PPC: Why You Need To Pay For Your Brand Terms
When it comes to developing an effective PPC strategy, it is important to include branded terms. However, many marketers are opposed to doing so. This is a mistake. Let’s take a look at why.
Understanding the value
In this economy where marketers need to do more with less, it is easy to understand why they might balk [...]
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Google Going Transparent with AdSense Revenue Share; Planning an iPad Challenge?
Jeff "Dell Hell" Jarvis sat down recently with an impressive line-up of Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, President of sales Nikesh Arora, search boss Marissa Mayer, YouTube founder Chad Hurley, and counsel David Drummond.
During that meeting, a lot of interesting topics were covered, including a potential new level of transparency for AdSense’s earnings split:
Google told me today that they would consider giving more transparency about revenue splits in Adsense…Arora said that the company was considering more transparency. I confirmed with Google’s people that this was new. I suspect that they’re not going to promise the possibility and not deliver something.
And now that Jarvis–and now us–are blogging about it, let’s hope we can push them forward with this new transparency! 
The discussions also included talk of China, Google’s reputation, the economy, and whether Google might build an iPad competitor:
Will they have a tablet? “You might want to tell me what the difference is between a large phone and a tablet,” Schmidt said.
We’ll take that as a "yes" then Eric!
Google’s Brin & Page Tap Into Their $2.75b Emergency Fund
What do you do when the economy is in the tank and you’re only making $1 a year in salary?
Well, if you’re Google’s Sergey Brin or Larry Page, you dump 15% of your company and pocket a cool $2.75 billion–each!
How does that compare to your emergency fund? 
As many places are reporting, Brin & Page aren’t exactly dumping their shares on the market. It’s all part of a quite common practice by majority shareholders:
Under the trading plan, the co-founders would reduce their combined holdings in Google from about 57.7 million common shares, or approximately 18% of outstanding capital stock, to 47.7 million shares, or about 15% of the company, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange filing.
Under the stock trading plan, adopted on Nov. 30, 2009, the two would also reduce their combined voting shares from 59% to about 48%, the filing said.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists will wonder why this was put in place in November, but only announced two months later–but that takes us down a rabbit-hole that’s full of speculation.
Online Recommendations > Advertising
Deloitte’s 2009 State of the Media Democracy report was released today. Unsurprisingly, it reports that TV has become more popular in the struggling economy (beating out other forms of entertainment). But the big news might be two of the “lesser” findings—about online recommendations and the mobile Internet.
Online recommendations are becoming increasingly influential, especially compared with online advertising. Online advertising doesn’t stack up against its offline counterparts—83% of those surveyed cited TV advertising as having an impact on their buying decisions, but less than half mentioned online advertising among their top three. Even clicking through to another site has dropped from 72% to 59% over the last three years. (Only half would click more on more targeted ads, down from two-thirds last go round.)
Online recommendations and reviews, on the other hand, are on the way up:
Over half of all U.S. consumers and 69 percent of Millenials believe that online customer reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising, and 51 percent have purchased products based on an online recommendation. In fact, 24 percent of U.S. consumers would like to have an online service that recommends a product based on other consumers’ preferences.
Meanwhile, the mobile Internet is making great strides in separating the Internet from the perception of a desktop. Of those surveyed, a third used their phone as “an entertainment device” and nearly half (47%) of smart phone owners say their phone is one of their three “most valuable” media/entertainment products (up from 20% last year).
48% of those surveyed have data plans, and nearly all of them (88%) are using their phones to access the Internet. (The rest are paying too much 
.) Shopping is already making headway on the mobile Internet—15% have purchased something on their phones. Also popular: texting, online search, downloading apps and online GPS.
Clearly, both of these findings show us how the Internet is spreading not only in influence but in accessibility.
What do you think? How can better you use online recommendations to your or your clients’ advantages? Are you ready for the mobile Internet?
Online Spending Up Year Over Year for Black Friday
Let’s face it this holiday season is a pivotal one for all of us from a macro point of view. While many retailers will be focused on their individual bottom lines it will be important to look at how this whole ‘first weekend’ of the holiday shopping season plays out from start to finish with the latest entry, Cyber Monday, happening as you read this.
First the good news. Online sales for Black Friday were up 11% over last year according to comScore and the rest of November was an improvement over the prior year. Let’s remember, though, that last year’s holiday season was on the heels of “Bailout 1” and waiting for a new president to be inaugurated. In other words, last year sucked so any improvement over those numbers needs to be tempered.
Overall, meaning the performance of the Black Friday weekend in total, was less heartening in that it appears that people are intent on spending less and there was virtually no increase in spending overall from last year. Yahoo News reports
Consumers spent significantly less per person at the start of the holiday season this weekend, dimming hopes for a retail comeback that would help propel the economy early in 2010.
Consumers said they will have spent nearly 8 percent less on average, or about $343 per person, over the weekend that includes Thanksgiving, Black Friday and runs through Sunday, according to the NRF (National Federation of Retailers).
Traffic to stores and websites rose to 195 million people from 172 million in 2008, but shoppers were focused on buying low-priced items, like $10 toys and $9 books, the NRF said.
Total spending for the holiday weekend rose to an estimated $41.2 billion, up 0.5 percent from a year earlier, NRF said.
Since I am not a prognosticator I am not going to offer some thoughts on where this will all go. What I will say is that this will not be the time for irrational exuberance over numbers that look nice in a silo. This season is about online and offline together and if there is little or no increase (or even a decrease) in spending then we are looking at some interesting times ahead.
Black Friday 2009: Bing Cashback Bumps, Users Searching For Deals
It could be that the general state of the 2009 economy is fueling the increase in early search queries for “Black Friday” related terms, or it it could be that the retail industry as a whole have embraced the annual event as part of a clever marketing strategy to boost overall holiday sales. As you [...]
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SEMPO Releases Second Annual In-House Salary Survey Results
Want to make a recession-resistant career move? Consider going to work as an in-house search marketer. According to the second annual SEMPO in-house salary survey, compensation for search marketers working on behalf of a single organization actually increased during the past year, despite a turbulent economy that took a toll on many other types of [...]
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Five Ways To Amp Up Holiday Shopping Season Results
Despite indications that the U.S. economy is starting to turn around, low consumer confidence will undoubtedly have an impact on retail sales this holiday season, making every consumer’s online search, browsing and buying experience more critical than ever. The challenge for online retailers is not only to get shoppers to your site, but keep them [...]
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E-commerce. Up? Down? All Around?
Welcome to this Friday’s version of surveys, research and statistics to ponder. Of course, how and what you ponder always has more to do with the source of the statistics and your mood which makes the numbers kinda funky but ‘Hey!’, if we didn’t have stats what would we do with our days?
This latest statistical ‘he said / she said’ consists of different numbers regarding the state of e-commerce. Today’s particpants are, “In the red corner”, comScore. They are in the red corner because they are reporting that e-commerce is slipping for the first time in the history of the world (you get it right?). “In the blue corner” is Forrester who tells everyone to not get our knickers in a twist because even in the cruddy economy e-commerce is the light on the hill or a veritable economic ‘beacon o’ hope’. Today’s match is brought to you by the Wall Street Journal.
On Thursday, comScore reported that U.S. online spending in the third quarter slipped 2% to $29.6 billion versus last year. That represents the first time since comScore began tracking the figures that online spending has shrunk for two quarters in a row. (Online shopping was flat in the first quarter, and slipped 1% in the second quarter.) ComScore was slightly more upbeat about the potential of growth in the fourth quarter, if only because we’ll be comparing it to last year’s dismal fourth quarter.
But on Monday, Forrester Research put out a report that reached a different conclusion: online sales in November and December are likely to grow 8% compared to last year. Moreover, a survey Forrester conducted with the National Retail Foundation found that online retailers reported sales in the third quarter grew 16%.
Geesh, can’t we all just get along? Let’s just say this. The rest of the article is the two researchers pointing fingers at each other saying that how they collect data is better than the other guy and having a researchers equivalent of a “my dad can beat up your dad” argument.
How about we do this? How about we look at what has happened and then work toward getting better. Then we assess if we did or did not get better after we actually DID SOMETHING! What a concept.
Aren’t rosy predictions and unfettered prognostications how we got into this mess in the first place? Isn’t predicting the future that never was a mistake? If the Internet truly is a better way to do things then why can’t we find a better way to assess things rather than act like we have some magic 8-ball or crystal ball that tells the future as well. We don’t.
My prediction? People will go out and do their very best to make something happen in Q4 regardless of these predictions and then they will live in the world of reality of whether things are good or bad, not in the fantasy land of what they may or may not be in the future. This research is for the big boys and not the rest of the world and even then it’s dicey at best. One man’s opinion. Have a fun Friday!
Google’s Q3: $5.94 billion, 7 Percent YoY Revenue Growth, 14 Percent Paid Click Growth
Expectations were high for Google’s Q3 given some of the positive reports coming out about clicks and search volumes from third parties such as Efficient Frontier and comScore. Even though Google performed solidly (almost $6 billion in a still-bad economy) there may be some disappointment on Wall Street (apparently not). Google’s Eric Schmidt said “The [...]
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