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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

Oct 7, 2008 at 11:59am Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Small Business Alert: Claim Your Google Local Business Listing Before Someone Else Does! Imagine going to the Post Office to check your post office box to discover that all of your mail and receipts for the past few weeks had been forwarded to an unknown party. The Post Office informed you that there was no chance of getting your receipts back and if you wanted to start receiving your mail at your PO box once again, you needed to go over to their new business center and fill out some forms to claim your box. Just notifying the Post Office that it was your box was not enough to protect it in the future. Due to normal delays in processing it would be 2 weeks before you started receiving your mail and money again. If you're a small business with a local listing in one of the major search engines, you need to beware: the same scenario described above could happen to your local search result info if you're not careful. The apparent hijacking of a large number of independent florists in Google Maps several weeks back is just such a story. Google, in the role of Post Office, allowed someone to hijack listings in the Florist industry using the community edit feature. For those of you unfamiliar with the incident here is a brief recap. The technique, apparently in widespread use in the locksmith, pay day loan and other industries, exploited weaknesses in Google's Community Edit capability. In this newly reported case in the floral industry, affiliate mapspamers targeted high ranking florists in major markets that had not claimed their business listings in the Local Business Center so as to be able to benefit from an existing businessâ ranking and reviews. The spammers, using these community edit tools, would change the phone number to another local number, change the location of the business slightly and then proceed to add a category, a new URL and ultimately the change name of the business. Apparently the smal

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

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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.

Oct 3, 2008 at 9:48am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Removes Directory Links From Webmaster Guidelines Brian Ussery reported that Google has dropped two important bullet points from the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Those bullet points include: * Have other relevant sites link to yours. * Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites. At the same time, Google Blogoscoped reported that Google removed the dictionary link in the search results, at the top right of the results page. Related, I am not sure. I speculated that maybe Google is going to go after more directories in the future. By removing those two bullet points, maybe Google can do this - without seeming all that hypocritical. In addition, I noted a comment from Google John Mueller at a Google Groups thread where he explained the logic behind removing those two points: I wouldn't necessarily assume that we're devaluing Yahoo's links, I just think it's not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it's obviously fine to get listed there. It's not something that people have to do though :-). As you can imagine, this is causing a bit of a commotion in some of the forums. Some are worried, some are mad, and some are confused by the change.

"complaint center"

"Linux servers are open source and can be based on a number of different distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, or FreeBSD."

"Non-Essential Home Retail up +6% week-over-week, +8% over last month, +77% against pre-COVID average. "

"Social Media Marketing Industry Report"

"Enticed by the possibility of high returns, financial institutions have flooded into the voluntary carbon market, working as carbon "�brokers' helping bringing integrity to the market and helping small companies continue to participate in carbon trading. While heavily polluting industries, particularly in the energy, cement, and metals production sectors have experience with carbon trading (largely because they are required to buy offsets in the EU-ETS, small companies can be overwhelmed by the complexities of the carbon market. This has created a demand for financial intermediaries to help companies navigate the emissions trading scene while at the same time, generating significant profits. Business leaders around the globe now realize that going green is not an unbearable plight but rather a win-win situation.

The Nofollow Link & Social Media Published by Your SEO Mentor under SEO, Social Media Aug 23 2008 There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. "Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it." First of all don't worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results. The NoFollow link (e.g. ) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, "nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place." With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn't mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to

Current Top 20 Social Bookmarking sites that Dofollow