| Home > Weblog Columns > Goyami | |||||||||||||||||
Microsoft has released their adCenter Labs Beta with a few interesting tools. One of the interesting tools is their Search Funnel program that will allow you to see what keywords people searched prior to or after any search term you are interested. Here are some examples using the term "ipod nano":
I played around with the tool and it appears only go grab the most popular terms with significant traffic, so it won't be much use for true "tail" SEMs, but it can still come up with some interesting ideas and keyword nuggets you may not have thought of before. Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: SEM Company & Industry News May 27, 2006How Much In Commissions are you Missing?
Now that I am driving more and more traffic to landing pages, blogs, and sites, I decided to take a look and my analytics reports, I use IndexTools, to see what percentage of the people visiting my sites have cookies disabled. For the first quarter of 2006, 13.33% of the visitors to my sites had cookies disabled. Assuming that the people with cookies enabled and disabled convert at the same rate, that means that 13% of the sales I am generating are probably not being tracked. A recent report in Web Services Magazine indicates that of the 25 percent of searchers that purchased an item directly related to their search query, of these buyers only 37% completed their purchase online, the remaining 63% of the sales happened offline. Clearly there is a large portion of revenues being created by affiliates that are benefiting the merchant advertisers but not showing up in commission reports, or the company calculations of the value of their affiliate marketing channel. Additionally, companies may be under-estimating the value of their own internet marketing efforts if their tracking tools are relying on cookies to track performance. I wonder how many marginally unprofitable campaigns I have shut down over the years that might have been salvaged if the true value of the campaigns were being tracked and compensated. Any ideas how this could be resolved? Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Affiliate Marketing May 22, 2006Google Gains Share and MySpace 6th in Search
comScore released their monthly qSearch search engine rankings report for April showing that Google has once again increased their total share of the total online searches to 43.1%, an increase of 6.6% from April 2005. Google is followed by Yahoo at 28% dropping 2.7% from April 2005. Microsoft comes in third at 12.9% off 3.2% (the largest drop in the group). Time Warner and Ask round out spots 4 and 5 with 6.9% and 5.8% respectively, both dropping from a year ago. Interestingly, comScore has added Myspace.com to the list as the number 6 spot with 0.6% of the total searches. This amounts to 43 million search queries performed. Total search queries reached 6.6 billion, up 4% from last month. Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: SEM Company & Industry News May 5, 2006Merchant Promotions, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Ok, I hate to pick on individual companies and promotional deals, but I am going to anyway... I had a really bad offer come through the wire and a really good one, so I had to hunt for an ugly one to fit the title... As you can imagine, it wasn't hard to find, in fact I found the ugly one on my first random click of the general promotional offers I get all the time. First, let's start with the Good: Rugman.com comes in with the Good deal, they sent out a May newsletter announcing that they are now tracking Phone orders for affiliates. According to Rugman.com "Up to 25% of our internet traffic uses the phone to ask questions and finalize their rug orders. With the new affiliate phone order tracking on ShareASale, you will not have any 800# leaks". Great deal! Now the Bad: The headline of the email caught my attention " Add RSS to Your Site And Get A Comission Increase" (Yes they spelled commission wrong…). Finally a company using RSS feeds to help affiliates promote current deals on their site? Not so fast. If you add AutoBarn's JavaScript code to your site you will get a listing of their new items feed on your site, but they are not affiliate links and you get no credit if people click through them. They even try to explain this to you, but the grammar just doesn’t cut it. “Please note that you will not receive a pay-per-click credit if these links are clicked on a visitor to your site.” Wow! But hey, they will increase your other commissions by 2% so long as you run their script. I suggest you run the script on a site you don't send traffic to, to get your 2% on your money paying site... Finally, the Ugly: Here's a Mother's day shoe banner from DesignerShoes.com that makes you want to jump up and add it to your site. And HURRY! Comments (0) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Affiliate Marketing MSN AdCenter - 100 Trillion Keywords Max
Now that MSN is officially running their own ads instead of Yahoo's, its time to start investing more time into adCenter. I was playing around with their bulk upload tool today and came across a keyword limitation of 10,000 keywords per "order". MSN adCenter works under the idea of Clients, Accounts, Campaigns, and Orders. Each company that sets up an account is considered a Client. When you login to your client, you have the ability to setup multiple accounts with separate billing information etc... (This is great for agencies). Each Client can have a maximum of 10,000 accounts associated with it. Under each account you can setup campaigns for your different products, services, or companies that you are promoting. Each account can have 10,000 campaigns. Once you create a campaign you can associate 100 orders to a campaign. An order is a request for advertising, and each order contains your keywords and ads. Each order can only have 10,000 keywords, which means a single campaign can only have a maximum of 1 Million Keywords (10,000 keywords x 100 Orders). So if you have a really large lists, you will need to create multiple orders and possibly multiple campaigns to support your efforts. When you add it all up though, you should be able to support a lot of keywords. 1 Million per Campaign, 10 Billion per Account, and 100 Trillion per Client. Not bad. Managing a lot of keywords through the adCenter interface looks like it could be a nightmare though, with only 100 keywords showing at a time through the editing interface. It's clunky but it's a good start. Comments (3) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: PPC Search Engine Marketing Sales Humor
I thought this was funny, and throught it would be nice to share a bit of light humor for this Cinco de Mayo Friday: Salesperson: "You want answers?" Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Misc / Funny
|
|
| |||||||||||||||
Adam Viener
