Search Engine Advertising Marketing 1-818-501-3646

A few years ago, we spoke of the "AdSense Economy." It was so simple. Create a website, slap on an AdSense widget, and voila: "Insta-biz." Wow! Who knew business could be so simple? AdSense was proof of Google's genius, having grown into a multi-billion dollar business in only a few years after its launch in 2003. Google's search business continues to grow in dominance, and the company's apps business is putting a serious dent in Microsoft's franchise.

But cracks are appearing in AdSense. AdSense is 30% of Google's revenue, so this matters. Any weakness in AdSense is important for Google's investors as well as advertisers, publishers, users, and entrepreneurs.

Three Constituents Who Need to Be Kept Happy

AdSense was a runaway success because it met the needs of online publishers, advertisers, and users all at once:

• Publishers could get revenue simply by pasting a widget on their website.



• Advertisers could extend their performance-based search-driven advertising, which they already knew and liked, across the Web.



• Users began to see ads that actually made sense in the context of what they were reading, and many of the ads came from smaller advertisers whose products and services would not have otherwise reached them.

But each of these constituents is starting to see problems with AdSense. Let's start with publishers.

Publishers

BtoB Magazine published an article on June 5th titled "Declining revenue has publishers rethinking Google AdSense." It quotes many B2B publishers who echo the conclusion that revenue from AdSense is no longer meaningful to them, that it does not "move the needle." This is less a reflection of AdSense's decline than the fact that traditional publishers have gotten smarter about how to sell advertising online. They have had to. Print is in decline, and the Internet is their only hope. Getting some "spare change" from AdSense may have been okay in the past, but they need a lot more now. Plenty of good alternatives exist on other advertising networks, and publishers are getting a lot smarter, too, about selling directly to their consumers.

Who cares about traditional B2B publishers that are migrating online, you say? What about those big native-online publishers? Well, Facebook just hired the guy who masterminded AdSense, but don't expect too see AdSense ads there. Rupert Murdoch wouldn't like to be thrown scraps of revenue for MySpace with a partner that makes all the rules. And one couldn't imagine Twitter pasting AdSense ads on its network. What large online publisher could get a meaningful amount of its revenue from AdSense?

Back in around 2006, all you needed to do to get VC funding was build a website that got user traction. "What about revenue?" they'd ask. "AdSense," you'd say. "Okay, then, here's the term sheet." Anybody try that with a VC lately?

Ah, so it's all about the long tail, right? Yes, a lone blogger has few other options. Everything else takes too much effort. They are not making a living from it, so they are satisfied with "spare change." Many of the alternatives to AdSense seem rather scammy, along the lines of, "Make a lot of money working from home." Google is well respected as a brand, and everyone knows what they'll be getting from AdSense. Don't they?

Actually, most people don't know one very important part of the deal: the percentage of the revenue that the publisher gets. You can parse the data from Google's financial filings in aggregate. But knowing its percentage in aggregate does not matter to a publisher. Google may be giving a great deal to a large publisher with clout. What do you, the little guy, get? You may know how much Google is paying you for the clicks that you generate, but do you know how much the advertisers are paying for those clicks? If you get $100, did advertisers have to pay Google $200? Did you get 50%? Was it only 10%? Maybe Google sold the clicks you generated for $1,000, and you got 10% of it? How would that feel?

To Google and its investors (more about them later) this ability to simply turn a lever and get a bigger percentage of revenue is marvelous. Who would not want that kind of pricing power? But to your average publisher, it seems to violate one of the most basic rules of business: knowing the terms of the deal, knowing who gets what.

The long tail is also where the problem of click fraud is most serious. To protect it, Google will (quite rightly) sue publishers who scam the system. But now publishers are suing back, and winning. This is ugly stuff.

In another murky corner of the Internet are "made for AdSense" sites that scrape other publishers to generate ad clicks. This is also considered click fraud.

So, the long tail looks rather like fishing in a murky bottom, full of nasty catches, and hardly a bright future for a great company like Google.

Advertisers

Hang on. Get real, you say. None of this matters because Google sells more advertising than any other company, and that's all that matters, right? Publishers, big and small, will take whatever Google gives them because Google has advertisers locked up.

Yes, that is true in search. Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft, nor any of the myriad of search startups, has made a dent in search advertising. AdWords reigns supreme.

Not so fast, though. First, some perspective. Traditional brand-based advertising is still bigger than search advertising, which is why Google bought DoubleClick. But the current excitement and creativity is centered on social media advertising, and Google is not a player in that game (yet). So, search is only one part of the ad market.

More importantly, AdSense clicks are converted differently than clicks on Google's search page. Getting people to talk about this on the record is hard. Off the record, many advertisers/marketers and ad agencies will tell you that those conversions are not the same.

Conversions matter. Clicks are only the first step in the process of earning revenue. Conversions, either directly into revenue or into something deeper in the conversion funnel, such as a free trial, are what advertisers care about.

Logically, an AdSense click wouldn't convert as well as a click on Google's search page. That ingredient of direct intention on the part of the user is missing. Some advertisers may not be savvy about tracking conversions and will therefore pay the same for both types of clicks. But Google can hardly rely on dumb advertisers for its growth strategy.

Advertisers will pay less for AdSense clicks, then. This could cause AdSense revenue to decline (more on that later). Or instead, Google might "dial back" the percentage it pays out to publishers, which would almost certainly spur the system's decline in a vicious cycle. Smart publisher and smart advertisers would desert AdSense, leaving Google to profit by mediating between dumb publishers and dumb advertisers. Not a good long-term strategy.

And then there is the "brand safety" issue. The keyword approach to contextual relevance can create those ugly mismatches that you occasionally see. You know, like when you see an ad for kitchen knives while reading an article about a vicious stabbing? Readers are only faintly upset or annoyed by it when they notice it, but advertisers consider it a major issue. This is the kind of thing that keeps brand-builders up at night.

Weaker conversions and brand safety issues in search-based advertising will only fuel the excitement and creativity in social media advertising. Is AdSense simply a bottom-fishing volume game?

Why is it hard to get advertisers and their agencies to talk about this on the record? Martin Sorrel, founder and CEO of WPP (the world's largest advertising agency) speaks of Google as a "frenemy." Actually, now he has renamed it a "froe." WPP buys $850 million worth of ads per year from Google, which would normally give WPP a lot of clout with media firms. Yet Google also disintermediates ad agencies. One just buys AdWords ads directly from Google.

The relationship between advertisers and Google is delicate, one that would not be helped by advertisers speaking to journalists on the record about weaknesses in one part of Google's services. Advertisers with clout prefer to negotiate behind closed doors.

Users

The most important person in the AdSense eco-system is the user. As long as the user is clicking and buying, all is well. Publishers and advertisers will both be happy. Users may be buying less now, but that is a simple cyclical issue: we are in a consumer recession. When the economy recovers, AdSense will recover.

Well, maybe. There are three reasons to doubt this:

1. Ad blindness. Advertisers are in an arms race for attention, leading them to produce ever more creative ads, in turn leading users to tune out those bland, familiar old AdSense ads all the more.
   
   
2. Social media alternatives. People trust other people more than they trust ads. That is why Ad-land is channeling its creativity into inserting its brands into their conversations.
   
   
3. Declining relevance. Users who do not get what they want from clicks will stop clicking. If they don't see AdSense ads on high-quality websites, and if the ads they do see are not relevant to what they are thinking about at the time, they won't click.
   

Google's Investors

Let's jump to Google's Q1 2009 results. The headline was that Google's revenue grew 6% (compared to the same quarter a year prior) to $5.51 billion. We can break that down as follows:

• Revenue from Google websites grew by 9% to $3.70 billion,



• Revenue from Google's partner sites, also known as network revenue or AdSense revenue, fell 3% to $1.64 billion.

According to the numbers, not all is well with AdSense. Still, a 3% decline does not sound like much; it would raise questions only with a fast-track company such as Google. Maybe this is simply the effect of the recession.

But maybe it is an early sign of a fundamental weakness in AdSense. With AdSense making up about 30% of Google's revenue, such a sign is big enough to matter. This should be a serious concern for investors. If I owned Google stock, I would be looking very hard at network revenues in Q2. Network effects can lead to explosive, hockey-stick-like growth on the way up... and falling-off-a-cliff declines on the way down. When all three constituents (publishers, advertisers, and users) were getting great value from AdSense, revenue exploded. If all three suddenly lost interest, that virtuous cycle of growth could turn into a vicious cycle of decline.

Judging from its actions, Google management fully understands the issue. Follow the money. Look at what Google is acquiring. Its two biggest acquisitions have been:

1. DoubleClick, which it purchased for $3.1 billion, allowing Google to diversify from search-based advertising, so that it could have more clout with advertisers;
   
   
2. YouTube, which it purchased for $1.65 billion, allowing it to lock up the fastest-growing inventory, video.
   

Look at the websites and services Google invests in. It plays to control inventory so that it doesn't have to depend on publishers, and so that it has better control over relevancy matching. Some of this has gotten a few publishers riled enough for them to go on record, particularly when their services lie directly in Google's path.

So, don't feel sorry for Google. It's taking care of the AdSense problem. We'll have to see, though, whether investors buy that story. Investor reaction to Google's Q2 report will be interesting.

Opportunities For Entrepreneurs, New Venture Intermediaries

If AdSense is in decline, that leaves open a big market for entrepreneurs. Publishing is not a winner-take-all market. Google will not control all online inventory. Advertisers and their agencies like choice. And users click on whatever is relevant.

We see two plays in this environment:

1. Match relevance. Match relevance means parsing content to deliver more relevant ads. This is easy to say and hard to do. A lot of smart semantic tech ventures are focusing on this problem. This is smarter use of search technology than Quixotic tilting at Google's search bar dominance.
   
   
2. Connecting CPM to CPA. This is another hard problem to solve but promises a huge payoff for the winner. Publishers like selling CPM (cost per mille): it is easy for them, and the burden of performing lies with the advertiser. Advertisers, on the other hand, like CPA (cost per action or acquisition): it is easy for them, and the burden of performing lies with the publisher. Both parties look at the CPC (cost per click), because that is trackable from both sides of the transaction. But CPC is just a proxy for what each really wants: CPM and CPA, respectively. Any venture that brings publishers and advertisers together with a deal that satisfies the needs of both will do very well. There is a huge opportunity here. High-quality websites that really engage with their audience will certainly do well by CPA metrics, but the solution will have to be really easy to implement.
   

What Do You See?

Please give your feedback to www.readwriteweb.com And if possible, tell them your vantage point: publisher, advertiser or new venture intermediary.

Marketing Advertising | Directory

How Do I Increase My Website Traffic and Visitors

Good question, simple answer. Web site specific advertising has been around for many years and in the recent past it has evolved into much more than just a simple banner or piece of text being placed on a web page.

Now, you could rush off and find the cheapest website to advertise on or you could do your homework first. There are several ways that are available for advertising online these days which include but are not limited too:

Banner advertising

1. Text Advertising
   
2. Social Networking
   
3. Links Exchange
   
4. Pay Per Click Advertising
   
5. Pay Per View Advertising
   
6. Pay Per Click Bidding
   
7. Rich Media Advertising
   

… and more.

My focus in writing this article is to show you how you can increase your monthly traffic from advertising and turn it into a sale or lead by using a simple straightforward method. In order for me to do this I will be using an example:

Let’s suppose that you wanted to advertise teddy bears. Your online store hasn’t made much money ever since it started and you really need this to kick off! The most important step is to find a niche that you can market in.

Geo Targeting: You don’t want people from another country (unless you offer international shipping of course) or people that are not interested in your advert to even view it. Therefore it is vital that you find a proper niche site that will bring you in targeted visitor traffic.

So, you should find a site that is about childrens’ books, or children’s games or even gifting idea websites. That way you know that the visitors that come to your site are looking for precisely what you have to offer.

Have attractive adverts. Budget permitting, try finding a company that will design attractive flash advertising banners for your site that is animated, gives a clear description of why your teddy bears are superior and is small in virtual size to allow of quick downloading. Keep your banners or text as short, catchy and simple to the point as possible.

Do not waste your hard earned cash. I can not stress this point enough. Do not pay per month. Especially if the site in question has limited or no tracking capabilities, can not give you precise reporting and does not spport rotation and/or rick media advertising. The likelihood of this site being published by amateurs would be very high in contrast to a site that can offer you results and statistics.

You should only be paying per impression or per click. Anything else will negate the possilbitly of targeted driven results and lower your return on investment. to get your business website start with advertising visit world marketing

Marketing Advertising | Directory

Advertising Online Business Website Blog Reasons to go online

Below are a list of the top 20 reasons that you should advertise online utilizing the many different methods that are available. Because Internet advertising and marketing is so flexible it is advisable that you always know exactly what you are doing and how your advertising is being displayed to your potential customers.

1. To Establish A Presence

Approximately 750 million people (1998) worldwide have access to the World Wide Web (WWW). No matter what your business is, you can’t ignore 750 million people. To be a part of that community and show that you are interested in serving them, you need to be on the WWW for them. You know your competitors will.

2. To Network

A lot of what passes for business is simply nothing more than making connections with other people. Every smart business person knows, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Passing out your business card is part of every good meeting and every business person can tell more than one story how a chance meeting turned into the big deal. Well, what if you could pass out your business card to thousands, maybe millions of potential clients and partners, saying this is what I do and if you are ever in need of my services, this is how you can reach me. You can, 24 hours a day, inexpensively and simply, on the WWW.

3. To Make Business Information Available

What is basic business information? Think of a Yellow Pages ad. What are your hours? What do you do? How can someone contact you? What methods of payment do you take? Where are you located at? Now think of a Yellow Pages ad where you have instant communication. What is today’s special? Today’s interest rate? Next week’s parking lot sale information? If you could keep your customer informed of every reason why they should do business with you, don’t you think you could do more business? You can on the WWW.

4. To Serve Your Customers

Making business information available is one of the most important ways to serve your customers. But if you look at serving the customer, you’ll find even more ways to use WWW technology. How about making forms available to pre-qualify for loans, or have your staff do a search for that classic jazz record your customer is looking for, without tying up your staff on the phone to take down the information? Allow your customer to punch in sizes and check it against a database that tells him what color of jacket is available in your store? All this can be done, simply and quickly, on the WWW.

5. To Heighten Public Interest

You won’t get Newsweek magazine to write up your local store opening, but you might get them to write up your Web Page address if it is something new and interesting. Even if Newsweek would write about your local store opening, you wouldn’t benefit from someone in a distant city reading about it, unless of course, they were coming to your town sometime soon. With Web page information, anybody anywhere who can access the Web and hears about you is a potential visitor to your Web site and a potential customer for your information there.

6. To Release Time Sensitive Materials

What if your materials need to be released no earlier than midnight? The quarterly earnings statement, the grand prize winner, the press kit for the much anticipated film, the merger news? Well, you sent out the materials to the press with “The-do-not-release-before-such-and-such-time” statement and hope for the best. Now the information can be made available at midnight or any time you specify, with all related materials such as photographs, bios, etc. released at exactly the same time. Imagine the anticipation of “All materials will be made available on our Web site at 12:01 AM”. The scoop goes to those that wait for the information to be posted, not the one who releases your information early.

7. To Sell Things

Many people think that this is the number 1 thing to do with the World Wide Web, but we made it number seven to make it clear that we think you should consider selling things on the Internet and the World Wide Web after you have done all the things above and maybe even after doing quite a few more things from this list. Why? Well, the answer is complex but the best way to put it is, do you consider the telephone the best place to sell things? Probably not. You probably consider the telephone a tool that allows you to communicate with your customer, which in turn helps you sell things. Well, that’s how we think you should consider the WWW. The technology is different, of course, but before people decide to become customers, they want to know about you, what you do and what you can do for them. Which you can do easily and inexpensively on the WWW. Then you might be able to turn them into customers.

8. To make pictures, sound and film files available

What if your widget is great, but people would really love it if they could see it in action? The album is great but with no airplay, nobody knows that it sounds great? A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don’t have the space for a thousand words? The WWW allows you to add sound, pictures and short movie files to your company’s info if that will serve your potential customers. No brochure will do that.

9. To reach a highly desirable demographic market

The demographic of the WWW user is probably the highest mass-market demographic available. Usually college-educated or being college educated, making a high salary or soon to make a high salary, it’s no wonder that Wired magazine, the magazine of choice to the Internet community, has no problem getting Lexus and other high-end marketers advertising. Even with the addition of the commercial on-line community, the demographic will remain high for many years to come.

10. To Answer Frequently Asked questions

Whoever answers the phones in your organization can tell you, their time is usually spent answering the same questions over and over again. These are the questions customers and potential customers want to know the answer to before they deal with you. Post them on a WWW page and you will have removed another barrier to doing business with you and freed up some time for that harried phone operator.

11. To Stay In Contact With Salespeople

Your employees on the road may need up-to-the-minute information that will help them make the sale or pull together the deal. If you know what that information is, you can keep it posted in complete privacy on the WWW. A quick local phone call can keep your staff supplied with the most detailed information, without long distance phone bills and tying up the staff at the home office.

12. To Open International Markets

You may not be able to make sense of the mail, phone and regulation systems in all your potential international markets, but with a Web page, you can open up a dialogue with international markets as easily as with the company across the street. As a matter-of-fact, before you go onto the Web, you should decide how you want to handle the international business that will come your way, because your postings are certain to bring international opportunities your way, whether it is part of your plan or not. Another added benefit; if your company has offices overseas, they can access the home offices information for the price of a local phone call.

13. To Create a 24 Hour Service

If you’ve ever remembered too late or too early to call the opposite coast, you know the hassle. We’re not all on the same schedule. Business is worldwide but your office hours aren’t. Trying to reach Asia or Europe is even more frustrating. But Web pages serve the client, customer and partner 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No overtime either. It can customize information to match needs and collect important information that will put you ahead of the competition, even before they get into the office.

14. To Make Changing Information Available Quickly

Sometimes, information changes before it gets off the press. Now you have a pile of expensive, worthless paper. Electronic publishing changes with your needs. No paper, no ink, no printers bill. You can even attach your web page to a database which customizes the page’s output to a database you can change as many times in a day as you need. No printed piece can match that flexibility.

15. To Allow Feedback From Customers

You pass out the brochure, the catalog, the booklet. But it doesn’t work. No sales, no calls, no leads. What went wrong? Wrong color, wrong price, wrong market? Keep testing, the marketing books say, and you’ll eventually find out what went wrong. That’s great for the big boys with deep pockets, but who is paying the bills? You are and you don’t have the time nor the money to wait for the answer. With a Web page, you can ask for feedback and get it instantaneously with no extra cost. An instant e-mail response can be built into Web pages and can get the answer while its fresh in your customers mind, without the cost and lack of response of business reply mail.

16. To Test Market New Services and Products

Tied into the reason above, we all know the cost of rolling out a new product. Advertising, advertising, advertising, PR and advertising. Expensive, expensive, expensive. Once you have been on the Web and know what to expect from those who are seeing your page, they are the least expensive market for you to reach. They will also let you know what they think of your product faster, easier and much less expensively than any other market you may reach. For the cost of a page or two of Web programming, you can have a crystal ball into where to position your product or service in the marketplace. Amazing.

17. To Reach The Media

Every kind of business needs the exposure that the media can bring, as we touched on in reason #5 “To Heighten Public Interest”, but what if your business is reaching the media, as a newswire, a publicist or a public policy group. The media is the most wired profession today, since their main product is information and they can get it more quickly, cheaply and easily on-line. On-line press kits are becoming more and more common, since they work with the digital environment of more and more pressrooms. Digital images can be put in place without the stripping and shooting of the old pressrooms and digital text can be edited and outputted on tight deadlines. All the these can be made available on a Web page.

18. To Reach The Education and Youth Market

If your market is education, consider that most universities already offer Internet access to their students and most K-12’s will be on the Internet within the next few years. Books, athletic shoes, study courses, youth fashion and anything else that would want to reach these overlapping markets needs to be on the Web. Even with the coming of the commercial on-line services and their somewhat older populations there will be nothing but growth in the percentage of the under 25 market that will be on-line.

19. To Reach The Specialized Market

Sell fish tanks, art reproductions, flying lessons? You may think that the Internet is not a good place to be. Well, think again. The Internet isn’t just computer science students anymore. With the 70 million and growing users of the WWW, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers. Since the Web has several very good search programs, your interest group will be able to find you, or your competitors.

20. To Serve Your Local Market

We’ve talked about the power to serve the world with a Web page. How about your neighborhood? If you are located in San Francisco Bay Area, the Raleigh NC area, Boston or New York, there is probably enough local customers with Web access to make it worth your while to consider Web marketing. A local Palo Alto, CA restaurant even takes lunch orders through the Internet! But no matter where you are, if the big client has Web access, you should be there too.

http://www.net101.com/reasons.html

Marketing Advertising | Directory