Cost-Per-Click Strategies 2003

This year the Search Engine Strategies conference could really have been called the Cost-Per-Click conference. This appeared to suit the general populace (including me) fairly well, with a general mix of Marketing Managers and SEM companies plying their wares. While I am still putting together an update on the conference itself, I did have time on the plane to update a previous article - CPC (Cost-per-click) Search Engines - where to list?.

Search Engine Strategies 2003

Nzbase.com will be taking a few days off to catch up with the rest of the search engine optimisation world at the Sydney Search Engine Strategies Conference hosted by Jupiter Media. It will be interesting to hear the latest gossip on some of the acqusitions that have been taking place over the past few months. A full update on the conference will come next week.

SEO Interviews

It appears everyone who's anyone in the SEO space is rolling out interviews at the moment. To me that signifies there isn't much happening in the search world which is probably close to true at the moment. But wait for next week ;)

Here's a good one with Robert Clough from Search Engine Guide interviewed by Enfin.

ROI tools for the masses...

An Internetnews.com article has just announced that Findwhat.com have launched an ROI tool for all advertisers.

AdAnalyzer inserts a tag into the destination pages of an advertiser's site. The tags collect data from users arriving on the site via referrals from the FindWhat.com network. Marketers can view data on page views, conversions and ROI via AdAnalyzer. Results can be viewed by keyword or by campaign. AdAnalyzer will be offered as a free additional service to FindWhat.com advertisers.

A fine idea from FindWhat.com who have been lagging further and further behind the PPC market leaders Overture and Google Adwords.

Google Censorship

A fairly technical report has been written by Seth Finkelstein of Infothought on how Google results are 'suppressed' by the Google system especially in relation to local censorship.

An interesting read if you spend a large amount of time dealing with Google search patterns.

See : Google Censorship - How It Works

Contextual Targeted Traffic...

Andrew Goodman discusses some interesting topics on the content targeted advertising released by Google in the last few weeks.

CTR's (Click-through-rates) are generally lower on contextual site adverts in comparison to SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) where the user has specifically requested the target phrase. Will this result in lower performing adverts on Google Adwords? Also, how much will this affect middlemen such as DoubleClick who have already 'ceded a sizeable chunk of the overall web advertising pie to Google and Overture'

See : Will Content Targeting Work This Time Around?

Google in Gaelic?

Google have announced that it's Europe headquarters will be based in Dublin, Ireland.

This will be the first operational centre for Google outside of the United States and is a likely choice considering the available bandwidth that was built-up over the dot-com boom but is now idle.

See Reuters: Google Search for Europe HQ Ends in Dublin

Google gets Go.com

'Google said Monday that it has begun providing Web search results to Walt Disney's Go.com in a deal that will replace one with competitor Overture Services.'

See : Disney passes Go.com to Google

Back on the search engine services train...

After a few well deserved days off we're back into the full swing of things with plenty to catch up. Here's some of the lastest highlights in search engine marketing;

• The 'Goggle Dance' (the monthly search engine crawl by Google) started around the 6th of March according to WebmasterWorld - see here,
• Alltheweb get a new look for search including a 'new streamlined user interface, increased readability and usability plus the removal of distracting banner ads' - see here,
• Kartoo launch a new version of their interface - see here,
• and Google have released a newsletter for all the budding PPC junkies entitled 'Google Adwords News' that features the lastest in PPC tidbits from, you guessed it, Google :).

Google extend Adwords to 'content pages'

Google Content-Targeted Advertising has been introduced which includes adverts from Adwords on the recently purchased Blogger.com plus sites such as HowStuffWorks and Weather Underground.