July 26, 2007 Archives

One of the Search Engine Roundtable's trademark features is our extensive, quick and comprehensive coverage of the major search marketing conferences available to the community.

Most of our readers see the hard work we put in time and time again to type up and publish our notes on this site. In fact, we have covered 26 conferences dating back to 2003. In fact, we have covered 546 sessions over those 26 conferences. We have done so across America, and globally, including places like San Jose, New York City, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, Seattle, New Orleans, Sweden, Toronto, London, Germany, China, and more. We have had dozens of hard working contributors type away hard at their keyboards to get this done for you. You can find our past conference coverage by scrolling through our search conference archives.

As we prepare to cover the approximate 75 sessions at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference, I thought I share a little behind the scenes on how we prepare to cover such a huge conference amongst several authors.

I recently released RustyBudget a tool to help coordinate the stories bloggers and authors write about on a daily basis. We are now using it to coordinate the sessions each of our writers will be covering while at the Search Engine Strategies conference. For more information about this tool, which I use to manage the topics here, at Search Engine Land, my personal blog and other places, read the RustyBrick press release named RustyBudget - the Writers Budget, see my personal blog post on it, or read TechCrunch's review.

The screen shot below shows a screen shot of the budgeting system:

As you can somewhat see, we place all the sessions into a folder named "Available Sessions." On a first come first serve basis, the authors login and drag the topics from the "Available Sessions" folder to their own folder, titled by their first name. Here is a video of me dragging a topic into my folder.

That is what goes into preparing to schedule several authors over a four day conference with 75 sessions.

We hope to cover all 75 sessions. We currently have about 40 to go, but I suspect we will have no problem covering 90% of the sessions. If you are interested in helping with the coverage, please contact us.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

This morning, we got a hat tip from Jon West about a Google AdWords campaign feature that has been added to allow campaigns to run virtually forever (or until Google dies, but does anyone see that end in sight?)

Here's a screenshot of the feature:

The Google AdWords Help Center confirms that advertisers can now either set an end date for their ads or let their ads run indefinitely.

Advertisers now have two choices: set a specific end date when their campaign will stop running, or select 'no end date' to have their campaign run indefinitely. Campaigns set to 'no end date' don't have to run forever -- they simply run until the advertiser decides to pause or delete the campaign manually, or resets the campaign to a specific end date. You can make those changes at any time. If you want to create a campaign and let it run until you decide to make changes, 'no end date' is a good choice.

What do you think of this feature? Do you want your ads to run forever?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Guess what, everyone? According to Google Docs and Spreadsheets Guide on Google Groups, a new feature has been added to Google Docs. You can now create a Google Calendar event from within a document. This feature is explained in further detail at the Google Docs & Spreadsheet Help Center.

The goal is collaboration, according to Google.

As you can imagine, this feature is great for those of us who enjoy Google Docs & Spreadsheets as a collaborative resource for collaborative events -- think of all the times a document becomes a meeting -- scheduling a get-together to review a proposal, sending an agenda in advance, or just keeping score for your Wednesday night backgammon club.

Here's where you find the new feature:

Nice.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Danny over at Search Engine Land breaks some news about the Yahoo! Search Engine. Yahoo has come out with Search Assist, which is a smart and selective tool to suggest particular search terms and appears when you need it (like when you've stopped typing). It also shows related topics.

Danny's screencast shows what it's all about.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yesterday, Digg made an announcement that it dropped Google as its advertising partner and has chosen to sign a three-year exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft. Search Engine Land quotes Microsoft's Steve Berkowitz about the move:

Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content. We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg's combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.

DigitalPoint Forums members believe that this might mean that Microsoft will acquire Digg, but I'm not so sure.

WebmasterWorld takes a more rational approach. They have an understanding of the Digg community (Digg loves Google but is not so keen on Microsoft), and the story on Digg initially reflected that but people started simmering down as their comments got buried. ;)

Cre8asite Forums members echo the anti-Microsoft sentiment. And what Administrator Adrian said is very true:

I expect a lot of Digg fans will find some way to rationalise it. It's how they are, they're a big crowd of sheep in a way. If someone like Kevin Rose says "Microsoft's cool, we're going to use them for our ads", I reckon a decent sized portion of the Digg crowd would go with it.

I totally see that. Everyone follows Kevin Rose. Even I do.

On Sphinn, the story is a bit different. Search Engine Land writers had the story as did many other prominent blogs. But they were embargoed until 3PM EST. Did Kevin Rose break his embargo? It seems that he did -- two hours earlier. Oops.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint, WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums, and Sphinn.

Google recently launched pay per action for all US AdSense to try out.

Reports from DigitalPoint Forums show that some publishers are being opted into the program automatically.

One publisher said that Google emailed him saying he "has been selected to" be automatically entered into his ads showing Pay Per Action ads. Within five days, Google will dynamically replace 5% or less of his normal AdSense ads with Pay Per Action ads.

The only way for him to opt out is to email Google, requesting to be opted out.

People find this outrageous. Why would Google force publishers into this program, when it is clearly available for them to select under the referrals section of AdSense? Why require an opt out, just let them opt in?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks why is this person's private Facebook profile listed in the Google index?

In this case, Google really did not fully index this person's profile. They just crawled a link to this person's Facebook profile, but could not access the private profile and index the content on that page.

This is something everyone needs to keep in mind. You can disallow search engines from accessing your content, but if some public page is linking to that content, Google can pick up on that link. So if you want zero traces of a URL being available, you need to ensure that there are no public ways to get to that URL.

This is exactly that case. The person linked to his or her profile from a blog and Google indexed the link. Google probably tried to index the content, but was denied. How do I know? Simply because the search result contains only a lowercase title and URL. There is no full title, no description and no cache link. All signs of Google having problems indexing the content on a page.

Note, there are public Facebook profiles available. Here are some examples of public Facebook profiles.

If you want to friend me, I have a Facebook profile over here. To be honest, I rarely use it, but feel free to "friend me."

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google launched placement reports to help clarify where advertisers are seeing impressions and clicks from, for their ads they place in AdWords within the content network.

The reports provide more transparency then ever before. But the transparency is not crystal clear. There are some placement report lines of data that say "other." This is where Google is not telling you all the details about that impression and click. What can other mean?

Moderator Discovery posted an email form a Google representative which classifies most, if not all, the possible scenarios for an "other" classification. Here is the quote, it is long:

Unavailable data

In some cases, statistics provided by the Placement Performance report may not be exact. Due to the large volume of data a Placement Performance report can include, there are several factors that can affect reporting accuracy. These factors are listed below.

1. Impression cutoffs

Sites that have accrued a negligible amount of impressions per day may not be included in your report.

2. Property exclusions

Statistics from some properties that are a part of the Google Content Network may not be included by the Placement Performance report, such as Gmail.com.

3. Unidentifiable URLs

Although rare, there may be technical reasons that a specific web site does not properly pass back a domain or URL to us, resulting in an unidentifiable web site address, resulting in them not being included in your report.

4. Reporting delays

Reporting delays may also impact the accuracy of the Placement Performance report, depending on the time of day you run a report. We recommend you run this report after 3pm PST the following day to ensure you get the most accurate metrics for the previous day.

CATEGORY DEFINITIONS

You may see an 'Other' URL or even your own website in your Placement Performance report. Below are some scenarios to help illustrate why this may occur.

I. Your website's URL

At the time the user types your website address into the browser address bar, Internet service gets temporarily disrupted and your site's server simultaneously goes down. The user is directed to a page of ads that are targeted to what he entered into his browser address bar. The Placement Performance report attributes this impression to your website based on what the user typed into the browser address bar, which is why you may see your website appear in the report. This does not mean that your website is hosting ads as an AdSense partner.

II. 'Other' URL

There are two types of sites that are categorized as 'Other' in the Placement Performance report:

- Although rare, there may be technical reasons that a specific website does not properly pass back a domain or URL to us. Because these websites are not identifiable, they are aggregated under the 'Other' line item in your report.

- All pages that served your ad through our AdSense for Errors program will be categorized as 'Other' in the Placement Performance report. These pages serve users with targeted AdWords ads when they enter a search query in their browser's address bar instead of querying it through a search engine (like Google). Instead of displaying an error page, users will see a page displaying ads and relevant information. (THIS IS NOW SEPARATED INTO ERROR PAGES line item.)

We may not be able to identify the specific URL that displayed your ad through AdSense for errors. This is because the URL or search term users typed into their browser may not be a valid website address. With AdSense for Errors, when a user types a non-functional URL into their browser's address bar with the intent of reaching a website or conducting a search, the user will get redirected to a page with relevant content with or without ads. This improves the user experience because the user will see a page relevant to the content they were looking for instead of seeing an error page.

In these cases, because the domain is not a registered domain or functional website, a URL or domain is not passed back to Google. Instead, we will accumulate and report traffic from these AFE sites under the 'Other' line item in your Placement Performance report.

You can see whether the 'Other' line item is a result of error page ads under the 'Special Category' column in your report. The column will read 'Error page ads' in these cases. To include this column in your report, select the 'Special Category checkbox under 'Attributes' when creating your report from within your account.

Note: In the beta program for placement reports, users could see ALL placement URLs!!! Now the Other, Domain ads and error summary categories are used to cloak the placements!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Towards the end of May, Yahoo launched the new Panama Search Ad platform in the UK.

Yahoo recently introduced the new ad ranking model that takes into account quality. Gabs posted at his blog an email he received from Yahoo Europe:

Dear Advertiser,

We're excited to announce that the new ranking model is now live in our UK market. The new ranking model is designed to improve user results through higher quality search ads. When users engage with these higher quality search ads, advertisers will receive more interested, valuable potential customers, helping to drive better results for your business.

As we previously announced, both bid amount and ad quality now determine an ad’s rank in search results.

Yahoo launched the quality component in the US on February 5th. It seems like Yahoo gave less time for the UK advertisers to get accustomed to the new ad platform before switching over to the new ranking model. But then, the UK advertisers have been reading the feedback from the US advertisers, so maybe they need less time to transition.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.