Mobile N SYNC & Yahoo Team Up!

Mobile Search and PPC ADvertising seemed to be the perfect combination for the 2006 marketing platter.

This dish will entice those R&D budgets and those who continue to look to other avenues in order to expand their already well integrated strategies. Marketing to people on-the-go? Are you kidding me? Sounds almost too perfect, "Hey I'm in San Diego, CA today and I happen to be 3 blocks from where Urban Outfitters is doing their Summer Sale. they already have my cell phone number from registering through their new cool mobile site, they should just text me with a special promo code or note in my account that I opened their message and give me 15% my order if I go into the store in the next hour." (If you're from Urban Outfitters and you are reading this and haven't thought about this, maybe you shoudl hire a new marketing strategist.)
It's old news, but Yahoo has acquired software start-up VerdiSoft and founder-entrepreneur Marco Boerries, the brains behind Sun Microsystems' StarOffice. How old is the news? Yahoo completed the deal in February, but purposely kept it under wraps until today, when Boerries' name surfaced in connection to a new Motorola alliance. Read more about this here

Mobile is set to be the fastest growing media platform over the next five years, according to a new report by Informa Telecoms & Media, reports NetImperative. The global market for mobile entertainment is expected to reach $42.8 billion by 2010, nearly tripling from the current $15.8 billion.

Global revenues from mobile games are predicted to rise from $2.6 billion this year to $11 billion by the end of the decade, overtaking the music and adult-content categories. The number of mobile phones is set to climb from 1.8 billion to 3 billion.

Are you beefing up your 2006 Search Marketing Campaigns to include mobile search? I bet you are now!

Local Search to Release Headache Reliever

The following post from ClickZ goes into detail about people in the US who are moving and describes what they are searching for in this newly developing buying cycle. I guess searching for maps is a good idea especially for those cross country moves or how about a "Guide to Bee Stings" or "How to Deal With Out-Of-State Drivers?"
Moving Stressful? ... Nah... Get educated below.

New movers are increasingly turning to local search to get information about their new towns, according to a study conducted by Harris Interactive for Yahoo!

One in every four U.S. adults have moved within the last three years, and 60 percent of new movers said the experience was stressful.

However, 91 percent of new movers – a group coveted by marketers because moving always triggers a slew of new purchases – found that using the Internet for local searches was helpful in reducing their stress.

The top four stress-reducing features of using the Internet for local search cited by new movers was comprehensiveness (58 percent), speed and convenience (51 percent), accuracy (41 percent) and dependability (28 percent), according to the study.

Seventy nine percent of new movers searched for local maps and directions within a month of moving, making it the primary search activity by new movers. Sixty four percent looked for movie theaters, bars and nightclubs, making entertainment the secondary local search activity for new movers; and 56 percent looked for restaurants, making that activity third.

Other popular search categories for new movers in descending order from most popular are doctors and dentists, supermarkets, home and garden stores, churches, drugstores, hardware stores, gyms and dry cleaners.

The results are based on a survey of 2,604 U.S. adults who have relocated within the past year, according to Harris Interactive.

*So what is the deal with the extra 4 people, why are survey numbers never round, like 2600 people? So go back and re-evaluate your PPC campaigns and see if you are targeting the right markets for your product.

Potential End to Laundry Media Blog?

So I haven't blogged in forever now after getting nominated under the Marketing Sherpa Best of Blogs 2005. Without disclosing anything, my blog may be getting moved under my current company where I've been promoted recently. I am very aware that there are many readers of this blog and I will still be maintaining one with all of the same data and whimsical posts, but it will be under my current employer's domain. Check back for updates as this may happen sooner than later.



For anyone interested here is a recent note from the Google Adwords Team:
Google AdWords™ Announcement
Keyword Evaluation Changes
Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

You asked, and we listened. In the coming weeks, we'll simplify our keyword status system and introduce quality-based minimum bids, giving you more control to run on keywords that you find important. We believe these changes will result in higher quality ads.

What's changing

Simplified account management: Your keywords will be active or inactive — instead of normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled. In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don't meet our performance requirements and your ads appear rarely for your keywords.


Quality-based minimum bids: Soon, each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid based on its Quality Score. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be given lower minimum bids to stay active and trigger ads. Keywords with a lower Quality Score (including those that are currently on hold) will have the opportunity to run if your keyword or Ad Group's maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid.


The Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.


Ad Rank, or the position of your ad, will continue to be based on the maximum CPC and quality (now called the Quality Score).
What you should do

Here are some suggestions for what you should do before and after we implement the changes described above:

Before implementation: If you're happy with your current keyword list, there's no need to make any changes. However, if you have any on hold keywords that you don't want to trigger ads, we suggest you delete them from your account. This is because any keywords with a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC could be activated and accrue ad clicks. You can use our Find and Edit Keywords tool, available in your account's Tools page, to quickly search for and delete any keywords in your account.

After implementation: We'll email you after we implement these changes. You should then log in to your account and monitor your keyword performance under these new guidelines. Any disabled keywords at the time of implementation will remain labeled as disabled in your account. Several weeks later, we'll delete them. This period of time is meant to give you an opportunity to review your disabled keywords and activate them.

Finally, to ensure your ads are optimized for performance, we suggest you continue to improve your keywords and ad text for relevancy. Here are some resources that will help:

How to create a targeted keyword list.
Optimization Tips page.
For more information, please visit our Performance Changes page.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

Competing Metrics: PR Impressions vs. Online Clicks

So I started a recent post about competing metrics in the form of PR impressions reported by generic demographics of a TV show spot/mention and it's relationship to targeted online clicks. Though online clicks may not be in the billions, there is one significant difference...Online Clicks are targeted when it comes to search engine marketing campaigns. To say that PR impressions are bloated would be too PC at the present with search growing to a $6B industry in 2006. This thread offers some feedback into the very nature of what is important when comparing apples to oranges...

From Robert Charlton:
"Click-throughs and conversions, of course, are the name of the game... though there's also that intangible called branding. It's been argued that the kind of result, paid, organic, or a combination of the two, influences the branding effect. These things are very hard to measure, and just looking at raw impression numbers, with no weight being given to them, can be extremely misleading. But you could make a strong argument that search impressions are more likely to be effective than the PR impressions you're competing with."

Continue the post here.

MarketingSherpa Blog Awards Are Posted!

Though I wasn't a winner in the Search Marketing category it was awesome to be on the same playing field as all of these upper crust blogs that I pull from and reference on a daily basis. Maybe with a little advertising, I could even do this full-time...?

Congrats to all the winners, everyone deserves it and SERoundtable rocks! Thanks to everyone who nominated me.

Advertising Haiku for You from Google

The ad pods include either four or five such entries and comprise either a small rectangle of about 120 by 90 pixels or simply one long line of text.

Google released a new, smaller form of AdSense text ads (via SearchEngineLowdown) in a variety of vertical and horizontal sizes. The ads display just one short title for each ad, often consisting of only one word each, which may put further strains on the copywriting skill requirements that have already reached haiku-level difficulty.

Internet advertising totaled over $2.8 billion for the first quarter of 2005

“While the online audience gets bigger and broader, the TV audience continues to fragment, even as the cost of advertising spots rises,” notes Tom Hyland, Partner and New Media Group Chair, PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Add the growth of broadband in the home, which enables advertisers a platform to deliver rich media, and brand advertisers have a new mass audience to target. The economics are too compelling for marketers to ignore.” Excerpt from the IAB.

As rising costs of advertising...exactly; place your dollars in search, the revenue-generating all-star in your marketing mix. When it comes to speaking of reaching various audiences at all points of the day, no matter what phase of the buying cycle they are in, search is the most cost-effective. Hands down.

As Blogging Goes Corporate, So Does Your College Roommate

Blogging is becoming quite the tactic in every marketer's toolset. Reaching out to the masses with a personalized message is becoming the most travelled route to getting their attention.

The Wall Street Journal reports that blogging, once seen as a subversive voice of the unwashed masses, has gone corporate. Danone’s Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, Microsoft and many other companies are now paying people to write blogs for marketing, recruiting and other purposes. According to the Journal, about 4 percent of major American corporations have blogs that are available to the public. The story also reports that online job sites such as Dice.com and Monster are posting more ads for corporate bloggers.

So if you're in school still, it might be a good idea not to skip those writing courses at 7am. Blogging has become a corporate position and it may be useful to those wondering what they are doing at the end of May. There are multiple sites that allow you to setup free blogs:

AOL Journal
Blogger
Blog Easy
Blog City
Journal Space
Mod Blog
MSN Spaces
tBlog


6% of the entire U.S. adult population (internet users and non-users alike) have created blogs. That’s one out of every 20 people.
New data on blogs and blogging from PEW

2005 MarketingSherpa Readers' Choice Awards

All Blogs were nominated by our readers and qualified by the rules (must have been written regularly since Jan 2, 2005; must be on the topic of marketing, PR, or ads). Voting ends Wednesday, June 8th, 2005.

I just wanted to thank everyone who has been reading my rants and posts. It has been totally worth the experience updating this frequently and keeping abreast of all the search engine marketing news and developments in 2005. So below is the link to vote if you haven't yet. Keep on reading and coming back because there is a ton happening in the search engine world, as as most of you know "Bourbon" is the annual hurricane.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=333931095143


Thanks BJ!

My Yahoo Leads Personalized Web Pages Race

Roughly 26 million people visited My Yahoo in April, representing 22 percent of the 115 million visitors to Yahoo websites. Just under 10 million people visited My MSN during the same month, representing 10 percent of MSN's overall visitors.

Source: Comscore Networks