Vinny Lingham’s Blog

In keeping with mentioning good blogs, I though this post was rather interesting, and instead of cluttering the blogosphere with yet another post about del.icio.us being acquired by Yahoo, I thought I’d rather endorse another great blogger, Greg Yardley, and his latest post.

P.s. Neither Chris or Greg have asked for endorsements, and I don’t actually know Greg, but I do follow his work.

There has been a new blog (about 6 weeks old or so), that has emerged from a true industry Guru, Chris Zaharias, VP of eFrontier - the largest PPC management company on the planet. I just wanted to give his blog, SearchQuant a mention, as he has been posted some interesting and very fresh opinions and editorial on the online marketing industry - I expect that it will grow from strength to strenghth, so best wishes to Chris!

For those of you who don’t know Chris, he probably knows more people in this industry than anyone I have ever met - so when Chris speaks, I tend to lend a very willing ear, and I hope you will too!

*** Update *** Here is a link to the official announcement.

I’m in Silicon Valley right now and I just got back from the Googleplex (where I had a fabulous lunch).

Sources inside have confirmed, and an announcement will come out tomorrow, that they have made a significant change to the Quality Score algorithm. Going forward, Google will utilize automated methods to evalaute the landing pages within the destination URLs to determine relevancy and quality which will impact the Quality Score, and subsequently, the minimum bids.

This is a major leap forward to removing alot of the “Click pimping” or “Click arbitrage” that you see happening so often. I’m totally behind them, and I’m looking for improved results on the paid search side. This will obviously also impact the Quality Score of keywords which are deep linked within sites, giving those keywords additional discounting within the AdWords discounter. On the flip side, this will also mean that if your landing pages are not in tune with your keyword research, your minimum bids are going to go up.

Look for increased demand for services from companies like Offermatica, Clicktracks & Urchin (Google Analytics Service).

Dough Stotland – Senior Product Manager, adCenter, MSN Search.

Dough introduced the adCenter product and informed the audience that the product is available in Singapore & France. There is a 3 phased approach to setting up a campaign with MSN adCenter.

Learn About Your Customers:
Traffic Trends
Demographics: Age, Gender, Wealth, etc
Income
Geographic
Day Parting

Connect through Targeting
By paying additional fees per demographic segment, you can target better.

Refine Your Campaign
By using audience intelligence capabilities, MSN will allow you to slice date.

How to get into MSN:

Getting into the US Pilot:
Contact your account exec if you already advertise with us
Apply for invite-only us pilot:
http://advertising.msn.com/msnadcenter

Learn More

Varnished: http://advertising.msn.com/msnadcenter/
Unvarnished: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com and http://www.webmasterworld.com

Next up is James Speer from Ask Jeeves.

Introducing the PPC Solution from Ask Jeeves

According to James, the overlap with AJ and their respective competitors is low enough to warrant using AJ.

Spend Management – “We back our benefits with technology”

Forecasting capabilities

View monthly run rates – for your campaigns and/or specific keyword(s). The monthly run rate represents the expected value of traffic (in dollars) that will be delivered to the campaign (or keyword) during the month based on the network’s traffic history.
Ability to set campaign-level budget limits.

James says that they focus on customer service, given the fact they are a smaller engine.

Proactively Blocking Click Fraud

“What are we doing to prevent click fraud?”

Proprietary software tracks and evaluates the validity of each click.

Multi-faceted Evaluation allows a broad array of factors to assess the validity of each click.

Next up is Hilary Hoover Keller from Google.

Success with Google Adwords

The Google Network reaches over 80% of Internet users.

Tips for Creating Successful Account:

1. Planning your account
a. Choose keywords relevant to your products/services
b. Multi-word keywords tend to perform better
c. Place keywords in ad text
d. Set URLs per keyword for Landing Page control
e. Create Multiple Ads – best performing gets shown
2. Monitoring Results
a. Use Google Analytics
3. Refine your strategy
a. Are your products grouped logically into ad groups?
b. Are clicks converting to sales? On all keywords?
c. Is there room to expand your successful keywords?
d. Are you getting enough traffic?
e. Are the sites you’re showing on, giving you enough results?

Contextual Advertising: Increase your Reach Across the Web

Search Campaigns – Search is effective at the instant consumers are ready to buy.

Contextual Campaigns – Reach consumers are all stages of the purchase cycle.

Content Bidding
1. Content Campaigns – Adwords ads that will only run on the content network
2. Content Bidding Control – Set bid for content clicks separately

Converting Clicks – Landing Page Optimization

Lead users to the advertised product, service or solution.

Quick but effective presentation – the next speaker is an old speaker at these events, and I have the privilege of still being his client, 4 years later.

It’s a very visual presentation, so it’s not easy to make notes on the fly. I’ll see if I can post the presentation later on.

Good session all round!

There’s a rumour circling around at Search Engine Strategies that Yahoo will be moving over to a yield based advertising approach - similar to Google’s Adwords. I’ll keep you posted!