Marketing Pilgrim

Not sure if this is a sign of Google Checkout’s success or struggle, but rates are increasing effective May 5th.

• If your monthly sales are less than $3,000 you’ll now pay 2.9% + $0.30
• $3,000 – $9,999.99 you’ll pay 2.5% + $0.30
• $10,000 – $99,999.99 you’ll pay 2.2% + $0.30
• $100,000 or more you’ll pay 1.9% + $0.30

It gets worse! Any transactions with buyers outside your home country will incur an additional 1% fee.

Worser still! You AdWords spending will no longer help you get free Google Checkout processing–welcome to our world!

The new rates are virtually identical to those offered by PayPal, but PayPal offers many extra features for the fee.

Michael Stebbins—Market Motive

Whilst not technically a session I was fortunate enough to hear Michael Stebbins of Market Motive present a little mini-presentation in the Expo hall, which grabbed a lot of people’s attention. I was away from my laptop but managed to type up notes on my iPhone.

His presentation was titled: 15 stupid things you can do to your website:

1. Using lots of JavaScript menus so search engines can’t crawl your website properly.

2. Using stupid keywords—ones that are too competitive or no one is searching for. Michael suggested picking mid-range keywords and work your way up.

Today [Google is] launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest…so if you visit an online sports store, you may later be shown ads on other websites offering you a discount on running shoes during that store’s upcoming sale.

Imagine my initial reaction to reading the above announcement from Google? It was something along the lines of: "They’ve finally done it! Google has finally become big brother and will now follow us all around the web!"

Oh how the adrenaline was flowing. I was half-way through mentally writing this post when Google went and spoiled everything by doing the right thing–it offered full customization and opt-out of its new "interest" ads. They smugly explained:

It’s that time again folks. It’s time to write a headline that if someone doesn’t look beyond the statement it may seem a little odd or maybe even shocking. Of course since we are concerned with Internet marketing here this is actually a story with a pleasant ending.

The findings are reported over at eMarketer from a study done by the Kelsey Group and BIA Advisory Services. By the year 2013 the local ad market will shrink. The compound annual growth rate from 2008 – 1013 is projected to be -1.4% with the biggest year to year decline occurring this year. Here’s the picture.

By David Lindop

It’s coming up to a year since I interviewed someone over at Hakia.com, a semantic, natural language based search engine. Now it seems another contender to the throne is making considerable noise in Britain where London-born scientist Stephen Wolfram believes he has set the foundation for a more intelligent search engine coined Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram aims to unveil the new search engine to the public in two months’ time, and has so far tantalised us with claims “that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make [Wolfram|Alpha] work.”

Yes, it’s true: the Microsoft/Yahoo saga continues. Over a year after the initial buy out offer, and all the drama that followed, Microsoft is still trying to flirt with Yahoo.

It’s kinda sad, really—like watching your extremely inept friend, er, acquaintance making a pass at someone who’s obviously not interested. Now, we all have different opinions over whether Yahoo should be interested, but right now it looks like they’re not. Really, really not. Which makes Microsoft COO Kevin Turner sound every bit as desperate and pitiable as said acquaintance when he tells the Times Online:

We’ve certainly made [Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz] aware and the Yahoo! board aware that if they are ever interested in an opportunity to partner with them on search, we’d like to sit down and at least have the conversation.