So maybe Microsoft is not calling it 2.0 but since my job is marketing I will go ahead and do it for them. That way I beat the street and will be the first blogger to break the news. If you are a PPC advertiser with Yahoo or Bing you know that on October 25th your Yahoo ads quit working and things were transitioned over to Bing. Now Bing/Yahoo combined can advertise that they own around 20-30% of the overall search space and therefore are hoping to command a bit more of the advertising dollars that have built the Google empire.

My question to the world, do you think its working?

My company has a pretty substantial advertising program with Google and we have maintained a scaled version of Yahoo and Bing advertising hoping to maintain some market presence but over the past two years we have only seen minimal success relative to Google. But I must say I liked the idea of the combined advertising and the fact that Bing is running a huge marketing blitz lately. Its only mid-November so I haven’t formulated my opinion yet but I can say that the content advertising is not meeting my expectations but the PPC search ads are still up in the air.

Anyway I wish Bing 2.0 the best of luck and I hope they gain more market share, I like competition and currently the only people pushing Google to be better is Google themselves. Google currently has around 80-90% market share for search depending on who you ask, that’s difficult to maintain but also a huge hill to climb for the competition.

So as I’m sitting here writing this post I am using Firefox. Why Firefox instead of chrome or IE? Well primarily because I really enjoy the open nature and ideology of Firefox and the community that supports the plug-ins and supporting applications. Various reports around the internet suggest that Firefox owns about 25% of the search engine browser market, that is outstanding for a company without the huge financial support like Google or Microsoft.

Firefox once upon a time was a not for profit organization and all though the company became for profit a few years back. Through there public filings and a great article from the Registry Mozilla the parent company has made everyone aware for years that 86% of their revenue is from a non-disclosed search engine provider. Well since we only know a few companies who can do this it is pretty well known that it is Google. So with Google now wanting Chrome to own more and more market share every year will they continue to pay Firefox to make Google their default search engine provider in the US?So what is Google thinking behind the scenes, should they continue to keep Firefox in business? If they don’t will Microsoft step in so that Bing can continue to gain more market share? In the wonderful world of big business a couple of things are for sure. Market share means people, people mean money, and money means bigger boats and nicer cars.

Firefox is a great tool but the big search engine manufacturers already have their own interface, so what will happen with Firefox in 2001. I wish they would start an open source compete to Google and Bing but if not I wish them the best and I expect if Google debates then Microsoft with Bing will be there waiting.

I work for a small company where everyone has several hats, one of my ongoing tasks is to manage our PPC advertising as one of our primary forms of lead generation. It is critical that our PPC advertising stays current, produces a high ROI, and that we monitor it closely to maintain our lead generation. But I have a hundred other things to do such as supporting sales, generating brochures, monthly newsletters, competitive analysis, product testing/feedback, partner management, and organic search engine growth to name a few. We had two options; keep everything in house or outsource to one of the hundred of companies that manage search engine marketing and advertising.

Ultimately the decision we made was to keep our online advertising and marketing internally, here are a few of the reasons why:

1. PPC advertising is a primary source of our revenue and lead generation. We could not see outsourcing our primary sales medium to a 3rd party.
2. Although not an expert in PPC management myself, I had two things going for us. First I had a resource in my organization who had been previously managing it that I could go to regarding questions, decisions, and to talk about ideas. However if we would not have had that resource it would have been extremely difficult to start from scratch.
3. The majority of the companies who manage PPC advertising are paid on a percentage of your spending. So is it really in their best interest to potentially cut certain low performing campaigns or expensive keywords?
4. We had some bandwidth to try new things. Which gave me freedom to learn under fire as they say. By making small changes and testing those against our current statistical model we knew if the changes were successful, hurting our sales, or neutral.

Now all that said I have four recommendation to any Adwords newbie.

• Don’t take on Adwords by yourself, work with someone who has experience and can help you understand the power of the program.
• Do stay very engaged at the beginning.  Play with it yourself and monitor the results to see how your changes affect conversions or lead generation.
• Get setup on Google Analytics
• If you do decide to outsource monitor their results closely, there are a thousand SEO and marketing companies out there but only a handful who are really good. A few reports and some stats each month is not a good Adwords manager! They should be talking with you about conversion rates, campaign performance, increasing/decreasing spending, link building, and organic growth on a regular basis.

Best of luck and happy selling!

Mathworld.com has an article talking about coincidences in math. A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989). Given a large number of events, extremely unlikely coincidences are possible–and perhaps even common.

But I don’t think Google integrating Flash is one of those coincidences, I believe that Schmidt and Google just wanted to get to Jobs and Apple by giving Adobe Flash instant credibility. Just recently Jobs lashed out against the poor quality of Adobe and pushing for more people to adopt HTML 5.0 and this two huge search engines Chrome and Mozilla discuss further integrations with Flash. I wonder can we get that guy from the tv show Numbers to run the stats on that?

More info on the integration from Technology Review.

I have been meaning to write this post for a few weeks since I attended their inaugural online demo. I am new to graphic design only really picking up and learning Adobe in the past 12 months. But in that time I have managed to hack my way through Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, and Flash with reasonably success. Most of my work is simple icon design, banner pictures for my company website, or the occasional brochure.

But even as a novice I can see the power in CS5, there is way more incentive for upgrading than what I saw in CS4. The two features that jumped out at me was the puppet warp and the content-aware. If you are a newbie like me to the Adobe creative suite but you need to modify pictures for personal or business reasons you will be amazed at what these two features bring to the table. Its hard to explain but take a quick look at these images from the content-aware feature.

This wasn’t a layered image it was a jpeg that had the content aware applied. If this feature works half as well on my projects then it could save me hours of editing. For more info on Adobe CS5 take a look here: http://cs5.org/?cat=3

Ok I must be the only person in America who is just not sold on the new iPad. To this point I just don’t see where I would introduce it into my day to day activities. Lets see:

• I just don’t see me putting up my laptop for the iPad just yet.
• It is a bit too big for my back pocket so I guess I need to keep my phone.
• Oh and no arm strap so my iPod is safe for the moment.

CNET recently did an article on why people purchased the iPad, it has a few eye opening ideas that are worth reading, my favorite was the dedicated coffee table item.

Hey but please still go buy the iPad, spending money is good for the economy! With the economy improving we will see a car in every garage and an iPad on every coffee table.

If you have been watching TV for the last few months you have seen Verizon and AT&T battle it out with their maps of coverage. My personal favorite is the guys watching the football game and the Verizon map is in the way, but when the AT&T guy asks if his map is in the way the overwhelming response is no your fine. Great commercials but the reality is somewhere in the middle I’m sure. I guess that is what Root Wireless is trying to help us with to uncover which mobile carrier is the best for each of us and our day to day use.

Their software which can be installed on smart phones measures signal strength, upload speed, latency, and a bunch of other data points that most of us don’t care much about but then they take the data and do something really cool. They provide an overly on top of geographical maps to show which carrier is the best for where you live, work, or during your commute.

This is pretty cool technology that when it’s fully implemented could be a great tool for consumers and service providers alike. Service providers spend tons of man hours, resources, and money tracking where they have signal issues for their customers a tool like this could allow them to be more proactive to resolve issues.
There are a few limitations preventing wider adoption; currently, they are only supporting about a dozen or so major markets around the US. And their list of supported phones is a bit sparse with a few notable devices missing such as the Blackberry Storm, Motorola Droid, and the iPhone.

Ok now my take on Root Wireless. Few organizations are completely altruistic, my guess is that by collecting this data they will be able to sell their services to wireless providers potentially saving them hundreds of thousands or millions in market research, troubleshooting, and preventive maintenance. What a great idea, I was actually pretty surprised when I found out that the service providers were not doing more of this themselves. I hope to see more about this application in the coming months and can’t wait until its available in Raleigh.

Yesterday I was asked how important I thought listing your website on directories was and if it was worth the time it takes for small business owners to get their site listed on the dozens and dozens of directories out there today.

My first thought was of course, experts in SEO and marketing have been preaching link building and directory listing for years. But then I thought about how much Google has changed the nature of SEO over the past 2-3 years.

Why do you want to list yourself in a directory? The answer is so search engines will find you and display your site under specific keyword searches. Now there may be some other small niche reason but really its all about visibility to people on the internet.

When you create your website or blog and list it with Google webmaster or when you get an Analytics account you have basically told Google that your site exists and provided them with insight to what your site is about. Within 3-4 days of my first post without listing my site anywhere but Google I could find my blog and blog entries in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Now I wasn’t very high up in the list but I was there.

If asked again today I would say it is still important to list your site on the directories for link building purposes and it should help your page rank with the search engines but in order of priority I would have this half way down my list of priorities behind getting my site listed with Google, establishing a social media presence, establishing an RSS feed (for blogs), reviewing my keywords and keyword density on my site, and making my site my own. A website is part of your sales team, it has to have personality and do a great job of representing you.

Its funny how we get so used to how we interface with a particular piece of software, we go through the normal routines and we never look at the new things, the nuances that really make good software applications great. Now Google bugs me with how they do certain things, like not having a phone number for their Google Checkout (If your reading this Google, get a phone!!!!) but Analytics is really a good piece of software for providing a snapshot of your web traffic, traffic sources, advertisement conversions, and goal achievement.

A little trick that I had never seen before was making annotations on the charts denoting anything that might have an impact on your results. For my company we recently made a big change to our website, so we made an annotation of when the website when live.

You can add these annotations by left mouse clicking on one of the “blue dots” in the main chart which launches the pop-up highlighted above.

When you add the annotation you are basicly placing a milestone on your charts. Now going forward when you look back historically you can see exactly when you made significant changes and what they were. This allows teams to isolate what changes resulted in signifcant impact…hopefully for the better.

I am in no way an SEO professional but I do spend a lot of time analyzing PPC ads on Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search , and Bing adCenter. I have seen a few things that worked, and a lot that didn’t; but like anything with technology I expect it will evolve, improve, and provide new options everyday. I have put on my guessing hat for a few minutes and decided to make some projections on what I think we will see with online advertising, specifically PPC advertising over the next 3-5 years.

More Personal Advertising – Companies will be able to set advertising pricing for achieving goals as opposed to just a click. If companies continue to see high volumes of click fraud, irrelevant traffic via poor ad placement, and increasingly higher bid prices there will be a backlash to the search engines. Companies will focus on more personal interaction with customers and  will start to distribute their marketing dollars across other mediums; blog writers, social media, and other industry focused websites/newsletters. These other mediums will have a varying range of ROI and barriers to entry.

Goal Oriented Pricing – Search engines will create new programs other than just impression and PPC pricing. These options might include; monthly flat fees, average pricing based upon previous month(s) spending and results, guaranteed positions based upon the package price, and tiered pricing based upon achieving goal(s). The goal pricing is the most interesting, because it could create some interesting pricing models for companies of all types and sizes.

Expert Recommendations – Human intervention will play a role in the Google page rank. Like encyclopedias in the past and Wikipedia today, humans play a key role in determining what information is relevant. A group of experts that Google trusts will be available, probably for a fee, to review your website and advertisements to provide an extra vote of confidence for your site. This will affect page rank and organic position.

Google Competitors – I think we will see a few different competitors to Google search over the next two years. I expect a few will try the open source approach, a couple will target niche markets, and one of the big players will try to buy the market by greatly reducing advertising costs. By niche markets I mean specific sites or search tools for anything local, national, or international.  For example if I am searching for plumber, I may not care about plumbers available in a different state. But if I am searching for a particular type of software then maybe I just want company websites and not blogs. Customized and refined search results that are easy and doesn’t take much work to create will be critical to the success of these solutions.