experiences on cave walls and in books, we can now envision a point at which anyone can instantly, and routinely, find the tiniest needle in this vast data haystack of knowledge. This is the context of Google's announcement last week that it will integrate libraries into its indexes: parts or all of the collections of Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. Google cofounder Larry Page says that he and his partner Sergey Brin had been exposed to the digital-library idea when both were Stanford students but "we didn't think that this could be done in our lifetime." Now it can, and at a more-than-reasonable price tag. After all, at an estimated $10 a volume, the cost of digitizing the 15 million books in some of the world's great libraries tallies to less than that of financing the movie "Van Helsing." This covers only printed books, but Page is already excitedly talking about research papers' dealing with the task of digitizing handwritten manuscripts.

Google's goal is to have everything at your fingertips, all the world's information digitized and instantly available to all who have a right to see it. It's a task hardily joined by heavyweights Microsoft and Yahoo, along with an ever-expanding list of smaller players. So we can expect Google's growing family of currently or potentially searchable applications--which include news, images, social networking, academic citations, catalogs, personal photos and maps--to be duplicated by others, if not leapfrogged. (Just last week Yahoo introduced its beta version of video search, allowing instant access to the millions of clips stored on the Web.)

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Don't Let Machines Write Your Keyword Lists

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:15:08 -0700

As anyone who has seen the Terminator or Matrix movies can attest, if machines rule the world humans are in deep trouble. Similarly, if you allow machines to control the PPC keyword creation process you are guaranteed to both leave opportunity on the table and flush money down the toilet.

The reason is simple: language is really hard. The best language software in the world, Google's, is awful with language. My last SEL post related to bid management in PPC; the AdSense ad running next to it was for a contracting firm looking to bid on construction projects.

Consider the following:

Example 1: Playboy Classic Cigarette Girl Adult Women's Costume

A smart human would tread carefully here. A dumb robot would throw out some fairly eye-opening keywords. Now, in the real world someone would catch this, right? Maybe. In fact, we found that for this retailer an agency using robotic keyword construction was running the keyword "Playboy" as a search term landing on this page and ran the same keyword on content match!

Example 2: Mountain House Beef Stew

Now, the smart analyst realizes that this is backpacking food and will attach the appropriate modifiers whether or not those words appear on the page. The robot? Not so much.

Machines will also put together words that don't make any sense as keywords, and carve up phrases that should not be separated. Some example of the nonsense we've seen from "world class keyword generating tools": "nnn", "33", "longsleeve", "clothes", "women", and many more. The retailer for whom these were built sells sporting goods. These lists not only came with landing pages, but bid suggestions, too!

Granted, for websites with 20,000 products, smart humans can't keep up with keyword construction manually. However they can use tools that allow humans to control the process in a way that both prevents wasteful spending and capitalizes on the analyst's understanding of industry jargon, appropriate synonyms, common misspellings and likely abbreviations to build a much more robust list.

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Search and you often don't find ... and here's why

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:25:16 -0700

Employees often can't find the data they need to do their jobs effectively, a new survey reveals.

Some call it "findability" -- the art or science of making content in an organization "findable."

And many big businesses haven't figured how to do that yet.

Their employees often can't locate the information they need to do their jobs effectively, a new survey reveals.

The crux of the matter isn't that Search technologies are mediocre, but that many businesses don't have an effective content "findability" strategy, concludes the study from AIIM, a non-profit organization based in the US.

AIIM provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information.

Employees from more than 500 businesses who were polled for this study said enterprise search just didn't offer them the same positive results as using consumer search applications, such as Google or Yahoo.

About eight in 10 respondents say their experience with such Web sites has created greater demand for enterprise-grade "findability."

But it isn't hot Search apps alone that will do the trick.

That's a misconception a lot of organizations have, says Carl Frappaolo, vice-president, market intelligence at AIIM. "They think search is a function of an application and not something that someone needs to own and deliver," Frappaolo notes.

Though half the workers surveyed said their enterprise search experience was inferior to what they got from consumer-facing Web sites, the vendors of enterprise search apps were given good approval ratings.

Most vendors had few dissatisfied users -- Google only had eight per cent for example. IBM Dogear and Verity (recently acquired by Autonomy) had none.

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Paid search management made easier.

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:42:12 -0700

Up until now, I have kept my topics largely centered around leveraging baseline server statistics. Today, however, I wanted to address some of the capabilities of more enterprise level web statistics packages in getting the most out of your Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns.

If you have a search engine marketing company doing this for you already, please read no further. However, if you have the time, resources and inclination to tackle running a PPC campaign by yourself, please follow along.

In the first part of this series I talked on a high level about tracking your campaigns, and today I wanted to drill down a bit deeper for the PPC experts to be. I've said it before and will say it again, if you're not performing analytics on your paid search campaigns, then you're wasting money, plain and simple. Whether you choose to use the increasingly robust free options for analytics, or something more extensive like Clicktracks or Omniture, you can also choose how in depth you choose to go with your analytics. But you have to start somewhere.

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Twitter blends online networking, instant messaging

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:36:09 -0700

There’s a universe of small-business entrepreneurs who swear by Twitter, a new and innovative online networking tool.

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that lets you get your message out to an instant community of followers by simply answering the question, “What are you doing?”

In 140 characters or less, you can post a response that becomes a “tweet.”

Users can respond by simply discussing what they are doing at a given moment or they can generate discussion about any given topic. Some even claim Twitter users broke the news about the recent earthquake in China.

Twitter is one of the newer social media services to sweep the Internet. Sites such as MySpace and Facebook are widely popular with teens and young adults, while LinkedIn is embraced by thousands of entrepreneurs, professionals and executives.

Twitter can be accessed via the Internet, through desktop applications like Twhirl or through your hand-held mobile device.

I joined Twitter last week. That makes me a Twitterer. I've connected with six people - mostly young male techies I otherwise would not have met who have been advising me on how to use Twitter effectively.

To get a sense of the financial potential of these online networking services, venture capitalists last week valued LinkedIn at $1 billion, one of the richest appraisals in years for a Silicon Valley start-up.

Large companies like Southwest Airlines and Starbucks use Twitter to market their brand and to solicit customer feedback. Zappos, a large e-commerce shoe retailer, uses Twitter to drive traffic to its Web site, and Tony Hsieh, its CEO, blogs on Twitter.

In the Milwaukee area, business professionals and entrepreneurs like Al Krueger are embracing Twitter with a passion.

For smaller companies, Twitter can be a good resource in connecting with like-minded entrepreneurs and for finding good hires.

Krueger, 31, is founder and president of Comet Branding LLC, a Milwaukee firm that specializes in strategic branding and public relations.

He uses Twitter to connect with people in his industry, to keep abreast of trends and to share information and ideas.

"In the beginning, I used it as a way to find people locally who were doing cool things. I was experimenting with it to recommend it to my clients," said Krueger, who launched his business last November.

"Where Twitter is cool is that you're able to see what people are working on. It's a tool to bring more people into your life, whether personally or professionally, and to get your voice heard. It's a way to monitor and be a part of the conversation."

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Internet Advertising Set To Overtake TV Advertising

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:33:57 -0700

As the internet bandwagon rolls on there are signs of marketing companies switching from traditional TV advertising in the UK to online paid searches, such as Google Adwords. Analysts forecast that online advertising will increase by 26.4% this year, to £3.56 billion, while TV advertising will fall by around 2.5% to £3.39 billion. While the main beneficiary will be Google, there are hopes that the increased investment into the sector will see more competition appear, loosening the current stranglehold of Google.

Even though online advertising has been growing for some time there is a feeling that the new wave of online video ads may have initiated the expected shift in focus for 2008. Online videos are affectively the same as TV adverts except the potential audience is much greater.

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Environmental e-commerce 'on the up'

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:55:13 -0700

Green issues are an increasingly prominent factor in e-commerce, a new report suggests.

According to eMarketer, consumers are taking environmental concerns into account when deciding which items to buy on the web.

The new report, entitled Green Online: Growing Awareness, has been released after Gemma Clarke, founder of green washing powder brand Footprint International, explained to the Independent that the internet offers consumers an easy way to buy in bulk and avoid the need to regularly drive to the shops.

Paul Verna, senior eMarketer analyst and author of the report, notes that marketers are tapping into such tendencies with online strategies, such as video ads, social networking campaigns, viral marketing and display ads.

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Online Ad Spend To Overtake TV? Maybe Next Year

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:15:43 -0700

The Guardian reported yesterday on the latest figures from the Advertising Association (note, PDF link) on the UK advertising market. As with just about every other such report for the last few years, it shows online advertising in rude health.

[Online] spending up a dramatic 39.5% - year on year - to just over £3bn. Online advertising, which was the fastest-growing sector, accounted for 16% of total UK ad spend last year.

In contrast, TV only grew by 2.3%, although it does still sit at a lofty £4.6bn. So does this back-up suggestions that 2008 could be the year that online finally overtakes TV to become the 2nd biggest advertising medium in the UK (behind the combined spend on national & regional press & magazine advertising)? Well, not entirely.

A simple bit of maths shows that if last year’s growth rates continue, then 2008 will see internet spend on £4.2bn and TV on £4.7bn. And whilst it would be rather foolhardy to suggest that growth will continue at exactly the same rate, it seems likely that online will continue to grow at a much faster rate than any of the other mediums, especially if the troubling financial outlook makes ROI even more important than ever.

There are some who do think that 2008 will be the year that TV is left for dust by online, The Guardian amongst them. Below you can see a still form rather whizzy little animation they put together, tracking the inexorable growth of Google (which for many, is the internet, and certainly accounts for a massive proportion of spend online):

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Person to Person -- Social Networking for Business is Next Big Thing

nobody@vox.com(My Web Design Source) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:14:14 -0700

By Jane Roberts

Ask Dave Barger what businesses get from investing in social networking sites and pretty soon you're on his favorite topic: media and humans as social creatures.

Social sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn feed the craving people have to find one another, exchange information, catch up and solve problems.

But there's more, and for business, this matters. In the back- and-forth of ordinary conversation, ideas pop up.

They may be about your product or ways you could do things better ... or new products your customers could use if you were hearing what they had to say.

"Those conversations are going on online anyway, believe me. You want them going on in your foyer," Barger said.

The idea, of course, is that if people are talking in your presence, you're the first to hear what is being said.

And if it's said on your site, the exchange can be cataloged and stored, giving you a tidy archive of correspondence.

Barger, president and chief executive of LunaWeb Inc. - a Memphis company that does Web design and Internet marketing - is speaking Wednesday on social networking at the Public Relations Society of America meeting at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn.

"It has gotten to be such an important part of a PR person's job right now," said Bob Phillips, chapter president and Thompson & Berry Public Relations account exec. "Listen, business is so competitive. Everyone wants to know as much as they can find out."

Barger is likely to start his talk by reminding the audience that "business used to be a faceless entity behind a security guard at the corporate gate.

"A perfect corporation was a business entity that could be perfected with mass production and quality assurance. It was all mechanized, and not human," he said.

Now, with the push to put a face on the corporation, companies are using professional photos of employees on their Web sites, for instance, and finding employees, such as Don Dodge at Microsoft, to blog in voices that are credible and, well, folksy.

Blogging opened up a dialogue that social networks expanded. Today, there are more than 200 social sites, excluding niche networks - sometimes called vertical sites - tailored to specific audiences.

LinkedIn is one of the best for connecting professionals. In Memphis, about 100,000 people have Facebook pages. Two years ago, the population was probably closer to 40,000, Barger said.

Everything changed last fall, when Facebook broadened its membership beyond its college core, and the universe changed overnight.

"Now all of sudden, Facebook is saying, 'Business, we welcome you. Here is how you set up shop; here's how you engage your client base,'" he said.

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