10e20 Blog

Last week, I spoke with Investor’s Business Daily regarding Google’s latest AdWords enhancement Placement Performance Reports and the article was published yesterday.

This enhancement is something that advertiser’s have been requesting for quite a long time. If you’re advertising on the AdWord’s Content Network it allows you to see the exact sites where your ads appear. From Google: “Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

My thoughts from the article:

A maker of steak knives, for example, might prefer to have its ads on Marthastewart.com and food-related sites than on the risque Hotornot.com’s photo-rating service, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a search marketing firm that helps advertisers place ads online.

The 2008 election promises to be an exciting and hotly contested one. Jake Matthews takes a look at how some of the leading candidates are doing in their search marketing efforts on Google in Part 1 of a four part series - and gives each one of them a grade in the 2008 Presidential Candidate Search Marketing Face-off .

There has been a fair amount of community coverage of how the leading candidates of the 2008 Presidential elections are leveraging or missing the boat on SEO and in the Social Media networks. There are interesting posts that follow the quality and strength of the campaigns. Mima looking at backlinks to Presidential hopeful sites. Further on March 13, 2007 Michael (Solo) Jensen did a great candidate SEO review on WebPro News. Rand-Moz chimed in May with insight regarding keyword rankings, missed opportunities and John McCain’s nasty SEO blunders, while Jonah from Alchemist discussed the grassroots value of the web for campaigns.

Yesterday I wrote a post titled What part of a graduate’s costume gave the cordon bleu cooking school its name? No, I’m not trying to compete with Yahoo! Answers and launching a new service. That strange phrase (without the question mark) was actually the hottest term in Google’s new Hot Trends service at the time of writing. Personally I was a bit perplexed at how something that random could be so popular yesterday. Luckily some commenters were able to fill me in on a few things I had completely overlooked:

• Radio trivia contests
• Crossword puzzles

The purpose of my post was to see if anyone really was searching for that term:

How can you benefit from this service as a marketer? One way would be to see what the most popular trends of the day are and if they match your topics, write blog posts or news articles about them. That way when someone clicks through your article could be there. We’ll see how that works out with this post….

Yesterday I spoke with Holly Sanders from The New York Post and appear in her article in today’s paper called Ad & Subtract. The article is all about the recent emails that Google sent out to many AdSense publishers informing them that their accounts would be disabled on June 1st.

Search experts said Google routinely cuts off publishers who run afoul of AdSense rules, but they believe this latest round of notices was a more widespread effort to clean up its ad network.

“I don’t really remember where this many people reported it at one time,” said Chris Winfield, president of Internet search marketing firm 10e20.

Google confirmed that it had sent out notices, but characterized it as part of an ongoing review.

Yesterday Google unveiled a new addition to their Google Trends service. Google Trends shows the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now and charts a particular terms popularity throughout the different regions of the world. The new service is called Google Hot Trends and they hope this will share more insights about what is on its users’ minds on any given day. They will do this by showing a daily list of the 100 hottest topics on its Internet-leading search engine.

When you go to Google Trends you can find this right towards the bottom of the page:

One important note with these lists is that they will not include all of the top queries of the day because it will be edited to exclude pornography and other common type queries about the weather, popular Web sites like MySpace.com or even prominent celebrities.

Eariler this month there was an extremely popular story on Digg which told the story of a guy and an argument he was having with his girlfriend. In an attempt to prove him wrong, his girlfriend did what so many of us now do, she turned to Google for the answer:

I was arguing with my girlfriend about women not inventing anything useful. In an attempt to prove me wrong she Google “She invented” only to have ask Did you mean “He invented”

Why was this such a big deal? It just so happens that there are many, many women inventors from Randi Altschul (invented the world’s first disposable cellphone) to Grace Hopper (world’s first computer compiler) to Mary Walton (developed a method of deflecting smoke stack emissions).

Yesterday I spoke with Jeff Graham from USA Today and I am quoted in his story about the alleged Microsoft and Yahoo deal.

Could a potential Microsoft/Yahoo deal solve the freefall?

Short answer: no. Long answer: Internet analysts say it couldn’t hurt.

“Overnight, MSN and Yahoo’s market share doubles,” says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York firm that helps businesses set up search marketing campaigns. “They still aren’t as strong as Google, but they are healthier together than apart.”

Any webmaster should be aware of the tools available to them. This is especially true for Google’s Webmaster Central, a collection of tools that allow you to better understand your website and give you more information about it.

One of the first things you will notice when you go to Google Webmaster Central is that you can check if your site is being indexed by Google. The site status wizard allows you to see when your site was last crawled and if it’s in Google’s index.

You might be told that you have potential problems and that you should submit a sitemap. It is recommended that you do so, even though you can now declare the path of your sitemap through your robots.txt file.

If this is your first time at Google Webmaster Central, you need to verify that you are in fact the owner of the site. You can do so with a meta tag or you can upload an HTML file.

10 days ago there were lots of rumors flying around about toolbar based social network StumbleUpon getting acquired by eBay. On the same day Google released their own version of StumbleUpon with their Google Dice feature (Searching Without a Query). Many people looked at this as a way for Google to rain on the StumbleUpon parade and also possibly usurp them at their own game. So you can imagine my surprise today when it came to light that StumbleUpon was running Google ads on their user pages.  Here is a screenshot that a user grabbed:

I’m not sure if this has been going on for awhile but its the first time I have ever seen it. The ads only appear if you aren’t logged into your StumbleUpon account. The other interesting note is that it simply says “Ads by” not the typical “Ads by Google”.

Google wanted to buy toolbar based social network StumbleUpon according to TechCrunch & Gigaom but unfortunately they lost out to eBay (allegedly). So if you’re Google what do you do? Simply build your own “StumbleUpon” into your extremely popular toolbar - and it looks exactly like that’s what they did. In a blog post tonight called Searching Without a Query they explain:

The first is a recommendations button on the Google Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice. Click on the dice, and we’ll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we’ll show you a new one. We’ll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. Just add the button to your Toolbar. (In order to use this feature, you need the latest version of the Toolbar.)