Vinny Lingham's Blog

I’m not going to rewrite the post I made on Revenews this morning, so here is a link to it.

I was recently interviewed by e-Consultancy, who are a fantastic source of online marketing information. Incidently, another great source is eMarketer. The interview posed some interesting questions, so feel free to email me your thought!

Entrepreneur Magazine has just published an article on click fraud. The research was conducted by Clicks2Customers, which is a part of incuBeta, and Marketing Experiments. The article basically highlights the fact that there is up to 29% click fraud which goes largely undetected, not because of Google or Yahoo’s unwillingness, but rather their inability to track fraudulent clicks.

Google’s move into Web Analytics, definitely will help in stemming the amount of click fraud, provided they use the data for that purpose. Incidently, Google has stopped allowing new accounts for their free analytics due to overwhelming demand and very high server loads – which has delayed reporting.

I am currently testing out the free version on this blog, and I must say that the data there is really impressive, alot better than Urchin version 5, which we are currently still using.

This report by Pew Internet & American Life and ComScore highlights how Search has become ubiquitous.

Here are some highlights from the report:

Google is the most heavily used search engine in October 2005 with nearly 90 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo! Search with 68 million uniques, MSN Search with nearly 50 million uniques, Ask Jeeves with about 44 million uniques and AOL Search with 36 million uniques.

63% of all American Adults that use the Internet on a given day, use Search and the gap between search and email users has closed to just 15 million, from 29 million a year ago.

This is the best news all year! Google finally allows discrimate pricing for Content Targeting.

By allowing the advertiser to choose the price they want to pay, instead of just paying for the same rate at search triggered clicks, advertisers will be able to pay the full value of a content click, and achieve ROI goals.

Typically search triggered clicks are more valuable than content clicks, and up to now, Google has not allowed you to price them independently. This is the most significant move for Adwords this year!