MasterLink Internet Marketing

April 25, 2006

Creating Web Pages & Driving Search Results Based on Analytics

According to a news report WebSideStory this week is announcing that it will marry its back-end Web analytics engine with consumer-facing search engine technology in Search Version 4.0.

The technology, dubbed Active Ranking and Active Navigation, allows the search engine to write to a suite of APIs in the analytics engine to pull data out of the system. Consumer searches on retail sites, for example, could present results based on most commonly purchased model, color, or style of product.

Essentially, this tool allows the analytics to determine in real-time what is most popular over a set period of time such as the last 30 days or 3 months. If a user on a cell phone site searched for Motorola on the site and the Pink Razor had the most purchases, then the search results would list the Pink Razor at the top of the results. This allows previous consumers to somewhat dictate what current shoppers are seeing.

Most web sites are currently using the analytics to determine the most popular items and then adjusting their site accordingly. Also, many sites such as Amazon.com utilize similar technologies to the recommend the products that people commonly buy that are related to the product that you are currently viewing. This technology takes it one step further and takes the manual labor out of the picture and automates the process in real time using these API’s.

What the future holds…

This technology has the ability to increase conversions dramatically. If sites can present these search results in this manner, one would think that the ability to build the site dynamically according to consumer preference is right around the corner. Here is a possible scenario:

A customer is on a phone company site. If they click on a link for phone service, the site would be able to instantly determine the most plan that has been purchased most frequently in the past week and then lead the customer to a page featuring that plan and then list the next most popular below, and so on.

Creating web pages or driving search results based on analytics was typically a behind-the-scenes manual operation, but now it can be automated. The end result for companies is less time spent analyzing data and more time to focus on other aspects of their marketing and their business.

-Mark Barrera
Search Engine Marketing Services

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April 20, 2006

Pew Internet & American Life Project: Report on influence of the Internet

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently released a report on the effect that the Internet has on people's lives. According to the report:

"The internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives. It is also the case that for many of online Americans, the internet has become a crucial source of information at major moments and milestones in their lives.

Our surveys show that 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.

Specifically, we found that over the three-year period, internet use grew by:

54% in the number of adults who said the internet played a major role as they helped another person cope with a major illness. And the number of those who said the internet played a major role as they coped themselves with a major illness increased 40%.

50% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they pursued more training for their careers.

45% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions.

43% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they looked for a new place to live.

42% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they decided about a school or a college for themselves or their children.

23% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they bought a car.

14% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they switched jobs."

-Mark Barrera
The MasterLink Group
Dallas Internet Marketing

April 11, 2006

MSN adCenter Launching New Features

I just received the following email from the MSN adCenter team:

We have listened to your feedback during the MSN® adCenter pilot, and we are excited to announce an upcoming update of the tool, with some new features that will offer you a better, easier, and more productive customer experience.

With these new features, you will be able to:

Add multiple keywords when creating campaigns, rather than manually typing each keyword.
Sign up for MSN adMail with the new Communication Preferences checklist.
Print billing statements through our updated Billing tab.
Estimate bids to help reach position one ad ranking through our improved price estimation tool.
Insert text dynamically into an ad title or ad text (formerly known as parameters).

Please note that MSN adCenter will be down briefly while it's being updated on the afternoon of April 18. This should have no effect on your existing data or campaigns, which will remain live during this time. However, you will not be able to access your account or its features while we update adCenter, so we encourage you to make any needed immediate changes to your account beforehand.

To get more information about MSN Search, or to review frequently asked questions about MSN adCenter, check out our FAQ and Troubleshooting sections in the MSN adCenter Learning Center.

Sincerely,

The MSN adCenter team

These changes are going to be very beneficial to adCenter advertisers, with my favorite being the ability to add lists of keywords instead of the previous time consuming way of typing each keyword one at a time. The other key benefit of the upgrade will be the addition of the bid estimation tool. This will be very beneficial for advertisers who are targeting a specific ranking position. The part of this upgrade that is new to me is the MSN adMail. I assume that this will just be a way for MSN to communicate the latest news and changes to adCenter in an easy fashion. We will just have to be patient and wait until April 18th and test out the new features once the system is back online.

-Mark Barrera
Dallas Search Engine Optimization

April 07, 2006

Yahoo Search Marketing Upgrade in Beta Testing: Great for Advertisers

Rumors in the search industry have been confirmed by Forbes that Yahoo will be testing a new and improved advertising system. They are claiming that it will be the best system to date, but I will only believe this when I see it. Reports say that they are testing the system with select advertisers in Scandinavia. The beta tests are expected to begin in June or late summer for the US advertisers. This new advertising system will feature dynamic bidding similar to Google and MSN which would take such factors as Click-Through-Rates and max bid price to determine the actual Cost-Per-Click. We will be searching for any screen shots and other fresh news on this MUCH AWAITED upgrade to Yahoo's antiquated system, so keep checking our blog for more info.

-Mark Barrera
Dallas Search Engine Marketing

April 03, 2006

Yahoo Index Updated

Yahoo just announced that they have done a major update to their Index over the weekend. As a result, we ahve noticed some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. Most of the changes seem to have had time to stablize but some search query seem to still be bouncing the results around pretty good. Thus far we have not seen much negative effects from this update. Meantime, if you have any comments or concers about the new index, feel free to email Yahoo at ystfeedback@yahoo.com.

-Mark Barrera
The MasterLink Group
Dallas Internet Marketing

March 13, 2006

MSN adCenter Support/Help Desk Phone Number

This post is for all advertisers using MSN adCenter and are in need of help from an actual person. If you advertise in MSN adCenter and have clicked on the "HELP" button, you know that this button does nothing. The same is true when you attempt to "Contact Support" by means of the "Give us Feedback" link. It took me almost half an hour to find a phone number for adCenter technical support.

The phone number that I located that puts you in direct contact with the support desk at MSN adCenter is 1-800-966-7361. Their hours are 6:00am to 6:00pm PST. (TTY phone number is 1-800-877-9580).

I called this phone number and was directly connected to an MSN support representative, without having to go through any menus and withour entering any account information, which was very nice. I asked my question and was put on hold for less than 5 minutes and an answer was given to me. The answer was not the one I was looking for as they told me what I wanted to do was not yet possible, but none the less I had an answer from the adCenter help desk. I was also told that the issue of the "help" was being worked on by an MSN adCenter team and should be resolved "soon". This has been an issue for at least the 3 weeks that we have been using adCenter, so I hope this "team" can figure this thing out soon.

-Mark Barrera
Online Marketing
The MasterLink Group

MSN adCenter Ads soon to be on Xbox Live? You bet!

It seems like the big news in the Pay Per Click Search Marketing war seems to always be about Google. I would say though you should never underestimate a billion dollar giant like Microsoft which many search engine marketers seem to do all to often. Microsoft seems to be getting ready to display adCenter advertising to millions of Xbox players via the XBox Live service.

According to Reuters Business Channel with a report released on Sun Mar 12, 2006 4:34 PM ET.

“Microsoft envisions adCenter to one day be a one-stop shop for advertisers to gather information then buy ads on search results, Microsoft-related sites and services, non-Microsoft sites, mobile phone software or even online Xbox video games.“

You can read the rest of the Reuters Report, “Microsoft takes on Yahoo, Google for Web ad dollars” at the Reuters Website and the rest of my thoughts on this matter at my Cracking the MSN adCenter Code Blog in my post, adCenter comming to an Xbox near you.

~ Jack Spirko
Web Site Optimization Specialist
The MasterLink Group

March 06, 2006

Google to Provide Hosting? - What's Next?

Well, for years Bill Gates and the boys and girls at Microsoft have tried to basically own the operating system market. Goggle has seemed to be on the same track in the internet world now here comes more evidence.

Garett Rogers posted on his Google blog a discovery of some code hidden in GMail. This following line was the code in question

function vJ(){if(uy){;return''+"Manage this domain"+" "}else{return""}}

Don't worry if you don't know code all that well the only real piece that you need to grasp is the part that says, "Manage this domain".

What this indicates, (according to Garett) and I would tend to agree, is that Google will soon be allowing people to set mail.google.com as thei mail server as they develop their own mail servers for public use. This is nothing like Gmail it would be like me using @masterlink.com for my email but then have the mail traffic run over the google servers.

Taking this one step further and based in part on the launch of Google Web Page Creator last week and building on the launch of Google Analytics (for free) it appears that the folks at Google are preparing to not just index the Internet, they want to control it by monitoring how people use your site (Google Analytics), control how you design and host your site (Google Web Page Creator) and now, control how you communicate over the Internet with others.

So whats next? In my opinion full scale hosting (for less then most quality competitors). Will we see Google's top three in front of Congress some day in a "Microsoft Like" set of hearings? Who knows but it is certainly possible,

Jack Spirko

Search Marketing Specialist

The MasterLink Group

March 02, 2006

Is there a Rogue Google Data Center not Using the Sandbox?

Recently we have launched several new websites with brand new top level domains. We quickly got them indexed and began to gain ranking for some non competitive terms as is the usual pattern. However, we also have noticed with some of them, a major traffic spike for some quite competitive terms. This issue is that all the traffic seems to be coming from one particular google data center.

While the other centers have stuck to the pattern of making it tough to rank new sites for the more competitive terms (more then 100,000 exact matches) and you really have to throttle your link building to avoid a "google bomb" this new data center has picked up, on one particular niche not only our site but 3 others that appear to be new as well and ranked them in the top ten among some very powerful sites with high PR and a good deal of age on them.

(clearly we are unwilling to release the exact terms and the sites in question for obvious reasons)

This has us thinking [and for now it is only a thought], that this data center may be rogue in nature and perhaps Google is looking to see if the "sandbox" is being over used and having a negative effect on their results especially on new topics. Here are the factors we have noticed that at least are worth considering.

1. 40% of the top ten terms on this one data center are new to very new sites (one is less then 5 days old! and drawing close to a thousand visits for one term per day all from one data center)

2. While some decent links were used to get the indexing done swiftly they were from PR4 to PR5 sites (not pages) so now major power of a PR7 or PR8 is at play here.

3. More interesting the traffic is from all over North America so it is not like this data center is serving a particular region or anything like that. If you wanted to "test" something you would get better results with a broad sample. The traffic logs clearly show that this traffic is from a very broad geographic region.

4. The sites are all indexed by the other data centers and rank for non competitive terms but not the competitive ones that rank top ten in the rogue center following the typical pattern. Only this one data center gives the newer sites a high rank for the harder terms.

This is an interesting concept to consider. We have not yet decided whether or not we are going to publish the IP address of the Google Rogue Data Center so stay tuned and may be we will release it.

Of course we did all the things right with these sites to avoid the sandbox and they are optimized well, have reasonable links for a new site, etc. Still it is clear one data center has for some time treated this group of new sites a lot differently then the rest. Dusting off and old quote, "things that make you go hmm". There is no doubt that highly revelant new sites are penalized by the sandbox and that it must hurt searches as well that are looking for the newest content available. So may be just may be there is indeed a Rogue Google Datacenter and perhaps it is intentional. As marketers we know that testing is the best way to get answers based on facts so that could be what Google is up to.

Any thoughts or comments are appreciated,

Jack Spirko

SEO Specialist

The MasterLink Group

Dallas Web Design and SEO Firm

March 01, 2006

MSN adCenter Blog

Recently I decided to launch a new Blog Dedicated 100% to MSN's New adCenter called The MSN adCenter Code Blog. We will continue to post MSN adCenter and all intenet marketing news and tips here but all MSN specific posts and some exclusive posting will go on this new blog.

Jack Spirko

MSN Adcenter Taking Away from Yahoo Search Advertisers

MSN Search has recently turned up the amount of ads that will be served from its new AdCenter advertisers. MSN had been showing their ads 25% of the time and announced that this Monday they were increasing that amount by 75% meaning that almost half of the ads shown alongside organic MSN Search results. This rollout should be done by the end of this week.

The upside to this is that advertisers who are currently advertising in the AdCenter Beta program will be seeing better results from their campaign. These advertisers need to watch their budgets carefully if they have set budgets higher with the expectation that they would not be reached in the beginning. Their impressions and click throughs are expected to climb immediately.

The downside to this change affects advertisers in the Yahoo Search Marketing program. Currently these advertisers are having their ads shown not only alongside Yahoo search results, but also along side MSN Search results. This means that as MSN stops showing the ads on its network the number of impressions and click throughs that will been seen on the Yahoo Search Marketing will inevitably decrease. Many self-serve advertisers with Yahoo Search Marketing will have to search out new keywords for the traffic -OR- as Bill Gates is hoping, put that money into MSN's AdCenter.

MSN has also announced that they will be showing their own ads fully by June so Yahoo Search Marketers need to hurry to get into the MSN AdCenter Beta or else face losing a large chunk of their traffic.

Now you may ask how to start advertising in MSN AdCenter when they are only sending out invitations into the Beta program. The answer to that is to call up an Internet Marketing Firm who manages large accounts and has a little more pull with MSN. Otherwise, it looks like you will have to wait and watch as others reap the benefits.

-Mark Barrera
Online Marketing
The MasterLink Group

February 21, 2006

MSN Team Gives First Public Demo of MSN adCenter 3.0 presented to DFW SEM

On Tuesday night Feb, 20th MasterLink and other attendees of DFW SEM's Monthly Meeting were treated to a presentation of MSN's new Adcenter Version 3.0 (which of course is still in Beta and just released on Saturday which made this 3.0s first ever public showing by Microsoft) Quite a few members of the MSN staff came out to present the new PPC Option from MSN but the presentation was given by the two ladies in the picture to the left (Celena Kingson, Search Marketing Specialist on the left & Robyn Raybould, Search Marketing Analyst on the right) who flew in from in from New York just to meet with our group.

Overall Mark Barrera and I both felt that MSN adCenter is going to be a great new source of traffic. I have already gone on record stating that MSN seems to be getting the organic results right with my article (Is MSN Building a Better Mouse Trap), now it seems they may be on the way to a better PPC Mouse Trap as well.

Here is some of what we learned straight from the MSN folks about the new adCenter.

1. The new adCenter has dynamic parameter options beyond just dynamic keywords. Much like with Google Adwords you do dynamic keyword insertion. You can also however set up to three dynamic parameters that allow you additional control over your ad copy and even allow for dynamic destination URLs. Due to the fact that adCenter enables you to insert keywords into each creative, they are even more relevant to every search and when used properly should have a dramatic effect on CTR.

2. In addition to key word research that is similar to the adCenter system (shows terms based on a website or terms related to terms you provide) you can view extensive demographic data which is gathered primarily via Microsoft Passport users and includes things like, basic traffic trends, age and gender, geography, wealth index and lifestyle. This allows you once again to tailor ad copy and landing page messages to the most prominent demographic for your terms.

3. adCenter also offers a tool called incremental bidding allowing advertisers to bid a higher rate for specific groups. For instance if you wanted specifically target 26-35 year old males and felt that traffic from that demographic was worth more then your base bid you can add a incremental bid for that demographic. Say you were bidding 1 dollar max bid on a key word or group of words, you then could say 26-35 year old males are you most likely buyers so you could set an incremental bid of 20% for that group and when searched for by a user in that demographic your higher bid of 1.20 max would be applied automatically. This opens up a lot of options that we will have to research a lot further to fully exploit, however it takes targeting and spit testing to a new level.

4. MSN has also noticed what Google did right and Yahoo has done wrong when it comes to ranking ads. Unlike the wide open show all bids system of Yahoo MSN adCenter simply asks for your max bid and shows "estimated average position" for your terms. You can then write multiple ads per ad group (called orders in the adCenter system) and split test them. In doing so you can spit test and find the best CTR. Also much like adwords you are not ranked based solely on your bid but on a combination of your bid and CTR.

5. This next feature we feel is a huge benefit and it makes one wonder exactly what is wrong with the folks at Yahoo and Google and why they have not provided it long ago. This feature allows you to only display your ads on specific days of the week, specific times of day or a combination of each. For instance if one of your key word groups always converted best on weekdays during business hours you can set that group to only display during those times and there spend your monthly budget fully during the times that have proven to convert best for said group.

Overall our opinion is that Microsoft has gone out of the way to give marketers what we most want when it comes to targeting and budget optimization. That being more ways to control our budgets and maximize them by demographics, geography and time of day or week.

Two additional notes...

First, when questioned about a possible entry into the content advertising business (i.e. Adsense and Yahoo Publisher) Robyn and Celena declined to comment on a timeline and only stated that it was being discussed.

Second, When asked about analytics no time line was given but we were told that one of Bill Gates' special research groups was currently working on a very powerful analytics system for use with adCenter. That was all the information we could get on that subject. Of course standard conversion tracking is available already.

We look forward to working with MSN and our local Account Executive Juan Garza as well as Robyn and Celena to learn to maximize adCenter. In any event 3.0 is a clear improvement over 2.0 and we are greatly looking forward to the next rev being even better.

Jack Spirko
Search Marketing Specialist
The MasterLink Group

February 10, 2006

Search grows by 75% Google's share tops 48%

Yes once again the totals for the past year are in and again Google has increased its' market share to a now whopping 48.8% according to Nielsen/Net Ratings.

The standings in 2004 were

1. Google 43.1% of all search traffic

2. Yahoo 21.7% of all search traffic

3. MSN 14.0% of all search traffic

The new standings for the year ended 2005 are

1. Google 48.8% (up 5.7%)

2. Yahoo 21.4% (down .3%)

3. MSN 10.9% (down 3.1%)

It seems pretty clear that Google grabbed most of the market share increase from MSN, (my guess is it has a ton to do with the growth of the FireFox browser just watching web logs I have seen 5+% growth of FireFox in 2005). While many may look at this and see that it is just another indication that Google is winning the war that is a short sighted view.

The real story here is the total growth of the search market. While MSN may have lost 3% of the market share you can bet they even at the bottom saw tremendous growth last year.

Looking at it another way the market as a whole grew 70-75% so by loosing 3% MSN had to "suffer" with a growth of only say 65-68%. Or another way to see it is that MSN at the bottom of the heap only had a "tiny" 590 Million Searches last year. (that would be about 10% of 5.5 Billion Total Searches)

What does this tell us? It tell's us that search engine marketing and website optimization is now more important then ever. A growth curve of 75% makes search and search marketing the most rapidly growing market in existance today.

It is also important to understand that this growth is really about people using the internet more not just growth of users. There was only a gain of 3% of total internet users so clearly what we see is existing users moving more of there entertainment, research and shopping online.

Jack Spirko
Seo Specialist
The MasterLink Group

December 29, 2005

It's A Wonderful Internet

For all of the fans of Frank Copra's well known movie, It's A Wonderful Life, this link is for you:
It's A Wonderful Internet

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays from MasterLink!

December 19, 2005

AOL picks Google over MSN in new deal

AOL has chosen to use Google for all aspects of its search needs. No more than two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal stated that MSN was in the final stages of inking a deal to provide the AOL with its search services. The deal is expected to be announced formally tomorrow.

Published reports claim that Google has paid $1 billion to take a 5 per cent stake in the media giant. This is good news for AOL as it has struggled with a lower subscriber base and problems with its merger with Time Warner.

Google will promote AOL web properties and include AOL's online videos "amongst the search results", adds the Wall Street Journal, ambiguously. 'Amongst' may mean 'as part of', or it may mean along side', and there's a world of difference between the two. Google emerges from the negotiations as an advertising powerhouse. It will use AOL's ad sales team and make use of a range of advertising inventory, such as banners, that brand conscious advertisers demand.

The deal is principally about advertising, but the pair also agreed to extend their search agreement, signed in 2001, for another five years.

In MSN's fight to 'build a better mouse trap' it seems Google has thrown a large obstacle in the way of MSN's fight to the top.

-Mark Barrera
The MasterLink Group, Inc.
Search Engine Marketing Services