Picture it - Superbowl Sunday. There's a huddle on the field and a huddle in the living room as my friends and I get ready for greatness of some kind. Some looked for greatness on the field, and some, like me, looked for it in the commercials. Imagine my surprise (I was almost GIDDY) when the tail end of a Pontiac commercial encouraged viewers to "see for themselves" by Googling "Pontiac".

Continue reading "Pontiac Excitement Sweeps Search Engines (And exposes a major flaw)"

Director Marketing Services Division
Partner Centric Inc

It's our pleasure to present unique insights from experts outside of affiliate marketing... stretching into practices of increasing importance such as paid search advertising. Count on AffiliateCluetrain to bring you unique insights from industry thought leaders like Heather Paulson.

One common yet troubling trend in the paid search advertising industry is for pay-per-click (PPC) or "paid search" management companies to charge advertisers based on the advertisers' costs associated with each engine or otherwise known as their PPC budget. When I received my Google qualified professionals certification I was included with a wide group of managers throughout the industry that had to face an important question: how to charge the advertisers for the service of managing their Google, Yahoo/Overture, and other paid search campaigns.

Continue reading "When Qualifying PPC Ad Management Firms, Budget Matters"

Need a search that only does news headlines, forums and Blogs? Need your RSS by....email... read on!

Continue reading "More ways to search and syndicate"

I've heard a lot about trademark bidding in the last, oh, year or so, as more and more affiliates - and merchants - have realized the goldmine in trademark pay-per-click (PPC) bidding. There are 2 schools of thought: let your affiliates bid on your trademark so that you get more coverage and squeeze your (presumably unscrupulous) competitors out, or don't let your affiliates bid and preserve the integrity of your trademarks while tracking the PPC revenue stream separately from the affiliate marketing stream.

Continue reading "Lego my trademark!"

I was recently reading a discussion on a forum about affiliates bidding on branded keywords. One AM offered up a couple of nifty solutions... either cap affiliate bidding for branded keywords at a certain price, or allow affiliates to bid on branded keywords as long as they bid below the merchant.

"That's a great idea!" was the response from another AM. A year ago, I would have agreed.

Continue reading "Sometimes a 60 hour work week is not enough!"

Why don't marketers "do SEO" - often outsourcing it to affiliates? It can be expensive to hire a search agency and a hassle to interview them... only to find that the one you hired engages in so-called "black hat" techniques (those prohibited by major search engines) to trick search bots into ranking their pages higher. Sure, Marketing Sherpa makes it easy via their SEO firm buyers guide but let's face it, SEO as a do-it-yourself project, is not something that many marketers choose to get involved in... or do they?

Recent studies show that it's important for marketers, themselves, to optimize their many product pages. Why haven't they? It's painstakingly tedious and, even when outsourced to a SEO agency, expensive (again, due to time needed for the geeks to optimize your pages).

Continue reading "The Problem with SEO for Marketers: Scale"

As reported by Catalog Age magazine, the CEO of executive air service CharterAuction says he's got clear evidence of click fraud against his company by a rival. Even though, he can't get major search engines to investigate his complaint properly, or to take action against the alleged perpetrator. The result? He's reducing his search engine marketing budget to about 5% of what it was two years ago.

Has anything changed for CharterAuction since being the lead story in the Wall Street Journal recently? Nope.

CEO Nate McKelvey describes his initial reaction to Google and Yahoo (Overture) crediting his account due to suspicious activity that, in the end, they were not willing to provide any evidence of beyond the fact that they considered it to be suspicious.

"Google didn't even offer me a refund... they credited my account, which I thought was peculiar," he says.

Continue reading "Google, Yahoo Leave Advertiser Holding "Smoking Click Fraud Gun""

Jeff Nienaber of Celebrate Express recently poppued up at Searchenginewatch to point out an interesting practice at Google and, in fact, Yahoo's Overture.

Google's editorial guidelines state:

"Links to your website must allow users to return to the Google search results page or ad network by clicking once on the browser's Back button."

Is this an example of doing no evil?

Comments in the string included:

Maybe, but they do things differently when it's worth it. For instance, they offer sites with huge traffic different AdSense conditions to the rest of us.

Looks like Google is breaking its own rules - stuffing keywords into pages and such.

Also, Doc Searls has something to say about all this buzz surrounding Google's odd behavior lately. Doc says...

"... here's the problem: Google is an advertising company, more than a search company. That's becoming clearer with this feature, and the company's apparent lack of interest in the feedback they've been getting.

Usage, maybe. But not business."

Tired of all that affiliate-related clutter when you search for favorite brands at search engines? Bada-bing, bada-boom.... welcome to VisioBrand.

Read more here about this directory of major global brands. See if you can get the damn thing to work cause I sure can't. Very buggy but as you can imagine I'm bullish on it :)

It's rare that I read something in DM News that's insightful of thought provoking and even more rare when I read someone from a company like AtlasDMT making a good point in a very articulate way. Yet, that's what happened this week with Nico Brooks' piece on how people search. Brooks is AtlasDMT's director of search technology. I encourage you to read the full article while you can (for free) as DM News locks it up after a few weeks.

His insights are certainly not Earth shattering but considering the fact that marketers are just now getting around to understanding (according to comScore and DoubleClick... and a few others) that people actually conduct research via search (before buying) this piece is valuable. Further, I find his use of examples to be wonderfully digestible and to the point.

Give it a read and let me know if it's as insightful as I think it is.

What's the action item that falls out of this? As Wayne Porter and I have, in private circles, discussed at length marketers who generate quality "informational content" that facilitates deep product/service research at - or along side of - their e-commerce offering are going to beat the competition every time. Getting there involves understanding precisely how customers go about their research. I suppose companies like comScore, and others, can assist in that regard.