E-Harbor Search Marketing Blog

A few months ago, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs released a keyword forecast tool which displays a search term’s impression count forecast and demographic predictions in any format (flash, picture, or text). The tool allows you to evaluate traffic for previous months as well as forecasting of impressions for future months.

It gives a very useful snapshot of detailed historical impression data, something that Yahoo! doesn’t offer and Google only offers visually with no numerical data. Here are a few screen shot examples of the search term impression data:

search term “real estate websites”

multiple search terms “real estate websites; realtor websites”

The side by side impression comparisons of search terms are very useful in identifying effective keywords. The demographic data is also very interesting, but I still question how reliable this data is. Overall, it’s an impressive tool, coming from adCenter, and hopefully they can continue to innovate and offer useful resources to online advertisers.

The cover story of USA Today’s Money section, sheds light on the fact that more and more home buyers are turning to the Internet in their quest for a new home. 80% of buyers used the Internet to help find a home last year, according to the National Association of Realtors.

This is an important point that a majority of our potential clients have a difficult time embracing.  A quote from the article gives insight into a possible reason why:

The Internet is a significant threat to Realtors, who in previous decades have had iron-grip control over all necessary information for those seeking to buy or sell a home,’ says Stuart Gabriel of the University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate.”

The fact is that Internet and search engines use is growing, and more home buyers will continue to use them each year. Those real estate agents who choose not to accept this, will fail to remain competitive.

In a recent post by Danny Sullivan he comments on the December U.S. Search Engine Rankings from comScore. In the release, comScore shows a continued decline for Microsoft Live even with the release of IE7. Here are the numbers:

• Google: 47.3%
• Yahoo: 28.5%
• Microsoft: 10.5%
• Ask: 5.4%
• AOL/Time Warner: 4.9%

Danny drills down even deeper at Live’s decline:

According to comScore, Live’s search market share has dropped nearly 4% in the last year. This doesn’t bode well for Microsoft who, despite increased efforts in the search game, has little to show for its efforts.

Yahoo! Search Marketing launches it’s update ad ranking system today. The new ranking model changes the way that advertisers ranking for various keywords and replaces the bid-to-position model. The new model is based on both bid and the quality index score - YSM’s measurement of CTR relative to other competing advertisers.

The new ranking model closely follows that of Google AdWords. YSM gives the following explanation for the change:

“When users engage with highly relevant ads, advertisers receive interested, valuable potential customers. This new ad ranking model should, in the long run, help bring up the value of our network for everyone: advertisers, partners, publishers and consumers alike.”

Overall, I think the change is a good one. It will essentially allow advertisers with the best ads win, which gives us an advantage over our less experienced competitors

Yahoo! Search Marketing has begun inviting advertisers, in the U.S., to upgrade it’s new Sponsored Search interface. The new interface changes resemble Google AdWords, with new organization of ad categories and ad listings. The YSM Upgrade Center includes checklists for preparation for upgrading, FAQs, and a request form for upgrading early.

Google AdWords has released a new tool for advertisers to enable them to easily test conversions on different landing pages and elements. The tool then shows advertisers the results, including graphs, allowing them to chose the best converting ad options for their campaigns. Advertisers interested in signing up for the beta can do that here: http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/.

Ben Stein usually posts articles on Yahoo! Finance regarding investments, however on Monday he posted a great article entitled, “The Art of (Killing) the Deal” which gives several key ways you can destroy customer relationships. Here are a few which I found especially amusing:

“#3 You learn from talking far more than you learn from listening. Talk all you want, but don’t bother to pay attention to anything your customer says. He’s just a bore.”

“#7 Don’t do it today if you can possibly do it tomorrow. Mañana is your motto.”

“#16 Never apologize, even if you’re totally wrong. Never admit you’ve done anything wrong, no matter what. If you’ve done it, by definition it’s right.”

Over at Search Engine Roundtable is a post regarding all of the problems that YSM is having with its account management interface. We’ve been experiencing the same problems and frustrations on our end since Monday (Oct. 9). As of this morning we’re finally able to login and manage our accounts with no problems.

It’s issues like this one that make us question who our primary ad portal should be moving forward. Yahoo! Search Marketing has always had the most problems between all the different ad portals we use for our clients. Hopefully, with the release of its new CPC model, YSM’s problems will become a thing of the past.

It’s now official, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. The biggest struggle that Google will now face is the filtering of copyrighted material and the current copyright infringement issues that YouTube has been dealing with.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is in talks with YouTube for approximately. $1.6 billion. The rumored aquisitioin is still just speculation and neither party has commented on the issue. YouTube currently holds the lion’s share of monthly audience compared with other top video sites, with over 30 million visitors monthly.