CarbonGraffiti - Email and Online Marketing

Announced yesterday on their official AdWords blogspot that the algorithm used in determining a paid ad’s quality score is changing very soon. TechCrunch covered the same story today.

In a continual push for ‘bettering’ their services (including enhancements made to their content network), Google have said that 3 main components in AdWords are changing, in an effort to provide the advertiser with more complete, real-time information that impacts their quality score, and the ability to make it to the front page easier (at a higher cost, of course). In all cases, changes are clearly ‘win-win’ as advertisers get more flexibility and Google gets more money.
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A quick post to point out some very revealing and interesting data from ‘Think Eyetracking‘. After fitting 30 participants with what I assume to be the crazy Clockwork Orange-style headkit, the searchers viewed a Google SERP for the term ‘Oasis’.

Anyone who works in SEO or SEM… Your job just got harder.

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It’s safe to say that Wordpress is now officially more than your basic blogging platform. Often touted as a basic CMS (content management system), Wordpress offers SMB’s a great opportunity to get a professional-looking website up in minutes – allowing for easy creation, updating and editing of content with little to no technical knowledge.
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I’m not saying it’s bad, but if you (or the marketing department you work in) insist on calling your email marketing campaigns something like ‘e-shots’, ‘mail shots’, ‘mail blasts’ or anything else similar to being expelled by force from a cannon or gun, chances are you’re viewing email marketing the wrong way.
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A bit late on this one, but Google announced on Thursday (Aug 7th) that the content network has (finally) been upgraded to offer a better experience to users, and a better value for us publishers & advertisers.

In summary, Google’s enhancements are as follows:
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Lately I’ve noticed a rise in creative ways to use PPC for personal or corporate gain. Whereas I use PPC daily to market B2B or B2C products the ‘old-fashioned way’ - selecting and bidding on a keyword, using appropriate ad copy, and directing B2C traffic to a tracked landing page - savvy marketers seem to be going one better. Here are some top examples:

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Huge news from Adobe today - they have officially released optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo in an effort to enhance the search engine indexing of SWF files (the output file from a native Flash file, called an FLA - the SWF files are web-optimized and are what you view on a Flash-based website).

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It seems the latest free, online product from Google is going to make a big impact in the online ad area – both positive and negative.

Unfortunately I’m still waiting for my granted invitation from Google, but basically Ad Planner is a free online tool that allows online advertisers to find and target sites that match certain demographic criteria. The sites listed are (thankfully) not restricted to the content network, meaning that Google are clearly using some form of data collection method apart from AdSense subscriptions to generate lists of viable, revenue-generating sites for online advertisers.

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Their mantra is ‘don’t be evil’ right? Isn’t transparency Google’s middle name?

So why is it that after installing a real-time site tracking tool (statcounter.com) to my PPC landing pages, I see several (50-60%) of all inbound, paid clicks being referred from websites or pages of questionable quality? Did I mention that, as always, my content network option is most definitely set to ‘off’?

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Google has just launched their Google Apps engine platform, which looks to bring cloud computing to Google’s growing arsenal of services and applications available to the public.

A direct gauntlet throw-down to Amazon’s web services, the launch of the App Engine means that Google won’t just host your application for you, they’ll actually help you build the entire thing, offering crucial components like free server bandwidth, an application environemnt, BigTable database access, and GFS (Google File System) for data storage.

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