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Oct 8, 2008 at 8:28am Eastern by Greg Sterling Online Ad Revenues Up Vs. 2007, Down Vs. Q2; Search A Relative Bright Spot Overall online ad spending in the US was up almost 13 percent compared with Q2 2007, but down slightly (0.3 percent) from Q1 2008. Online ad revenues for the second quarter were $5.7 billion, compared with $5.8 billion in Q1. Revenues were $11.5 billion for the first six months of 2008 vs. approximately $10 billion during the same period in 2007, according to the IAB. Search took a bigger share (44 percent) of the pie than it did in the first half of 2007 (41 percent). Otherwise the first six months of 2008 look quite similar in most respects to the first half of 2007. The question now is: how will a souring economy impact Q3 and Q4? Here are some IAB graphics reflecting the spending trends: Most ad categories are flat or differ by a percentage point, except for Search and Classifieds (which includes yellow pages/directories). Those two saw gains and losses of three points respectively. The concentration of ad spending among the top online players remained consistent with 2007 in terms of percentage distribution. Among the top spending industry categories, retail and financial services were down slightly in the first half vs. last year: Expect those numbers to decline further in the second half, as weakness in both sectors gets (perhaps much) worse before things improve. Overall, performance based advertising saw gains of 2 percentage points, while CPM pricing saw an equivalent decline in the second quarter vs. a year ago. I would also expect this trend to continue in the second half as advertisers look to the greater "accountability" of performance-based pricing from their online ad buying. This will continue to benefit search in a relative sense, but no one will likely be spared the effects of the recession.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (formerly adCenter Add-in for Excel Beta) is a keyword research and optimization tool that operates seamlessly in Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Oct 22, 2008 at 7:13pm Eastern by Greg Sterling Relying On Print Yellow Pages? Most Local Customers Turn To The Web! Online marketers have been predicting the death of print yellow pages for years. While that will never happen, print yellow pages are no longer the primary way that people seek local information. In fact, the internet collectively - through search engines, local search sites, online yellow pages and other venues - is the top way consumers look for local information. A new study underscores this change and documents with hard numbers why local advertisers have to take the internet into account when trying to reach customers. The study The shift from print to web was captured by advertising agency TMP Directional Marketing, which commissioned comScore to perform a study in May 2007 about local search user behavior - online and off. The stated purpose was to "understand the use and value of on- and offline local search sources," including Internet yellow pages, print yellow pages and search engines. That study involved behavioral observations and survey responses from 3,000 members of comScore's US consumer panel. TMP followed up that original study with a second one this year, in July 2008. The results were released late last week. This overview compares the topline findings from the previous study and those just published. Internet now 'primary' local information source When asked about their "primary" source for location business information, here's how survey respondents answered: In the 2007 findings, print yellow pages were the single, leading source for local business information. However the internet, in the aggregate, was used as a primary tool by almost twice as many respondents. In the 2008 survey, search engines (e.g., Google) have pulled ahead of print yellow pages, while internet yellow pages (e.g., Yellowpages.com) saw growth and local search sites (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo Local) experienced a slight usage

Google has unleashed a new feature in AdWords and is making it available to all U.S. advertisers. The feature is called Product Extensions and it uses information from an advertiser's account in Google Merchant Center. Product extensions allow images to be shown with your ad. The ads include a plusbox, which expands the ad. Advertisers will not be charged when a user simply clicks the plusbox - only when a user actually clicks through to the site.

Though bidding on competitors' trademarked keywords, and even using them in ad text, are fair game on Google, the company does have policies preventing false or misleading ad copy. According to a spokesperson, "Google allows advertisers to bid on competitor keywords as well as to use competitor terms in the ad text itself as long as advertisers do not make any false or inaccurate claims in their ads (see more here). We use a combination of manual and automated processes to enforce this policy. Ads that are found in violation of our policies will be removed."

Top 10 Industry Search Terms - September, 2008 By Hitwise US The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise All Categories category for the 4 weeks ending September 27, 2008, based on US Internet usage. 1. myspace - .78% 2. craigslist - .47% 3. ebay - .34% 4. youtube - .26% 5. myspace.com - .26% 6. facebook - .20% 7. yahoo - .19% 8. mapquest - .16% 9. www.myspace.com - .10% 10. craigs list - .09% Top 10 Fast Moving Search Terms - September, 2008 by Hitwise This list features the search terms for the industry All Categories, ranked by largest relative increase for the week ending September 27, 2008, compared with the week ending September 20, 2008. 1. dancing with the stars 2. paul newman 3. david blaine 4. clay aiken 5. britney spears 6. 2009 ford mustang concept car 7. hooters 8. criss angel 9. heroes 10. presidential debate Some of the terms that are off the top ten list from August: sarah palin, hurricane gustav, how to get a tax refund, palin, democratic convention Average Search CPC Data by Category for September 2008 Reported by ClickZ based on an Efficient Frontier study A look at the average CPC (define) in search by vertical in the U.S. for September 2008, compared to the prior month. Data and research are provided by Efficient Frontier. "Total finance" includes auto finance, banking, credit, financial information, insurance, lending, and mortgage. Each vertical contains data from multiple advertisers. The percentage of change from the previous month is indicated in parenthesis. Total Finance - $2.06 (-22.6%) Mortgage - $2.89 (7.8%) Insurance - $12.65 (4.3%) Travel - $0.69 (-4.2%) Automotive - $0.54 (-5.3%) Retail - $0.50 (13.6%) Dating - $0.44 (2.3%) The biggest change came in the Finance category which dropped from $2.66 in August to $2.06 in September. Paid Search Spending Pops: Very few cuts planned, most plan to splurge From eMarketer

Social Intent vs. Search Intent More importantly, Facebook ads not only fail to gauge what a user's current intent might be, but they fail to acknowledge what Facebook know a user's intent is. Essentially, most Facebook users log on to socialize, not buy. In this respect, Facebook ads can make you look a lot like the guy who goes around a cocktail party trying to sell insurance. Social intent is probably one of the main reasons that Facebook's average CPM ranges somewhere between 13 and 53 percent below the industry standard. Indeed, as ClickZ reported, Facebook ads get half the clicks of network banners and the average click-through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads in 2009 was 0.063 percent and 0.051 percent in 2010. Conversely, the average CTR on AdWords is around 2 percent. That's 20 times the industry standard and almost 40 times that for Facebook ads. This is probably because many search sessions revolve specifically around making a purchasing decision -- maybe not buying right then and there, but deciding how the user will buy when they're ready. And when they are ready, there's a decent chance they'll return to Google to recall that product or purchasing decision they arrived at during previous sessions. Context is Everything Given Facebook's position in the marketplace, this isn't to say that Facebook ads should be ignored by marketers. Indeed, Facebook has become such mainstream channel, that it can't be ignored by certain advertisers. As this Webtrends study points out: ... industries that are fun to discuss with our network are seeing higher CTR. ... Brands that are social get a higher CTR, which translates into better engagement metrics: Post Quality Score, EdgeRank, Feedback Rate, and others. In turn, Facebook rewards such behavior with a lower cost-per-click and greater visibility in the News Feed. It's the marketers and/or campaigns that are driven by results, however, that should think twice before investing too much into Facebook -- especially if

Took me awhile to get a sense of exactly what they do - but I think the core of it is that they have packages depending on what industry you are in, and based on that put you into a network of relevant sites. These sites all run banner advertisements for a cost per number of impressions. It's basically like IYP advertising. We should definitely explore adding this as a service. Service would include gathering network of applicable sites, creating ads, and reporting on monthly stats. More active management, like ad copy testing, could be included.

Starting today you can buy Promoted Videos directly in AdWords. Any AdWords advertiser with video content - from a small business looking to promote a product, to a movie studio premiering a new trailer - can use Promoted Videos to make sure their videos find a larger audience. This integration will provide a single destination for your overall Google ad buy, and will give YouTube advertisers access to campaign tools in AdWords.

Smart Goals harness aggregated conversion data from Google Analytics-enabled sites for advertisers that don't have another way to track and optimize for conversions.

Oct 8, 2008 at 5:55pm Eastern by Matt McGee Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Yahoo has announced that they'll begin to roll out Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on a limited basis beginning this week. According to Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo's Web Analytics VP, the service has already been made available to select Yahoo advertisers and third-party application developers. The next "big deployment," Kavathekar says, will be for Yahoo's 13,000 e-commerce customers hosting under the Yahoo Small Business service. Beyond that, Yahoo Web Analytics will continue to roll out for the rest of this year and into 2009. Yahoo's analytics service is a result of the company's purchase of IndexTools earlier this year. Shortly after the purchase, Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen announced the company's plans to make Yahoo Web Analytics free. In its FAQ about the new analytics service, Yahoo suggests three reasons why its product is better than the competition: 1. Real-time Data: "While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after collection, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection." 2. Raw Data: "While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form." 3. Ease-of-Use and Flexibility Yahoo offers a sign-up form for future updates on the Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) home page. Update: Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen explains more and shares screenshots in a new post on VisualRevenue.

Oct 14, 2008 at 2:19pm Eastern by Greg Sterling YouTube Now Featuring "Promoted Videos" Perhaps the "third leg" of the new YouTube monetization tool, the site has introduced "promoted videos." These ads are to YouTube video search results as Google paid search is to organic listings. AdAdge wrote about the new ads yesterday. This new ad unit joins "click to buy" and ads on full-length shows, which were also introduced within the past week. Here's an example of the promoted videos (right column) on a search results page on YouTube: In this case the search was "puppies" and only one of the ads is relevant. This is likely a function of a limited number advertisers at this point. Because promoted videos are fairly unobtrusive and consistent with the appearance of YouTube search results, they don't impinge on the user experience. And while they could be quite effective for Google, the challenge will be to get enough coverage so that they're relevant to queries and users click on them accordingly.

Oct 3, 2008 at 5:37pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan Banner Ads & Image Ads On Google Images Google Images & Banner Ads Closeup Earlier this week, we noted a report that Google was showing banner ads on Google Images. Now via TechCrunch, a new implementation - an AdWords ad on Google Images with its own thumbnail image. Notice in the screenshot above how a Guinness Logo is appearing next to a Target ad where NHL Buffalo merchandise is being sold on a search for buffalo logos. While a Guiness logo is being used as part of the ad isn't clear. Here's the ad in context: Google Images & Banner Ads While showing an image next to ad is a big step for Google, it's not that far removed from video they've tested with some ads. But an actual banner ad that they've tested with some ads. But an actual banner ad that SearchViews spotted on Google Images is another thing entirely: Google Image SERPs with banner ad See it down at the bottom of the page? An actual banner ad. We're checking with Google for more details. Postscript: Google sent this: As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they're looking for, we are currently conducting a test to show ads on the results pages for Google Image Search. The experiment is restricted to U.S. advertisers who are using formats including text ads and static image ads. Display Ads Coming In Image Search from us back in May has more details on how Google said this type of test would be coming. There's also some discussion now developing on Techmeme.

Oct 13, 2008 at 9:53am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Now Working With Click Forensics Google allies with click-fraud-detection firm Click Forensics from ComputerWorld reports Google has now agreed to work with Click Forensics to aid in the detection and reporting of search ad click fraud. Specifically, Google said they would now accept click fraud submissions through the product, FACTr. FACTr is a product Click Forensics created with the help of Yahoo to gather and submit click-quality reports. Google will now be accepting these reports electronically, hopefully streamlining the process for advertisers to get refunds for approved click fraud. Looksmart and Miva are also now accepting them, along with Google, in news that Click Forensics announced last week. As you may remember, Google and Click Forensics have not always seen eye-to-eye. But this is a nice step to see from both parties involved. As a matter of history, Yahoo partnered with Click Forensics back in March of this year.