Internet Marketing Blog

What other explanation can there be? For at least the past month, Overture’s keyword suggestion tool has not shown any results for keywords that include “analysis”. According to the tool, there are not enough searches on business analysis, keyword analysis, data analysis, etc. to register. This is obviously wrong. Note that it does work for analyze and analytics.

I have tried several times to use Yahoo Search Marketing’s online customer support to find out why, but they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) understand what I was talking about. Fortunately I found a very helpful woman on the other end of the phone during a recent call to Yahoo Sponsored Search’s support center. She checked with the appropriate technical team and called me back with an answer. Evidently, the word analysis is too similar to a word consisting of only the first four letters that is usually associated with sites of “lesser repute”. No joke.

So remember, if you’re looking for keywords statistics related to analysis, you’ll find the Overture tool to be a “pain in the rear.”

I have to say that I’m impressed with the pace of change at MSN’s adCenter, although they did drop one of my campaigns in a recent update. I’m even more impressed in that they called me to see how things were going. Try to get Google or Yahoo! on the phone. (Or try to get quality support from Yahoo! via their help center.)
The most significant difference in the latest rollout? It appears that ads can now appear in almost any country, although regional targeting is still only available in the US, France, and Singapore (are there regions in Singapore?). Other changes:

• The interface has been cleaned up a bit, making it easier to manage campaigns.
• Charting of keyword usage even before you add them to your campaign. Very cool! Chart by traffic trends, age, gender, geography, wealth index, or lifestyle.
• There is a very nice keyword suggestion tool.
• Bids can be adjusted for particular times, days, genders, and age groups.

There are still some quirks:

• Specifying matching options is still confusing, requiring addition of columns which are subsequently omitted from keyword listings.
• It’s not obvious how to setup negative keywords or if you can do so across an order.
• The heirarchy of campaigns, orders, keywords (and ads) is still confusing. I’m spoiled by the clarity of AdWords.
• The interface has lost some of its “wizardness”, which I find good, but there are still times when it’s not clear that a “submit” or “save” is required to apply changes.
• The help feature has a bug in it so that I can’t use it.

While not ready for prime time, MSN adCenter is showing a great deal of promise.

Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Submit provide you with a means of telling the search engines about all of the pages on your site that you’d like indexed. Both programs allow you to upload a text, XML, or RSS file that lists every page and specify additional parameters that may affect indexing.

Do you need to do this for your site? I can’t think of a reason that it would hurt, but if you’re site is already being comprehensively spidered and indexed, it may not be worth the trouble. (You can check either search engine’s cache for particular pages.)

If you want to use either program, you’ll need to build the input file. There are numerous free online tools for doing so, and more are being created all the time. I recently used http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. You can find more with a quick search.

Remember these numbers:

• Pre-owned cars - 2,124 searches
• Used cars - 1,143,275 searches

One of the maxims of product marketing is that it is very difficult and expensive to educate potential customers, hence it is usually better to describe products with language already in use for similar products: Less differentiation and more imitation. This is particularly true for search engine optimization since the objective is to be found by people who are looking for a product they are already aware of. Branding — creation of a strong corporate or product identity — seeks to differentiate a product or service from competitors and thus usually conflicts with the goals of SEO. For instance, an automobile manufacturer wants to emphasize the uniqueness and better value of their product compared to that of competitors, not describe it as “just another car.”

The difference in vocabulary between branding and SEO affects every project to some degree. Perhaps surprisingly, I have encountered the greatest problems with companies in mature markets. New companies with innovative and never-before-seen products may not be able to describe themselves with existing vocabulary reducing the conflict between branding and SEO. Companies that sell mature products can have a harder time differentiating themselves. The perceived risk of commoditization can result in a strong desire to avoid the “standard” vocabulary.

This brings us back to the numbers provided earlier. I recently worked on a project for a car dealer that asked for feedback on a proposed reworking of their site. They wanted to avoid the negative perceptions of “used cars” by referring to them as “pre-owned cars” throughout the site. The numbers I cited earlier show that for every search on “pre-owned cars” there are 500 searches on “used cars”. As an SEO advisor, what do you think I recommended? Note that this difference is vastly larger than I encounter in most projects.

I’m always on the lookout for new and better resources, particularly those that help me client SEO and PPC campaigns for my clients. I’ve been recently given the opportunity to try Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery as an alternative to tried and true WordTracker. Here are some initial thoughts:

The interface is very clean and relatively straightforward. It’s easy to get of queries that include specific words, and the side-by-side drill-down is nice. The look and drill-down capabilities make it look like a nicer version of the Overture keyword tool with many more features. Other “likes”:

• It’s fast, taking seconds to call up a hundred terms unlike the unpredictable Overture tool delays and without the quirkiness of WordTracker’s multiple panes.
• You can sort and reverse-sort by any column.
• Counts include simple phrase variations like plurals (e.g. used car and used cars are different keywords).
• Two databases: their own and Overture’s.  (Many if you count each national Overture database.)
• The Industry Terms feature is interesting, but it only seems to be useful for high-volume mature market keywords.
• There is a nice built-in keyword density tool for web page evaluation.

In spite of the vast improvement over the current WordTracker interface, I have some qualms with that of KeywordDiscovery. For one, they should put all commands at the top AND bottom of the screen, not splitting them between the two. Want help? Scroll all the way down. More annoyances:

• The use of “projects” is not at all intuitive.
• When switching from their own database to Overture’s, it doesn’t warn you that you’re going from annual to monthly data.
• Some online documentation is unclear. For instance, are these annual or monthly numbers? They look to be monthly.

My main gripe is that they provide no specifics about their information sources. They could have the best feature set and interface in the world, but that’s not important if the data is innaccurate. I’ve looked at a few terms upon which my clients advertise in AdWords with budgets and bids that provide a very good count of the number of searches on these terms in Google’s search network.  Of the 5 keywords I looked at,  KeywordDiscovery, AdWords, and the Overture suggestion tool were usually within less than 50% of each other, which I consider to be … adequate.  This is a very difficult area to measure, and something that I may pursue in more detail in future blog posts.

There are a host of other features that I haven’t played with yet, such as “Advanced Search Syntax”, import/export, seasonal analysis, etc. Perhaps a future blog entry will touch on these.

Sadly, Jeeves is being retired from www.ask.com. After years of faithful service to the [mediocre] search engine, he is putting off to greener pastures. You can bid adieu and vote for his next adventures at http://www.jeevesretirement.com/desk/. I’m voting for space, for no good reason. You can read more here and here.

The natural question to ask is, what will the new version of Ask be like? No news yet, although it will probably maintain its strong consumer focus either by design or the habit of its users. However, it would be nice to see changes that try to gain significant market share and stir up the search pot a bit. Google is a strong innovator that doesn’t need much of a push, but Yahoo!’s recent acknowledgement that search alone is not their highest priority suggests that a nudge from smaller players could refocus their innovative efforts. What I would really like to see is more real competition for Overture / Yahoo! Sponsored Search, a service whose functionality (or lack thereof) and management console have changed very little over the last couple of years. Overture / YSS only gets my nod as a necessary evil because of its market reach; it’s terrible to work with.

Christine Slocumb of The onQuest Group was kind enough to forward along a free tool that checks outgoing messages for spam-like characteristics. Lyris’ ContentChecker can evaluate an email message, checking it for the presence of spam words and characteristics that might get it caught by filters at the recipient addresses. This can be particularly helpful for email marketing campaigns, decreasing the ratio of discards caused by automatic spam filters.

I just received an email sent to all Beta customers of MSN adCenter identifying some areas that will be updated tomorrow. They have also created an adCenter blog that summarizes the aforementioned email.
Updates include:

1. Order creation process simplified into 4 steps
2. Broader differentiation between campaigns and orders
3. New pricing tab includes all budget, bidding, and incremental pricing
4. Negative keywords can be applied at the order level
5. Keyword / ad rejections include reason codes…

I’m glad to see that several issues that I griped about previously are already being addressed.

Stay tuned for more as things develop.

I recently received an invitation to try the MSN adCenter Beta. Here are some first impressions:

First and most importantly, MSN adCenter implements the fixed bid-for-position technique of Yahoo! Sponsored Search (and almost everyone else) instead of the vastly better AdWords method of rewarding better performing ads with more bid power. This means that ad placement will be subject to the same bid inflation, pinning, gap-surfing, and other time-consuming and wasteful techniques seen on YSS. This rewards MSN at the expense of advertisers.

MSN adCenter doesn’t at first look like either AdWords or Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Instead of a typical dashboard, the design is more along the lines of a typical Windows “wizard”, comprised of a series of steps. This is fine for starting out and building Orders (basically equivalent to campaigns), but it is inconsistent with maintenance tasks.

Features I like:

• Dayparting - You can specify what days of the week and times of day your ads will appear.
• Geotargeting - Target by country or city. This is a bit ambiguous with respect to what constitutes a city. For intance, does Seattle include Bellevue and Redmond? What about non-incorporated areas?
• Interface - Generally the interface is clean and makes good use of controls…with some caveats (see below).
• Parameters - These are somewhat helpful global constants that save typing and make management a little easier, although you only get three of them in the version I tested.
• Automatic keyword insertion enables you to include search queries in your ads.
• Importing keywords from a spreadsheet.
• Accounts may contain multiple campaigns, each with separate billing information.

Features I don’t like:

• Many features need to be renamed or relabeled. For instance, calling the word “order” isn’t consistent with the object’s use or other PPC systems.
• The frame within the window is really annoying: when editing a list of keywords, you may need to scroll the windows sideways or up/down. This would work much better if the web page itself expanded.
• Names of the various items - An “order” suggests that it’s a temporary request that exists until the order is fulfilled. Call it a campaign.
• Negative keywords are difficult to apply.
• You can’t edit existing keywords. They must be deleted and recreated.

I’m still tinkering and will probably add more comments in future posts.

Amazon is testing an online advertising service for affiliates that would compete with Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network. Details aren’t exactly forthcoming from the giant online superstore. Amazon’s advertising network could become a significant threat to the two “big guns” if it gains significant traction among site owners, although the entrenchment of both Google and Yahoo will make progress difficult unless they focus on new web properties.

Amazon’s network could represent a significant new channel for advertisers interested in reaching non-search sites. Most content advertising networks are better suited to consumer products and services rather than those for businesses, and I suspect that this will be even more true for Amazon’s network because of their consumer focus.