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: Search Engine Marketing BlogAdWords Offers Demographic Site Targeting
Want your advertising message to reach 18-24 year old women?
Now you can with Google AdWords.
With the AdWords site tool, you can pick your preferences in up to three different demographic categories. The system will analyze your preferences and create a list of available Google Network sites that are popular with that audience. If you select multiple demographics, the AdWords system will look for sites that match all of your preferences. For instance, you might ask the site tool to look for sites popular with users who have children, or for sites popular with men earning a high income. The site tool will then return a list of sites whose audience tends to match those demographic descriptions.
The demographic data comes from comScore Media Metrix, which at the moment is only profiling US based visitors.
All the data comes from comScore’s panel, which is comprised of US-based Internet users who have filled out a demographic profile and installed software that allows comScore to track what Websites they visit.
This means, for the time being, your demographically targeted campaigns have to be focused on the US market.
More info.
Searching For Link Partners on MSN
MSN has a very cool new feature described at SEOMoz.org that allows you to see whose linking to your competitors but not to you.
For example a search for:
(linkdomain:amazon.com.com linkdomain:bn.com) (-linkdomain:borders.com)
Will provide a list of all sites linking to Amazon.com and BN.com but not to Borders…
This is a great way to find potential link partners, as well as to find areas of the web where your visibility is low compared to your competitors.
MSN AdCenter is Open (for today only)!
For today only, anyone, anywhere in the world, can sign-up to become an advertiser on MSN’s new AdCenter system, which will is competing directly head-to-head with AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
I’ve written about MSN AdCenter previously, and mentioned the unique targeting features that they offer (including, age, gender & time of day). Well, today, I finally get to take it for a test-drive!
You have until 5PM PST on Monday March 6th to sign-up:
https://adcenter.msn.com
SES NYC: Does Barry Diller Get Search?
The Search Engine Strategies conference kicked off this morning with Danny Sullivan’s interview with Barry Diller of IAC/Interactive, about the rebranding and future direction of the Ask.com search portal.
First of all, let me say something nice about Barry Diller - he understands positioning. He gets branding. He understands that users will decide whether the search engine under his care survives, thrives, or remains just a little irrelevant. He’s persuasive. He got me fired up about trying the new Ask.com search - which I can report to you has the cleanest interface and best set of tools that I’ve seen on a search portal so far.
What I have to ask about Barry Diller, and indeed the entire organization at Ask and IAC, is do they understand search? The reason that I use Google as my search engine of choice is not a cool user interface, it’s the quality of the organic search results that Google delivers. The reason why I fall back on Yahoo and MSN if Google lets me down, is again, that they are likely to deliver good search results.
Ask’s organic search results are powered by Teoma. Teoma/Ask reps have been coming to SES for years, talking about their …
AOL Converts Better Than Google
WebSideStory has released data breaking down the conversion rates for the top four search engines: AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and Google.
For the month of January, AOL Search generated the best conversion rate at business-to consumer e-commerce sites (6.17 percent), followed by MSN (6.03 percent), Yahoo (4.07 percent) and Google (3.83 percent), according to the WebSideStory Index, a new statistical barometer that features techno-graphic and e-commerce trends culled from the millions of users that visit web sites using the company’s award-winning web analytics technology, HBX Analytics. The study includes traffic from both organic and paid keywords.
One of the explanations given for the difference is that “portal” sites like AOL, MSN and Yahoo tend to attract more active shoppers. “With portals rich in content and services, AOL, MSN and Yahoo may tend to appeal toward a more buyer friendly demographic. Google, meanwhile, may appeal to more browsers – those with less of an intent to buy,” aid Ali Behnam, senior digital marketing consultant for WebSideStory.
That being said, all four of the major search engines are still greatly outperforming the “other search engines” category, which generated a measly 1.97% conversion rate in January 2006, and just 2.3% during the 4th quarter of 2005, …
Search Engine Marketing Magazine
How do you know an industry is maturing?
It gets its own trade magazine.
Such is the case with the Search Engine Marketing Industry, which this year is getting its very own “Search Engine Marketing Standard” magazine which will be published on a quarterly basis.
Right now, residents of the USA can get a free 1-year subscription through SearchMarketingStandard.com. International subscriptions are only $20 USD/year.
The first issue is being published in May. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Google’s Insider View As a Domain Registrar
Nick Wilsdon has posted an interesting blog post about just what Google knows as a Domain Name Registrar (which it became in Feb 2005):
believe Google has built or is building a tool to analyse domain names. The API access they were given as a Registrar allows them to carry out the level of automated queries they needed for this. I would also go further and suggest this tool is building up a historical picture of each domain through regular scraping of their WHOIS records.
Read the rest of Nick’s blog post.
Google’s ‘bigdaddy’ datacenter
Matt Cutt’s, Google’s infamous Blogger, has written about “bigdaddy”, Google’s new datacenter which will become the default in the next 1-2 months:
Q: What’s new and different in Bigdaddy?
A: It has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration.
At the moment, Google is requesting feedback on the quality of search results at “bigdaddy”. Specifically, they want feedback about canonicalization, redirects, duplicate urls, www vs. non-www, spam and similar issues.
Check out 66.249.93.104 to preview how your Website might rank in Google in the near future.
Attention all PPC Marketers
Business 2.0 Magazine has an in-depth article about the domainers - the people who hold thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, and then resell their traffic to Google and Yahoo, and ultimately you - the PPC Advertiser.
Why is this important?
Simply put, of the hundreds of thousands of advertisers on Google and Yahoo, few have any clues that they are paying good money for traffic from massive domain name portfolios, held by individuals and corporations such as NameAdmin and Marchex, who are profitingly richly from their established niche:
Schwartz owns about 5,000 names, with less than a third falling into the “adult” category. He’s the industry’s biggest promoter, preaching the power of domains to anyone who will listen and bringing domainers together with moneymen and execs from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). He sports a $65,000 Rolex on his left wrist, a $32,000 diamond bracelet on his right, and is astounded that he — a community college dropout — is living like a king in a waterfront house in Boca Raton.
Read the full story here.
But hey, if you have a few spare domain names lying around, check out AdSense for Parked Domains. Maybe you too can …
Newsweek on SEO
Newsweek Magazine has a write-up in the December issue about the world of SEO (talk about mainstream coverage!). Quote:
[Search engines] deplore the so-called black-hat SEOs who use unsavory techniques, like spamming the Web with dummy pages full of links, in an effort to make their sites appear popular. But they are increasingly tolerant of ethical or “white hat” SEOs like Fishkin, who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site. … It’s good for Google and SEOs: better-organized sites increase the amount of content in Google’s index, while improving SEO rankings.
Matt Cutt’s, the Google employee interviewed for the story, has some additional information in this blog post. It seems, Google was already aware of the “black hat” SEO featured in the story, and actually used them as an example in a workshop, just days before the story appeared!
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