Looks like the Yahoo Marketing to MSN AdCenter cut-over is now complete (I had several email notices to this effect this morning). With this change, customers will no longer be able to differentiate bids or ads between these platforms. To make this more clear in the reporting for my customers, I have updated the campaigns that previously read MSN (cpc) and Yahoo (cpc) to display as “Bing (cpc)” in their Google analytics traffic reports.
Several in the industry are reporting wild gyrations in bid prices during the cut-over, so I am not chasing display positions at the moment. I will start to review bids again in a week or so after things level out.
For those of you who don’t know, Yahoo billed in advance, Bing and Google bill in arrears, so some of customers still have a balance at Yahoo. I exchanged email with a Yahoo rep about balances, who says they will not move Yahoo balances to Bing, as previously stated, but will apply any remaining balance to the credit card attached to your account after the cut-over (I expect this 30-60 days from now).
SEM Huntsville
adcenter, msn, yahoo marketing
A bounce is a visit to your website that doesn’t result in a second pageview or a desired action. If your site participates in affiliate marketing programs such as Google AdSense, an outbound click may very well be your desired action.
To be able to properly optimize your website and your marketing campaigns, you need to differentiate someone clicking out on an affiliate link from someone who doesn’t find what they are looking for and just leaves. The “proper” way to do that is to either track them as pageviews, with the benefit of being able to tag them as goals but with the disadvantage of inflating pageviews, or as an event.
Joost de Valk talks about tracking affiliate clicks.
SEM Huntsville
adsense, affiliate marketing, analytics, google analytics
In a recent article in Inc Magazine, a on-line merchant of gift baskets discusses how a link building campaign cost him 4 million dollars. The loss comes both from a direct drop in traffic to his site and indirectly from the money that he had to spend on AdWords to bring traffic while his site was banned.
While link building is an important part of any marketing effort, I would disqualify anyone who is sending bulk emails promoting this as a service. I feel that anyone doing link building in volume is going to raise flags with the search engines and is very likely to get you banned. Sure, automated and/or assembly line link-building may provide dramatic short-term gains, but you have to ask yourself, is it worth the risk.
Google Official Webmasters Blog discusses the legitimate side of link building and provides advice on building links (here).
SEM Huntsville
google, Link Building
It looks like the transition of Yahoo to Bing for it’s advertising platform (Micro-hoo) is finally happening. In case you were not aware, Yahoo has been testing the use of Bing for its search results for several weeks. Yahoo made the full-time switch to Bing results last week (if you search on Yahoo, you now get Bing results). The date for Yahoo to start using Bing’s AdCenter platform has been less clear, but it appears now that the transition will start later this week.
see: http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/08/17/important-updates-on-search-transitions/
SEM Huntsville
adcenter, bing, microhoo, Search Marketing
An update to Bing’s webmaster tools was announced today. Webmaster tools provides valuable insight into the search engine’s view of your website. Unlike Web Analytics, which shows you what traffic came to your site, webmaster tools tells you what search phrases triggered the Search Engine to display your content in the search results and if that content was clicked or not.
Bing’s new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site is displayed for the wrong things, and what was actually clicked. However, since it doesn’t show the URL that was displayed or your position in the results (you can preform an actual search to figure this out), you don’t have a compete picture of what content is working and what isn’t.
Crawl errors are recorded and graphed, but Bing provides no specifics to guide you as to what the errant links are or what they are linked from. And the tool lacks reports for incoming links, linked phrases, and ranking information.
In summary, Bing’s new interface is slicker looking than the previous product and has some attractive charts. However I am hoping this is just the first pass and that Bing will flow-in additional information to expose the critical details that are currently missing.
SEM Huntsville, Web Analytics
bing, Web Analytics, webmaster tools
On July 14, 2010, I will discuss how to maintain Page Rank when you update or launch a new website with the North Alabama Web Developers group.
This issue can arise when companies or divisions combine; product lines are renamed or when a new face is placed on an exiting website. Money spent on redesign and years of traffic building can be squandered, if this critical step is missed.
In this session we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting).
Please visit the meet-up site for details and sign-up.
http://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/
SEM Huntsville
SEM Huntsville
I attended a seminar today that discussed the Microsoft (AdCenter) /Yahoo (Panama) transition. I have hit several preliminary discussions on this topic at conferences, but this was the first one that had any real information about the Microhoo transition.
The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects search results and paid search campaigns (not other services such as Yahoo/Hotmail mail, Yahoo/Live log-ins etc).
After the transition, all organic and paid search results on Yahoo and Bing displayed will come from Microsoft. Presentation of the results may differ, but rank and ad order will appear the same in search results for both.
Once complete, the plan is to use the AdCenter interface to manage and view the performance of ads running on Yahoo and Bing with a single bid strategy across both engines. There was a good deal of discussion about improvements being made to that AdCenter desktop to provide better support and performance for very large campaigns. The interface will have improved import/export capabilities.
Yahoo users will see new features including.
- Exact, Phrase, and Broad (formerly advanced) match options
- Match types will not apply to negatives (AdCenter is adding ability to have more Negatives)
- Separate bidding for misspellings, plural, and singular terms
- Create custom reports, improved keyword tools
- Content Network support
- 30 character headline drops to 25 (!)
- Microsoft’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion method
- A search query report will be available.
- No decision yet on how Yahoo conversion tracking will be migrated/supported, but it sounded like Microsoft conversion codes will be the norm going forward.
- Bidding/Trademark policies will be merged into a single policy.
The transition sounded somewhat like the transition from Overture to Yahoo Marketing. If you already have campaigns running in Yahoo (Panama), you won’t be forced to migrate (at least not immediately). Once Panama users migrate their accounts to the AdCenter, any accumulated conversion history from old campaigns will be lost.
More information at:
SEM Huntsville
adcenter, AdCenter Desktop Beta, bing, microhoo, microsoft, yahoo marketing
I attended PubCon in Dallas last week. I have attended several Search Engine Strategies (SES) and Search Marketing Expos (SMX) over the years, but this was my first PubCon. PubCon is driven by the folks at WebmasterWorld, which is the leading source of what is happening in search and is a different crowd than either SES or SMX. I went to PubCon to get a fresh perspective on the SEO universe and I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. I picked up especially good information on reputation management and Black-Hat SEO that I haven’t gotten anywhere else.
Black-Hat techniques are often used to inflate a websites ranking or destroy some one’s reputation. While I don’t advocate or use Black-Hat techniques (if caught you will be banned from search engines), it was good to learn some of the many nefarious techniques that are employed.
I was eager to connect with some of the people associated with WebmasterWorld. I was extremely pleased to meet Ted Ulle (Tedster), a prominent poster on WebmasterWorld. I attended Ted’s session on Information Architecture [take away: limit choices to seven or less]. I also attended sessions with Tim Ash and Bryan Massey on Landing Page Optimization [take away: test, test, test...] and the session on Local Search Marketing by Kate Morris was especially good and uncovered several recent additions to the AdWords interface.
It will take some time to digest all that I learned, but I will discuss key finds with my customers and begin to roll out key changes for their sites in coming weeks.
SEM Huntsville
black-hat, Pubcon, SEM Huntsville, SEO Huntsville
