Archive for the ‘Adcenter’ Category

PPC v Organic

PPC stats

when you first look at this you think Dave most be crazy, he is losing money by running PPC , but you start looking a little closer you see a pattern.

the next 2 screen shots show me the times and what happen in a organic sale.

PcC time of day

and

ppc ACTION

You can see this visitor can to the Site at 7:40 for a model number keyword listed in the organic serps, later in the day he came back twice again via organic serps this time the keyword was the url of the site but this time he purchased.

but you see the yellow box that say supported, well that means that the customer originally came from a PPC click, but what I found interesting was:

Customer in the Research Mode

Searches for single keywords example “laptops” or “Mobile PCs” ( in fact I did that today lol ), I was looking at buying an eeePC change my mind and started my research with “ultra light laptop”.

once in the research mode I start collecting a list of Model Numbers or manufacturers.

Customer in Purchase Mode

I start searching for model numbers, Like so many other users I guess because a site I found originally advertising on PPC with Mobile PCs, when I saw them listed organically for the model number I wanted to by, I clicked the listing and purchased.

DaveN

Microsoft Funeral Video

Get over to Mel Carson’s blog and you tell me what this is all about!

DaveN

adExcellence

Adcenters’ Adexcellence went Live yesterday .. so get signed up and get listed on their Membership Directory

adExcellence is designed to give adCenter advertisers the ability to gain valuable adCenter knowledge and demonstrate their expertise.

DaveN

A Day at Microsoft

Microsoft Building 88

So this is the Lobby of Building 88 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, And where my Day at Microsoft began

9:45 -10am
Arrive at Microsoft, first Impression it’s just like Yahoo or Google except it’s White in fact I would say very white, I checked in and waited for my first Meeting

10am–11am : Leon Warman

Leon takes me to his Office and the first thing I notice is That EVERYONE has their own office ! we chatted about spam in the index and how LIVE was combating it, what things I had seen, mainly techniques, rather than sites.

11am-12pm Webmaster Tools : Nathan Buggia

Leon was supposed to take me to Nathan’s office but we had just started to over run when Nathan turned up. I ended up in a meeting room where Nathan promptly told me to be honest with the team about how I felt about http://webmaster.live.com which is the beta of the live webmaster portal. It’s Weak I say very weak, Nathan has just loaded slide one .. and to be honest we never got to slide 2, but this was one of my favourite meetings, we chatted about what webmasters needs are, what would make people like me use Live over the competitors, at present live webmaster portal has :

Summary  of your site which basically lets me see that www.davidnaylor.co.uk Domain rank and that it’s not blocked, my top 5 pages and last crawl date

Profile : is basically where I have my XML Sitemap etc

Keywords : at present this is where you can add a keyword and see how your site is performing in live search but I just don’t get it, we chatted about how this could be improved and what I would do…. If they implement my ideas I reckon 50 to 99% of the webmasters would use it.

12pm-1pm Gatineau Team

I think I’m one of the first NON US people to be on this beta, again very open discussion. One thing which has impressed me with all the Microsoft teams I have been with is their openness to what webmasters like me want. Now Gatineau has a way to go yet, but the things I like about it and the ideas that I brought to the table seem to all be doable. We talked about ROI tracking to split testing landing pages, to consoles for webmasters – web marketers – Company owners, what the needs are and why we are so different

1pm-2pm Live.com’s Fall Launch Deep, Sebastian Gard

I could have spent all day with Sebastian, I don’t think I added much to the conversation, lol the more Sebastian showed me what they had pushed out in the fall the more I heard myself saying wow.. from live traffic maps to digital cameras to Viagra .. yes Viagra I was very very impressed..
I loved the fact that the medical stuff is on Https giving the user the ability to search on sensitive issues without the ability of been tracked.. thumbs up Live.com .

2pm-3pm Business Operations Rotimi Olumide

Rotimi made me laugh, he is another real good guy. We discussed UK market share and how Live could get more from the UK. I so want to share my ideas with everyone on this but at the moment I will leave them at Live.

3:30pm-5:00pm Speaker Series

I did my Powerpoint then a Q+A with the audience, then some 1 on 1 with the spam team .. AND most of the off the shelf products to spam the indexes have footprints !! .. the spam team know they still have a way to go but they seem hungry and motivated which isn’t a good thing for spammers lol

7:15pm-11pm Dinner at Etta’s Seafood

Nathan drove me and him to the restaurant he explained how there are only two routes into Seattle from Redmond and as 30,000 other Microsoft cars slowly moved down the freeway, we chatted about about Microsoft, life and living in the Seattle area.

Nathan then showed me the Seattle GUM Wall and decide to see if he could get me drunk and lick it … Eck..

gum wall

DaveN

Adcenter Needs your help

Ok it’s does not actually need your help, what they want is more what cool features you would like to see .. so get your backsides over too http://forums.microsoft.com

how often do you get to tell microsoft something and they listen ,, JOKE.. MS customer service rocks. it would rock more if I had my Xbox360 back grrrrr.

DaveN

Paid Links the debate that just will not Go away

Well not in my office anyway, so Google say Paid Links to influence search are evil and of course they would, they’re a search engine that’s sells links via JS, don’t we can’t really take a leaf out of google book, because the main traffic pages are robots.txt’d out.. oh the dilemma.

so how can you buy links and not get caught, well first off you could test the links..

but for a site / page that doesn’t matter if page move up by another link for the master site or better ask for the link to be change to master site, again if site moves down pass that link to a competitor.. yer i know it’s dirty and underhand but I still have site pinned down because a competitor buy me links.. cheers, but remember what goes around comes around..

but I guess the really answer is when buying link make dam sure Google has to ask it’s self what was the intent and are we 60% sure it was purchased for improving search rankings.

here is something that happened just recently, a Guy rang me up and said his site had lost all traffic from Google, and he hadn’t used any SEO’s and did his own PPC, in fact his site had no spam on it and was pretty under optimised.

Before I jumped in I asked the guy how he markets his website, this took me by surprise the Guy used Hitwise and monitored his competitors, and basically used PPC to clone those sites keywords, One day he found that one of his competitors was getting quite a bit of upstream traffic from a Site, so he went there and found to his surprise that the competitor didn’t advertise on the site, but he did have a text link, so he emailed the site and bought his link right next to the competitor, and so it went on and on every time he saw upstream data he went and purchased the same has his competitors.

Until a few days ago when he rang me.. at first I joked and said Google had banned him because they wanted all his advertising spend.. guess what that’s what he thought too .. I told him that wasn’t the case and he had been hit for link buying and he should stop and ask Googles forgiveness.

At the moment he is testing YPN and ADcenter and looking at stopping using Google, I think the guy has balls he actually wants to see if he can survive without Google. Me I’m going to help the Dude for free just so I get the data ..

what you reckon fail or succeed, btw he had his best day ever today thankyou stumble upon :)

Gatineau Answers Privacy Question

Ian. Just posted on His Blog (www.liesdamnedlies.com) more about Gatineau and how they get the data on age and gender, Btw Ian was supposed to be at Adchamps Europe but Justin Carder stepped up and was pretty awesome I would have to say.

Anyway from Ian’s Blog.

the answer is that we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product.

Which Is pretty cool IMO, As an Advertiser I want to get more bang for my Dollar, not just say here is my money go spend it.

and If you outsource your web advertisings to an agency, ask them if your ads are getting age and gender targeted, In fact ask if they have even set-up the account in Live and Yahoo, you will be surprised how many agencies just don’t give a fuck about you !!!

DaveN

Facebook overtakes Myspace in the UK

Heather Hopkins over at Hitwise UK… just blogged about how Facebook is still marching on in the UK and no wonder it’s caught the eyes of Microsoft, although Myspace still gets more traffic than Facebook, the trend isn’t looking good for Myspace which has so much spam and false users it’s getting a little silly.

If Microsoft do buy Facebook, this will give Live and adcenter more data for their age and gender targetting

From adcenter :

You can target customers by age and gender so that your ads are displayed more frequently to people who will be interested in them. The data used for the demographic targeting option (age and gender) comes from information reported by MSN customers.

and with Live.com getting more traction with internet users it’s only time before live.com really starts to make more in roads into the search world..

DaveN

Microsoft adCenter Scheduled Maintenance for Saturday, July 14

Mel Carson posted on the Adcenter Blog, that the Update is happening on Saturday, I Think I know what it is but you will have to wait and see.

DaveN

Natwest Bank and PPC

seems that this post is getting some people looking for credit cards so try knowyoumoney
Ok, First off the Natwest Bank is my company’s choice for Business Banking, and secondly who the hell is doing their PPC

Natwest Bank in Google
Natwest Bank in Yahoo
Natwest Bank in Live.com

@TOR at Adcenter this is what I was talking about at adchamps,

Natwest bank Loans - www.FastLoan24.com

Bad credit ok. Get an unbeatable 4.7%. Homeowners only.

That’s just bad and plain wrong, but the Google and Yahoo are just as bad with Trademarks on broad match.

DaveN

one.com
smx

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