Vulcan Golf now wishes to add a RICO 18 U.S.C. §1962(a) charge.

“The plaintiffs now seek to file a second amended
complaint repleading certain of their previously dismissed claims and adding a RICO count under 18 U.S.C. § 1962(a).”

I believe Google using its power and organization to engage in illegal activity. The illegality trademark infringement, profiting by trading on trademarks owned by other via typosquatting, and of course the organization is the Google the registrars and the Domain holders. But my reading of RICO tells me that there must be a vilolent act to qualify under RICO. Can anybody help clarify that?

Here is the complete court ruling on this.  The plaintife has asked to add a RICO count?  More on that later.

Tomorrow is the official First Day of Spring. That means blooming flowers (and pollen!), warmer weather, longer days, tax time, and of course, spring cleaning.

But spring cleaning doesn’t stop at home or even at the office if you’re advertising online. While you’re cleaning dust from the corners of your house or purging old files at the office, have you given any thought to sprucing up your PPC campaigns? We all know that search engines love fresh, optimized campaigns, and below are five easy spring cleaning tips for you to try:

1) Ad Group Review
This single step will likely take the most of your PPC spring cleaning time, but will have the fastest and most immediate impact. At our company, we regularly review our client’s ad groups and check for key factors such as relevancy, performance, and ROI.

To begin, start at the foundation of your ad group, the keywords. Locate the non-performers and pause them to make way for the shining stars who have been working so hard all winter long to get you traffic. Next, use a keyword tool to discover new words that users are searching on and add those to your ad group. Re-evaluate your max and min CPC bids; chances are you could be saving some money since the last time you set these prices.

The next step is to review your ad copy and ad headline. Ads work best when the keyword that you are using to fuel the ad is reflected somewhere in the ad - either the copy or headline, or both. Your ad groups should be focused enough to make this work, and if they are not it’s time to reorganize your ad groups and get creative. The incentives that worked six months ago may no longer work now and it might be time for upgrades! Examples: “big discount” might perform better as “deep discounts”, and that same old tired offer of 10% off of your order might perform better as “Free Shipping!” What’s better than free?

2) Impression Share*
Impression Share (IS) is a neat tool in Google which will let you know what your reach, or as Google describes it “voice” is in a particular vertical. If you saw that your normally top performing keyword has been suffering lately, take a look at the impression share. Chances are your competition is eating up the spotlight for your company. IS can be done at the campaign and ad group level in Google and you can even include your Lost IS in rank and and a value we all understand - money. The Lost IS rank will show you what percentage of impressions you lost due to low ad rank, while the Lost IS in budget terms shows you exactly what percentage of impressions you lost due to budget constraints. If your numbers are low here, go to step 1.

3) IP Exclusion / Site and Category Exclusion*
Did you know that you can block a certain IP address from viewing your ads on the search network? For that matter, you can block certain sites and even categories of sites from where your ad appears on the content network.

We’ll start with the IP exclusion. Have you ever noticed a huge spike in clicks without the conversions to back them up? Twice I’ve seen this happen and both times the culprit was a college class doing research on my client’s websites. The search engines will be able to identify the IP address (or block of IP’s) and prevent your ads from displaying on their machines. Try another, more familiar scenario: say you suspect a competitor from clicking on your ads - block their IP address and your ad won’t be served to their machines when they search for you.

Site and category exclusion are terrific tools if you are serving content ads. By running a placement report you can get a list of the domains which are serving your ads, visit these domains and see if this is a site where you want to have your ad running. If it’s not, a simple site exclusion will prevent your ad from displaying on the non-desirable site, and focus your content campaigns more effectively. Category exclusions are more broad and allow you to block your ad from displaying on certain page types (such as error and parked pages) as well as on a variety of sites which include topics like: international conflict, sexually suggestive material, juvenile material, crime and even profanity.

The bottom line is this: if you are running ads on the search and content networks, you have control over where you show up and what kind of traffic your site is getting from that ad.

4) Landing Page Review
I can’t say it enough, and search engines can’t say it enough: your landing page has got to be relevant to your ad group. Relevancy boosts your quality score which, in turn, allows you to place higher on search results pages and potentially pay less for that placement than your competitors.

Take a good long look at the page presented when a user clicks on an ad. Have you kept this page as up to date as you have kept your inventory, or do you need to sweep out a few cobwebs from the corners? Do you have keywords that are in your ad group listed on your landing page? Is your offer in text where search engine spiders can “read” it, or is it part of a graphic? For that matter, consider your graphics: do you sell a product which can really be best described in a short, concise video? So long as you’ve got the content to back it up, show your potential customer your product is better than the rest. Make your desired action: a newsletter subscription, an order button, or an information form-fill up front where it can be easily identified. Your customers have seen an entire page of ads vying for their attention, don’t waste their time now that they’ve selected you.

One last thing to consider when you are spring cleaning your landing page is your landing page load time. Google recently announced that they will be weighing landing page load time with an ad’s overall quality score. Don’t let all the videos you uploaded which showcase your products perfectly be in vain. Google will be rolling out a tool soon which will evaluate your landing page load time for you, and you can talk with your SEM manager on how to improve this time to get the best overall quality score that you can get.

5) Negative Keywords
I thought I’d end this PPC spring cleaning blog with a nice, easy tool to relieve the hard work you put in doing the previous four.

We all know that new products are being put on the market every day, and most of these products are seemingly unrelated to you and your business. Or are they? If you are a dentist advertising your services online, but you don’t do braces or veneers - those better be in your negative keyword bank or you risk paying for a visitor to your site who was never qualified in the first place. If you sell car theft prevention tools and alarms, have you considered adding the popular video game to your negative keyword bank? Look at your campaign objectively, and now turn your mind to pop culture and do some quick internet research, or pull a Search Query report in Google and see just what could be fueling your ads. Chances are you have some spring cleaning to do.

And you thought you were going to get a long Easter weekend relaxing!

* Sorry, these features are in Google only!

Social Media Marketing, the new media Web 2.0.

Social Media Marketing has been coming on strong for some time now. This is a wonderful new area of the web. The struggle I have seen with many people is understanding its business impact. As marketers it is difficult to get your head around such a viral arena. On one hand SMM brings reach because it is so prolific. The number of pages and profiles coming online make the early days of the internet pale.

Reach Dilution

My first question is how to leverage this reach for marketers when on first glance it appears to expand the reach opportunities in advertising and at the same time dilute the effectiveness of advertising. On the other the target of SMM advertising, the relevance of the audience goes up exponentially.

Demographic Targeting

I like this revolution of adverting to the original onset of Search Marketing. At first it was an educational sale and a tough one at that. The impressions of Search Engine advertising are so small compared to the cost per thousand, CPM, model it is staggering. At the same time the value delivered by SEM and the return on investment make it one of the best media buys in the industry. This is because the SEM audience is predisposed to your product or offering by nature of the search terms entered into a search engine. SEM is no longer tenuous media, in fact it has joined the ranks of mainstream and any serious marketing is obligated to this space.

The Me Too! Effect

Will SMM make the same transition? The jury is still out on that one. The flood of rapid entrants into this media makes it appear so. These entrants may have learned that SEM is now mainstream and many marketers have missed the boat because of a wait and see position. So now these same marketers are flooding into the space espousing it’s virtues.

No Silver Bullet

The truth lies somewhere in between for SMM however. It is time consuming and and arduous endeavor. But if done correctly it can rival the best that Madison Avenue has to offer in results.

Stay tuned for SMM tips and how to make your SMM program a success.

Google is on the steady march of increased market share. Comscore released its latest data in January with a 30% increase over the same period last year. With the looming Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo this is very relevent information. The combined reach of the Yahoo/MSN merger would be 33% compared to the Google share of 58%.

On the Yahoo earnings call, Yahoo President Sue Decker complained about the accuracy of the comScore numbers. Unlikely Eric Schmidt will do the same.

Yahoo’s new strategy won’t be measured by standard third-party metrics (Web Analytics 1.0) such as page views, reflecting the new dynamics of distributed traffic on the Internet.

“Third-party services such as comScore (that) assess unique users or time spent (on site) may not tell the story of what’s happening (in aggregate),” said Decker. “Our internal logs show that metrics we’ve discussed with (analysts) in the past, such as uniques and page views, continue to grow in the double-digits in Q4, with unique users now topping 500 million and page views about 4 billion per day.”

If I search myself on Google and find a cyber-gripe site about me and end up getting attacked because some crazy person found it and decided they wanted me dead - is Google also to blame because they indexed the site?

What if my biggest competitor runs an ad on prime time TV openly misleading the population about my company and product and sells the same thing with a typo’ed version of my product name - is CBS responsible?

I think we create a slippery slope when we are allowed to place blame, or cast a net of liability, regarding trademark infringement to search engines. The advertising and keywords that they put up are really just user-generated content when you boil it down - and more and more websites are insulating themselves from any liability whatsoever from user-generated content.

Just look at MySpace and your favorite networking sites. Simply saying - “But! Google (or MySpace) let me put it up! Why isn’t it their fault?” is not an excuse - my mom would say, if Google told you to jump off a bridge, would you?

On this issue, I stand on the side which feels that it’s up to businesses, and their representatives, to protect their brands, and feel that a reactive position by search engines with policies which remove the infringement, protect a trademark, and remove indexed pages from their cache is appropriate.

Web 2.0 is ALL about user-generated content and vamped up advertising platforms and I don’t think this issue (and the ones related to it) is going away any time soon.

The other day a collegue and I had a discussion about the ads which are presented on typosquatted and cybersquatted sites. His point was that the ad presenters, for instance Google’s AdSense platform, were responsible for trademark infringements since they made a direct profit from the ads. I, on the other hand, respectfully disagree. Although Google does profit from ads that are sitting on these cybersquatted sites (more like pages),  in the end the person who set them up to run also profits. Why does this matter? Because the person who set them up to run on the pages probably also registered the [allegedly] infringing domain name. If a criminal robs a bank (an inherently illegal thing, not unlike like trademark infringement) is the manufacturer of the get away car responsible too? The car manufacturer did serve, literally as a vehicle, to aid the criminal in his act, so are they liable? Of course not! Why then would we feel that Google was responsible for serving ads on a site which was cybersquatted or typosquatted when they didn’t register the domain name?

We see the culpability that search engines feel for trademark infringements reflected in their user agreements which speak to the issue, and even their policies for the protection of registered trademark terms too.

However, search engines aren’t proactive about protecting marks, they are simply reactive and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. Should we put more weight on search engines to protect trademarked terms? Where does it become their responsibility?

I am always a champion when it comes to acknowledging intellectual property rights and protecting brands for businesses - but just because search engines provide a vehicle for advertising doesn’t necessarily make them responsible or liable for infringements.

I think it’s up to the trademark holder to protect their brand the same way they would protect themselves against any other attack. I caution that if we hold search engines responsible for selling advertising space which contains trademark infringements - where does it stop?

The lawsuit the article below speaks of was a bold move by Dell, and I think they’re going to try to pass new laws against domain tasting. With GoDaddy on their side, it’ll be interesting to watch. It seems that there are trademark infringement lawsuits which involve cybersquatting and typosquatting filed less frequently; usually the UDRP solves the issue or a C&D letter will do the trick when it comes from someone who you knew not to mess with: a company with a large amount of authority and prestige.

I read somewhere that 15% of all internet traffic is direct-type. I believe that this reason is one of the driving forces behind typosquatting and cybersquatting. We all know how easy it is to to misspell a URL - how many times have you been like “oops! I was trying to go somewhere else”? If you stay on that page and click on ads which display what you wanted, or in Dell’s case competitors products that users were searching for, you just made whoever hosts that page money.

Part of proving trademark infringement or dilution is the loss of profit from the infringer taking your term and using it in commerce. If there’s no profit then you don’t satisfy all the prongs to the infringement/dilution test and then where are you? If these domain name registrars weren’t running AdSense or some other type of pay-advertising programs on the landing or parked pages that were put up, I wonder if Dell would have such a strong case.

I worked with a domain name registrar who had just boatloads of domain names and participated in domain tasting. Part of my job was to broker sales and transfers some of the domain names, and part of it was to convince my client to drop the names that he had registered which contained trademarked terms or typos of trademark terms back into the marketplace. “But! They sent valuable traffic to my site!” he whined to me. After reminding him that we could find a smarter (read: completely legal) way to get more traffic to his site and he could sleep at night, he started listening to my ideas. My overall thought on this issue is that cybersquatting and typsquatting are cheap and dirty tricks to get traffic to your site. If you want to promote a site that means something to you, then you shouldn’t mind investing money in it.

This issue has been gaining momentum, and it’s so interesting to see the “old world” court system get involved in the “New Frontier”.

This is one of my hot topics that I follow. I have been watching for well over a year, maybe two, and it is building momentum and getting more press on a regular basis.

My theory is that ad serving provider, Google™ and Yahoo, have huge liability exposure to this as they profit directly from the sale of ads on these sites.
Dell Takes Cybersquatters to Court
PC Maker Alleges Domain Registrars Profited on ‘Confusingly Similar’ Names

By Brian Krebs
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 28, 2007; 4:06 PM

Personal computer giant Dell Inc. is pursuing a major “cybersquatting” lawsuit against several companies that buy and sell Web site addresses, alleging that the entities earned millions of dollars from Internet traffic intended for Dell and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

Dell Takes Cybersquatters to Court
Washington Post - United States
The Washington Post examined Google’s connection to the typosquatting industry in a story published in April 2006. Google maintains that it specifically …
See all stories on this topic

In one of my earlier posts I wrote that companies shouldn’t ignore natural search.  In a study conducted by WebSideStory of data from January through August of B2C e-commerce sites, the statistics bear this out.  Natural search had a median conversion rate of 3.13% versus a paid conversion rate of 3.40%.

Interestingly, Rand Schulman, CMO of WebSideStory, attributes this to how searchers perceive listings.  Searchers view natural results like a newspaper editorial and paid search as a front-age advertisement: the advertiser does not control the editorial so the content has to be compelling to warrant a place in the paper.  But paid ads have their place because they contain calls to action, offers, and other elements that move the searcher towards a purchase.