Marketing Pilgrim

It’s been slowly coming for a very long time. Google announced that they’d acquired FeedBurner back in May 2007. Only eleven months later (*eye roll*), in April 2008, the two finally began their integration. And now it’s complete.

Last night, FeedBurner was the same website. Today, feedburner.com redirects (with masking) to google.com and www.feedburner.com gives the Google login:

Once you sign in, however, you find the old FeedBurner layout. If you’re a FeedBurner user, you’ve probably seen the promptings to migrate your feeds to Google. As the above screenshot assures you, there’s still time. In fact, the front-page–only change may just be a ploy to reluctant or lazy users to migrate faster.

Have you seen this change?

Despite once being Rupert Murdoch’s golden boy, it appears MySpace founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe has fallen out of favor. News Corp has announced that DeWolfe will be stepping down "in the near future" and will be left with a role on the board of MySpace China and perhaps some other adviser role.

There’s no announcement about who will take over from DeWolfe, but that’s not stopping AllThingsD from speculating former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta will get the job.

And really, that says it all. MySpace was once the hottest social network on the planet, then Facebook had the audacity to open its network up to everyone. Say what you want about the numerous interface changes at Facebook, but it appears the MySpace rival is gaining audience simply because it doesn’t allow you to set up pages with flashing backgrounds and tacky MP3′s that auto-load.

When your business relies on an increasing trend in click fraud, what do you do when the bottom drops out of the numbers?

That’s the predicament facing Click Forensics as its fourth year of providing its Click Fraud Index shows a dramatic drop in the average industry click fraud rate. The fourth quarter of 2008 was all gloom and doom, with the rate climbing to 17.1%, but the first quarter shows a drop to 13.8%–that’s about a 20% decline.

Never fear, there’s bottom line to protect, so Click Forensics gets granular and explains that while overall click fraud may have dropped, what’s there is getting more sophisticated.

Microsoft is rolling out its answer to Google’s AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network with its new pubCenter beta. It is open to all and publishers can sign up for free at the pubCenter site reports cnet.

Microsoft’s offering provides another option for publishers looking to monetize their content. Here are the highlights from the pubCenter site

The Microsoft pubCenterBeta offers you the chance to include advertising from one of the leading online advertising networks on your web site. With the pubCenterBeta you can:

• Place ads on your web site—realizing revenue potential with relevant ads targeted to your audience.
• Customize ads to the look and feel of your web site.
• Gain access to one of the largest advertising networks, delivering high-quality ads.

Can you believe it’s been more than a month since we held our last book prize giveaway? Let’s rectify that immediately and give away 3 copies of Steve Woods’ Digital Body Language.

I’m a big believer in targeting your marketing campaigns–especially search marketing–to the different stages of your customer’s buying cycle. I tend to break it down to 3 basic steps: awareness, research, and purchase. Little did I know that I should really look a lot deeper and consider the digital “body language” of my target customer.

That’s where Woods comes in. His book helps you understand not just the buying cycle, but how to profile your customers, how to nurture your relationship with them, and how to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

As with many things regarding Yahoo these days, the conversation has been altered by the CEO Carol Bartz. Check out the Jerry Yang post from last September. He sure was excited about the impact that APT, the new service for selling display advertising, was having on Yahoo. In fact, as reported in the WSJ’s Digits blog, this service has been a favorite talking point of Yahoo reps in earnings calls and a big event to introduce it was held last year. Well, yesterday Ms. Bartz struck a little different stance on APT during an earnings call as reported by the Digits blog over at the WSJ

…she referred to it as lots of different pieces of technology, many of which still need to be built. “There is no such thing as a rollout of APT,” she said. “APT is a product that will be ongoing for a long time.”