Lots and lots of stories were written about MSN's promised PPC platform launch. Danny Sullivan's written a comprehensive overview at SEW. The most innovative dimension of the new product (beyond adding a major competitor to the marketplace) is the demographic…
Toronto-based DCCI has partnered with Ingenio to give online publishers the option to offer local phone numbers to advertisers seeking to adopt Pay per Call. Right now, the option is targeted pretty much exclusively to IYP publishers in North America.…
I cut out on SES early to head to Denver to observe a focus group conducted by our research partner ConStat, Inc. The point was to find out anecdotal information about consumer behavior, the purchase cycle for both products and…
Though still in beta, Google last night put Local on the Google.com home page. No longer will users need to go to the somewhat buried Local.Google.com, nor will local results come up irregularly and, from a user point of view,…
Small business Web host Affinity Internet recently launched a product called €œValueTraffic Deluxe,€ which is an upgraded version of its previously deployed, guaranteed clicks, €œValueTraffic€ product. For a flat monthly fee of US$500, the service delivers a minimum of 250…
The conventional wisdom is that there is little or no search-engine loyalty€"Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Jeeves, InfoSpace/DogPile, Lycos, etc. are €œjust a click away€œ from Google. I hear this argument again and again -- and as a hypothetical matter it's true.…
Like Yahoo! before it, Google announced a significant increase in Q1 revenues. Profits were US$369.2 million on revenues of US$1.26 billion (vs. revenues of US$651 million in Q1 last year), beating analysts' expectations. Growth appeared to be driven in part…
Traditional media, including TV, Yellow Pages and newspapers, face a central paradox and challenge that was explored in Lincoln Millstein's keynote at Drilling Down on Local. In a very thoughtful presentation, he advanced a skeptical view of the revenue potential…
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Internet as an advertising medium has surpassed radio in the U.K. Ad spending on the Internet in 2004 was 653.3 million pounds, or US$1.2 billion, representing 3.9 percent of total advertsing in the…
No doubt Google's acquisition of Urchin Software (rumoured by Battelle to be worth $30 million) was in the works for a while, but MSN's AdCenter announcement (with its enhanced analytics) might have given the deal whatchya might call a "nudge."…
There was an article today in the NYTimes about click fraud. The piece is pretty balanced: it's happening but the search engines are dealing with it. I think that's the reality in the marketplace; it's there but it's not terribly…
Search marketing firm Oneupweb released data showing that four-keyword queries were correlated with the highest conversion rates, compared with shorter and longer strings. Over a roughly six-month period, average conversion rates for paid search ads appearing in response to those…
I'm late to the party, but results from the NextSearchSurvey, an online survey of search engine users about the current state of search and its future direction are available here. The survey was conducted from August, 2004 through November, 2004.…
Today Vonage, a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider, which serves both residential and small business customers, announced it would begin offering Wi-Fi service through an agreement with UTStarcom beginning this Spring. While UTStarcom will provide the portable handset, Vonage…
Following in the footsteps of other "small business aggregators," (e.g., Yellow Pages publishers, Web hosts, Newspapers) real estate vertical HomeGain.com has launched a simplified search engine marketing program for local brokers and agents. Dubbed "SearchMaximizer," it will encompass Google, Yahoo!,…
Truth be told, I don't much enjoy watching awards ceremonies, which can be mind-numbingly dull if not done well. The YPA hired entertainer Roy Firestone, who did his best to liven up the evening. He was fine (although his show…
For years after it was effectively dead, the At Hand URL still allowed access to the front door of a failed experiment. That experiment was an effort to create a nationwide, Internet Yellow Pages network. The idea was a single…
One of the questions being asked in the wake of the stock hits that Google, Yahoo! and FindWhat took last week is: Can search engine marketing growth be sustained? If the attendence at this year's SES show is any kind…
Microsoft formally (and finally) launched its search engine on Monday. What happens now? Of course the market will tighten to some degree. Keynote Systems found that
The latest round of Pew consumer research concludes that most search engine users are still confused about what's paid search and what's not. According to a report issued yesterday, 62% of respondents to Pew's telephone survey were "unaware" of a…
