RSS (really simple syndication) has changed the way users and websites utilize the web. Whenever a new technology comes along that changes the way we interact with the web, new companies emerge to assist with the process and introduce even more new technologies that are built upon making these technologies usable. Enter Feedburner.

The next big thing is what makes the current big thing better

Unfortunately, I can’t remember who said that (and it might not be in it’s exact form), but that is essentially what Feedburner is accomplishing.

RSS is a technology which allows publishers to push their content around the web. Instead of relying on email and newsletters to keep consumers updated with news or features, RSS puts consumers in control. Continue Reading »
Feedburner Helps Websites Understand Their Content

The new features of Yahoo Search Marketing’s Panama project have been widely discussed and speculated upon. Terry Semel made it public yesterday that the launch of the new system will be delayed until Q4.

It seems that many inside Yahoo have been as uncertain of the launch dates as those outside of Yahoo. No wonder they’re are not many answers. We’ve already had several conference calls with Yahoo about the new API, new interface, new features, etc - and had always been led to believe that August 15th was the launch date. In fact, I had heard that launch date as far back as Q1 of this year.

It seems Yahoo set an aggressive date, tried to keep that date both publicly and internally, and then in the end - just couldn’t hit it.

Yahoo shares fell yesterday after they failed to meet ad sales expectations (and for your internet PPC geeks, many of their sales are CPM based, they have one of the best CPM behavioral buys around). The new Panama system will increase Yahoo’s inventory and profitability - something they sorely need as shares fell after the news was made public.

More Information:

• Yahoo’s Analyst Day Information
• Yahoo’s Rumored New Features
• Stock Ticker: YHOO Information
• What is all this PPC Stuff?

Microsoft adCenter’s conversion tracking code did not function between July 8th-14th due to an upgrade to their system. Hence, if you use the code, you will not have any conversion data inside your adCenter account for that time frame.

The code has since been fixed; however, Microsoft recommends that you update your code by doing the following:

1. Sign in to https://adcenter.microsoft.com.
2. On the Campaigns tab, in the Campaign column, click an existing campaign for which you have conversion tracking enabled.
3. On the Select an order page, in the Order name column, click an order.
4. Click the Order Settings tab.
5. If the Enable conversion tracking check box is not already selected, select it.
6. In the conversion tracking code snippet window, click Copy Code.
   This will temporarily copy the revised https://adcenter.microsoft.com code snippet to your computer clipboard.
7. Re-paste the code snippet within the HTML of the Web pages you want to track.
   You can paste the code snippet anywhere between the HTML body tags. We recommend placing the code toward the bottom right of the page so it does not detract from your page design.
8. Repeat steps 1-7 for any other orders that have conversion tracking enabled.

Note: Whenever a conversion script isn’t functioning for a few days, of course the data will not be transfered to your account. Therefore, when you run reports that include the affected date range, keep that in mind when you look at your cost per conversion data.

Google has often included vertical search results within it’s main results. Often these are from Google Base or Google Local. Google has recently added a new twist on this feature and started showing map results when the search is an explicit business name.

If you want to check to see if a map comes up for your business, the first thing is to do an explicit search of ‘Your Business Name’ and ‘Your City’. If you don’t see a map in the results, there seem to be two different answers. The first is that your business is not listed in Google Local (more on how to be listed below). The second is that there are many locations and Google isn’t quite sure which results to display. Results for Wal-mart, Target, Starbucks did not bring up a map in Google Search.

Let’s first look at the three types of results Google may show on a local query.

Ads are sponsored listings through Google AdWords.
Local results are from Google Local or Google Base.
Organic results are from the natural listings.

Now, let’s take a more in depth look at the possible inventory.

When you see a result like this in the ‘local ad space’ from above, this is a prompt to do a search on Google Base. Listings can be either hand submitted or feed submitted to Google Base.

When you see results with many addresses in them, Google is pulling these listings from Google Local. One can get into Google local by submitting a business directly (requires a pin number to be mailed to you, and then verification. Often takes 4-8 weeks for the entire process to be completed.) or by submitting a feed.

This is the brand new result that Google is now showing. If your business is not in Google Local, it appears that a map will not show for your business. To ensure your business will show up for these results, you need to submit your business to Google Local (or use a service, discussed below).

This is a local.google.com search result. By searching through Google Local, one can determine if your business is in their index. What is interesting about Google local is that a submission may not show up exactly as you submitted it to Google. Basically, Google looks at all the sources it has for a particular business, does some algorithm magic, and then displays what it thinks are the proper results.

In most cases, this works fairly well. However, if you move, change your business phone number, or any information, often the new information will not be shown because in it’s ranking formula, your new information looks incorrect as there is so much other information that is telling Google it’s still the old information.

How does one get their business into Google Local?

There are a few ways. The first is to submit to the Google Business Center. This requires you to first submit your information. Then, Google will email you a pin number (takes 4-6 weeks). Then you must input your pin number into the account your created. Finally, when Google re-compiles their local index, your business will be listed.

The second way is to submit to Google Base. You can login with your Google account and create a listing all about your business. In about 6 weeks, that information will be submitted to Google Local. Again, once the index is recompiled, then your business will be listed.

The last way is to use a Business Distribution Service. Such a service will take your business information and submit it to many local search properties (such as Yahoo Local, Superpages, Judy’s Book, etc). The leader in business data distribution is
RegisterLocal. There, you can create a profile of your business, track all kinds of results (such as phone calls, map views, etc), and even use it for a marketing landing page so that you can see the effectiveness of internet marketing for your business.

Please, don’t use a simple mailto link on the web. That’s the single easiest way to increase the amount of spam you receive. Instead, use a contact form. Wordpress has some plugins for email. If these don’t work for you, I’ve included other options available. If you don’t use wordpress, please skip below, there are options available to you covered here.

The simplest way to add a contact form to wordpress is to use one of these plugins:

• WP-Contact Form Plugin
• In Touch Wordpress Plugin
• Secure Contact Form

With servers and senders going through more email verification these days, these two plugins may not work on your server. If these two won’t work, the next option is to install wpPHP Mailer. This takes a little bit more work as it uses a sourceforge php code. Don’t be afraid of working with PHP if you’re unfamiliar with it. This is a fairly straightforward plugin to work with. The main advantage of this one is that it let’s you put in your email password and account, so it will work with many servers which require an additional level of security.

However, if that still doesn’t work for you (some servers again have issues with this particular plugin), the next is to move to the cgi-bin. If you don’t have a cgi bin, write your administrator, most servers come with a cgi-bin and cgiemail installed.

If you happen to have formmail.pl, please read this first before thinking that’s the best way to proceed.

The cgi bin is pretty easy to work with. The main issue most people have using cgiemail is they don’t realize it’s actually two different files they’re working with.

• The first is the actual form. This is a straightforward form which is located on an html or php page (and can be added to a wordpress post or static page so that it’s integrated nicely with your blog).
• The second page is a .txt file that tells the cgi emailer what to do. (Note: The page must be in iso or ascii, cgi doesn’t work properly with all text formats. So, when you save this page, just do a ’save as’ and look through your options - ascii is the best choice).

The last issue is that some servers don’t seem to process the cgiemail form properly unless it’s stored in the root folder (no idea why, this shouldn’t be an issue, but it happens).

Here are the top documents around to show you how to create these forms:

• Official cgiemail page
• An MIT page with additional help
• And yet another good university page from a website creation class

Finally, the last way is to use a wysiwyg editor (such as Frontpage) and publish to your website (the server must have frontpage extensions installed). Since this will not have the ‘feel’ of your blog, you’ll want to create this in a few different steps.

• First, create a new page in Frontpage using the Feedback or Contact Form template.
• Second, customize the form for the fields you wish to include
• Next, publish (since this uses Webbots, you’ll have to publish it, not FTP the page) the page to your server
• Fourth, create a static Wordpress page and use an iFrame to include the contact page in your regular wordpress page
• Complete. You will now have a contact page from Frontpage that utilizes your blog’s template

If this is your first time working with a form, it will take a little bit of time (if you’re creating it from scratch) to make sure all the details are perfect. If you have some experience with HTML, you should be done in 30-60 minutes. If you don’t it might take an hour or two. However, your inbox will be happy with the reduction of spam you receive.

For a while now, if you’ve visited the ‘Official AdWords Blog’ you’ve probably seen a URL redirect that lands you on ‘data:text/html,’.

I’m not sure of the error, but it’s a homepage erorr. If you go into an individual post, you can then navigate via archives and read everything on the blog. Just don’t visit the homepage.

Here’ an internal link to get you into their blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/archives/2006_04_01_adwords_archive.html

Many people have seen their Min CPCs on AdWords raise considerably the past few days right after the AdWords blog posted about a new quality score change.

Greywolf posted screenshots at Threadwatch showing his min CPC going through the roof.

Webmaster World has several active threads, such as: ‘open letter’, determine QS,, been helped, damage control, and an update thread, and many other smaller threads discussing the quality score damage.

I’ve looked at hundreds of our accounts now, and have yet to see a single one taking a beating due to the new quality score system.

I looked through some of my affiliate accounts, and again, no issues.

So, it’s been difficult to assess what exactly Google is seeing from these accounts who have had their min CPCs raised considerably.

However, I can tell you that a min CPC of $0.01 is still possible:

I then looked at one of my AdGroups with a lot of history, spending around $1k/month, that does have an average CPC of $0.64, and average max bid of $1.50. I wanted to know if I lowered the CPCs to $0.01 what would happen in wake of the new system. The results looked pretty good:

So, while some accounts are seemingly being hit very hard by the recent update - there are others which aren’t seeing any effects at all.

It will be interesting to start to put together the ‘factors’ that are making up this change. For the last QS system, there were about a dozen easy-to-spot factors that could be manipulated as necessary. I’m guessing something similar will happen again once the picture is completely clear.

Click to Call (CTCall) and Pay Per Call (PPCall) are often used interchangeably when they are in fact, quite different.

Pay Per Call (often called PPCall) is similar to PPC (Pay Per Click) except that instead of bidding for clicks to your website, one is bidding for calls. This is a fairly generic term that is used to describe the entire industry of buying phone calls.

The most common form of pay per call is displaying a trackable phone number on a webpage (or search result) and then when a searcher calls the number, the advertiser pays the inventory provider. Often the inventory provider is showing phone calls based upon an open bidding environment - the same way PPClick works.

Click to call is a technology that is used within PPCall. Basically, when one comes across a click to call ad, the searcher will see an open text box for their phone number. When one inputs their phone number into the box and hits ‘connect’ the technology starts to work. Behind the scenes is some telco tech that calls the searcher, calls the advertiser, and then connects the two lines together so they can speak with each other.

Similar to the old geometry adage ‘A rectangle is a square, but a square is not a rectangle’; so is ‘Click to call is PPCall but PPCall isn’t click to call’.

I’ve talked to many people over the past few days about the latest AdWords update. The results are pretty strange overall. I’m hearing about merchants who got hit hard and arbitrage sites that are fine (seems a bit backwards).

On the affiliate side, I’m seeing very mixed results. Some are doing great, others terrible.

Overall, content based sites seem to have escaped relatively unscathed.

I’m collecting data about who got hit hard, who didn’t have any issues at all, and other general observations.

I really don’t want a link drop fest (the wordpress spam filters will autodelete a lot of comments with too many links, especially if the sites are on the blacklist) on the blog.

If you have a comment - please comment.

If you’d rather just send me an email (urls included if you wish - definitely makes analysis easier) please do. I’ll keep the URLs confidential. If I can get enough data to do some real crunching - I’ll do a full write up of the results and see if I can see what’s going on.

SES Miami was an incredibly successful conference. Yes, it was only a rumored 500 or so attendees. Yes, there were just two tracks. Yes, the rooms didn’t hold over 125 or so people (and that was the larger of the two rooms). However, it’s been a long time since everywhere I looked, someone was having yet another relevation.

I arrived on Sunday in time to watch the World Cup finals and hang out with a new crowd I didn’t know much about. While sitting down listening to people I had never met (ok, so I knew about a dozen people on Sunday, but the other few dozen and I didn’t even always share the same language) my preconceived notions I had about Latin American were completely blown away. It’s a much more complex (and exciting) market that I had imagined.

It’s been a while since I went to a conference and just absorbed great information hour after hour. It’s not often that I see people walking around with glazed looks on their faces trying to integrate foreign thoughts, twists on traditional thoughts, and having ideas that they just want to rush home and implement. And then the next hour starts, and there appear a new set of ideas. While, if it were just the new conference attendees (there were a lot of first time SES attendees) that were having these thoughts, the conference would have been successful. The fact that these new ideas were even coming from the ‘experienced’ SES crowd is what made it incredibly successful.

Thanks to Nacho, Danny, and Incisive for putting on a very successful, enlightening show.

FYI -
The powerpoint presentations will be online shortly.