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Facebook’s Success Drives Social Ad Spend Forecast Up

Written on August 16, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing

Facebook is the market maker for social media ad spend. Maybe that’s why there is so much rumbling from Google about getting into the social media game for real because, after all, online advertising is Google’s game, right?

eMarketer reports that they have increased their projections for social media ad spend for 2010 an it is mainly Facebook’s success that is causing this reassessment.

eMarketer estimates US advertisers will spend $1.68 billion on social networking sites this year, a more than 20% increase over 2009. Spending will rise even further by 2011 to more than $2 billion.

In December 2009, eMarketer forecast $1.3 billion in social network ad spending for 2010. Strong performance from online ad spending in general, and Facebook in particular, has resulted in the increased forecast.

Funny how ‘real’ numbers can impact forecasts, huh? At this rate cracking the $2 billion level in 2011 should need to be updated as well but for now it looks like eMarketer is playing it safe.

This growth is something that is occurring worldwide as well which makes it all the more interesting for advertisers. The US should account for just over half of that spend in 2010 but in 2011 it will slip below the 50% of spend mark due to increased popularity of the advertising opportunities around the globe.

With the market shaping up the way it appears for now it will be very interesting to keep an eye on Google’s plans for the social space. Many have speculated that because of their recent abandoning of Google Wave and the non-impact of Google Buzz that the Goog won’t be able to pull this off.

Personally, I think that their two relative ‘failures’ have moved them closer to figuring out just what might give Facebook a run for its money. Of course, if Google lays a social media egg with anything in the future they are going to start to look a lot like a corporate ‘dinosaur’ in the land of the young, quick and nimble. It has happened to the best in the past (remember the invincible Big Blue of IBM?) so Google better pay heed to history.

Your thoughts?

Originally posted here:
Facebook’s Success Drives Social Ad Spend Forecast Up

Free Data

Written on July 1, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site’s visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance. And so they never got a response.

Given that we live in “the information age” it is surprising how little people value data & how little they expect you to value it. But there are still a lot of naive folks online! Google has a patent for finding under-served markets. And they own the leading search engine + the leading online ad network.

At any point in time they can change who they are voting for, and why they are voting that way.

They acquired YouTube and then universal search was all the rage.

Yes they have been pretty good at taking the longterm view, but that is *exactly* why so many businesses are afraid of them. Google throws off so much cash and collects so much data that they can go into just about any information market and practice price dumping to kill external innovation & lock up the market.

Once they own the market they have the data. From there a near infinite number of business models & opportunities appear.

Google recently became the #1 shopping search engine. How did they respond? More promotion of their shopping search feature.

All those star ratings near the ads go to a thin affiliate / Google value add shopping search engine experience. Featured placement for those who are willing to share more data in exchange for promotion, and then over time Google will start collecting data directly and drive the (non-Google) duplication out of the marketplace.

You can tell where Google aims to position Google in the long run by what they consider to be spam. Early remote quality rater guidelines have highlighted how spammy the travel vertical is with hotel sites. Since then Google has added hotel prices to their search results, added hotels to some of their maps, and they just acquired ITA software - the company which powers many airline search sites.

Amongst this sort of backdrop there was an article in the NYT about small book shops partnering up with Google. The title of the article reads like it is straight out of a press release: Small Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market. And it includes the following quote

Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners.

“I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.”

He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.”

If they have all the sales data they don’t need to make recommendations. They let you and your customers do that. All they have to do to provide a better service than you can is aggregate the data.

The long view is this: if Google can cheaply duplicate your efforts you are unneeded duplication in the marketplace.

Look at the list of business models Google publicly stated they were leery on:

• ebook sites

• get rich quick
• comparison shopping sites
• travel aggregators

3 out of 4 ain’t bad. But they even on the one they missed, they still have an AdSense category for it.

Go here to read the rest:
Free Data

TV is the New Mobile

Written on June 1, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

When Google enters a field sometimes they do so quietly, but when they decide they want to own something there is nothing quiet about their approach. They are not content to pick one niche and one model (the way that Netflix does):

Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down.

Google wants to turn Youtube watchers into mindless drones who are spared the expense of thought:

“If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder.
…
“We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says.

They want Youtube to be like television, because the TV ad market is far larger than the web ad market, and they already own search. They are desperately searching for new markets for avenues to grow.

Google spent $106 million buying On2, and then open sourced their V8 video codec:

It’s the “first one is free” approach that a drug dealer uses, and it’s not a “free” play, it’s a “we are the new railroad” play. For one-tenth the amount they paid for that crappy old codec, they could have paid Firefox’s licensing fees in perpetuity, if being a sugar daddy is what they want. They don’t want it. This is a “in your face, Apple” play, and a monopoly play.

And in addition to owning Youtube, tons of dark fiber, and their video codec, Google announced their Google TV effort. The person who controls the set top box has the market data.

Mark Cuban highlights the gaming that will occur in manipulating the rankings

The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV ? Like Google said, there are 4 billion TVs and growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does.

but if Google is passively monitoring the network they are far better than a guide. It becomes easy for them to see when their recommendations were not relevant & adjust. And if a network screws them multiple times they can always provide a dampening factor in their rankings.

If successful their TV efforts can tear down the walls between different types of content:

Google will do what it does, and that’s insinuate itself between information and the user. And the fretting will be minimal.

As for the impact of Google TV, this has the potential to challenge the TV hegemony. By blurring the lines between TV and the Internet, Google TV has the potential to destroy classifications of content. No more “TV shows,” just “content.” No more “Web videos,” just “content.” And, once the distinctions are completely undermined, then direct distribution via the Internet becomes more viable. Google TV could replace Big TV as the aggregator, then it just becomes a matter of who offers the fattest pipes.

Once Google has the aggregate usage data they can use it any way they like. The concept applies to any market. Economies of scale advantages breed more economies of scale. Apple and Amazon want to have proprietary ebook formats? Fine. Google will assist publishers in creating the default common e-book format.

It is not just regular algorithm updates that can whack your traffic. A couple years out these additional content formats will be a big issue for many web publishers because if Google gets a significant sample size & market leverage in any of these parallel markets then some of these other content formats will start bleeding into the search results. And that (along with market competition) can quickly drive margins into negative territory for many publishing business models.

Go here to read the rest:
TV is the New Mobile

Marketers Respond to the Apple v. Flash Battle

Written on May 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

In the past few weeks the back and forth between Apple and Adobe about the merits and demerits of Flash technology use has gone from bad to worse. Bitter rhetoric and open letters to about each other played out like a high school romance gone bad. Needless to say you would hope that grown-ups might act, well, more grown up but this is the Internet era after all and sometimes it’s what you say over how you say it that wins the day.

Evidence of how Steve Jobs’ tirade against the evils of Flash and Apple’s adoption of HTML5 as the future of all things Apple might have worked is becoming apparent. Who says throwing a public hissy fit can’t help business?

The Wall Street Journal explains just what impact is starting to be seen in the market and it’s not great news for Adobe.

The punches that Apple Inc. is throwing in its fight against Adobe Systems Inc. are beginning to land, prompting some companies to shift away from Adobe’s video and animation technology and forcing Web designers to work with competing standards.

Programmers and Web designers say clients increasingly are asking that their websites or applications be compatible with Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Those sites can’t be built with Adobe’s Flash technology, which is used widely for online video and animation but which Apple has banned from its devices.

“Since the iPad came out we’ve had a lot of clients say that they just don’t want Flash on their sites,” said Chantelle Simoes, vice president at Ninth Degree Inc., a design firm in Dana Point, Calif., which has built websites for Sanyo and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. If current trends continue, Ms. Simoes said, her 10-person firm will need to hire people familiar with Apple’s development tools.

So, if you are Jobs and Apple you gotta feel like this battle is moving in the right direction. If you are Adobe and the Flash community there may be some hand-wringing going on as this plays out over time.

Does this sound like an over reaction to the early market response to the ‘Flash War”? For some maybe but when you have major players like Sports Illustrated adjusting their strategies to fit Apple’s view of the world you have to take notice.

On Wednesday, Sports Illustrated, whose website uses Flash extensively, unveiled a Web app built with HTML 5. “We’re going forward on more than one front,” said Terry McDonnell, editor of Sports Illustrated Group, a unit of Time Warner Inc. “The last thing that we want to do is make some decision that we’re not sure about.”

While that means having to maintain multiple versions of its properties, Mr. McDonnell said it doesn’t make sense to settle on one technology because Sports Illustrated needs to be able to reach readers no matter what device they use.

This kind of market reaction to embrace a relatively new and under developed ‘standard’ like HTML5 speaks volumes about who has clout in the market place.

Waiting in the wings is Google who is promising to cover all bases with Android devices. If that truly takes place then the gloves are off and confusion will be the order of the day. Developers and designers will be forced to put together two versions of everything they do so they can do just as SI did to ensure they reached everyone and not just one platform’s users.

Where this goes is anyone’s guess but due to the overwhelming adoption of the iPhone and now the iPad one has to think that HTML5 is going to ‘grow up’ real quickly right before our eyes. Flash, on the other hand, will be fighting to secure its future in the online world.

Who’s operating from the position of power here? You tell us.

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Marketers Respond to the Apple v. Flash Battle

Android Outselling iPhones

Written on May 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Maybe Google really has found the way to challenge Apple’s iPhone supremacy—and it isn’t the Nexus One. Or at least not the Nexus One alone. While it seems like Google’s been searching high and low for an iPhone killer since the G1 came out in October 2008 (or since rumors started in December 2006), they’ve hit on the real way to take over the smart phone market: by the OS.

Google’s Android OS outsold the iPhone in Q1 on 2010, according to consumer surveys conducted by NPD. With dozens of devices offering various features—and more than one potential carrier—Android is a more versatile option.

While both still lag behind RIM’s Blackberry, Android was the #2 OS in sales in Q1, with 28% of the market. iPhones saw 21%. Numbers from comScore, however, show that Android does have a ways to catch up, with only 9% of the overall smartphone market. (iPhones had 25% and Microsoft was #3 [and falling], but Blackberry wins there, too, with 42% of the market.)

On the other hand, this may actually be good news for Apple, as AllThingsD points out. Apple may be facing antitrust action from the US government—but if they’re not actually dominant in this area, maybe it’s not quite the concern the DOJ thought.

What do you think? Is this better news for Google or Apple? Will Android continue to steal the iPhone’s marketshare?

Original post:
Android Outselling iPhones

Google Responds to Countries’ Privacy Concerns (Kinda)

Written on May 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Last month, privacy and data protection officials from Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom wrote an open letter to Google voicing their concerns about Google Buzz. Of course, this is nothing new, since Buzz has prompted privacy concerns since the day it rolled out.

Now Google is responding: and they’ve decided that what those ten countries really wanted was a briefing on Google’s privacy policy and guiding principles. Yeah, that’s what they were looking for.

Let’s rehash this conversation here. First, the ten countries say:

In essence, you took Google Mail (Gmail), a private, one-to-one web-based e-mail service, and converted it into a social networking service, raising concern among users that their personal information was being disclosed. Google automatically assigned users a network of “followers” from among people with whom they corresponded most often on Gmail, without adequately informing Gmail users about how this new service would work or providing sufficient information to permit informed consent decisions. This violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information.

And then Google says:

At Google, we have 5 privacy principles that describe how we approach privacy and user information across all of our products:
1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

Hm… So are they now claiming that Buzz “reflected strong privacy standards,” “transparent information collection,” “meaningful choices to protect [users'] privacy” and “responsible” stewardship? Because that was kind of exactly what users and governments alike were complaining about.

Read Write Web hits the nail on the head: Google’s response “reads more like a public relations form-letter on the company’s privacy practices.” Or, essentially: Thank you for your interest in our company! We wish we had the time to respond to every user. Or even the governments that represent nearly 400 million people. Unfortunately, we don’t care.

What do you think? Is Google being flip? Or is there no better way to respond?

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Google Responds to Countries’ Privacy Concerns (Kinda)

Google: It Wasn’t Just the Hacking (And GoDaddy Hops on the Bandwagon)

Written on March 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Ever since Google first began its threats to leave China (which they finally made good on this week), it’s seemed like a bit of a logical leap to see what a hack attack had to do with the country’s government-mandated censorship—something Google agreed to when it entered the market in 2006.

But the hackers—and their target—were just one piece of the puzzle, according to an Atlantic interview with Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond. Although Google has survived dozens of hacking attempts, the targets of this particular attempt were all political activists (emphasis added):


That was distasteful to us. It seemed to us that this was all part of an overall system bent on suppressing expression, whether it was by controlling internet search results or trying to surveil activists. It is all part of the same repressive program, from our point of view. We felt that we were being part of that.

That was the direct connection with the hacking incident. It wasn’t in isolation. Since the Beijing Olympics, our experience in China has gotten worse. Although we have gained market share, it has become more and more difficult for us to operate there. Particularly when it comes to censorship. We have had to censor more. More and more pressure has been put on us. It has gotten appreciably worse — and not just for us, for other internet companies too.

Says Drummond, “We thought when we went in that we could help to open the country and things could get better by our being there.” However, Drummond says they don’t understand why people seem to think this is an all-or-nothing proposition.

Google Blogoscoped, however, has a good answer:

Google shouldn’t wonder too much that people saw it as all or nothing – that’s how they themselves suggested the situation in was China when they announced why they would start to self-censor Chinese web search in 2006: “Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced.” In other words, Google said they were facing a choice between no Google search at all for Chinese users, or a filtered search.

Meanwhile, China hasn’t yet reacted to Google’s decision to redirect google.cn to google.com.hk (the Hong Kong version). Still, Google’s efforts are being lauded in the US Congress (and Microsoft is getting slammed), even though their efforts may really only be half-measures, as Danny Sullivan says.

But that’s good enough for some other Internet companies. The domain registrar GoDaddy has announced that they’ll no longer sell .cn domains. Says the WSJ, “The reason: New regulations from China that require domain registration companies like hers to turn over to the government a color image of ID documents, a business license and a signed physical contract for each registered domain.”

The WSJ reports that China accounts for 1% of GoDaddy’s market. But still—if Google’s getting praise from Congress (um, have you seen their approval rating lately? Is that actually a good thing?), maybe now is as good a time as any to drop 1% of your market and get ahead in the US.

What do you think? What will happen with Google, GoDaddy and China? Who will be the next to jump on the bandwagon out of China?

Read more from the original source:
Google: It Wasn’t Just the Hacking (And GoDaddy Hops on the Bandwagon)

A Review of Spy Tools

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

There are quite a few spy tools on the market currently, some more heavily promoted than others. They come in a variety of flavors such as SEO spy tools, PPC spy tools, and some which do both.

Spy tools can be useful in an SEO and/or a PPC campaign. However, many of these tools essentially try to extrapolate scraped results which can lead to some fairly inaccurate results. Also, these tools occasionally come up with in-house metrics (of which they really don’t give you much useful info about how they arrived at the data the present from these “proprietary” metrics”) to help try and differentiate their offerings from their competition.

Spy Tool Reviews

There is a much more in-depth review, with examples, up in our members forum. Here, we will do overviews of some of the more popular tools on the market. Specifically, we will be taking a look at:

• review of SEM Rush
• review of SpyFu
• review of Keyword Spy
• review of Compete.com
• review of Ispionage

Value of Spy Tools

The idea that you are missing out on something is a core marketing tactic so even if you are comfortable with one tool chances are you’ve been tempted to go with another. Keep in mind, from a cost standpoint, the ROI you would take by just finding a few decent keywords to target will likely far outweigh any cost associated with these tools. Your business probably won’t collapse if you pick an A minus tool versus an A plus tool and none of these tools are able to make concrete decisions for you. What these tools provide are additional data points for you to consider in your own research.

We hope you’ll find these reviews useful. There are perhaps a few other services we missed given how many of these tools as there are and our primary focus on SEO. If these reviews are well received we could also review everything from Quantcast & Alexa right on through to AdGooroo, but we need to know if you would be interested in those types of reviews. If there are any other cool products or services you would like us to review just let us know.

A few disclaimers: some of these services have given us free review accounts, whereas we have paid for some of the others. And some of these tools offer affiliate programs, but all reviews were done without those 2 factors influencing the editorial. Most these reviews do not have affiliate links in them (I think SEM Rush is the only one which does have an affiliate link right now), and Aaron reviewed SEM Rush before they even had a public affiliate program.

Already an SEO Book subscriber?

• We license SEM Rush’s SEO data for our competitive research tool.
• The second post in this thread has some killer member’s only tips for getting the most out of competitive research tools.
• This thread is also awesome, and these three threads really shows how to use these tools in a way that really kicks arse.

If you can’t make $1,000’s from reading those threads then you certainly are not a professional grade SEO.

Here is the original:
A Review of Spy Tools

Compete.com Review

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo

Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month. Although, some of their lower price points may provide good value depending on what you might use them for.

Compete Site Profiles

Here is how compete gets their data.

Here is a screen shot of their site profile overlay

It’s kind of like a semi-analytics program view of things which includes:

• Unique Visitors
• Page Views
• Average Stay
• Demographic Info
• Link through’s to Referral and Search Analytics (discussed further down)

Data is available in 7 day, 30 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year increments.

The audience profile tab is similar to quantcast and is only available to the verified site owner (unless the site has made it’s info public) and the sub-domain tab shows sub-domains associated with the main domain.

Enterprise users, where there is no standard pricing listed…also get access to category profiles and behavioral categories as shown below:

You also get the option to compare up to 5 sites at once in their site profile section

Those are the options in the profiles section. These statistics are far beyond what most traditional spy tools offer and can be very useful when comparing large sites as small sites do not fare very well with these types of data sets (this is not specific to compete, it’s pretty much industry wide).

Analytics Tools

Compete’s second tool set is the Analytics Tools set. Here you can search through Search Analytics (keywords) and Referral Analytics (sites referring traffic to the domain) as well as a variety of Ranked Lists.

Referral Analytics

This is pretty sweet as you can see what search engines the site’s SEO campaign is doing well in, as well as possible advertising opportunities for your site.

It also will show you Destination sites (where users go after landing on the site you are reviewing.)

In addition to messing around with some of the filters you can take a peek at historical data (trends, seasonal, etc) as noted here.

Ranked Lists

Compete offers ranked lists which you can filter in a few easy steps

Compete lets you look at ranked lists via 3 steps (one from each)

• Step 1 - unique visitors, visits, page views, time spent, monthly attention
• Step 2 - site ranking, ranking + unique visitors, ranking + all metrics
• Step 3 - top 200, 1,000, 15,000, 100,000, 500,000 domains

Search Analytics

Compete’s Search Analytics show keywords referring traffic to a site (or two) with some pretty neat metrics:

• Highly Engaging Keywords - Keywords that make up 40% of the total time index and have a referral share greater than 0.01%
• High Traffic Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of the search referral share
• Paid Keywords
• Natural Keywords
• Engaging Long Tail Keywords - Keywords making up the bottom 60% of search referral share, with a total time index of > .10
• Enthusiast Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of Average Time Index and a Search Referral Share greater than 0.01
• Long Tail Keywords
• Total Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term where the searcher came from…that made up the highest total time spent on the site for ALL visits.
• Average Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term which resulted in the most average time per visit spent on the site.

You can also compare 2 sites like so:

In Closing

The high price point of Compete might scare some users away, but consider that their data is not just relying on scraped Google/Yahoo/Bing results then extrapolated by some internal metrics. Compete is probably more useful to those who “compete” in really competitive markets with some sites as competition, although it can be useful to folks who may be involved in less competitive SERPS with smaller sites as competitors because they can use this data to investigate larger sites in their market, which may not be competitors but could yield helpful industry data.

Read the original:
Compete.com Review

ISpionage Review

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

iSpionage is a newer player in the spy tool market. They are much more PPC oriented than organic SEO oriented. They offer 3 tool sets:

• Keyword and Domain Research
• Keyword Monitor
• PPC Campaign Builder

Keyword and Domain Research

They index the top ten results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although I only saw G and Y).

They give you breakdowns of common spy tool elements such as:

• Competitors and Overlapping Keywords
• Ad Copy
• Keyword Specific Ads
• CPC
• Average Search Volume
• Average Rank
• And so on..

The one really neat thing they offer is overlapping keywords between Yahoo and Google for a particular domain. I’m not aware of another spy tool that does that.

Their database does not seem to be very deep but they are newer so that’s to be expected.

The do show overlapping keywords, total keyword count, and a monthly budget under their competition tab.

Here is another spot where they compare Google and Yahoo, this time for overlapping keywords between sites.

Keyword Monitor

This lets you search by domain name or keyword to get ideas for keywords to add into your campaign. You can also add your own manually after the keyword research option. Keyword Monitor will show you the following for your campaign + competition:

The impression share is not something I’ve noticed in most other tools and the other 4 metrics can be useful in determining which competitor might be a bit savior in the PPC game. Other metrics they will show you on the keyword level include whether or not the keyword has direct ranking affiliates, the average CPC/search volume, and total advertiser counts in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The tool also shows you related keywords you may wish to add to your campaign or just place on your watch list.

PPC Campaign Builder

The campaign builder allows you to search for keywords via a keyword or domain name input. The steps are as follows:

Keyword Clean Up

This is where you can weed out keywords that contain certain words, are duplicates, or have special characters. You can also choose to remove extra spaces if needed.

Keyword Grouping

Here you can set up ad groups and campaigns right from within iSpionage. It also gives you the option to create one ad group per keyword if you want to get that granular

Campaign Builder

Here you can input bid prices for Broad/Phrase/Exact match bids, set up your ads, and input the url. Then you can export for use in Google, Yahoo, or Bing PPC campaigns.

In Closing

iSpionage has some promise and seems to be much more into the PPC market than the SEO market. If that’s the case then they are taking on some pretty big players as many of the spy tools offer both PPC and SEO data sets. They have some unique features and it will be interesting to see how they develop their product going forward.

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ISpionage Review