We all do it or have to one degree or another.  One you get an email and you can’t tell if the author is kidding, joking or really really mad.  When this happens to me I try to pick of th phone and clarify things.  I can’t tell you how many times I have wrongly presumed anger because of the brevity of the email, or misinterpreted joking because of the  sarcasm only find out how far off base I was.

Our preception can be impaired because we read too much, or too little in between the lines.  READER BEWARE, sometimes when it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck; it is anything but.  On the other hand if you know the person that is writing you do know.  Use your best judgment but be cautious when you jump to a conclusion.

“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?

“pays registrants for its use of the purportedly deceptive domain names … uses semantics technology to analyze the meaning of domain names and select revenue maximizing advertisements and controls and maintains that advertising”

What was not said is that Google profits from this action.

Online Media Daily Reports - Wendy Davis

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!

Google’s metric does take into account the general region that the site is located in and compares it to the average of the site load time in that area. This will help to even out the difference caused by connectivity.

Load time to be incorporated in Quality Score

As we strive to continually improve the user experience, we’ll be adding a new element to Quality Score: landing page load time. Waiting a while for a page to load isn’t a positive experience and can hurt your conversion rate if users decide to abandon your site. To learn more about this change and where you’ll be able to see your load time evaluations, see our Inside AdWords blog post.

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.

Internet marketing, IM, is any activity to market or proment a service product or even a message. IM can be made up of various different subsegments.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO. Enabling a web site to properly indexed by search engines.

Search Engine Marketing, SEM, also known as Paid Search, Pay Per Click.

Web PR - Blog writing, posting, press releases.

These are all campaings. Most people understand SEO as a task, skill or project. It really is a campaing that needs it’s on budget goals, planning and proper execution.

NetSearch Direct, based in Richmond Virginia provide all of these services.

Adotas article, Lemon Law For Leads , chides the industry for not defining leads. We are proud to be int he forefront of this issue providing client solution where the industry on a whole cannot.

Lemon Law For Leads?
Opinions: Anyone who participates in online lead generation is left with one of two conclusions at the end of a campaign: there are either a disproportionate number of John Smiths at […] More…

In a recent article, The Coming Ad Revolution, posted on The Wall Street Journal Online, this increase in sophisticated advertising is featured.  “This market will get more competitive, and users will be barraged by ads which they will pay less and less attention.  Even though the ads will be more ‘relevant’ than ever, users will increasingly tune them out.”  These marketers are now being sold uninterrupted access to users.

The big boom of social networking sites has also begun to have a tremendous effect on advertisers and consumers alike.  Through social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook, users are being taught to supervise their own data.  This responsibility taken on by users gives them the privilege of being able to choose who can catch a glimpse of “them,” so to speak. Presented in the article, The Coming Ad Revolution, is the process as to which the advertiser must go through to connect with the possible consumer.  A company will request to “friend” the user and if accepted, can offer that user any number of promotions using marketing tools. 

By using social networking sites, marketers are able to reach the type of consumer that they want.  Consumers who are on these sites have formed some sort of trust with them; therefore they are more likely to respond to an advertisement which they believe is trustworthy.  “The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers.”

This sudden flux of unconventional & fresh advertising is able to manufacture and strengthen virtual communities, giving them the upper hand in the internet marketing world. 

To learn more about Internet Marketing & Social Networking Sites please visit NetSearchDirect.com

Please read the entire article for more information on The Coming Ad Revolution.

 By Esther Dyson, Investor
WSJ.com, The Wall Street Journal Online
Monday, February 11^th, 2008