Google Testing Creative in Adsense
Google seems to have been doing a bit of testing in their Adsense layout and branding. This is probably the most subdued one that I have seen and I wanted to provide a snapshot of it.
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I didn’t alter the image. That washed out, greyscale ‘Ads by Google” is what displayed on the page. Notice that the block also fails to display the “advertise on this site”. Yes, the site that I clipped this from is enrolled.
Microsoft Combines Search, Ad Development Teams
I am quite the Microsoft (MSFT) basher at times. The news that they are combining their ad and search teams isn’t exactly earth shaking.
I just wish they would learn one thing.
When you are trying to tap the consumer market, understand that you have to have fast, clean, and tight code.
Obviously there are exceptions, but keeping this in mind will help.
A great example of this is Microsoft’s Live.com mapping. It is a dog on a typical PC. Are they just way ahead of the curve? Maybe. The local.live.com maps are awesome. In case you aren’t aware, they don’t just have overhead shots from an satellite (as all other map services do), they offer angled pictures from 4 different directions from an airplane. The quality is terrific.
Enough with the praise. The app is a dog! I don’t use it in my day to day and because of that I will not migrate to live.com to discover the other services. You have to give me a reason to come back and then prove to me that your services are as good or better than your competition. They might be, but I wouldn’t know. I didn’t have the patience. And when I say me or I, I mean Mr. and Mrs. consumer.
Yahoo tends to strike a balance. There is Google (GOOG) at one end, Microsoft at the other, and Yahoo (YHOO) in the middle.
Who uses MS Live? Anyone? MSFT, you need to win us over with something basic, clean, and fast. After that you can give us the goods and we might just use them.
Googles Goes CPA
Cost per acquisition from Google (GOOG)? Wow.
Let’s do the math here. “We have the technology, we can re-build…”. You middle agers will get my 70’s reference here.
Seriously though. This is completely logical. How many of us have already seen similar ads at Yahoo. A banner that expands on mouseover that includes a response form in the banner. The traditional goal in advertising is to bring people to your site so that you can make your pitch in your own way and build your brand in a way that you have control. With a CPA (cost per acquisition) advertisement, “I don’t care” if they hit my site, I don’t care…if they get my brand, I don’t care… about anything other than the customer acquisition that took place. Once that submission has taken place I will then have the opportunity to get my message across, do some branding, etc. The form is all about a conversion to be able to reach the customer.
I read the news at Businessweek and I found it a bit funny that the article mentions Yahoo and the progress that they are making with Panama. The writer doesn’t even touch on the fact that YHOO has been doing these CPA ads on their site for some time. Google is getting credit for…, here is the headline “Google’s Out to Remake the Ad World Again” and Yahoo is getting credit for… “But Yahoo’s new Panama is a major step forward”. They missed the fact that Yahoo has already been out there.
Why would they miss the fact that Yahoo is doing something similar. Is Yahoo billing these on a CPM basis? If so, that is a major undersell. If you have ever been a buyer of leads, you know that the cost gets a little sick. And by “a little sick” I mean very high.
Is this an effort to help stem click fraud? Good luck. Pay a content distributor based on a CPA and you can be assured that they will do their best to get those forms filled out. There is a fine line between someone saying “not interested anymore” and hanging up, and the guy who says “I never filled anything out”. One is a bogus lead, the other is… well, maybe a bogus lead. If I am paying the high CPA, I call them both bogus. The reality is that the aggregator, in this case Google, will have to make that determination. If there are 3 people competing in a space, all running CPA campaigns, don’t think that a content site won’t self enter some data in every offer. If you have been involved in the operations of a lead aggregator, with an affiliate program, you will know what I mean. Self entry is a common method a smaller affiliate will use in an effort to game the system. They will collect the data on their own forms and then self enter on as many affiliate sites as they can.
There are issues for both Google and the advertisers. Let’s assume that this is an insurance quote provider. Let’s pick AAA insurance. If AAA is paying a CPA price of $15-$25 and John Doe submits a request, do they still pay? Lead aggregators have a credit system in place so that the buyers of the leads can request credits for bogus submissions. At some point there is probably manual intervention needed. With something that could take on such scale, there are bound to be service issues. Perhaps they can put a system in place to automate the process. Companies like Google don’t do these things without thinking these issues through and addressing them. They can’t take the little guy mentality of “we’ll address it if it becomes an issue”.
I get back to the fact that YHOO has been doing this for some time. Does that mean they aren’t have success with it? Are they on a CPM (as they were in the past)? If so, this move should at least give them some pricing power and the ability to make moves where they might have been afraid to go there in the past. Often times the biggest player in the space will make a game changing move and customers (advertisers in this case) are forced to follow.
Maybe that headline is justified.
Microsoft Gets Socially Vertical
Microsoft is getting into social networking in a vertical way. It is funny because I came across details on this story while listening to a complaint from a partner who is looking for a new web store solution due to the closing of that product at BCentral. The new offering is Microsoft Dynamics Live. They are beginning with a vertical targeted at finance professionals.
“We’ve been thinking for a while about, is there a desire or a need for communities where businesspeople can connect, not on technology issues, but on business issues,” said Craig Dewar, director of community marketing for Microsoft.
Hearing that Microsoft is jumping into this space is both exciting and frustrating. It is exciting because it creates a new arena to play in. There are ways to use the social networks to your companies advantage and to a clients advantage. The fact that they are creating different verticals should add to the ability to create some benefit for your site or a client site thanks to theme of the vertical. What works today? Links. Ah wait, targeted links. A vertical social=Many targeted links. Perhaps.
This could fall by the wayside like many Microsoft ventures. It is amazing how many areas they jump into with a “me too” product. This is the trouble that many companies face. Especially one the size of Microsoft who needs to see significant upside to even think about it.
I just wish MSFT would find a way to tie new offerings to older products.
Do their products and offerings fail to reach their full potential in part because we are concerned that they will be discontinued or left to fade away (Case in point: bcentral.com).
The bottom line is this. Use the services to your advantage. Work them while you can and be ready if there is good value there. Don’t become too dependent on something that might go away in the future.
BTW: Can’t they just roll something out without announcing it before it is ready? It doesn’t even have a name yet. I know that it is a BETA, but come on. At least name it.
Another BTW: When did MSFT start putting a search bar in the header of the free web sites and domains that they offer through live.com? Fine, if you tell me that going in (maybe they did, I didn’t really read the TOS. Don’t tell), but adding it down the road is a bit bold.
Google Rumor
There are a number of sites chattering about Google buying up ad spots from the satellite TV companies and reselling the ad space.
In an effort to extend its growing advertising empire to television, Google has already started a pilot project in Concord, Calif. to deliver ads to cable television subscribers, it was revealed in yesterday’s WSJ. (source: VentureBeat.com)
As an online advertiser, what are your thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? My feeling… If the concept makes sense for our company and our clients, anything is worth testing.
Who will be using the service?
Do TV ads work for the “I need it to work now” crowd?
OR
Is a whole new era upon us where there will be more measurement, tracking, and accountability with respect to TV ads? Perhaps. My guess is that is what Google is after. Traditional networks probably don’t want this to happen and don’t need this to happen. They can sell their space now by using the current ratings metrics.
How many people feel that ad rates on TV are too high? Am I going to start seeing ads for Meso and PI Lawyers?
When will Google start start distributing advertising in my local movie theatre? Don’t laugh, I mean it.
Google’s 2%
Google’s click fraud estimates have been getting quite a bit of press lately. A guy who some of you will know, Joe Holcomb, wrote about this back in December. “Google Click Fraud Less than 2%? BULL“. Joe has a unique perspective since he has seen the fraud from the inside with companies such as Kanoodle and Blowsearch. He is now on the outside trying to build his own search engine that will virtually eliminate click fraud (the big claim).
Obviously, click fraud exists but the definitions will vary from source to source. What is the true definition? What is your definition?
- Some feel that the user who clicks forward and back within 2 seconds indicate a fraudulent click. Have you ever done that? I have. Not click fraud.
- Some feel that a user who clicks your ad ever day clearly represents fraud. This could very likely be a competitor. Is this fraud? Not click fraud. They are free to order your free fabric samples or take all of your flyers from your mall kiosk, do you think the mall refunded the merchant? No, it isn’t fraud. It is an underhanded competitor, but not fraud.
- Some feel that a user that clicks on all paid listings within a result set is committing fraud. You could argue that this could just be someone who hates the ‘meso’ or ‘P.I.’ lawyers and wants to stick it to them. Fraud? Not click fraud.
How does Google define fraud?
Don’t skip this advertisement!
Are you running ads on other sites? Flash based ads with hot zones in part of the ad? Are you paying based on the number of clicks and not CPM or CPA? Well, you better be sure that your designer designed your Flash banner/advertisement properly. If not, one little mistake could be costing you. Or not.
Check out this ad that I came across while using a calculator at Bankrate.com. Click on the image below to view the entire screen shot, but what I want you to focus on is the “Skip advertisement” in the ad. There is a “skip advertisement” link on the interstitial page, but the one within the ad is not active. The ad is Flash based and should have that section mapped to the “skip” link/code for the site where it is showing. In this case, you click on the “Skip advertisement” link and you end up at the advertisers site.
Was this an accident? Done on purpose? Who knows. Why would you do either?
Scenario 1:
Well, if you are the advertiser who is running this campaignm, and it is a PPC campaign, you certainly wouldn’t want to pay for visitors who simply wanted to ’skip’ the ad. If this is the case, you are to blame, your programmer is to blame, your designer is to blame, and your QA (quality assurance) is to blame. Take your pick. There is fault in all of those areas. If those four people were in the boardroom on The Apprentice, I would expect that the QA person would be gone.
Scenario 2:
This is a CPM or CPA campaign and because of that you want as many clicks as possible.
If 1 out of 300 of the accidental clicks converts, you have 1 customer that you wouldn’t have had before. As the advertiser, you are happy. It is an “oops” that you could explain off very easily. No one is likely to call you on it, but if they do, you could explain it off. Perhaps this is today’s version of the ads that confused enought to generate a click through. I haven’t seen them used in a while, but I am sure that we all remember the “Windows like” navigation used within display or banner ads (ie: the phony scroller to the left). It generated a click through, a poor quality one, but a click through none the less.
In this scenario, the site where the ad resides tends to look bad. A little less professional and perhaps even a little underhanded.  The user experience isn’t where it should be.
I would love to see the logs from this page to get a gauge on how many people clicked expecting to reach their desired page (in this case a mortgage calculator) and then clicked back only to try it again. John Marshall once told me that behavior means that you aren’t answering a question or providing the anticipated result for that URL. Right on in this case. On purpose? Perhaps.
Use the Label Tag on Your Radio Buttons
If you are a self taught programmer, you might have learned the basic programming skills and jumped right in. It might be Coldfusion, PHP, or ASP. Whatever your flavor, there are some basic HTML functions that we sometimes forget or didn’t even know about. When coding a form, I never considered the use of the <label> tag. Thanks to Joe Danziger, I will now.
I was reading through some post’s on Joe’s Blog this morning and came across a short post regarding the <label> tag. Have you ever wondered why you can click on the word next to a radio button in certain forms and the button will select? Well, the <label> tag controls that function. As Joe puts it:
Why should we be forced to click a tiny little circle when we should be able to click the actual text for that choice?
True. It all comes down to useability. There are a ton of tiny tips and tricks whether it be in HTML, or your programming language of choice, that make for a better experience for the user. One tip on its own might not have much of an impact, but when you apply many usability tips during the same user experience, you visitor should browse away feeling like you have your act together.
All that you need to do is to include the ID element to your radio button form code.
<input type=“radio” name=“buttonName” id=“button1″ />
For the text that is associated with the button, reference the ID in your <label>.
<label for=“button1″>Whatever the choice is for Button 1</label>
Here is a radio button group so that you can see them in use.
Here is the code for the above:
<input type=”radio” name=”buttonName” id=”button1″ /><label for=”button1″>Whatever the choice is for Button 1</label>
<input type=”radio” name=”buttonName” id=”button2″ /><label for=”button2″>Whatever the choice is for Button 2</label>
Open Your Eyes .. Shoemoney
Open your eyes, thanks to Shoemoney.
Shoemoney put together a nice feed from a number of webmaster marketplace forums. As of this writing he has included SitePoint, Digitalpoint, Webmaster-talk, and DNforums. Most of what you will find for sale are domains and sites, but you will find some added stuff from time to time (scripts and such). I love viewing this stuff to get a handle on where values are falling, but even more than that, it can help to clue you in on what is happening now.
Viewing the marketplace feed will help you open your eyes to what is working now. You will find some designers who crank out site after site in whatever niche is working now, get some revenue and traffic (or not), and post it for a quick sale. For example, I have never worked in a corporate environment and didn’t realize how well some of these proxy sites do. Whenever I heard proxy, I assumed that click fraud was part of the discussion. Call me naiive, but I really didn’t realize that employers were blocking so many of the social networking sites. A proxy allows you through the wall. Ok, so you knew that, I didn’t.
Some of the sites that come up for sale offer tools, scripts, and/or databases that I have overpaid for in the past. Open your eyes. The webmaster marketplace is a quick read, it is fun viewing, it will keep you tuned in to what is happening now and
To top it off, the pricing is kept in check. We have all seen the silly numbers tossed around at some of the domain sale sites, or on Ebay. The people participating in these forums seem to have a good idea what their stuff is worth. The listiungs that are out of line are brought back to reality by the members pretty quickly.
Props to Shoemoney. Way to go Shoe, you are starting to get pub like the Gossip Gangsta’