Archive for 2008

Google and Yahoo has abandoned their efforts to overcome the objections of the antitrust regulators who have hindered it’s progress because they believe it would give Google too much power over online advertising.

This was announced today [Wed Nov 5]. This could be seen as another hit for Yahoo is currently at $14.02 a share. Yahoo had previously hoped that this deal would give a $800 million boost to it’s revenue line. It was a reaction deal to the shareholders anger over management’s decision to forego the $47.5 billion takeover deal by Microsoft.

Google had previously announced that this deal would have been great for the online world. However Google is not expected to take much of a hit because of it’s dominant hold on search marketing.

“We’re of course disappointed that this deal won’t be moving ahead,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote on a company blog. “But we’re not going to let the prospect of a lengthy legal battle distract us from our core mission. That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on.”
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Many of our prospective clients want to know, do we have any bidding tools or management systems in place? Yes we do! We’ve built internal tools and bidding systems to help us manage our accounts. Though we are always manually looking through accounts and checking on the data, we saw a need to have systems in place to help us flag issues and quickly make massive but calculated account adjustments.

At LeadQual, we pride ourselves in thinking outside of the box. See an example below. This is our greatest latest automated bidding tool. First of it’s kind. We first built tools for our analysts, but got lazy figured we should automated the whole process altogether. It still has a couple bugs to work out, but so far so good.

[We had to haze the picture out a bit, for proprietary reasons].

Happy Halloween

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google is making more tweaks to it’s Quality Score Algorithm. They seemingly will normalize the data dependent on the position in order to be “more precise” in serving up the more relevant ad. Positions have a direct effect on CTR. If lower CTR ads found in the lower positions were placed in a higher position, it is entirely possible the new CTR would be better than the current holder of those high placements.

Straight from the horses mouth that is Google.

“Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.
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SEM in the travel space is not easy. We know, as here at LeadQual we have a number of travel related clients serving different parts of the world. To help all those who struggle and work hard in this space, I wanted to share some data from a ComScore study of 50,000 UK web users. This study focused on user behavior and trends for the online travel industry. Some note worthy facts.

“I like to take my time to buy”

• 15.9% of purchasers buy holiday travel items from the first site they visit
• But only 1.6% will buy in their first session
• This means 14.3% will return at a later time!
• Most users will visit your site at least twice before transacting
• On average it takes 29 days for a transaction to occur for a holiday user
• 30% of transaction occur more than 6 weeks after initial search!

Note: Check delayed conversion especially on Google accounts. Re-pull old reports and update your conversion information. Note that Google’s cookie is only 30 days, so check your backend data to determine if the value of the clicks you are paying for are worth more than it has.

“If I remember your name, I’ll be back”

• 35% of Transactions occur without a keyword search
• Almost 50% of travel searches are brand keyterms (names of companies)

Note: Branding is huge! Good URL is crucial. Bidding on Brand even more crucial!A user may come in and see your PPC ad, but end up not making a decision right away. When they are ready, if your URL is memorable and easy, they’ll just type that in the browser and purchase.
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One thing I often see, primarily on sites that use Windows IIS servers, is inconsistent capitalization in URLs.  For example:

www.mysite.com/products    (lower case)
www.mysite.com/Products    (proper case)

This is most common on Windows hosts, since Windows file handling is case insenitive, so that the above two links would serve the same content regardless of how the actual file or URL was stored or handled in the system.

On UNIX hosts, however, the above two links would not be the same — one link would typically return a 404 Not Found error if the capitalization did not match a file name.

Since on Windows hosts the user gets the same web page back regardless of capitalization, does it matter if a website uses a mix of lower and upper case on a URL when referring to the same page, and does this impact search engine (SEO) rankings?

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