Marketing Pilgrim

If you are planning to make any changes to your Adcenter account on Saturday, you better make new plans

Dear Microsoft adCenter Advertiser,

We’ve listened to your feedback, and we are pleased to let you know about an upcoming Microsoft adCenter upgrade that offers new features to improve your online advertising experience.

Some upgrade highlights:

Now, use Microsoft adCenter with the Firefox 1.5 browser!
Daily, weekly, and monthly data will be updated on a more frequent basis to help you view results and optimize campaigns efficiently.
Filter the time frame for which you want your campaign and order summaries to show, instead of viewing them in the life-to-date format.
User-interface changes to the reporting tab will make it easier to use.

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Every once in a while a new client will come to Fortune Interactive with a banned or penalized website in Yahoo. Here are the steps that need to be taken to get your site re-indexed. Just to give you a heads up, this process may appear short on paper, but actually takes a lot of work and it may take months for your site to start ranking again in Yahoo.

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Google adwords has released its Best Practices for their new video ads. These ads will appear in your content match results.

The real question is, is this the test before they start adding these video ads to the Google search results pages? If so, once they migrate to paid search video ads, what’s next?

People have been talking about actual “commercials” on the internet for a while, is this how it is all going to start?

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled “Yahoo Net Plummets Almost 80%; Ad-System Upgrade I Delayed.”

Terry Semel, Yahoo Chief Executive, states “Given the complexity and importance of going to market with an application of this scale, it probably requires a little more time than we originally anticipated.”

Instead of the system being ready around the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2006, it will be delayed to the 1st quarter of 2007.

Yahoo will be changing to its new interface soon. It will be very similar to Googles interface, except for one really neat feature. According to a post on WebmasterWorld.com you will still be able see your competitors bids.

I think this is great, but would love for it to go even a step further and show click through rates (CTR) as well. Yes, with this information we will probably be able to figure out the rest of their criteria for positioning, but is this a bad thing? If my bid and CTR are the same as my competitor, yet I am ranking lower, I have a choice of either raising my bid or creating a better, more relevant, landing page. Either way Yahoo wins. If I raise my bid, they make more money, if I create a better landing page, their content improves for the user.

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By Al Scillitani

Added 3:45 est July 14, 2006

WOW! Digg.com is going crazy!!! For those “unbelievers,” here it is, the actual scanned letter. I am sure new comments will appear that I wrote it, but I am not sure how I can prove I did not. I guess you are going to have to take my word for it Al

UPDATE 2 (from Andy): Google has emailed me to confirm the letter was from them. The sender is Adam Lasnik, one of Matt Cutt’s search evangalists. Google certainly knows how to keep good relations with search marketers, and it just proves that Google thrives on word of mouth.

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By Al Scillitani

Dear Google,

My head hurts. Almost everytime I log into an adwords account something has changed. I knew when I decided to enter the search marketing field over 5 years ago things would continually change. I found search engine optimization and paid search to be to interesting. I knew it would be a challenge to keep up with changes, but this is crazy.

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I can remember only a few years ago, if a company was letting an employee go or the employee left a 2 week notice, most employees would try to leave on good terms so they can use the company as a reference. There was not much of a benefit for the company to “take care� of this leaving employee. My, how things have changed. Enter the bloggers.

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Yahoo’s Click Fraud Suit has finally come to an end. Unlike Google’s settlement where they would give you adwords credit, Yahoo may be dishing out cash to their advertisers.

Yahoo’s response to the suit: “We’re very pleased with this important settlement because it not only validates the strength of the search marketing industry and the effectiveness of our system, but also it allows us to move forward to work more closely with our advertisers and others across the industry to fight click fraud. ”

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Going over the AdLab’s site and viewing the demo’s is a must.

What can AdLab’s do for you? According to Microsoft:

• Search Funnels: Customers tend to search by entering related keywords in certain sequences. You can use the adCenter Search Funnels tool to help you visualize and analyze these search behaviors through incoming and outgoing queries.
• Search Clustering: Microsoft adCenter’s Search Result Clustering (SRC) technology can cluster search results into semantically related groups in real time and then help your customers browse through the long list of search results. SRC can:

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You have until July 30 to set your time zone in your Google AdWords account. You should definitely take advantage of this option if you are using their new Day Parting tool.

When you created your Google AdWords account, the account automatically defaulted to Pacific Standard Time. According to Google, “Your time zone determines the official “working day” for your AdWords account.” In otherwords, if you are in the Eastern Time Zone and set your account to be off from 6pm to 9am, your account will actually turn off 9pm est and will turn back on 12pm est.