Friday, February 23, 2007

Google Thanks Users For Feedback

I just got this email from Google. First of these I have actually noticed. Nice job David!


A few months ago, we invited you to provide feedback on the Google AdWords program,
and we appreciate that many of you did so. Now, we want to thank you for taking the
time to share your thoughts in our survey and let you know the highlights of what we
learned.

You, our Advertisers
The vast majority of you are responsible for allocating your company's advertising
spend, managing your account and evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns. In
addition, most of you expect that you'll see either modest or significant growth in your
business over the next year. We hope that weÆll be able to help you achieve your goals as
we build off of the feedback that weÆve received from this survey.

Program Highlights
We were pleased to hear that most of you are very satisfied with your AdWords
experience. You let us know that you rely on Google AdWords as an integral part of your
business and a key method of driving traffic to your website. Overall, you are pleased
with the performance and results of your AdWords campaign, though you know that they
can always be improved.

In order to achieve these results, you want the best possible account management tools.
Our reporting tools, such as Report Center, were consistently rated as a major strength. In
addition, you found that AdWords system performance was very strong.

Opportunities for Improvement
Though we were happy to hear about our strengths, we're more focused on how to
improve our program to better meet your needs. Here's what we heard from you:

First, while a few of you crave simplicity at any cost, the majority of you are asking for
increased capabilities. In particular, you're looking for additional ad controls, new
performance metrics, and advanced bidding options.

Second, you want more transparency into AdWords - from providing you with more
information on how the system works to notifying you about changes in the pipeline.
We're working to address this, and hope that you'll continue to tune into the Inside
AdWords blog (http://Adwords.blogspot.com) where you can find information ranging
from AdWords tips to recent feature releases. One recent example is a post that provides
you with more information on our Click Quality team, including how to request an
invalid clicks investigation and understand if suspicious clicks in your account are
actually invalid: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/meet-click-quality-team.html

Get a Free Customized Optimization
Finally, we want to help you improve your advertising performance, so we're expanding
our customized optimization offerings to help you meet your goals. Campaign
optimization can help maximize your return on your investment, targeting potential
customers interested in exactly what your business offers. If you are interested, reply to
this email, and you will be scheduled for an optimization as soon as possible.

Thanks for participating in our survey. And please keep your feedback coming!

David Fischer
Vice President, Global Online Sales & Operations
Google, Inc.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

AvenueA/RazorFish Wins Yahoo SearchLight Award

I wrote extensively about the event at Search Engine Watch.

But I want to give kudos to AvenueA/RazorFish for their presentation and informative search report.

Hey if I had voted for anyone else it would have purely been on presentation. I loved Talladega Nights - laughed more than my kids and recommend it as a film. But the Sprint campaign was a little short on search... yeah they used Ricky Bobby and misspellings etc. as their keywords but apart from the cute blonde presenter they lost me.

Special K and the new marketing appraoch for weight loss was something I have seen on TV but it was noticable that the women were the more attentive listeners.... I had seen their ads but nothing in search (though I could use some weight loss info).

The Lexus LS ads by Team One wre clever use of intertestials on the Yahoo homepage but gave little to inform me about using search in the space.

Hands down the Chase campaign by RazorFish was the winner.... more search info... though they would not give ideas about conversion amid their other campaigns.

I think anyone submitting to the awards next year should be aware this about search and concentrate the info about that - and surprise you could win.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Neal Wilson Joins The Yahoo Evacuation

Neal Wilson and I have worked together for over 3 years. He is one of those Yahoo! people who really knows his stuff and did not come with the Overture notion that they were 'Kings of the Castle' because they 'invented ppc'.

He knows what customer service is, knew enough to develop a personal friendship - well I guess that was because we both had a sense of humor and kids. Why Yahoo is letting him go is another question I have to ask.

If you guys plan on really improving your PPC share then losing guys like Neal is counterproductive.

Your restructuring is going as slow as a 300 baud modem.

This is not the time to think the new kids on the block will be your saviors. The long-term people who stuck it out through "the blob"; have watched your endless high end corporate staff shuffle and stayed; those people who have the respect of your clients and in many cases are spending money with you purely because those people are there - you have been pushing them out lately, or not treating them as your true diamonds (I know this from conversations I have had with others in my positon, as well as what I have seen)...

Stop shooting yourself in the foot.

Neal best of luck at the new venture - you should arrange a get together of recently departed employees - I am sure there would be a line of people grabbing at that drink or dinner tab.

Great Free Webinar

I have a friendly adversarial role with Tim Daly of Send Tech.... we are on either side of the Arbitrage issues at times over at the SES conferences... they are always fun.

But this free webinar was informative and well worth spending the time watching it.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Breast Milk Scares Pork Board

Jennifer Laycock - the infamous Lactivist - well at least to the Pork Board - received a cease and desist from the 'other white meat' folks for her use of the slogan 'the other white milk'...

Come on Pork Sucks you have to be kidding me.

Jennifer has written about it in a very humous manner... well worth a read.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Pornado: The Word Of The Year

Okay I am doing the usual TV and net work at home a few minutes ago and heard the term Pornado for the first time.... have I been under that deep of a rock?

A character on Bones to cover his knowledge of a soft porn site blamed being online and hit by a popup that turned into a Pornado - a flood of pornsites taking over your system.

Don't see them as much as you used to with spam and popup blockers but make one wrong turn and they are still around.

Had to write about it before it fell out of mind.

Sometimes You Have To Love The Spam

I received this spam email today and had a good chuckle.

I am trying to contact Forex Trading.

Anyway I specialize in converting traffic into sales
and getting traffic to your site. Since you already
do some type of advertising in Google,
I know I can help you out. I was wondering
if you could get back with me as soon as possible.
I look forward to working with http://gocurrency.com/

In today's Internet Economy everything is about
performance. I know I can help drive traffic to
http://gocurrency.com and lots of it.

After the first month, it is only .25 a click
with a $300 min. That's all there is to it.
I hope that sounds good to you.
I look forward to hearing some kind of response.

(I deleted the link here cattledrive.org)
1-800-408-3413

Please get back with me at your earliest convience -
or you can email me here (I deleted the link here - not an email address but cattledrive.org)
Thanks,

Jeff Brown
(c) 1-800-408-3413

(If we emailed you by mistake and you would like to be taken off please go to the url.)


2805 E. Oakland Park Blvd #278
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33306




Okay I know email spammers look at us as cattle so I had to laugh at that name cattledrive.org a classic. Add on to that the script underneath that they used to record everything it was an education on how advanced some spam is getting.