The Seattle-Search.com Blog

At the Search Engine Strategies Travel Show held last week, Microsoft Search Media Analyst Janine Patrick, reminded those assembled at the Marriott Waterfront from Hilton Hotels to TripAdvisor, that adCenter demographics can allow advertisers to target age, gender, and geographic location in their search campaigns — something Google and Yahoo! have yet to touch.

I could not resist asking the obvious follow-on, at least obvious to me as one of the first certified MSN adExcellence members in the the Pacific Northwest, why the demographic features have not been tied to MIcrosoft parameters.

Imagine, for example, if you could use adCenter demographic targeting and incremental bidding, and that the system would allow you to customize the parameters of your MSN-Live Search ad so that it displayed a customized message tailored exclusively for the user profile being targeted. Such is the power of demgraphic mining IF the result can be combined with targeted message delivery. “An excellent idea!” Janine praised, and she will see that it finds it way to the product develpment team. [24x7]

Details are beginning to emerge on Microsoft’s upcoming Google Analytics challenger. Gatineau will launch in beta later this summer to compete with Google and give AdCenter advertisers detailed stats on their campaigns.

Gatineau promises to take analytics one step further with the addition of demographic data. Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have.
Google Analytics has already had a major face lift this summer, but Gatineau should provide enough competition to keep the improvements coming.

A Sneak Peek: <http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/want-to-see-gatineau.html>

Domain Roundtable, a domain name conference hosted by Name Intelligence, will hold its 2007 conference August 13-15 in Seattle.

“The focus will be on networking,” says Jay Westerdal, Name Intelligence President & CEO. Additionally, Domain Roundtable will feature Ntag, a networking technology that makes it easy to swap information with other attendees and follow up after the conference.
The event will feature a 450 lot live domain name auction on Wednesday, which is open for free to the public. The auction listings have not been publicly released because the Domain Roundtable staff is “triple checking” the validity and ownership of submissions. Even though the auction will feature twice as many lots as the most recent TRAFFIC auction, Westerdal says he expects the auction to last only 3 hours. Domain Capital will provide domain financing at the auction.

digg has decided to drop Google in favor of a 3-year exclusive deal with Microsoft.
The diggsters have signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year. The move gives digg an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with their growth. Best of all, it lets the digg team completely focus on new feature development.
Microsoft will provide display and contextual advertising on digg, with Federated Media filling in the blanks. Any doubts that Microsoft dangled a revenue share that was too tempting to turn down? If Microsoft can announce a few big deals like this - even if they don’t make a dime on them - other networks will take notice and come knocking.

During the recent Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference, I got a chance to ask new Microsoft Search GM Satya Nadella whether Microsoft might follow suit with the corporate incentives it was offering to enterprise customers who chose to use Live Search and win rewards. Those search incentives came in the form of discounts on Microsoft software and other products.

Apparently, someone at MSN was listening, and thinking along the very same lines. MSN and Microsoft Live’s U.S. search query volume showed a 67% increase from May to June, according to Internet metrics company Compete, Inc. at least partially attributable to a prize award program.

“A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products,” said Steve Willis, a Compete analyst, in a blog post Monday. “All of the games involve using Live’s search engine — to get the points, you have to search with Live.”

Google saw its search query volume drop from 67% in May to 62.7% in June, a 6.5% decline. Yahoo’s search query share stood at 19.6% in June, down from 19.7% in May and from 26.7% in June 2006. Ask.com’s search query share declined to 3.3% in June, down 3.5% in May and 4.1% from June 2006.

Internet metrics company comScore published its take on U.S. search market share numbers for May: Google (50.7%), Yahoo sites (26.4%), Microsoft sites (10.3%), and Ask (5%).

Google lifted one of the many veils that obscures the inner workings of its paid advertising program last week by unmasking its Content Network distribution sites to advertisers. These are the sites that keyword-targeted Adwords ads appear on when you opt-in to Google’s Content Network on a PPC basis.For the first time ever, the launch of the new Google Placement Performance Report affords AdWords advertisers who are running keyword-targeted campaigns a bird’s eye view of their networked media buy. The purpose of the report is to check ad position in AdWords page units on the various Websites where they are running. What is far more revealing to this search marketer, however, is the eye opening (and jaw-dropping) view of the actual sites where content ads appear, especially the realization that the quality of those Content network sites can be very poor. (In contrast, Google “site-targeted” campaigns place ads on Websites that are selectable in advance and on a CPM-basis).

A look at the sites being offered up for a mainstream B2C advertising campaign (by mainstream, I mean a campaign of fairly general terms and devoid of highly specialized keywords), reveals a substantial number (more than 15%) of proxy sites and anonymous surfing sites (neither of which are auditable), sites that were wholly irrelevant to the subject matter, such as s Song Lyrics sites or phonebooth finders, and sites using alphabets other than the language specified (which in this case was English). I’ll eat my hat if click fraud is not in play at these sites, which rang up clickthroughs at an alarming rate while yielding less than one conversion on a $3,000 run with over 14,000 keywords.

Seeing is disbelieving. When choosing Google Content’s Network for keyword-targeted advertising, the implication (at first impression) is all too clear. Use ONLY highly specialized terms that are completely unambiguous in terms of Content Network placement, OR be prepared to spend days or weeks adding negative keywords and site exclusions to your campaigns based on the feedback. One can only hope that Google will take seriously the concerns of advertisers who seek credit for erroneous or unauditable ad placements, and that is anything but clear.