SearchLine: Best Practices, Analytics & Tools for Search Engine Marketers
SearchLine, brought to you by DIRECT and MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT Magazines, is a bi-weekly e-newsletter devoted to best practices in search engine marketing with regular reporting on the tools and technology necessary to do the job.
Each Issue Covers Three Main Components:
- Best Practices: How to choose and obtain key words, work with search engines, conduct their own search engine optimization, and serve potential customers who visit readers' sites. Case histories and statistical research are provided as appropriate.
- Analytics: Determine return on investment for key words and search engines.
- Tools: Software necessary to administer and analyze search results, conversions and ROI. SearchLine covers the actual products and gives analysis on the good, the bad, and the ugly.
To sign up for SearchLine, click here.
For sponsorship information, please contact William Camaraza at 305-448-6168 or Elizabeth O'Connor at 203-358-4391.
For Relief of Decision Overload, Try Guidester
There’s search, and then there’s site search. One indexes the general Web and serves many consumers as a starting point for research into what they want, and the other helps them find that item on a Web site, and maybe cross-sells some other purchases in the bargain. Right? Not exactly, in the case of Guidester, which blends attributes of both. ...
Groomstand Uses Search to Sell Guys on Wedding Gifts
There's no shortage of marketers wanting to help brides prepare for their big day. But what about the grooms? Don't they want the same treatment? Ramin Ramhormozi thinks so. He's developed Groomstand.com, a site that offers personalized gifts for the husband-to-be's best men. ...
Search Analytics Gets It Together at iCrossing
As search marketing grows more hotly competitive, marketers’ success comes more and more to depend on the quality of the tools available to them for optimizing both their Web sites and their pay-per-click campaigns. And enhancing those tools has become something of a continuous arms race, as search marketing firms add bid management platforms and analytics and click-tracking tools to help advertisers maximize their investment returns on search. ...
Sports Collectible Site Powers up Major League Search
Very often, people outgrow the things that seemed crucially important when they were kids: building models, collecting baseball cards, riding horses. Putting aside the question of whether that’s a good thing, the same can be said of companies: sometimes the platforms and features that served them well at start-up just don’t satisfy their needs as they mature. That was the case with Beckett Media, a sports publishing company that struck gold selling sports trading cards and collectibles on the Web way back in the rookie years of 1995. ...
StepUp Makes the Local Connection for Web Searchers
There’s a school of thought that says the coming trend in e-commerce will be searching for products online and then buying them offline. Online shopping has lost its novelty for almost everyone, the thinking goes. People are looking to save on shipping; they want to have a physical place to take defective purchases for refunds and exchanges. And they’re often in the market for gratification more immediate than even the most overnight express delivery can provide....
Pay-per-call Breaks Out
No firm results to speak of yet about advertisers’ take-up of pay-per-call and click-to-call solutions, but there can be no doubt that on the supply side of the equation, making a direct phone connection between marketers and the audiences they want to reach is going great guns....
Auto Sites Feed Some Gas to Online Marketing
The accepted wisdom in selling cars is that customers start looking for their next ride the moment they drive their current purchase off the lot. But the Internet and its research possibilities have added focus to the last eight to 12 weeks of that decision process, making that the most crucial time in which to reach the prospect and convert him or her from a digital tire-kicker to a showroom visitor. A couple of leading automotive Web retailer networks have taken this time crunch to heart and added recent features to their marketing and promotional programs that should help pull customers off their desktops and onto the lots of their dealer-members. ...
Answerbag's Show and Tell
“I can’t learn something from a book; I have to see it being done.” If you haven’t said that yourself, you probably know someone who has. (Probably after buying furniture at Ikea.) Text is good for many things, but sometimes having that visual element really drives a point home. Anyway, that’s the hypothesis being tested right now by Answerbag, a consumer-generated question-and-answer Web site operated by InfoSearch. ...
Search Sophistication on the Upswing
Big-budget search marketers are entering the search channel, and they’re bringing sophistication in the shape of more intensive use of Web analytics and bid management tools. Those are some of the top-line findings of the latest survey by JupiterResearch of leading company marketers and agencies with responsibility for search marketing. ...
Integrating Search and Traditional Marketing
The Boston Red Sox; “American Idol”; “Lost”; “The Amazing Race”. Wednesday is a busy night on TV! To avoid this viewing traffic jam, I record “Lost” so I can view it another time, minus the ads. During the course of watching these programs, what messages reach me? Which ones resonate? What do I absorb? As a marketer, you actually have a good shot at finding out. How? With search. ...
LookSmart’s Dave Hills: “We’re Turner, Google Is CBS”
Last week’s article on vertical search was actually only half the story. While SearchLine reported on the presentation JupiterResearch analyst Patti Freeman Evans gave last week at Internet Retailer 2006, we didn’t reveal that she was joined on that panel by LookSmart CEO Dave Hills. That’s because we managed to sit down separately with Hills and get his thoughts on vertical Web sites and on his company’s place in the search marketing ecosystem. ...
MSpoke Puts Consumers behind the Wheel
You can debate the existence of an “advertising backlash” among consumers, but there’s no arguing with certain facts. Forrester Research says 60 million households have signed up for the Do Not Call registry, 54% of households use software to block spam and pop-ups on their computers, and digital video recorders are on average permitting their users to screen out about 60% of TV ads in the programs they see. How do marketers respond to this anti-ad reaction? Pittsburgh-based mSpoke thinks its personalizaton platform can help....
Catching Up with UpSnap
When SearchLine last spoke to UpSnap Networks, back in November 2004, the Davidson NC-based company had just introduced a free SMS-based mobile business directory service. Fast-forward a year and a half, and pay-per-call ads have been added to the ad mix....
Inventing the Circle
There’s no shortage of companies trying different ways to get small local businesses to make the jump to online advertising. Google, Yahoo!, MSN and A9 are all out there beating the bushes to set up business profiles for local enterprises that don’t now have their own Web sites. And the Internet Yellow Pages directories are putting their sales forces into motion to convince Mom and Pop concerns that they, too, can have a prominent online presence with a minimal investment of time, if not of money. So what's so special about Merchant Circle?...
The Virtues of Getting Vertical
As a term within the search industry, “vertical search” may have outlived its usefulness. In its original form, it was used to describe search engines that didn’t set out, like Google and Yahoo!, to index the total Web but only concentrated on a small portion relevant to a specialized user market—design engineers, for example, or bass fishermen....
Some Tips for Cleaning Up Clicks
The measurement and eradication of click fraud—bogus clicks on pay-per-click ads from anything other than potential customers—took an express ride to the top of the hot-topic agenda in search engine marketing when Google chief financial officer George Reyes told an analyst conference in December 2004 that such fraud was a threat to his company’s business model....
Allegis Trumps Rivals with All-Search Marketing
These days, big brands are turning their attention—and their ad budgets, in growing numbers-- to the power of search marketing, until now a traditional direct-response marketing tool. But staffing-services provider Allegis Group is reversing that trend. In a business category where its prime competitors rely heavily on branding advertising, Allegis is not only marketing exclusively on the Web but is using search marketing to build its own brand awareness among customers while blowing the dors off the competition....
Ice.com Seeks Blogging Gold
Many marketers are treading gingerly around the notion of adding a blog to their Web site. Some are worried about the time and effort required to keep the blog active, while others are uncertain that consumers will show sufficient interest in the feature to make it useful. But don’t count online jewelry retailer Ice.com among the pussy-footers. The Montreal-based e-commerce site has not one but three blogs up and running and linked to its Web pages. ...
Google Looking for Smooth Landings
As if online marketers didn’t have enough to think about, in early December 2005 Google snuck a lump of cyber-coal into their stockings in the form of an announcement that it was adding something new to its “Quality Score” measure: an evaluation of advertisers’ search ad landing pages....
Are You Ready for the New Yahoo?
Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced the largest revamp of its pay-per-click (PPC) ad platform since it bought the technology from Overture back in 2003. New interfaces, new analytical tools and new targeting capabilities will be rolled out to marketers, apparently during the third quarter of 2006. After that, at a yet-unannounced point in time, will come a whole new algorithm for delivering ads that factors in not just bid price but a “quality index”, much as Google does now. So how will these innovations in a platform that serves almost one quarter of all the PPC ads on the Web affect advertisers?...
Bigdaddy Lays Down the Law at Google
The news of Yahoo!’s impending changes to its pay-per-click (PPC) platform has tended to overshadow similarly sizable news at rival Google. The Bigdaddy update is fully operational, and Daddy’s kicking some inferior-link ass and booting some low-grade duplicate content. And Web operators need to take note of those facts and optimize their sites to avoid his size 13 EEE shoe....
Tacoda Goes to the Video
Behavioral targeting of online ads is coming on strong. Advertisers will spend $1.2 billion on behavioral targeting this year, up from $925 million in 2005, and will increase that spending to $2.1 billion by 2008, according to a report from marketing research firm eMarketer. And Dave Morgan, CEO of Tacoda, says his company is poised to take advantage of that interest. ...
Click Fraud: Energizer Bunny of Search Headaches
Anyone who thought click fraud could be solved with a blanket settlement, take a step forward. Not so fast, Google....
Radiator.com Boiling over Bum Clicks
The current click fraud wrangles have given industry-wide prominence to a handful of small search marketers unaccustomed to the spotlight: Lane’s Gifts & Collectibles, Web hosting service AIT, Crafts by Veronica, Metrodate.com. All of these made national news by putting their names on a legal filing against Google or Yahoo! in a state or federal courthouse. All are relative Davids who have decided to take on the search Goliaths over sub-par clicks for which they believe they were not rightfully compensated....
A Home at the End of the Web
Applying search technology to the residential brokerage industry both makes tremendous sense from the consumer’s angle and offers some jeopardy to the established ways that real estate agencies have conducted their business. While both large and local real estate brokerages have been fairly quick to bring their businesses online, their Web sites can often be less than helpful to searchers looking for shelter....
