In Seattle a new trademark infringement case has been filed which could have ramifications on the keyword advertising industry. Intelius Inc., the online public records company founded by former InfoSpace Chief Executive Naveen Jain, has sued two California competitors for buying online advertisements through Google that use the Intelius name.

Intelus contends that competitors, Enformion.com and PeopleFinders.com ran deceptive advertising campaigns through Google that infringe on Intelius' trademark and trade name.

Late last year, a federal judge dismissed a claim by Geico Corp. about Google's sale of advertising keywords that use the Geico name.

A key difference in this case, which does not name Google as a defendant, is that Intelius is saying that it's competitors tricked consumers by running fake Intelius advertisements that linked to their respective Web sites. Intelius contends that not only did the competitors use ads that deceived customers into thinking they were going to Intelius, but that the competitors also duplicated key parts of the Intelius Web site look and feel.

The competitors however argue that advertising competitive keywords are legally acceptable, fueled by the Geico ruling. They further content that this is a nuisance case and poor business tactic by Intelius' founder, Naveen Jain.

Here are some more links to current articles on MSN AdCenter:

BellSouth and Google announced a deal today where RealPages.com will become the first yellow pages publisher authorized to sell advertising through Google AdWords® to small and medium-sized local businesses.

According the a ClickZ article Reps will be able to sell customers flat rate listings so that small businesses don't have do deal with the unknown monthly costs of PPC advertising.

Sounds like they will come up with some keywords and put in a daily budget figure into adwords, and than just mark it up. I wonder how they will explain to small businesses about how low they rank for important words, and why their ads may disappear after a while if nobody clicks on them.

It will be interesting to see how this get's implemented.

Dmitri Eroshenko posted a great article that covers the ABCs of Click Fraud in the PPC search industry. Click Fraud could possibly be the Achilles heel of the PPC search engine market if it goes un-checked, so it's worth keeping an eye on.

Read Dmitri's article here.

Are you currently tracking for Click fraud and asking the search engines for refunds? If so how?

According to FindWhat, here are the hot Keywords for fall:

Looks like it may be time to dust off those old Halloween ads and look for a good company selling George Bush Bobbleheads. Do you think there is any correlation between the scary costumes and the homecoming dresses?

A recent report by eMarketer and Piper Jaffray & Co indicate that search is the most cost effective way to promote your business. With the current push into local search advertising, local companies should take note. Companies can now find customers for about 1/3 the cost of a lead from the yellow pages.

Another Corante contributor, Ross Mayfield of Many2Many, recently wrote an interesting article entitled "Cost per Influence" where he postulates about a model in which companies would pay publishers based on their ability to influence a sale. Recently John Battelle did a great job summarizing and expanding on the idea that Ross put forward in his article "Sell Side Advertising"

John speaks of a model where companies would place their ads out on an open market and publishers / bloggers, would come by and pick up these ads and run them as they wish. The tracking tools would be part of the ads, so that advertisers would know where their ads were running and how they were performing.

To be honest I am not sure this gives the advertisers any more control over the distribution of their ads, plus it ads a level of payment complexity that would be very hard to overcome.

I do agree however that the Adsense model where advertisers have little control over where their ads appear is problematic. I think sell side advertising would make this problem even worse.

What we need is PremiumSpots.com (a fictitious company, domain is for sale if you like my idea ). PremiumSpots.com would contract with premium service providers and enable the better publishers to let people bid specifically on specific spots on their site. So if I was running and add for Web Hosting Services, I might pay $50 per click on the registration page of a domain name service provider after a customer has just purchased a .com address. If this company was just running Adsense, they would get lumped in with all the rest of the companies and may not even show up as relevant for Web Hosting at all in the current model.

This PremiumSpots idea would maximize revenues for publishers and enable advertisers to find the best and most influential spaces to place their ads as opposed to the current run of network style of contextual advertising.

Once you had a large number of companies offering PremiumSpot advertising, these spots could be bought by categories or site by site by the advertisers.

What do you think?

Please note, all ideas postulated by the editors of goyami and the corante staff are for sale at a reasonable price. All rights reserved. :-)

A recent press release was highlighted on Yahoo Finance entitled "Internet's Advertising Gold May Be Running Out. The press release highlights that the cost of prime keyword terms are being bid up and goes on to explain that value and profit still lie in the more descriptive and longer search terms.

The article is right on. You can't expect to make any money in search engine marketing, if all you are doing is going after the most obvious search terms. Deep keyword research is the key to success, here is how to do it:

Anyone who has been in this industry for any length of time knows that Wordtracker is the best keyword research tool out there. Make sure you check your terms against the free keyword research tools of Google and Overture, but don't pass up the deep research you get from Wordtracker. Wordtracker helps you find all the terms that people are searching for including misspellings. It's a great tool. You can try it free online.

Don't make the mistake of trying to think up terms on your own, the obvious terms are getting really expensive. I guarantee you will be surprised to find out what people really type into search engines.

Are there other tools that you are using? Let us know.

I received this email response from a major PPC engine after seeking support for an error message:

Our tech team is currently working on a fix for the error messages you're getting on the campaign summary page, but I wanted to pass on a possible quick fix to you in the interim:

Hope this helps a bit.

Earlier this summer, I boarded a Carnival Cruise ship in route to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and attended a well-organized affiliate marketing conference called Affiliate Summit.

During the Conference, I sat in on Rachel Honoway’s presentation on integrated performance marketing. Rachel is VP Sales & Marketing at Kowbunga, a provider of affiliate marketing solutions, and software tools supporting paid search marketing. During Rachel’s presentation, she unveiled the beta launch of a new combined Pay Per Click (PPC) Management and ROI tracking tool specifically designed for Overture and Google with planned support for additional engines. The tool is a PC-based solution. I’m in the process of beta testing the offering for two major publishers personal finance news and information. The suite I’m testing is actually two integrated tools – PPC Track (bid management) and MyAffiliateProgram (ROI tracking). I’ll provide more insight on my beta test experience shortly.

Todd