St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ Category

Google Inc. said Tuesday that it plans to be more transparent with advertisers about a problem known as click fraud, reversing a policy of secrecy that left many advertisers in the dark about whether they were victims of scammers.

Starting late Tuesday night, Google was to start giving advertisers an estimate of the number and percentage of invalid clicks on individual accounts over a day, week, quarter and year.

Google said the numbers will go a long way to help advertisers determine the scope of the click fraud. Previously, to get an estimate of invalid clicks, advertisers had to examine their internal logs or hire a third-party measurement company.

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Doesn’t make much sense does it? But wait, maybe it does . . .
Read the Full story at Search Engine Watch

I guess it’s true that internet advertising goes in cycles. First it was “pay per exposure”. When advertisers figured out that doesn’t work very well, it was changed to “pay per click”. Now that Google and other pay per click advertising systems are rife with fraud reports, they are moving into another system that’s been done before. Affiliate marketing. Google calls it “cost-per-action” it’s really just commissioned based advertising or “Affiliate Marketing”. In other words the advertiser doesn’t pay unless the person who clicks on the advert actually buys something, something in particular.

It’s just a test program at the moment. Participation is by invitation only.

Google has something new – no surprise there right . . . This time it’s video ads. They will replace some of there regular payper click advertising. It kinda sounds as though they’ve put a lot of thought and effort into displaying video adverts on web sites ina way that isn’t so gaudy as well.
At first it appears that the advert is just a static graphical ad. “We are offering a very, very non-intrusive ad product,” said Gokul Rajaram, product manager for Google AdSense, which runs advertising campaigns across affiliated Web sites. “Only users who click on the ad see the video.”1
These video adverts aren’t mentioned at all on the Official Google Blog or on their advertisers web site as of yet.

UPDATE: Google just annouced this program

On Monday, 5-22-2006, Yahoo is set to add human advice to their SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). It will mix in human advice from their recently added service called Yahoo Answers with the SERP’s.

While Google is for the momment the most popular search engine, is less and less releavant result have caught the eye of several and soon Joe Public will catch on the Google sucks as a search engine. Seems gogle may have caught on too. They have some semi secret plans to add some human editing to their SERP’s. What you don’t realize google sucks yet? Well I’ll write an article about the poor relavancy on Google later, but in the mean time use this example below and remember, their job isn’t to give you what you search for in the results, their goal is to get you click on an Advert.
Oh here’s the example a search for restaurants in my city doesn’t have any restaurants! There’s some very spammy sites with PR’s of zero (this site was #5 on the first page for instance) in there but not one restaurant! Why? If your restaurant was there you wouldn’t buy advertising would you? More on this later.

Microsoft released a statement yesterday saying that within 6 months, their search engine will be better than Google’s.¹

I’m no big fan of google, but that’s not much to brag about. Most Search Engines are better than Google. When Google first came out it’s more relevant than usual result were far better than the only other big guy out there- Yahoo. They did revolutionize the way search engines work. The problem with their search engine is that their competition embraced this revolution and changed the way they provide Search result, but Google itself did not. So there competition all provides much better results than Google now.

Doubt my claim about the inaccuracy about Google’s results?
Try these searches on google:

• st petersburg fl restaurant
  — not one single restaurant!
• St Petersburg Web Design
  — only two out of 12 of the results are web designers in St. Pete, and look at the top result – the city of St. Petersburg’s web site! – they don’t do web design.

Google does have some great things and they did change the search engine world for the better, but they suck for actually searching.