Greg Niland and Frank Watson Search for Solutions on WebmasterRadio.FM

Two more of the long-term legends of search engine marketing are coming to WebmasterRadio.FM starting next week.

Greg Niland (GoodROI.com) and Frank Watson (Smart-Keywords.com), are teaming up to present Search for Solutions debuting Monday February 1 at 7pm ET/4pm PT.

Greg Niland (aka GoodROI) was the original host of Good Karma which aired on WebmasterRadio.FM from December 2005 until December 2007. An active member of the Internet Marketers of New York and avid organizer of IMNY charity events, Greg is one of the swiftest search marketers in the world.

Frank Watson (aka AussieWebmaster), is well known in the SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing communities. He is also a staple speaker on the web marketing conference tour making frequent appearances at Search Engine Strategies and Affiliate Convention events. He is a writer, educator, lecturer and one hell of a fine web marketer. His columns can be read regularly at Search Engine Watch.

Greg and Frank will have a free wheeling sort of show where they will take and pose difficult questions on search marketing and the business of being a working webmaster. With nearly three decades of experience between them, Greg and Frank are enormous additions to the WebmasterRadio.FM family of show hosts.

Tune into Search for Solutions, weekly on WebmasterRadio.FM starting Monday February 1, 2010 at 7pm ET, 4pm PT or download podcasts from the WebmasterRadio.FM archives, from iTunes, or from other fine podcast distribution outlets.

Bing+Yahoo=?: Decoding the Deal of the Decade, A Special SearchCast with Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan joins New York Times SEO Expert Marshall Simmonds on a special SearchCast tonight at 7PM Eastern (4PM Pacific) on WebmasterRadio.FM to discuss the Microsoft Bing – Yahoo Search agreement.

Dominated by Google for most of this decade, search advertising is a multi-billion dollar a year business. Google has commanded such an overwhelming share of the search advertising market for so long, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have been unable to present any credible competition and a sense of stagnation in the search marketplace set in.

Microsoft has been trying to strike a deal with a very reluctant Yahoo for over a year. Its attempts to acquire all or part of Yahoo was one of the defining events in tech in 2008. Yesterday’s announcement from Yahoo and Microsoft is the start of what will unarguably become one of the greatest shifts in the history of search.

To better understand the impact of yesterday’s announcement, Join Danny Sullivan and Marshall Simmonds live at 7PM eastern this evening (July 30) on WebmasterRadio.FM for a special episode of SearchCast.

The Benefits of BingYa!

Yesterday’s announcement of a 10-year pact between Microsoft and Yahoo! changed the trajectory of the search engine industry. Where there was no apparent competition in the business of search last week, the alliance between the second and third place search engines has at least laid the foundation for a credible though not necessarily dangerous competitor.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing will serve algorithmic search results on Yahoo!’s network. Yahoo! will, in turn, take over the provision of paid search advertising and contextually based ad placement across Microsoft search and web properties. Microsoft will support Yahoo! with revenue guarantees for the next 18-months and Yahoo! cedes all its search technology, including its deep well of patents, to Microsoft.

Though Yahoo! will be taking over the paid search advertising end of the business for both companies, Microsoft’s Ad-Center will be the PPC ad-buying platform, replacing Panama, the platform Yahoo! spent the better part of the last four years building.

Yahoo! will be able to drastically reduce its expenses through employment redundancies and savings from no longer maintaining or improving its search technologies. Microsoft’s Bing gets instantly propelled to the #2 position providing about 1/4 of all search results.

In battlefield terms, Microsoft has managed to ally with a former foe in what can only be described as a mutual defense alliance against a much larger enemy, the equivalent of the Greeks and Visigoths getting it together to fend off advances by the Roman Empire. Microsoft has closed one battlefront in order to focus on the more pressing problem of a much greater one.

At first glance, observers note that had Yahoo! seized a deal offered by Microsoft last year, shareholders and employees would likely have been better served though Yahoo! would have lost total control of its destiny. There are many who might argue that Yahoo! had already lost control of its own destiny, a power pushed away by the combined forces of the markets, two clever competitors and poor planning in the first half of this decade.

Whichever the view, all agree something had to change. The coupling of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create seismic shifts in the various businesses and marketplaces surrounding the search industry. Let’s take a look at the various sectors immediately (or very soon to be) affected by the new-born beast known as BingYa!

Microsoft
The biggest benefactor of the deal, Microsoft has taken the number two spot in its bid to disrupt the juggernaut known as Google. It has also put itself in a position to slowly subsume the search businesses developed and previously funded by Yahoo!. After the introduction of its new search engine Bing in late June, Microsoft needed to find a way to monetize it. While it owned its own ad-serving platform, it had not developed the technology to properly serve contextual paid advertising.

Microsoft spent most of last year trying to purchase Yahoo!. Last year, Microsoft was offering nearly $40billion in total for all of Yahoo!. This year, it got the parts of Yahoo! it wanted, (search), without paying a cent. Financially, Microsoft has guaranteed revenues at Yahoo for the next 18 months.

Microsoft projects about $1billion in extra revenues per year under this agreement.

Yahoo!
It is hard to say how badly Yahoo! has fared as a result of this agreement but from where I am sitting, it does not look as good as it could have.

On one hand, the company survives with its name intact and the ability to focus on providing media to what is effectively the world’s largest content network. It also gets to continue selling paid search advertising, the literal golden-goose of search revenues. Yahoo! projects a combination of expanded revenues and cost savings boosting their bottom line by about $700million.

On the other hand, Yahoo! is no longer in the business of providing search results. Yahoo! is no longer an independent search engine. This must be a bitter pill to swallow for the company which was once the brand that represented search with one of the most talented development teams on the Internet. Yahoo! gives up a lot of technology and a decade’s worth of innovation. As Danny Sullivan has noted, Yahoo! suddenly looks a lot like AOL.

Google
It is very hard to say how this impacts Google in the long run. In the short-term, the deal will have no appreciable effect on Google which is by far the most popular and profitable player in the search industry. Google never had to take Yahoo! or Microsoft too seriously in the search-space as it has held an virtually insurmountable lead against its two largest rivals for so long. Google actually made more money in the second quarter of 2009 than Yahoo! made in all of 2008. On the surface, Google’s got nothing to worry about.

In the long-run, a rejuvenated Microsoft poses a couple concerns for Google. One is that Microsoft might actually get its act together on the cloud computing front and in mobile markets. Google is investing a lot of energy and money in developing an operating system and ancillary services for hand held computing devices. Google’s Chrome, Wave and Docs are all geared towards collaborative computing on hand held devices with documents stored on remote servers. That’s the basis of Google’s not-so-secret smash-Microsoft’s markets strategy. Now that Microsoft does not have to concentrate energy on monetizing search, it can throw more resources into its core businesses, operating systems and productivity suites. The deal with Yahoo! gives it a way to further monetize both in the long run.

Barring extraordinary developments, ten years from now Google will likely still be the number one player in the search sector.

Search Engine Optimization Experts (SEO)
Perhaps the sector with the most to gain and the most to lose from this deal, BingYa! has been widely praised within the SEO industry. SEO clients care about Google placements almost to the exclusion of placements on Yahoo! or what was Microsoft Live. I have the sense that SEO clients are as interested in Bing as other Internet users are however Google is where the vast bulk of search referred traffic comes from and therefore Google is front-of-mind for SEOs.

Bing is generally thought highly of within the search marketing community. It is a good engine, perhaps better than Yahoo!’s. It is also fairly easy to optimize for, relying on a number of common signals such as title, text, internal site structure and topical relevance from page to page within a site. Because Google has basically defined SEO technique for the past five years, optimizing for Yahoo! and Microsoft Live was always a second thought. The advent of a two-search engine system might increase the perceived importance of non-Google placements, especially when one considers that the combined reach of Yahoo! and Bing is nearly 30% of the total search market.

Paid Search Engine Marketing Experts (PPC)
The agreement between Yahoo! and Microsoft will have an enormous impact on the PPC business. Yahoo! is the world’s largest content network. Microsoft owns one of the world’s largest content networks. Combined, the two networks are too large to be adequately described. Imagine being able to contextually place advertisements throughout that network?

It is going to take between 18 – 24 months (after regulatory approval) to combine Yahoo! Search Marketing with Microsoft Ad-Center. When the two are merged, Yahoo!’s already developed sales force will use the Ad-Center platform to enable PPC advertising to the biggest passive audience possible. The real question will be, will Internet users actually choose to visit Yahoo! or Bing to conduct searches. Pushing contextual ads to content sites is one thing. Having consumers come to you and pre-qualify themselves before having advertisements pushed across their monitors is quite another.

I suspect the deal will turn out to be very beneficial to the paid search marketing sector and might further popularize contextual online advertising for businesses.

Traditional Media Players
Note to Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Fox and others traditional media makers; re: The Future

That thumping sound you hear is the last nail in your collective coffin being positioned or it’s the sound of consumers dancing on your graves. I’m not sure which because I can’t really hear that thumping myself. I only have your confused and often off-point descriptions and convolutions to judge the noise by and I can’t be sure you have the background to properly describe it in the first place.

Remember Lloyd Braun? He was the guy who worked for Terry Semel when Semel was chief Yahoo in the early part of this decade. He was nicknamed Hollywood Lloyd, in part because of his connections with the movie and music industries and in part because it was his job to collect professionally produced content for Yahoo!’s media network. His Burbank initiatives failed but the set of offices opened for his team remains.

You’re not going to see Lloyd again. He is rumored to be searching for the super-secret poker game Elvis, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Marvin Gaye have going 24/7 in Bolivia. What you will see is a renewed effort from Yahoo! to capitalize on convergence. Expect it to be their mantra but don’t expect them to want to pay much for your media. It’s not media anymore anyway, it’s content now. Content isn’t worth as much as media once was. Get used to it.

The Yahoo! – Microsoft deal, for traditional media, represents a perfect storm of convergence and the ability to distribute internally monetized content. Where the traditional media businesses controlled distribution and made its wealth on excellence and exclusivity, the Internet allows anyone with access (about 1/4 of the world’s population) to be as excellent as their talent allows. Knowing that both Microsoft and Yahoo! desperately need to expand distribution channels and, knowing that both now have the ability to concentrate on either creating or acquiring those new channels leads me to believe we’re going to see something disruptive on the distribution front in the next half-decade.

End Note: I’m not even thinking about the video game market in this piece. That alone is worth another column and a lot of thought. There’s a number of other areas I’m not actually touching on in this piece. In the future, I want to think about display, real estate, news aggregation, instant messaging, file sharing, social media and a host of other patented tricks owned, operated or in development from Microsoft or Yahoo!.

Affiliate Convention Delegate Breakdown

The upcoming affiliate marketing conference, Affiliate Convention has released a several charts giving a detailed breakdown of exactly who is attending Affiliate Convention, where they come from, what they do and the promotion techniques they use to do it. The charts give an interesting glimpse into the make-up of the affiliate marketing industry.

The Delegate Breakdown Page on the Affiliate Convention website shows that 60% of all people who have registered to attend the affiliate marketing conference, June 17-20 in Denver Colorado, are working affiliate marketers. 10% come from affiliate networks, 9% are affiliate managers, 8% work for agencies, and 6% are merchants. The remaining 6% are sponsors, media, organizers and guests.

Attendance appears to be spread fairly evenly among segments of the affiliate marketing industry. The largest vertical sector represented will be diet, health and beauty (9%), followed by dating and finance (both around 7%), business (6%) and travel (5%).

Primary promotion tactics and techniques are fairly evenly distributed among registered attendees with 20% saying search engine optimization is their primary means of promotion, 19% identifying pay per click advertising, 16% saying blogs are their main promotion vehicles and 14% suggesting they use social networking or viral marketing techniques.

Information gained from registered attendees confirms the choices made by organizers when selecting speakers. There will be several sessions with well known SEO and PPC experts on them, along with a session devoted to social network affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Convention runs June 17 – 20 at the Denver Convention Center. The conference is free for all affiliate marketers who can prove they are working with a major affiliate network. Admission is also free to all members of the popular AffSpot Affiliate Forums.

Dark Arts PPC Tweet-up w/Marty Weintraub on PPC Rockstars

Social media and PPC master Marty Weintraub from aimClear joins Clix Marketing founder David Szetela on the PPC Rockstars this afternoon at 4PM EDT on WebmasterRadio.FM.

Both David and Marty are considered innovative pioneers in the use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, along with their extraordinary powers of PPC marketing.

Listeners are invited to join the conversation today via Twitter by using the hashmark, #ppcrockstars.

Google Introduces Behavioral Targeting to AdWords

Google today announced the inclusion of user behavioral targeting in the distribution of AdWords advertising via the AdSense program. The feature, named Interest-Based Advertising, will send ads to Internet users based on “interests” they have shown while online.

What this means is Google is actively tracking every move its users make while online and then delivering advertisements tailored directly to a user’s personal surfing habits.

For example, I tend to consult newspapers from the various cities I’ve lived in over the years each morning. I also use the Internet to book flights several times a year. Put those to pieces of information together and a reasonable observer (such as Google) might assume I am interested in finding information about hotels, restaurants and transportation options in those cities.

Similarly, if I obsessively check financial information sites such as finance.yahoo.com and thestar.com/business, I would likely begin to receive AdWords advertising regarding financial services in Toronto Ontario or ads for stocks I researched at Yahoo.

Advertisers have long salivated at the ability to target consumers based on individual traits. Demographic profiling was one step. Direct behavioral targeting is quite another. It will be interesting to see how Google users react to the news Google is watching everything the do when online. Several other search players do the same though no one else is using such a depth of information to deliver advertisements.

Google does give users the option to opt-out of the ad-delivery system. According to the Official Google Blog,

• Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google’s ad serving.
• Choice – We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
• Control – You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn’t deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.

An Experiential SMX West Review

Ever been in a busy room full of people and felt as if you and they were not really there? The sensation falls between an out of body experience and an unfortunate brain-full of high dosage pain relievers.

Standing with a small group of old-time search marketers on the trade-show floor at Search Marketing Expo (SMXWest) in Santa Clara at the beginning of this week, we all noted how the vibe of the show was sort of like that. Long used to feeling like ghosts in the machine, this month’s pilgrimage to the Valley made many of us feel like spiritless specters. It took a couple of days for the conference spirit to catch its first wind. Unfortunately, the conference was only three days long.
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Searchonomics – Dealing with a Depression

About a year ago, several search marketing commentators, myself included, suggested that the (worsening) economic conditions would pose less a problem for the search marketing sector than other sectors and might, in fact, provoke greater redirection of ad-spend towards search.

At the time, the assumption was simple to make. Every business needs to advertise, especially when business is slightly down. Since search marketing provides inexpensive yet highly effective and traceable advertising options, clients should be beating paths to the doors of search and Internet marketing companies.

In most respects, the assumption has held true. While we read of major layoffs in the traditional advertising sector almost every day now, relatively few layoffs have occurred in the search engine marketing sector. Many SEO, PPC and SEM shops are busier than ever. In one extremely important respect however, what feels like a safe assumption is in reality somewhat shaky.
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Yahoo alters relationship with PPC Advertisers

Yahoo! has made a bizarre alteration to the Terms and Conditions (TaC) of Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns which webmasters should be aware of. Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced it had altered TERM3 of the Sponsored Search and Content Match Program to read:

Sponsored Search 3. OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.

This langauge gives Yahoo! the right to spend advertisers’ monies and inform them after the fact. Yahoo! not only assumes the right to make such changes, they do so without having access to actual conversion (sales) data or the long-term business plans of the advertiser.

WebmasterRadio.FM is following this story and will bring you updates as they happen.

PPC Rockstars with David Szetela makes it’s debut!

WebmasterRadio.FM is proud to announce the newest show on the network:  PPC Rockstars with David Szetela!

This is what David had to say about the new show in an earlier message:

I’m jazzed to report that my first PPC Rockstars broadcast/podcast “airs” on WebmasterRadio.fm (http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Advertising/PPC-Rockstars/) today, May 12, at 4:00 PM EDT, 1 PM PDT, 21:00 GMT.

The show will be broadcast live (or sometimes “taped”) every Monday thereafter, at the same time. My first guest is one of PPC’s brightest stars, Matt Van Wagner of FindMeFaster.

In each week’s show I’ll feature a current or future PPC Rock Star, and have a discussion about one particular aspect of PPC advertising. The goal will be to provide listeners with meaty tips and advice that they can use immediately to improve their PPC campaigns. Topics like conversion optimization, shopping process optimization, etc. are fair game.

Listeners are guaranteed to learn insider PPC advertising tips and secrets that will make (or save) them big chunks of money – or I’ll cheerfully refund the price of admission.

And I’ll sweeten the pot: listen to the first show (the live version or the podcast – available via Webmaster Radio and from iTunes), and then send me advice for future shows using The Clix Marketing PPC Blog’s Contact form (http://www.clixmarketing.com/blog/contact-us/), and I’ll send you a free Clix Marketing T-shirt and an opportunity to appear in The Clix Marketing PPC Blog Dry T-shirt Gallery.

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