Hey everybody GoodKarma will be back April 13th with Yahoo Search Marketing. In the meantime I have an appointment in San Diego to visit Dr. Evil and will also be enjoying http://www.ecomxpo.com.
Technorati Tags: dr. evil, ecomxpo, yahoo search marketing
SEO By The Sea reported on this research paper (pdf) written by 3 of Microsoft’s researchers discussing their recent examination of similar pages. They found that about 22% of the pages were identical. I think this means that 22% of the MSN index and not necessarily Google’s index is identical.
They also found that identical pages remain identical pages 10 weeks later. Which makes sense since you would expect a spammer to only touch their auto-generated content once.
Then it states that these findings could help MSN reduce the load of pages to crawl if they identify identical pages and stop indexing or reduce its priority. I would agree, but I am not sure MSN has enough research to correctly identify the real site from a fake copy.
The weirdest thing from my pov is that they discuss the implications of this for PageRank. Last time I checked PageRank was a Google thing and link popularity was the generic name.
Yahoo Search Marketing (the artist formely known as Overture) has just partnered with not one but two leading vendors in ppc optimization - Offermatica and Optimost. These two companies will offer YSM clients multivariate testing and A/B testing. In plain english they will help you target your customers and split them into different groups then show them each a different version of your landing page and help you figure out which one page your customers prefer.
You can find out if they like a big “buy now” button or if they want a lot of text and details or you can test different prices. Optimost helped Monster.com test 13 variables on their site and increased subscriptions by 36%. Offermatica increased Quickbook’s conversion rate by 136%. This testing can ensure your online ad budget is not wasted and that your conversions are as high as possible.
A very cool thing of this deal is that Yahoo is not receiving a referal fee for this service despite getting these companies to guarantee best pricing for Yahoo! clients. The big winners are Yahoo! clients for being offered necessary tools at the best prices and also Offermatica and Optimost for being able to get new customers. Yahoo! should gain even more customer loyalty for putting their clients interests first.
Dan Boberg will join us to explain this in even more detail and as always we’ll open it up and let our listeners in the chat room ask him questions. Make sure to tune in and find out more about Yahoo’s new deal.
Several places are reporting that Eric Schimdt of Google said: “The quickest way to improve the quality of an ad is to have the ad instantaneously turn into a purchase that is 100 percent perfect,”
My speculation otherwise known as my WAG (wild-ass guess) is that Google could start providing a new type of Google Adword. Let’s call it Google Affiliatewords. This new ad is really an affiliate banner. It will appear in the serps like normal adwords and if a user clicks on it they are directly sent to an order page which has Google tracking codes. Google earns a commission and based on the commission and the CTR they will rank your ads in the serps.
My WAG idea would address the issue of click fraud since the user needs to use a credit card which would stop the automated bots. Also it could increase Google’s margin since they would be more involved in the buying process by directly delivering users to the cash register. It would also reduce the number of multiple affiliate ads in the serps since Google would most likely deal directly with the merchant to get the best rates. In addition it could force Adsense publishers to improve the quality of their sites. If a site has poor content a user is less likely to click a buy now ad instead of them currently clicking the google adwords to escape a poor quality site.
The problem is that this would not address the adwords that do not sell things. There are companies that use adwords to improve their company’s branding or broadcast their message ie politicians seeking election. Also Google would have to do a better job policing companies since they would be more closely tied to the purchase. If someone buys items via Google and is unhappy, it could turn into a pr nightmare.
Regardless of my wild ass guess, the marketplace will continue to evolve. Banner ads used to be big then came text ads. What will replace the current text ads and will you be able to evolve with it?
