Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn’t list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like “Buy discount cola” and “Snacks on sale.” The ads wouldn’t be useful since you wouldn’t know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

That is why, in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google’s policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard.

Google announced today that they are making updates to the their trademark policy. In the past advertisers were allowed to bid on trademark terms but were not allowed to use trademark terms in their Google Adwords adcopy. However Google has opened up their trademark policy for a few exceptions.
Read on to See Google Trademark Policy Exceptions

MSN Conversion Inflated

Most marketers and agencies probably never noticed, but MSN’s tracking has always been unreliable. Here at LeadQual, we knew about this problem because we do what we can to trace every click down to the conversion or sale. We try to de-dup our tracking efforts and match the numbers just to be sure what we report is accurate.

Microsoft’s adCenter conversion has always been inflated, the script often firing multiple times each time a person would refresh the page, reopen the conversion page (bookmarking the receipt page) or back into the page. This causes major pains when trying to analyze the performance.

LeadQual Implements MSN Conversion Hack

Here at LeadQual we spent time and resources to implement a code hack into our conversion codes in order to more accurately record conversion data. It de-duped the data for such refreshes or accidental reopening of the page. It made us proud to know that we had a solution for this tracking issue that most people were not even aware of.

The New Conversion Tracking Options

Well that felt good while it lasted. Good news for everyone, MSN has finally caught up. They announced new tracking options that would allow the user to track utilizing different methods.
Read More about MSN adCenter’s New Conversion Tracking Options

Online Ad Revenue YoY (via techcrunch)

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have all finished reporting their earnings for Q4 of 2008. The result? Growth! After seeing their revenue growth decline every quarter in 2008, their ad revenues actually started to pick up in Q4 by 3 percent. Together they showed a 8 percent growth year over year. In Q4 of 2007, the search engines showed a 12.7 percent growth year over year. By Q3, growth rates was only 0.6 percent year over year.
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Several sources close to Yahoo and Microsoft has mentioned that a search partnership deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is likely to be worked out now that Yahoo has named it’s new CEO, former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz.
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Yahoo has announced Carol Bartz, 60, to succeed Jerry Yang as the CEO of Yahoo. Bartz is a respected tech veteran who served in Autodesk as the CEO from 1992-2006. Autodesk is a software company which grew from $300 million to $1.5 billion during her 14 years of service. Autodesk’s stock price during that tenure grew ten-folds. She also comes with past experience as an executive at other major tech companies such as Digital Equipment Corp, Sun Microsystems, and currently serves on the board of Cisco Systems and Intel Corp.
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