Vinny Lingham’s Blog

Yahoo want to be the next Google. Google wants to be the next Microsoft. Microsoft wants to be in a world of Microsoft & no Google.

Where the heck does Ask.com fit into all of this? Walter Mossberg wrote this great article about Ask.com. He even claims that it stands up to Google!

I never really liked the old AskJeeves, but Ask.com is certainly something else. Maybe Barry Diller wants to be the next Bill Gates, err… Larry Page….Sergey Brin…. whatever…

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!

Ok, well that happened sooner than we expected! AJ has just launched their sponsored listings program to compete with Google Adwords.

In the short term, I expect they’ll continue to use Google, until they build up enough advertisers, but I expect they will not renew their contract with Google in the long term.

My opinion: This is not a clever move. All the savvy marketers out there know that AJ actually reduces the value of Google traffic and lowers prices due to poor converting traffic. By going solo, this will expose the weakness in their traffic quality and they will now make less money on direct advertisers than they would have by piggy-backing on Google’s 200,000 advertisers and getting a high revenue share from Google. But that’s just my opinion…

Mediapost has just reported that AskJeeves will setup their own PPC engine, to run in conjunction with Google Adwords (for how long, I’m not sure). Personally, I’m not too fond of AskJeeves traffic and we find that in general, the conversions are not good enough to warrant the Google CPC, so hopefully they’ll leave soon :-).

The bottom line is that the paid search industry is going to segment and Google, Overture etc. will need to rely less on partners as their partners become competitors. This has been coming for a while, so it should be no surprise. Amazon will probably be next to announce something similar.

incuBeta has been hard at work producing an internal media management system for Pay per click marketing, which is working wonders for us. The value in this system lies in the segmentation of the industry, as our system aggregates multiple engines and allows us to manage paid search campaigns for clients and on an affiliate basis, with almost effortless ease.

Here’s to segmentation!