ineedhits SEM Blog

ineedhits – Boosting your Business Online. ineedhits are search engine marketing specialists in search engine optimization, free and paid website submission and online advertising.

Welcome to the ineedhits blog, where experts share search engine marketing news and views on industry developments. You can add your feedback to the posts by clicking the "comments" link under the post you want to comment on.

Wednesday, March 15

Google's Click Fraud Pay-Out

After downplaying the problem of click fraud for years, Google has acknowledged that click fraud does damage advertisers by pledging a $90 million advertising credit pool to the settlement of click fraud disputes with its advertisers.

Google awarded the $90 million worth of advertising credits in order to settle a lawsuit with online advertiser "Lane's Gifts and Collectibles", but it should also cover any other click fraud claims that are outstanding. While Google normally requires any click fraud claims to be submitted within 60 days, the settlement with Lane's Gifts and Collectibles means that advertisers are eligible to receive compensation for click fraud committed between 2002 and today.

There are two main sources of click fraud: competitors who intentionally click on competing ads or publishers within Google's contextual ad network who click on ads to increase the revenue that they as publishers receive from Google.

Google insists that the company employs large teams of experts who identify, filter and discard any click fraud before it reaches advertisers' invoices. Compared to Google's total revenue from pay-per-click advertising, which was over $6 billion in 2005, $90 million in click fraud-related expenses does indeed look negligible.

Yahoo! Search Marketing and other PPC program providers also face the problem of click fraud within their pay-per-click programs. In the case of Yahoo! a few webmasters have reported to be pleasantly surprised when they received automated notifications from Yahoo! Search Marketing about click fraud refunds being granted without them having asked for those refunds. Yahoo!'s proactive approach in these cases definitely created significant goodwill in the search engine marketing community, which helps in maintaining the trust in paid search programs.

Tuesday, March 14

Local Search - Don't Miss the Boat!

Local Search is finally standing up to be counted. Once considered an uncertain "trend", the integration of the web into our everyday lives has meant that locally targeted search campaigns are not only viable, but for many firms, far more lucrative.

Borrell Associates have just released their "2006 Local Search Advertising" report, which predicts with some conviction that local advertisers are set to double their paid advertising spend this year, which will see it reach $987 million. What's more, 2007 should see it double yet again.

The report suggests that local search's "experimentation phase" is over. As with any trend, the market innovators test the water, and where sustainability prevails, the rest of the market follows. In this case, local search's main proponents in the early stages have been real estate and mortgage advertisers. With their goals to feature in prominent positions in the search results, geo-targeted paid search has been their core strategy.

For local search to be successful, it takes more than strong demand by advertisers, and the expectation by searchers for local listings is really what's driving the search trend. The report probed 400 ad experts for their predictions in local search, and over 60% believe that search engines will morph with online yellow pages models within the next two years. Say goodbye to your old print Yellow Pages as consumers are now relying on the web for these local business searches, and the trend is growing exponentially.

The Yellow Pages is not the only institution under threat. 50% of the panellists believe that local search engines will replace national search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN within five years, assuming dominant local search engines emerge. That's a big claim, and is probably the reason why the major search engines are investing so much time and money into local search technology.

So what does this mean for you - local search advertisers?

If you're already undertaking local targeting in your search marketing campaigns, then you're already a part of the leading group of companies that have realized the value of this strategy. Accordingly, continue with your efforts and ensure your website is ready for organic local targeting also. If you haven't started geo-targeting, now is the time to start investigating your options.

While most of the Borrell Associates' report discusses paid search advertising, which can offer instant qualified traffic, there are several steps firms can undertake to start local targeting within their optimization strategies. For tips on how to make your website "local" search friendly, review our previous post - DIY Tip: Targeting Local Customers.

Either way now is the time to review the returns of your traditional advertising in newspapers and local print yellow pages, and start embracing the local advertising of the future - Search Engine Marketing!

Where are Internet Users Researching Products?

A recent study sponsored by iProspect and conducted by Jupiter Research has revealed that the greater majority of Internet users are researching products on general search engines rather than shopping-specific search engines (such as Froogle or Yahoo! Shopping).

The iProspect Post-Holiday Online Shopping Study reported that 62 percent of Internet users utilized search engines, but only 26 percent used shopping search engines for shopping research during the 2005 holiday season, proving that shopping-specific search engines are not as popular with Internet shoppers.

1,731 respondents to the study were asked which of the following sites did they use to research products that they bought either online or offline during the 2005 holiday season. Results were as follows:

Merchant site (online store)	63%
Search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo!)	62%
Manufacturer site	30%
Shopping search engine (e.g. Froogle)	26%
Other	14%

Source: iProspect Post-Holiday Online Shopping Study, February 2006

The results reinforce the importance of having your products and websites easily found in search results on general search engines - on both branded and non-branded searches.

Interestingly, the study also revealed that 47% of Internet users that researched products online proceeded to purchase those products offline.

What You Can Learn From An Online Parenting Community Site

There is a lot of excitement surrounding the latest Web 2.0 developments. Ren gave a good overview of how Web 2.0 differs from the "old Internet as we know it" earlier this month - essentially Web 2.0 describes a new phase of Internet activity centering on collaborative, community-focused, dynamic and interactive World Wide Web.

Minti - A Global Parenting Community

A good example of the Web 2.0 trend is Minti (http://www.minti.com), a global parent-to-parent ranked advice website community, launched last week under the direction of Clay Cook, the founder of ineedhits. Parents often have difficulty in finding helpful information about child rearing and parenthood. The founders of Minti recognized that some of the best advice tends to come from parents' groups, took this principle online and have created a community in which parents can share and rank advice about parenting questions.

"Families feel more isolated due to the demands of today's fast paced life-style," said Clay Cook, co-founder and CEO of Minti. "Parents want a comfortable, always available, global community where advice is easily shared and ranked. Minti is very focused on solving this requirement, making the world a smaller place for parents in need of support."

Combining the Best of Web 2.0

Members of Minti (membership is free) can contribute articles, comment on and rank other members' articles, tag articles for future reference, create and manage their own homepage and upload and publish photos. The reputation and standing of a member increases with his or her contribution to the site content, giving the member greater visibility and recognition within the community.

The Minti website uses the new AJAX technology to enable article tagging, and many of the site's other features have been inspired by Web 2.0 trailblazers such as Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace.com and VirtualTourist.com.

Lessons for Your Website

Even if the topic of parenting doesn't interest you in the least, you can draw some valuable lessons from http://www.minti.com for your own website:

Offer your visitors relevant and useful information.
Even if your primary goal is creating sales of products or services, high-quality, topical information will differentiate your site from others and attract pre-qualified visitors. For example, a banking website might offer a free tool to assess your financial health, or a travel website might offer information on recommended vaccinations.
Give people a reason to return to your website.
No matter how good you are at generating repeat purchases from existing customers, try and give your customers and other website visitors more reasons than just purchasing to come back to your website regularly. You can do this by regularly updating your news or information section, or by adding tools or gadgets that can be used over and over.
Increase your visitors' involvement and sense of belonging.
The most active Web 2.0 sites are hugely successful in instilling a great pride and sense of ownership in their community members. Just imagine if you could instill similar feelings in your customers from your brand! Creating interactivity and the feeling of "being heard" is critical.
Harness the power of word-of-mouth.
Word-of-mouth or viral marketing is highly effective and very cheap compared to other traffic or customer acquisition methods. Make sure you have the content that makes your visitors want to pass it on to their colleagues and friends, and make sure you have the technology allowing them to do so easily. The "forward to a friend" button in emails or "send this article to a friend" link are only the beginning.
Make your site easy to use.
Yes, it sounds basic, but many websites are still far from easy to use. Make sure your visitors can easily find what they are looking for (for example by adding a search box), and ensure that your site navigation is intuitive. A simple text based navigation structure also has SEO benefits.

Definitely check out http://www.minti.com - if not for the parenting advice, then to see what Web 2.0 can mean for you!

Monday, March 13

Search Engine Strategies NY 2006: Measure What's Happening on Your Website!

Measurement and accountability - is that the first thing that comes in mind when you hear search engine strategies?

As a matter of fact, the more sophisticated search engine marketing is getting, the more advanced the main themes of the industry's premier conference, the Search Engine Strategies conference and expo, are getting too. One of the main themes of the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in New York was the accountability and measurability of search engine marketing.

Submitting your site to search engines, making sure your URLs have been added to search engines and improving their ranking is only the very first step. Any pay-per-click campaign is only half-finished if you don't have the appropriate monitoring tools in place to see how your paid search campaign is performing. And not only that - with click fraud being a real possibility, you need to be able to identify any anomalies in your pay-per-click campaigns.

In order to justify any investment you make in search engine marketing, be it buying the services of a search engine optimization firm or spending money on buying clicks through your pay-per-click campaigns in Google and Yahoo!, you need to be able to measure the results of those online marketing projects. And if you are asking for more money to spend on search engine marketing, you will have to provide convincing analysis showing how the return-on-investment compares to other Internet advertising options.

It is no longer about simply getting any type of Internet traffic to your site, the focus is more and more on the quality of visitors that come to your website. Highly advanced targeting technologies enable you to communicate specifically with the target groups you want to address while keeping your advertising costs down. More advanced targeting needs to be matched by more advanced reporting and analysis. This sentiment was shared by AOL's Gerry Campbell: "The value of metrics is transforming other marketing disciplines, which are placing more emphasis on using data to target consumer intent and deliver relevant messages in all forms of advertising."

Do you still need to make the leap to better website and campaign measurement and accountability? If yes, there are some simple ways to get you started. For example, try the free 30 day trial of the website statistics and web analytics service Hitslink that includes search engine marketing reports, historical reporting, conversion tracking ability and much more. You'll find you get addicted to transparency and information at your fingertips!

Thursday, March 9

What is Google Doing Wrong in Korea?

Google is synonymous with search engines and paid search adverting (pay-per-click ads) all over the world. All over? No, there's one country in which Google, despite its best efforts, is failing to establish a foothold: Korea. So what is going on there, and what is Google doing wrong?

South Korea has a population of 55.6 million and produced a gross national income per capita of US$12,030 in 2003, which puts it in 49th place, just behind countries like New Zealand and Greece (source: Worldbank). South Korea is an extremely well developed Internet nation. 67% of the population are using the Internet, and in 2005 the country lead the world in terms of broadband connections per capita, with 75% of households subscribing to broadband services.

The Korean search market is dominated by a number of home-grown search engines and portals, with names that people in other countries might have never heard before. According to some rankings from May 2005, the search engine Naver (NHN) held over 62% of the search engine market, followed by Yahoo! Korea (15%), Empas (10%) and Paran (6%). Google came fifth with a tiny 1.6% share of searches - and these figures ignore searches done through the country's popular portals such as Daum, Cyworld and Nate.com (source: webmasterworld.com).

Industry watchers seem to agree that Google's lack of success can be attributed to the fact that they "don't do things the Korean way", and instead go contrary to the Korean preference for very busy, visual portals. The clean, sparse look that has made Google so popular in the Western world simply doesn't seem to appeal to Internet users in Korea. Google therefore faces much stronger competition from the popular portal sites like Daum that have been able to create a loyal following of returning visitors. Finally, Google was also a relative latecomer to the Korean market; by the time they moved into Korea, local search engines were already well established.

Google has launched a Korean version of its AdWords program, but holds only a miniscule share of approximately 5% of the paid search market in Korea, which is dominated by Yahoo!'s Overture (or Yahoo! Search Marketing) pay-per-click program. Overture, on the other hand, commands a market share of over 90% in the Korean paid search market.

To make things worse, one of only two of Google's major AdWords distribution partners, KTH, deserted Google for Overture, and the second partner, Empas, is threatening to do the same. If that does happen, Google's market share would be virtually negligible. Google has tried to reverse its fortunes by appointing an official AdWords reseller for Korea, but even that does not seem to have been able to stem the negative tide (source: Korea Times).

Google has been highly successful with its uniform approach to marketing worldwide and has displayed great timing in entering new markets at the right time and securing significant market share. Korea seems to be a case where they got it wrong - they had already missed the boat when they entered the market, did not gain traction with their "no localization" marketing approach and weren't able to secure major distribution partners they urgently needed. While the column "Korea" is only a tiny spec on Google's balance sheet, I could imagine that this defeat irritates the heck out of Sergey and Larry!

Tuesday, March 7

Online Search at a Record High

Online search is growing like never before, with the number of searches conducted increasing by 39 percent in the U.S, across roughly 60 search engines year-over-year in January 2006, reports Nielsen/NetRatings.

Nearly 5.7 billion searches were carried out in January compared with 4 billion searches in January 2005, the highest growth to date. From December 2005 to January 2006 the number of online searches performed accelerated 12 percent from 5.07 billion.

Table 1. Online Search: Jan 2005 - Jan 2006 (U.S)

Month	Searches (000)
Jan-05	4,085,880
Feb-05	3,824,261
Mar-05	4,353,624
Apr-05	4,211,931
May-05	4,311,035
Jun-05	4,447,406
Jul-05	4,604,161
Aug-05	5,047,101
Sep-05	5,060,883
Oct-05	5,134,713
Nov-05	5,105,761
Dec-05	5,069,377
Jan-06	5,699,528

Source: Nielsen/NetRatings Mega View Search, March 2006

"Web users are conducting more searches not because they can't find what they're looking for, but because search as a utility has become deeply ingrained into people's everyday lives," says Ken Cassar, chief analyst, Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google continues to lead the way in online search, accounting for 48.2 percent of the share of searches, followed by Yahoo! with 22.2 percent and MSN at 11 percent. Both Google and Yahoo! rose by a point from the previous year, whilst MSN has dropped slightly.

Table 2. Search Share Rankings (U.S)

Search Engine	Jan-05 Search Share	Jan-06 Search Share
Google	47.1%	48.2%
Yahoo!	21.2%	22.2%
MSN	12.8%	11.0%

Source: Nielsen/NetRatings Mega View Search, March 2006

Google's G-Drive - Closer Than You Think

The mega power of Google has no boundaries, and the next frontier in their all conquering quest is online storage - well, at least unlimited provision of it to the masses. In a presentation to financial analysts last week, Google suggested their view on the future includes "infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power".

Their simple goal is to store 100% of their users' data. While online storage is not a new concept, their goal, which is summarized in the following excerpt from the presentation, takes online storage to a new level.

Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today.

This will really help drive the concept of mobile computing and free accessibility, but whilst there is an upside to being able to access your files from anywhere, connectivity is the key. Anyone who currently uses a web based application will know that without a web connection, your productivity is suddenly seriously diminished.

The second serious concern with the GDrive plan is security and privacy. Considering the amount of negative publicity Google has received of late with privacy concerns over its desktop search tool, it would surely make most users nervous to have all their data stored on someone else's server. When you realize how much personal information is stored on most of our home and/or work based computers, no matter how much security Google suggests the GDrive will offer, you would have to reserve some skepticism for their claims.

Although there are some issues with Google's plans to store 100% of users' data, the concept of a large web based storage system is fantastic. And if Google wants to offer me this space for free, I could surely do with it. I would be extremely careful with what I stored on the GDrive, but infinite storage space is a grand idea. It's just like giving yourself a super sized hard drive for free. Stay tuned to see when this latest Google initiative takes off.

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Lookout eBay - Microsoft Goes Classified

It seems that everyone wants a piece of lucrative online classified market. Where once eBay and Craigslist were the main sites for online classifieds, more recently the market is becoming overcrowded, with newcomers appearing every week.

Google stepped into the arena with a classified orientated service in Google Base which will be supported by the new Google payment system currently under development. Not to be left behind, Microsoft are the latest group to delve into the classified market, having just launched their beta classified site - Windows Live Expo.

Microsoft have been testing the site for months, both internally and then through businesses and universities in the Seattle area. Obviously happy with the testing to date, they recently opened the site up to the users nationwide (U.S only).

They are hoping their system, which links free classifieds to social networks, will help it take a significant share of the highly competitive online classified market. Garry Wiseman, product manager for Windows Live Expo, was quoted as saying: "What sets Windows Live Expo apart is that people can set their own search parameters for goods and services. They can define their own marketplace universe."

So with more control over listings, based on social network preferences, integration with Microsoft Messenger for instant communication with sellers/buyers, and mapping of listings using MSN's Virtual Earth service, will Windows Live Expo offer a genuine challenge to the likes of eBay and Craigslist? Only time will tell. But why don't you test the new service for yourself - it's free.

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Web 2.0 - What's Does It Really Mean

The term "Web2.0" has been thrown around for a couple of years now, and while there is a great deal of buzz surrounding this new term, there seems to be some significant differences of opinion concerning its definition. So as many suggest this is the future of the web as we know it, I figure it's a good time to try and set some definitions in place for future reference.

Originally coined from a web development conference held in October 2004 by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International, Web 2.0 is the term many are using for the architecture and application development associated with the second phase of the world wide web - the web renaissance so to speak.

So what does it really mean?

Understanding Web 2.0 is better gained through examples rather than technical definitions, which is what John Battelle, Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty, Web 2.0's earliest proponents, did at the inaugural Web 2.0 conference.

Some of the examples that were presented at the first of the Web 2.0 conferences are listed below:

Web 1.0

DoubleClick
Ofoto
mp3.com
Britannica Online
personal websites
domain name speculation
page views
screen scraping
publishing
directories (taxonomy)

Web 2.0

Google AdSense
Flickr
Napster
Wikipedia
blogging
search engine optimization
cost per click
web services (APIs)
participation
tagging ("folksonomy")

So what's the difference? Web 1.0, as we can now call it, was all about static web pages, and navigation via surfing and search engines, whereas Web 2.0 is focused on a more interactive and dynamic world wide web. Wikipedia suggests that Web 2.0 refers to one or more of the following:

The transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming a computing platform serving web applications to end users
A social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the market as a conversation"
A more organized and categorized content, with a far more developed deeplinking web architecture
A shift in economic value of the web, possibly surpassing that of the dot com boom of the late 1990s
A marketing term to differentiate new web businesses from those of the dot com boom, which due to the bust now seem discredited
The resurgence of excitement around the possibilities of innovative web applications and service that gained a lot of momentum around mid 2005.

So no matter how you choose to define it, or whether you think it's a buzz term or not, there is no doubting that the web has undergone some significant changes in the past few years, and the future is looking more interesting than ever.

Some of the concepts and technologies that are driving the new wave of the web include weblogs, linklogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds and other forms of "many to many" publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, and online web services. These formats are being championed by brands such as Google, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg, and Technorati, to name but a few.

Even if you don't believe the Web 2.0 hype, make sure you familiarize yourself with the above technologies and brands, because they are shaping the future of the web as we know it.

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