| Home > Weblog Columns > Goyami | ||||||||||||||||||
comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. Google Maintains top Market Share In July 2005, Google maintained its market share lead in the U.S. search market with 36.5 percent of all the searches submitted, followed by Yahoo! at 30.5 percent and MSN at 15.5 percent. MSN Leads in Volume Growth The total volume of online searches conducted in the U.S. increased by 22 percent year-over-year in July, reaching more than 4.8 billion. Market consolidation continued as the top six search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Time Warner (AOL), Ask Jeeves, and InfoSpace – accounted for 99.4 percent of all searches, up from 98.5 percent in July 2004. MSN-Microsoft saw the highest search volume gain among any of the top search engines, rising 30 percent from July 2004, accounting for 744 million domestic searches. Yahoo! Tops inU.S. Toolbar Searches The popularity of search toolbars has leveled off during the course of the past year, but usage remains high. In July, 11 percent of all domestic searches were conducted via toolbars, up from 8 percent in July 2004. Yahoo! remains the most popular toolbar, serving as the starting point for 51 percent of all toolbar searches executed in July. Yahoo! toolbars processed more than 282 million searches during the month, a 74-percent increase over the previous year. Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: SEM Company & Industry News August 18, 2005Google Increases Top Sponsored Links
Google recently started showing 3 sponsored listings at the top of some search queries instead of their old standard of 2 sponsored listings at the top. Based on the reports on how users interact with search engines, opening up this extra real estate at the top of the page (above the natural search results) opens up some new opportunities for advertisers, shows another Google shift towards the mighty dollar, and should help Google's Ad Revenues. Combine this change with the effective increase in cost per click prices that the new inactive status keyword changes are having and Google is well positioned for a healthy 4th Quarter. Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: PPC Search Engine Marketing August 16, 2005New Google Adwords Keyword Status
Google has released their new "simplified account management" system which does away with keywords being "on hold" or "on trial". Now keywords will be labeled as either active or inactive. Additionally, any disabled keywords will be purged from the system in a few weeks. Google announced the changes several weeks ago, (see Google Adwords Gets Rid of on Hold Keywords. In Google's FAQs, they say the following: "We've created this system to give you more control over the quality and cost of your own ad. By choosing highly targeted keywords and creating relevant ad text, you can pay less per click. On the other hand, if you want to run on an obscure and less-searchable keyword, you can. But you'll likely have to pay a higher CPC for it." This seems rather counter-intuitive. If the goal for the new system was to increase quality of the ads, then I can understand them charging more for less relevant ads on popular keywords, but why charge more on obscure and less-searchable keywords with little to no competition? My guess is this new "simplified" account management system may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If what they say is accurate about having to bid more on obscure keywords is true, than this could be no more than a way for Google to drive up their average cost per click fees on people who have done their research to identify non-competitive keyword niches. It may not be "fair" but it should be good for Google's balance sheet. First they get to purge out a large amount of disabled keywords that are clogging up their databases, and secondly they get to drive up costs for inexpensive keywords without having to come out and say "We are increasing our minimum CPC". In fact they way the have approached this so far, they have actually indicated that the minimum CPC could drop below $0.05, but if you read carefully, this would only happen on highly completive keywords and already bid up keywords. So on those you might be able to bid $0.01 but your not going to show up. Nice! What are you thoughts on the new system? Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Pay Per Click Management Tools Wordtracker Keyword Research Guide
Wordtracker has released a new FREE Keyword Research Guide. They have asked SEO experts how they use Wordtracker to help their clients get top placements. They created a fictional company, Virginia Veg and asked experts to provide real answers to the problems facing its CEO Susan Webster. The result is an e-book packed with insight, tips, and techniques on keyword research that you can apply easily to your own website. Contributers include:
Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Organic Search Engine Marketing & Optimization (SEO) August 11, 2005James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Boot Camp
James Martell has announced a new Boot Camp for Affiliate Marketers. At this 3 Day event on October 3rd, 4th, and 5th. James Martell will host a Boot Camp in White Rock, BC. Anyone serious about affiliate marketing and building content rich sites should consider learning from one of the masters of the Industry first hand. For more information click here. Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Industry Events August 4, 2005Click Pimping
Andrew Goodman recently write an article questioning if Search Engine Arbitrage should be called "Click Pimping". In Andrew's article, arbitrage is defined as people who buy cheap ads and land them on pages showing contextual PPC ads (like Adsense) in order to hopefully generate higher returns. I guess buying clicks to sell clicks seems more like arbitrage than buying clicks to get affiliate sales / conversions. Perhaps Click Pimping should be those that are buying clicks to pimp other's products... Are affiliate marketers the new media pimps of the digital age? Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: PPC Search Engine Marketing August 2, 2005Googletestad - What is it?
A quick search of the Wordtracker top 30 keywords for the day indicated a term I had never heard of, Googletestad. Why would so many people be looking for Googletestad, I wondered. So I started doing a little research, and to be honest I didn't learn much. I think Google may be testing something with this term. When you do a search for Googletestad on Google you will sometimes see the following top paid search ad: Congratulations! It would appear that Googletestad actually stands for Google's Test Ad, and is used to test their adwords system in the live production environment. So why is this showing up in the top 10 current keywords? Google must be running some massive traffic tests. Any thoughts? Comments (2) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: ! Hot Topics
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||
Adam Viener
