Internet Marketing Blog

I’ve blogged before about how to interpret CTR and what conditions are necessary for a valid comparison of two ads. In one recent case we created two identical ads that went to different landing pages so that we could test the effectiveness of each landing page. The assumption is that each ad — being identical — [...]

Google is working on a mechanism for collecting and sharing users impressions of search results. The system is called +1. It allows users to give a virtual “thumbs-up” on sites that they like by clicking on a small symbol next to their listing in search results. This applies to both ads and natural results. The [...]

Microsoft has announced that as of March 3, 2011 they will no longer review keywords for trademarks. This comes almost a year to the day after we explained why limiting keyword usage is unfair to advertisers and inconsistent with most other interpretations of trademark protection. It also makes trademark usage roughly consistent between Bing, Yahoo, [...]

Yahoo! Clues is a new tool that offers insight into search trends. Think of it as a version of Google Trends that only provides a month’s worth of data. It does try to provide additional demographic information such as gender and income breakdown, but this data almost certainly only applies to the very small portion [...]

With a recent announcement that some searches will result in up to 4 links to a single domain, Google has made it harder to gain traffic through competitive search engine marketing techniques. If Google determines that a domain is particularly authoritative for a search, as many as the top four search results could be for [...]

Google announced today the rollout of Google Instant. Now search results are shown as you type instead of waiting for you to submit a full query. This forces us to rethink the concept of an impression and suggests some new directions in ad targeting. Google Instant changes both natural results and ads as what you [...]

Microsoft adCenter has announced additional capacity for negative keywords. The new limits allow “1000′s” of keywords at the campaign and ad group levels, and the character limit at the keyword level increased as well. Negative keywords are critical for managing costs and achieving optimal ROI, and the extended capabilities offer more control. Now we just wish [...]

This week Microsoft sent emails to US advertisers stating that Bing is beginning to power Yahoo natural search results: This week, Bing will begin powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada. This only affects natural search, not paid results at this time. Microsoft is still [...]

A sudden increase in spending in a client’s Google Display Network prompted some head scratching. Our clicks jumped, but our conversions didn’t budge. After some sleuthing, we isolated the source of the new clicks to be a single domain, adsenseformobileapps.com. This domain isn’t real; its a designation for ads embedded within mobile apps for iPhone [...]

Apple announced that iPhone OS 4 will include iAd, a mobile advertising program tightly integrated with the OS. Very little information is available at this time. To quote Apple: Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. When users click on mobile ads they are almost [...]