July 10, 2006
July 10, 2006
Search Engine Strategies Latino, Miami, Florida - Day One
Day one of the first ever Search Engine Strategies Latino edition is pretty much complete. The networking cocktail is taking place now, there is a Google party tonight and also some Yahoo boat thing. I have managed to cover the Landscape & Tactics tracks, so here is the roundup.
+ The Opportunity: Tapping Into US Hispanics & Latin America Via Search
+ Search Landscape: US Hispanics
+ Search Landscape: Latin America
+ The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans
I also took pictures of the sessions and outside of the hotel, you can see them here.
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 5:44 PM | Permalink
Kayak Launches $10m Ad Campaign - Includes TV
Kayak, the travel search engine, today launched a $10m advertising campaign with a HUGE offline component. The TV commercials are fun, creative, and potentially viral. It's no coincidence that the spots can also be found on Kayak.com and YouTube.
This is either a brilliant move by the company or a sign that Bubble 2.0 is here. You decide after checking out the commercials and then reading my interview with Kayak CMO Dean Harris and my thoughts on the campaign.
Kayak is also running a contest encouraging the creation of user generated ads in the same style as the official Kayak ads. "The 'winning creative director' will win a three-night trip to New York with a friend to see his/her ad produced in the studio. Then, Kayak.com will show your ad on TV!"
Posted by Brian Smith at 12:34 PM | Permalink
Yahoo Buys Land In Santa Clara
The San Jose Business Journal reports that Yahoo has purchased 42.5 acres in Santa Clara. The price of the land was not disclosed, but we do know they bought it from San Francisco's TMG Partners. Yahoo's CFO, Sue Decker, said: "We see this as an attractive asset that provides attractive additional capacity and flexibility for Yahoo's future. We are planning for future growth and will analyze several different scenarios over the coming year regarding the development of the property."
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:39 AM | Permalink
Judge Orders Google To Disclose Advertiser's Information
Out-Law reports that Google was ordered by Justice Rimer to hand over the information on an advertiser to Helen Grant for copyright infringement. Helen Grant "complained that a Google advert led to a service which she claimed violated her copyright in a forthcoming book." A search brought up a site named Realityunlocked.com, "which offered a free download of an earlier draft of the book, and that the site violated the Trust's copyright." Google asked Grant to take the issue to court, this way Google does not have to worry about the privacy issues with handing over the information.
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:33 AM | Permalink
Matt Cutts Of Google Comments On Recent Listings Issues
Last week we reported that Google may have revealed the spam scores to the world. Well, Matt Cutts came back from vacation and he confirmed the data "was real." He promised not to "comment on what any of it means" but at least we know Google is part of the borg. Just kidding. I doubt we will see a treasure like that again, but if we do, it would be interesting to see if Google does add "extra settings for fun," such as –initial_time_travel_wormhole=”Wednesday, December 31 1969 11:11 pm."
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:23 AM | Permalink
Google Binary Search Not Only Finds Malware But Also Shows Signs Of More
PCWorld reports that Google's binary search feature came in handy to locate "thousands of malicious Web sites, as well as several legitimate sites that have been hacked." The feature reads executable files and can locate some malicious code within those files. It was used to help find malicious sites and programs by a security vendor named Websense. The article also explains that binary search may be a sign that "Google may be thinking about becoming a file searching service."
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:15 AM | Permalink
Eric Schmidt Claims The PPC Model is "Self-Correcting" In Terms Of Click Fraud
Donna Bogatin reports that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt claims that click fraud is "self-correcting." Meaning,
Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.
So the "let it happen" quote, in terms of Eric Schmidt saying let click fraud happen, has been buzzing through the blogging community. Schmidt writes off click-fraud as the "cost of doing business." Maybe he is just very confident of the new AdWords quality scoring?
Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:07 AM | Permalink
Yahoo Trip Planner Released From Beta
Yahoo is taking is community-travel site Trip Planner out of beta. The site has reached a kind of content critical mass and Yahoo has added some cool features in this general release:
- Trip Journals (blogging; photos can be imported from Flickr)
- Map-Based Search (You can drag the map and zoom to areas within countries for more specific options)
- Yahoo! Search Integration
- There are also a travel recommendations engine based on travel search history, as well as clipping and tagging functionality
In addition to being a useful travel site, with rich user-generated content, in many ways it’s the most impressive expression to date of Yahoo!’s social media strategy. Yahoo! Answers has received a great deal of attention recently (there’s an Answers integration with Travel) but the new Trip Planner is more fully realized as a product.
You can read a more detailed post on my blog.
Posted by Greg Sterling at 8:01 AM | Permalink
Click Packages Draw Local Advertisers Into Search
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports on the "bundle of clicks" search distribution packages that all the major yellow pages publishers in the U.S. are now selling to their local advertisers. Here's an amazing quote from Simon Greenman, SVP of digital products at R.H. Donnelly, "Our strategy is to connect our customers with their customers wherever they may be."
That's a radical statement for a yellow pages executive to make because he's not asserting that print yellow pages is the best lead generation vehicle "and we also have Internet." He's saying Donnelly is "agnostic."
Some will read that and be skeptical. But to the extent that Greenman can make that kind of statement to the Journal on behalf of Donnelly it reflects a culture shift.
All these products (click packages) are not created equal; some are budget based and some are pure arbitrage. The former will survive, the latter won't. Some involve SEO and SEM, some only involve paid search. Most have been in the market for more than a year now, with fairly high renewal rates according to anecdotal reports I've heard.
These click packages radically simplify the process of buying search for local advertisers. There's no setup and no campaign management; it's all outsourced. It's yellow pages as SEM firm. And the demand, based on interviews I've done with executives, has been significant. Fulfillment in some cases is a challenge, however. (Local traffic is fragmented and not all aggregated at Google and Yahoo! by any means.)
Almost all of these packages include phone tracking to substantiate the clicks, making the whole proposition feel more like delivery of "leads" or "customers" rather than anonymous clicks. But clicks and calls are not 1:1 and there is some sloppy language in some areas being used by the yellow pages sales force – referring to clicks as "leads" – according to some folks I've spoken with.
In addition to yellow pages, there are verticals (e.g., ServiceMagic, HomeGain), webhosts (MarketHardware, Affinity, Web.com) and newspapers (McClatchy, Hearst) that offer a version of this same product to the market today. But get ready for local cable companies, local TV affiliates and potentially radio to do the same tomorrow. Everyone that has local advertiser relationships and/or a local sales force will eventually be selling Google and Yahoo! (and MSN).
For search engines that's both good and bad. For now, however, it's good because they wouldn't get these advertiser revenues in the absence of this type of program.
If you want more information on who's making these products available to the market and on how they work, read a longer post on my blog.
Posted by Greg Sterling at 7:02 AM | Permalink
