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Search News: Google Spreading Tentacles Wider into Ad Exchanges?
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Written By Shivan Durbal | September 17, 2009 | Share This
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Rumor has it that in the near future, possibly within the next two weeks, we may see Google’s invitation only DoubleClick ad exchange marketplace door swung wide open to all buyers and sellers. This is according to ClickZ, but as such it’s still only rumor. As Mia Wallace said in Pulp Fiction “When you little scamps get together, you’re worse than a sewing circle.”
Still, assuming it’s true; Google could bring the worlds of search and display marketing closer together than ever and finally impose tools and measurement on display that we’ve been using for years in the search marketing field.
For those search marketers out there that are unfamiliar with ad exchanges in the display advertising space, in effect they are a support structure for the sale of undervalued, unused or remnant banner advertising inventory.
Social Media: Is Facebook a Final Destination or Just Another Social Fling?
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 25, 2009 | Share This
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Recently, a client asked me why they should put time and resources into their Facebook fan page when users are only going to migrate to the next platform eventually. The question felt very last year but I had to really stop and examine why that is – what is to stop fickle users from fleeing Facebook? After all Friendster and to a lesser extent MySpace were once the networking sites du jour but each found users siphoned off by the next big thing. Why shouldn’t Facebook be a victim of user burnout too? Or does it even matter?
After all, you go where the people are today. It’s unlikely that users discovering a new social media destination will stampede in such numbers that your fan page will be rendered useless in a matter of months. Also, although they have been eclipsed by Facebook, both Friendster and especially MySpace serve particular subsets of users very well. In the case of MySpace teens and music fans find the eye-wateringly be-spangled site to be more relevant to them in many cases than Facebook.
Search News: Yahoo and Microsoft Deal Begs The Question: Nature or Nurture?
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 30, 2009 | Share This
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By now I’m assuming you know that Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a groundbreaking 10 year deal that sees Microsoft’s Bing search technology replacing Yahoo’s search engine and Yahoo’s sales team taking the lead on high-end search sales for both channels. This is just the kind of news that sends us into our search geek clubhouse here at Reprise Media, where beers are opened, feet are kicked up, and opinions start flying around the room like mosquitoes in a swamp (apologies to Dan Rather.)
One of the most interesting takes was an offhand comment from Vice President of Media John Chan. While sipping on his 40 he pointed out that for many of our paid search campaigns, campaign performance was noticeably better on Bing than on Yahoo. There are three reasons this might be:
SEO: Optimizing for Bing is a No-Brainer Now
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 29, 2009 | Share This
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Google’s ubiquity in search is such that many clients feel that a website that is optimized for Google is good to go. Today’s announcement of a search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft ought to put a decisive fork in that thinking. Consider this – the combined share of the market that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will have is nearly 30%. Assuming this holds, businesses simply can’t afford not to optimize towards Bing’s algorithm when it will be powering results for both Bing and Yahoo.
So how different is Bing from Google when it comes to SEO?
Search News: Yahoo Shopping Flops with King of Pop
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Written By James Song | July 2, 2009 | Share This
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Unless you were living in an undersea cave, you know that “King of Pop” Michael Jackson passed away last week. As has been reported, websites around the world were affected when the story broke around 4:30pm EST. Visitors per minute to new websites worldwide increased 30% and social networking sites such as Twitter experienced network lag and outages due to the thousands of users simultaneously trying to update their status. The phrase “Michael Jackson died” became the highest search query on Google that day, which was so overwhelmed by the query volume that they initially thought they were experiencing a network attack.
This made me wonder about the impact of current events search queries on search marketing campaigns. On Thursday evening I searched ‘Michael Jackson died” on Google and saw a paid search ad in 1st position for Yahoo Shopping:
Search News: Yahoo’s WOO Much Ado about Nothing New
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 21, 2009 | Share This
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Yahoo this week announced that they see the future of search results as something called WOO. While this raises the strong possibility that Yahoo’s entire search team has been replaced with drunken sorority girls, the video on Kara Swisher’s blog of Yahoo’s Guy Raghavan confirms that there is at least one Guy on the search team. And he’s a guy.
Search News: How Serious is Yahoo About Search?
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Written By Shreya Kushari | April 29, 2009 | Share This
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Recently there has been a lot of speculation in the media about how Yahoo plans to move their business forward, much of it centering on search. Whether or not search continues to be part of Yahoo’s product offering the signals they are sending to clients like us is that they simply aren’t serious about it.
So the question for Carol Bartz and her team is, “How serious is Yahoo about search long-term?” After all, It becomes harder and harder to justify spending on a platform that sees its share of voice continue to decline as Yahoo’s has, and that also places an increasingly onerous process around mounting and managing campaigns.
Search News: Search Engines Sprucing Up SERP’s in Lieu of Algorithmic Advances
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 6, 2009 | Share This
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Pity the poor programmers at major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live Search. It’s clear that, like Netflix’s recommendation engine, search algorithms as they exist today are so well-advanced that any movement forward is so incremental as to be practically invisible unless you are industry geeks like us.
For anyone who isn’t Google that makes distinguishing yourself a near-impossibility. And if you do happen to be Google (and if you are, I have a venture opportunity to discuss with you strictly on the QT, and hush-hush), keeping searchers on your site and just keeping things interesting becomes a challenging process.
Search News: Welcome to Search 3.0
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 30, 2009 | Share This
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Sometimes the world is like a Chuck Close painting: standing up close allows patterns and colors to be discerned, but it’s only by taking several steps back that what seems abstract congeals into a recognizable set of strikingly realistic features. Right now, that’s the way the world of search and social media feel – we all know that they are converging, and we all know that they affect each other, but it’s difficult to actually wrap our heads around what this will look like from a marketing point of view – let alone as users.
In Advertising Age’s latest Digital Issue, Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg does the equivalent of taking three big steps back in the museum and reports on what he sees. What he reveals is something that we like to call Search 3.0 and it’s not just where search and social media are right now – it’s where it’s going in the future.
Search News: Yahoo Gets Rich with Big Brands
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Written By Noah Mallin | February 19, 2009 | Share This
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Yahoo announced today what we and some other companies have already been asked to test on behalf of a few hand-picked clients – the addition of what they call “rich” search advertising on their results page. Just as organic search results have become “universal” with the addition of video assets and other social media tools, Yahoo is hoping that rich search ads will serve to bring users a better experience and advertisers to open their wallets.