Tue, 2008-Jun-3 by nmw.

How Much does Google’s “Quality” cost?

Yesterday there was an interesting article in the New York Times about Google’s “Quality” measurements. You need to understand that since Google is not “about” anything, it is quite difficult to gauge whether the results on Google are good or bad — they just simply are. But what the Google team has come up with now is a new & improved “market basket” of keywords — so I guess that just like the CPI includes spaghetti and meat sauce, Google’s basket might include such keywords as “dating”, “social network”, “free money”, “download movies” (and similar strings that are often “bought” on the open market).

Brand name keyword advertising

Now since Google is the “brand name” in keyword advertising, it might be interesting to compare such market baskets of keyword prices between, say, Google.COM, Microsoft.COM, Yahoo.COM and VacationRentals.COM (do you ask why I mention “VacationRentals.COM”? that’s simple: VacationRentals.COM is a search engine focused on finding information about “vacation rentals” — and that was the example given in the New York Times article).

I am willing to bet that for each & every keyword in Google’s keyword market basket:

1. the price is of that keyword is significantly lower at least 1 other search engine

2. the greatest benefit per unit cost for advertising for that keyword is found at that keyword domain (for example, the greatest benefit per unit cost of advertising for a “vacation rental” is available at vacationrentals.com [or perhaps vacationrentals.net, vacationrentals.org etc.])

I wonder how long it will take before Google will say that they have the “best prices” — and perhaps that will never happen….

Posted in Statistics, Marketing, Advertising, Commerce, Domains & Domain Names | Print | No Comments »

Sun, 2008-May-18 by nmw.

Definitions of Advertising Formats

This is an interesting portion of the “IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (2007 Full-Year Results, May 2008). Note that the advertising format named “Digital Video” was not observed in 2006 — is this a new category?

What is Search?

If I go to hotels.com to search for a hotel, are the ads I see during that process included in the IAB’s “search advertising” format? Note the four subcategories of “search advertising” named in the IAB report (page 16 of the PDF):

Search—fees advertisers pay Internet companies to list and/or link their company site domain name to a specific search word or phrase (includes paid search revenues). Search categories include:

• Paid listings—text links appear at the top or side of search results for specific keywords. The more a marketer pays, the higher the position it gets. Marketers only pay when a user clicks on the text link.
• Contextual search—text links appear in an article based on the context of the content, instead of a user-submitted keyword. Payment only occurs when the link is clicked.
• Paid inclusion—guarantees that a marketer’s URL is indexed by a search engine. The listing is determined by the engine’s search algorithms.
• Site optimization—modifies a site to make it easier for search engines to automatically index the site and hopefully result in better placement in results.

Also, how does the IAB collect data on the amount spent for “site optimization”? Is using wordpress a “site optimization” expenditure? Why or why not?

While I’m busy asking questions, how is it that classified ads are not categorized as “search advertising”? Indeed, IMHO, the entire advertising expenditure on the Internet could be considered to be search advertising. For example: when I look at the homepage of the New York Times, I scan the page — is that not also a form of “search”?

And what about the New York Times search? Is that counted as search advertising or not? What about the search box on this blog (which is, BTW, not provided by Google)?

I feel this report raises more questions than it answers.

Posted in Statistics, Advertising, Commerce | Print | No Comments »