“Google Slap” – May 15th

Has anyone noticed significant changes in Google Adwords traffic patterns around last weekend?

This previously happened around April 1st, April 15th and May 1st of this year.

I come to a conclusion that twice monthly algo changes (aka “Google Slaps” ) can be considered as the norm now.

Sequoia Capital Invest in Kenshoo

Sequoia Capital , a well known VC fund with a substantial track record in the Internet industry has invested in Kenshoo, Search Engine Marketing Innovators from Tel Aviv, Israel, and is now a partner in the company. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed, however given the strategic investment, Sequoia’s market positioning and the synergy between parties, one should expect a major leap for Kenshoo and a much higher profile in the global marketplace. 

Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide

Epiphany Solutions, a Search Engine Marketing agency from Leeds, UK has set up a free, step by step online guide to understanding Search Engine Marketing and PPC. This guide is a very useful resource for beginners, as well as for marketers who want to understand more about Google Adwords.

Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide

Digital Point Forums review

With over 3 million posts and an impressive 30,000 active members, Digital Point Forums is one of the best – and certainly, most visited – community message boards on the Internet.
 
Boasting such a rich vein of traffic, the board has developed in to a hotbed of e-marketing activity. A quick visit to the website will uncover pages upon endless pages of Internet orientated advice. Indeed, there’s so much information on Digital Point that it can be hard to determine where to start.
 
So let’s get to the basics. What is Digital Point focused on?
 
You’ll notice that the forum is divided in to five main sections; Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Site Development and Products.
 
It’s pretty self explanatory what you can expect to find in each section, but slightly less expected is the sheer volume of traffic that passes through these boards on a daily basis. Each forum is bustling with new posts and topics, and they appear on a 24/7 basis. Indeed, you could call Digital Point the forum that never sleeps.

From a marketing perspective, there is plenty to take note of on Digital Point. The board covers all of the major topics that you’d be interested in, from search engine optimization to link development, from affiliate marketing to pay-per-click advertising. It’s all here.

The members that contribute to the discussions are extremely active, although as is always the case with a board of this size, it can take weeks or months before you begin to feel like part of the community. The older members are welcoming to new registrants and if you have a question or a concern, Digital Point is friendly enough to address it accordingly.

One of the centrepieces of the board is unquestionably the “Buy, Sell, Trade” forum. With up to half the members browsing this area of the site at any given time, it immediately becomes clear that Digital Point is much more than a simple advice-based forum.

Sure, if you have a technical issue, the knowledgeable members will more than likely have a solution. But it’s the ability to sell links, trade services and network with the developing community that makes Digital Point such a diverse home for webmasters around the world.

Indeed, browsing Digital Point will give you a fairly good idea of your own progress in an ongoing web project. A little research will uncover several members operating similar web businesses, and you can use their own experiences as a reference for your own.

Many people flock to the link exchange forum as a means to building their link popularity. It should be noted that all payments are handled off-site – PayPal will make life much easier for you – but Digital Point does employ a reputation and auction system.

Most of the control is left down to the members. This is perfectly fine if you’re outsourcing small projects, but think twice before accepting a forum bidder for several months’ worth of work! Digital Point is built on trust and while most members uphold the values honourably, there are always a few bad apples in the basket.

The board is laid out cleanly with what can only be described as a no-thrills layout. It isn’t the greatest design, but it doesn’t have to be. This is a website where functionality and content are the main selling points. And by that judgment, Digital Point excels as one of the best resources on the Internet.

WebmasterWorld.com review

Webmaster World takes all the ease of use from a vBulletin forum and throws it out the window in favour of a board powered by BestBBS. It’s quite obvious that the owners of the site are trying to appeal to a different audience in their approach, and upon first impressions, they’ve succeeded.

Webmaster World looks more like an article resource site than a buzzing community housing thousands of members. But a forum it is, and for those who prefer content over appearance, this is a site which will rapidly feel like home. As you’d guess by the name, Webmaster World offers discussion for those looking to start-up or improve their websites. It could be an online business, a hobbyist site or just about anything in between.

It is presented rather simply with a list of selected topics down the left hand side, and an overview of the forums on the right. The selected topics are titled as “Highlighted Posts”, which essentially means the discussions that are elected worthy of inclusion by the staff team. You’ll typically find two or three of these per day, so it helps to get an immediate idea of what’s going on – whether you’re new to the board, or returning to check up on what you’ve missed.

So what are the main selling points of Webmaster World? Anybody who has dabbled in the arts of E-Commerce will be well aware that the field is literally seething in sub-topics and new technologies. Webmaster World, in a bid to provide a comprehensive coverage of the entire industry, has opted to include just about every forum imaginable on its site.

We have categories for the basic languages of development, in HTML, CSS, PHP, XML and AJAX. We also have an area dedicated to the so called Web 2.0 movement. As the Internet swings towards a new generation of development, you’ll find all the latest discussion on mobile technology, scaled down application and multimedia design.

Perhaps the most useful area of the site is the forum for marketing on the Net. Whether it is link baiting, PPC programmes, Google Adwords, Yahoo…you’ll find just about every noteworthy topic under the sun in this section of the board.

Given the huge breakdown of forums that we’re talking about, it’s quite surprising to browse through each area and see that almost every topic has a reply of some kind. The member-base is clearly large, and the experts are active in providing help for the troubled members. Despite that, the forums aren’t overflowing with information. You can enter a sub-category and track topics dating back a couple of months in the first page.

If you post a thread today, it won’t be buried under four pages by tomorrow morning!

Under each topic is a neat little line which describes more about the subject at hand. This makes it much easier to locate noteworthy threads, and you’ll spend less time tapping at the search function.

Webmaster World should be commended for sticking to its guns and offering a board that relies on unique content rather than tidy presentation. If you prefer this kind of approach, drop by and see what you think. There’s enough relevant content to be reading for days!

Adwords CPA (PPA) Beta Expanding

Google is expanding  its CPA campaigns beta. I have been officialy invited and I already set up an initial campaign. Adsense publishers can now promote my products directly for a set payment per sales conversion, rather then per click to my website. I will let it run for several days and report here if it actually brings conversions (sales).

Compete.com site analytics – review

Compete.com was established in 2000 by Bill Gross, the very same man who founded Yahoo’s inaugural paid search facility. The knock-on effect of his invention has been quite astonishing. Advertising and publishing on the web is now a major business.

But as the web landscape shifted towards pay-per-click advertising, a new concern was addressed. Somebody had to develop a tool which would help us understand what the web audience is doing. After all, marketing and advertising are both ridiculously expensive affairs if you have no representation of how your ads or websites are performing.

Compete.com has been replicated by several other web businesses, but through it all, the site remains refreshingly simple and easy to use right from the first click.

The concept is derided from what is known as click sharing. It is the sharing of information about what our web visitors are up to. What links are they clicking? What websites are they visiting? Are there patterns? Are there trends?

Without this information, search engine marketing would be redundant. Nobody wants to spend money on guesswork. And for that reason, Compete is offering a service which we should all be taking an interest in.

The site offers a very Google-esque search function which can be used to search for a site domain (i.e. YouTube.com). Upon searching, you will be presented with a visual representation of the site’s traffic statistics. The most striking stat is the gross traffic graph. This provides a monthly evaluation of a website’s traffic and is great for determining whether a business is on an upward curve or cursing a one-way ticket to the cyber scrapheap.

Further demographics are available, although you will have to register for free to enjoy site comparison and specific breakdowns of the traffic.

Where Compete breaks the mould is in its willingness to offer more than the SEM guru’s favourite collection of traffic numbers and unique visitor graphs. There is consumer friendly information which would appeal to all of us.

For example, each website profile has a panel of current offers. What can you expect to find in the offers window? Well, it depends on the subject matter. It might be a special discounted hosting price or a clearance sale for a major retailer. Either way, the deals portal is an interesting window in to the best offers that you can expect on a given website. It’s like a catalogue of the best deals around the web.

If you are the owner of a given website, you can add a deal to your profile. Otherwise the trusted Compete staff will crawl painstakingly through thousands of popular websites to keep us all updated on special offers.

Compete.com also offers a handy toolbar which can be downloaded for free. It offers the “Compete Snapshot”, which is basically a stripped down traffic analysis of a website, easily accessible by Internet Explorer as you browse.

You will also find site voting, to get a good appreciation of where the consumer popularity lies.

Compete, affiliated with ISPs and several security services, works tirelessly to compile a safety ranking of every website that it checks. They check the security certificates, past history and content. If the site is trusted, it will be marked as safe. 

Ultimately, Bill Gross will be remembered for his vision of a pay-per-click web advertising future. But in Compete.com, he has given us the perfect tool to keep an accurate eye on the status of a website. It might not have the advanced features of other analytical products, but Compete’s clean friendly approach makes it a great resource for webmasters, experienced or not.

Article Marketing offers superior ROI over PPC

With PPC traffic getting more expensive and competitive by the day, it now becomes worthwile to examine again the organic (SEO) side of search engines – as with article marketing – aka content marketing - it might be possible to get a higher ROI on your marketing dollar over there.

A quick example: Lets assume an average unique outsourced keyword optimized article costs $10 and on average that article brings  in one unique visitor per day (365 per year) from organic searches. I have verified with several SEO specialists and this is a rather conservative assumption, as some of these guys claim that with good SEO an article could bring an average 3-5 visits per day.

Lets stick with the 1 visitor per day assumption though.

If you ordered 1000 such articles and added to your website, over a year you would expect to have an additional 365,000 targeted visitors - for an investment of $10,000. The cost per visitor would be 10000/365000 - which results $0.027 per visitor.

This is considerably cheaper than what is available on either Adwords, MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing PPC.

Furthermore:

1. Organic traffic is supposed to convert better than paid traffic

2. Some of these articles would bring in traffic in the following years as well – driving cost per visitor down even further.

This seems almost too good to be true, and obviously requires more work and an upfront investment in articles, but if the numbers work then the ROI on organic article listings is much higher than paid search. 

Please comment if you have any real data that either supports this hypothesis or contradicts it!

PPC bidding wars causing CPC inflation and ROI decline

PPC advertisers continue to report a decline in ROI on PPC spending. This phenomena is caused mainly by increased competition between bidders, driving keyword cost per click up and reducing profit margins for Search Engine advertisers. The proliferation of quality keyword databases such as Spyfu  - which continuously crawl search engines and expose advertisers’ long tail keyword lists to competing advertisers cause ultimately  additional competition on Google Adwords,  a higher average CPC, lower conversions and a lower ROI. The winners of increased advertiser competition on sponsored links are obviously the Search Engines themselves.

MSN explains how to recapture lost Adcenter traffic

The recent changes in quality score causing a major loss of MSN Adcenter traffic were due to the new ranking procedures.

Adcenter has provided some clues, which could help advertisers to understand the new algo.

“To ensure that we are delivering maximum benefit to the search user, we are doing the following:

• Assessing the content of the ad and landing page in relation to the user’s likely intent.
• Assessing the keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, to confirm that they are substantially relevant to both the landing page and the user’s search query.
• Trying to ensure that there is substantive content on the landing page to fulfill the user’s query.
• Assessing the duplicative nature of content in overall search results. In cases where there may be content that is duplicated within search results (including landing pages) Microsoft reserves the right to limit advertising of the duplicate content when it lessens the user experience.”