Denver Online Marketing Blog

Bing Gaining Market Share

Frank Salvatore — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:58:00 -0600

It appears that more and more people are using Microsoft's Bing browser. From a Wall Street Journal Article citing comScore statistics, Microsoft's Internet search market share rose to 12.1% during the second week of June from just 8% in May.

While not a dominant increase in market share, it is a promising sign that Microsoft is making some headway in search market share. Google has been responsible for around 2/3 of all US Based Internet searches, and Yahoo typically generates about 15-20% of the searches.

What Does This Mean to Small Business Advertisers in Denver?

I view this news as good news for the Denver advertiser. It would be a good thing for there to be more competition for Google, and a more even distribution of search market share among the three major players. This would likely result in better costs per click for advertisers who would have multiple search engine advertising platforms to choose from. Increased competition would also likely incentivize the major players to be more innovative and cater to their customers (advertisers) even more.

Click Fraud Lawsuit Filed

Frank Salvatore — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:43:00 -0600

Microsoft is suing 3 Canadian residents for at least $750,000 in damages for click fraud. It is alleged that these three individuals made $250,000 through their click fraud scheme by driving up ad costs for their competitors while simultaneously benefiting their own business. They allegedly did this to deplete their competitiors advertising budgets. View the Wall Street Journal article here.

Click Fraud Defined

Click fraud sometimes occurs in Internet marketing when a person (or an automated computer bot) clicks on an ad when there is no real interest in the person making the click in the ad. Instead, the person is just trying to levy charges against the advertiser either to drive up ad costs for the advertiser or to make money for themselves.

The Microsoft lawsuit alleges that the defendants were attempting to drive out competition by making it too cost prohibitive for other companies to advertise on the certain keyword phrases in the Microsoft Advertising Network. While not necessarily a unique situation, this is a bit different than how click fraud has historically occurred (as defined below).

How Click Fraud Has Historically Occurred

Historically, click fraud has most commonly occurred on the advertising networks of major search engines. For example, Google has a advertising network that allows advertisers to place their ads on a variety of published websites like news sites, sports sites, and even individual user's blogs. If your ad appears on one of these publisher websites, and a visitor to one of these publisher websites clicks on the ad, the publisher is compensated. Occasionally, an unscrupulous publisher may repeatedly click on your ad in order to drive up their own revenue. This was more common in the past as the search engine advertising networks now have capabilities in place to detect this kind of fraud.

Q: If I Advertise My Denver Business Online Do I Need to Worry About Click Fraud?

A: Yes.

You need to be aware that it exists, especially if you are advertising your business with the search engine advertising networks. Fortunately, the major search engines do have their own in house monitoring for click fraud - but you would be wise to closely monitor your campaign as well. If you see anything that looks out of the ordinary - like a disproportionately high clickthrough rate - especially from a given domain - you'll want to do further research to make sure you aren't a victim of click fraud.

Major Search Engine Monitoring and Click Fraud

All of the major search engines have click fraud monitoring built into their advertising platforms and are continually on the lookout for fraudulent activity. It is in the best interests of the search engines to try to provide a safe, effective advertising platform for their advertisers. This Microsoft lawsuit shows that they take the safety of their advertisers seriously.

Free Microsoft Software for Software Start-Ups!

Frank Salvatore — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:06:00 -0600

Great Deal For Small Businesses who Develop Software Applications

This is a legitimate offer directly from Microsoft. It is worth checking out to see if your business qualifies.

Eligibility

In order to qualify, be sure to check out the official Microsoft BizSpark website. At the BizSpark website you can apply for entrance to the program. There is also a 14 page guideline you'll need to review to make sure you meet eligibility requirements. See the official guidelines, but in a nutshell, your business will have to meet these conditions:

Your business must be privately held

You must be in business for 3 years or less

Your business must realize less than $1M in annual revenue

You also must be developing a software product

This just touches on the eligibility requirements, you'll need to see the official website for details

What You Get: Thousands of Dollars of Value Annually

The following are just some of the software products that you'll receive and be able to use for up to 3 years:

Visual Studio Team System Suite (Development Software)

MSDN Premium

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Windows Server

SQL Server

BizTalk Server

Office Sharepoint Server

Who Benefits from BizSparks?

While this is a nationwide promotion, if you are a Denver area business that is in the business of software development on a Windows platform - you'll want to check this out. Please also note that if you don't have to be an exclusively Microsoft Software Development shop to participate.

Augmented Reality Advertising

Frank Salvatore — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:53:00 -0600

Get ready to see a new kind of advertising take place on a national scale. The May 26th edition of The Wall Street Journal had an article titled "Madison Avenue Flirts with 3-D" in which a very interesting advertising innovation that incorporates augmented reality technology was explored.

My Test of the Virtual Box Simulator at the USPS.gov Website

What is Augmented Reality?

As defined by researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology:

"An augmented reality system generates a composite view for the user. It is a combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer that augments the scene with additional information."

Real world examples are best seen in sports. For football it would be the yellow first down lines that they superimpose on the field. Horse racing now has lines across the track which indicate the amount of yards remaining in a race. Augmented reality actually enhances the viewing of sporting events. But will it add any real value to advertising campaigns?

Augmented Reality and Advertising

This June, Papa John's is affixing an image to the back of pizza boxes. You can apparently hold this image up to a webcam and use your computer to drive a car on the computer screen. Seems kind of gimmicky. General Electric has a demo on their website where you can plug into the smart grid using augmented reality technology.

My Real World Experiment with Augmented Reality

The United States Postal service recently introduced the "Virtual Box Simulator". This simulator makes use of augmented reality.

I thought I would try out the Virtual Box Simulator, and it did work. You print out a piece of paper with the usps eagle logo on it from the above website. The webcam then uses this piece of paper to superimpose different boxes on top of the piece of paper. On your computer screen, you can see yourself holding the paper with the box superimposed on top.

If you hold up another object at about the same distance from the camera, you can see whether or not this object would actually fit within the box. You can rotate the box to get a feel for whether or not the object that you're holding would be able to fit into the box from a somewhat realistic 3-D perspective. I found the superimposed box movement was somewhat jerky when I slightly rotated the paper. Whether that was my connection or their servers, I don't know.

While impressive, from a practical standpoint - the technology seems like a toy to me. Fun to try out, but practical applications - at least right now - are somewhat limited. Even the post office example seems somewhat pointless. How many people looking to ship something are going to hop on-line and load the simulator to see what box is right for them? More than likely I would either grab a box from the house, or head down to the post office and pick a box there. I'm not sure why anyone would go out of their way to use the Virtual Box Simulator for real-world use. They seemed to solve a problem where none really existed.

Does this Affect Denver Small to Mid-Sized Businesses?

Not likely. It is a trend that you'll probably want to be aware of, but to me it seems like it might be a bit of a gimmick in its current form. There are also huge technological requirements to get an advertising campaign like this off the ground - which is why only the larger corporations like General Electric, USPS, and Papa John's are currently utilizing the technology. Perhaps the biggest downside of incorporationg a technology like this into your marketing campaigns is that users need webcams to make it work - and according to the Wall Street Journal, only an estimated 18% of the nation's 68.5 million broadband houselholds even have webcams.

Wolfram Alpha Advertising

Frank Salvatore — Sun, 31 May 2009 07:18:00 -0600

Yesterday I took a look at the new Bing browser that will be introduced by Microsoft in the upcoming days. Today, I'll be taking a look at Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha Background

Wolfram Alpha is named after its creator Stephen Wolfram and bills itself as a computational knowledge engine. Wolfram Alpha received a lot of publicity out of the gates - probably due to the success its founder has had with a software program called Mathematica. As for Wolfram Alpha itself, it is much different than your typical search engine. Queries with a quantitative nature are encouraged. Suggested queries on the Wolfram Alpha website include items like math problems and dates in history. Even if you stay away from numbers within your query, you're likely to get quantitative answers anyway. For example, I entered "Denver" as my search term, and it returned with population, time, current weather and elevation.

"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input"

I found Wolfram Alpha to be quite rigid in what it could accept for a query. I typed in "Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup" as well as "Denver Broncos Super Bowl" (without the quotes) and I received "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input". This despite many suggested sports queries that Wolfram Alpha provides. I also wonder about the viability of this computational knowledge engine - at least in its current form. If I wanted the elevation of Denver, or the current time - I would just type it in to Google. Google returns those numbers right at the top of the search page. Although Wolfram Alpha says it isn't a search engine, and is rather a "computational knowledge engine" - so far at least, existing search engines seem to be handling the same types of queries without much problem. Making it hard to justify switching over to Wolfram Alpha when you're looking for more quantitative answers to your queries. To be fair, Wolfram Alpha is just getting started (as witnessed by the "Alpha" designation), but it has a long way to go before I'd use it for any purpose on a regular basis.

Advertising on Wolfram Alpha

Well - what does this mean for pay-per-click advertisers looking for a new outlet? Don't worry about Wolfram Alpha - at least not for now. On Wolfram Alpha's FAQ page, they mention that they are focusing more on corporate sponsorships as opposed to targeted advertising (which I took to be pay-per-click advertising based on search phrases). They are actually quite vague about their business model as well. So, while they may offer pay-per-click advertising, it will probably be in the distant future if Wolfram Alpha turns out to be successful.

Despite all the hype you may be hearing, for pay-per-click advertisers, this isn't an engine that you'll need to be keeping a close eye on.

Microsoft's Bing Search Engine

Frank Salvatore — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:41:00 -0600

On June 3rd, Microsoft will be introducing a new search engine - Bing. The reviews are generally pretty favorable and the overall consensus is that this new search engine is pretty much on par with Google - ahead in some areas and behind in others. For online advertisers who spend a lot of money on pay-per-click, it would be nice to see a little more competition for Google. Unfortunately for Microsoft, from the reviews that I have seen so far, it doesn't appear that Bing will be significantly better than Google.

Microsoft is spending over $80M USD on the advertising campaign to build brand awareness and the hope is that this will increase Microsoft's marketshare for search from its current relatively low level of 8%.

Bing's focus from a search perspective will be slightly different from existing search engines in that there is a special emphasis on local search, travel planning, health, and shopping. Currently at Bing.com, there is a short 3 minute introduction video which provides a bit of detail on each of these areas and why you should be using Bing.com to conduct your searches.

While I'd like to see more about what Microsoft offers from a local search and ads perspective (what the major changes are from Live and how all of this impacts AdCenter) - I did find one of the tools promised for travel to be pretty cool. The price predictor - which shows you when it would be cheapest to say purchase airline tickets. Out of everything that I saw during the video tutorial - this was the most useful. From a shopping standpoint, if you type in a product review Bing will attempt to consolidate prices and reviews to help the searcher with their buying decision.

Steve Ballmer Talks About Bing

Interview with Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal (All Things Digital) About midway through the video Ballmer starts talking about the Bing Launch

Bing Reviews:

The following people have had a pre-release view of Bing. If their assessments are correct,the search engine doesn't look like a game changer that will push many people off of Google and onto Bing.com.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land - believes that this attempt to brand the search engine with a newer, more improved name is an upgrade from Live.com - which was somewhat less than memorable

Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land - has been working with Bing (pre-release) and Google over the past few weeks side by side and says that the gap that existed between Microsoft Search (Live) and Google is largely gone with Bing.

Rafe Needleman - of CNET really likes Bing and recommends that people use it. He notes that the results for product reviews, movie listings, weather, travel, and stock prices Bing really excels.

Impact on Search and Local Advertisers

It is unclear how local business advertising campaigns will be affected by the Bing rollout. Microsoft needs to really dig into the marketshare of other search engines to increase its marketshare. Until that point, focusing on your business listing performing well in Google should be where most of your time is spent. If Microsoft does somehow manage to capture additional marketshare, it would be very wise to familiarize yourself how their local search and business listings are presented so you can devote more time to making sure your business is well represented in Bing results.

Advertise in the Phone Book? Or Set Fire to Your Marketing Dollars?

Frank Salvatore — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:07:00 -0600

The Choice is Yours. The Outcome Will Likely Be the Same.

I recently read an article in the November 17th print edition of The Wall Street Journal titled "Extinction Threatens Yellow-Pages Publishers". If you are a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, you can view the article that I'm referencing here.

The article describes how Phone Book publishers are in dire straits. Ad spending in print directories is expected to fall 39% over the next four years - the largest decline across all local-media categories according to Borrell & Associates. Advertisers are jumping ship from the phone book for obvious reasons - no one uses their phone book anymore. For me - and I'm sure for almost all of you - when someone drops a 5 lb chunk of dead trees on my doorstep, I become irritated. It is a waste of trees, and a waste of my time figuring out what I need to do to recycle the darn thing.

The problem is that no one uses the phone book anymore. It is a dying medium. Why would someone look for a local pizza joint, attorney, or contractor in the advertising portion of the phone book when they can find what they want on Yahoo or Google in 5 seconds? Plus, when they go to one of the big search engines, they'll likely find customer reviews of the business so they dcan determine whether or not they'd like to initiate contact with the business. An ad in the phone book is completely one sided and doesn't give much information.

Phone books are suffering the same fate as newspapers. Newspaper advertising is also being decimated. Classified advertising was the revenue generation machine for local newspapers but this is the case no more. Advertisers have already found that they can reach their audience more easily, effectively, and with more flexibility online than they ever could in a newspaper.

Print is a dying medium, and phonebooks are leading the way into the grave.

Google Adwords Location Targeting Doesn't Work

Frank Salvatore — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:04:00 -0600

At least not as you intended. You're getting clicks from outside your target area. Find out why here.

When you select a location using Google Adwords Location Targeting, you certainly expect to see only clicks within your targeted area. But this doesn't always happen.

As an example, I have a campaign targeted for just the Las Vegas, Nevada metropolitan area.

Google AdWords Location Targeting Yields Unexpected Clicks From Outside of the Blue Shaded "Las Vegas Metro" Area.

And although this isn't the focus of the article, as you can see above, when you set up location targeting, I highly recommend that you look at the map to see the geographical extent of what is being covered by your Adwords location targeting. The light blue shaded area is what Google AdWords defines as Las Vegas metro. It goes most of the way to Reno and covers approximately half of the entire state. I'm targeting a "metro area" of what probably what amounts to over 40,000 square miles.

Most of this is desert, but it is always good to take a look to see exactly what is covered.

As it turns out, I'm fine with this targeted area for my campaign. What I'm not so fond of is clicks occurring outside of this targeted metro area. Shown below is a screenshot from Google Analytics for my Google CPC campaign (which I have integrated with Google Analytics).

Last Time I checked, California, Tennessee, and Utah weren't in Las Vegas Metro

What you'll notice is that there are multiple clicks from outside of my targeted location (which is located entirely within Nevada). All of the clicks - even the California and Utah clicks are located nowhere close to the border with Nevada.

This most certainly must be an error with Adwords that I need to tell them about, right? I don't want to be paying for clicks outside of my area, and these clicks from this sample timeframe comprise a full 16% of my total clicks.

Well, not so fast. Google has a FAQ Page to address the seeming Adwords location targeting error here.

Here is a summary of the reasons:

A user's IP Address is mapped outside the physical location where they are conducing the search from
(e.g. Someone conducting the search from California has their IP addresss mapped to a server in the Las Vegas metro area)
A user outside your targeted locaton is conducting a search that matches the criteria of your ad campaign
Your targeted area is bigger than you intended - use customized targeting instead (This reason provided by Google is really a setup error on your part and doesn't apply to getting clicks outside of Nevada - you should look at the map as I described earlier in this post.
The last reason has to do with International targeting which really doesn't apply to most of my clients who are in the Denver metro area. I advise you click the Google targeting link above if this applies to you.

I would prefer that Google, by default would only allow clicks from within the targeted area. It would be nice if you could exclude all searches who have IP Addresses outside of the targeted area from seeing the ad. That would be easy enough to do.

The moral of the story is be very careful when targeting your metro area. First look at the map, and make sure that the metro area lines up with what you had envisioned. The Next step is to monitor the campaign closely in your analytics package. This is something you should be doing anyway, but for locally targeted searches keep an eye on where the clicks are coming from and figure out if you need to adjust your Adwords campaign to compensate.

Yahoo Local Search Overview

FrankSalvatore — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:31:00 -0600

As a small business owner in the Denver Metro area, you may have heard about Local Search.

This screencast tutorial is the first in a multi-part series on Yahoo Local search. This tutorial provides an overview of Yahoo Local search - including:

What a Yahoo Local Search small business listing actually is
How your Denver small business can benefit from Yahoo Local Search
The fact that you can pay to advertise with Yahoo to receive premium listings
How users can interact with your Yahoo Local Search small business listing
How to access Local search through the Yahoo website as well as through direct links

Yahoo Local Search reaches many website visitors daily within the Denver metro area. There is even an option to get your Denver business listed for free - making signing up for local search a no-brainer. My next Screencast will actually provide detailed steps on how to sign up for Yahoo Local Search using an actual existing Denver Small business as an example.

Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool

FrankSalvatore — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:43:00 -0600

This presentation is about the Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool.The 6 minute presentation provides step by step instruction on how to use the tool, and why you need to be using it if you aren’t already.

If you’re running adWords campaigns for your Denver Business, you need to be using this tool for the following reasons:

1) Google Recommends That You Use the AdWords Ad Preview Tool!

Google actually recommends that you use the AdWords Ad Preview Tool to check your ad positioning for keywords you are bidding on.

Why?

If you use the normal google.com page and search for your targeted keywords, you run the risk of artificially increasing your impressions. Since you aren’t likely to click on your ads while conducting the search, you’re also going to be lowering your clickthrough rate with each search. This can hurt your quality score and your ad positioning. It may cost you more to maintain your current ad positions.

So, you really need to be using the Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool instead of Google.com to check your ad performance for certain keywords.

2) You Can Check Your Ads in a Different Geographic Region

If you’re in Denver and you’re running ads in Colorado Springs or Cheyenne, there is no easy way to see your ad as a person in Colorado Springs or Cheyenne would see it. Sure, you’ll get to see the average position from the campaign stats, but the AdWords Ad Preview Tool lets you act as if you were a resident of Colorado Springs or Cheyenne conducting the. You’ll see the actual sponsored listings. Perhaps even more valuable to your business - you’ll also get a good look at who is competing with you for the same keywords.

3) Advertiser Competition Analysis

If you’re thinking about entering a specific geographic market with an ad campaign, the AdWords Ad Preview tool will let you know how many advertisers are bidding on your coveted keywords. You can see the total quantity of advertisers, and click on advertiser links to get a better idea of the competition that you’ll be up against if you decide to enter this new geographic market.

Marketing for Denver Accountants

FrankSalvatore — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:23:00 -0600

I have just published the latest in The Power of Online Marketing series. This most recent white paper is for Accountants and is titled "The Power of Online Marketing: Getting Clients for Your Denver Accounting Firm From Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo".

This paper is great for Denver accountants trying to establish a presence for their website within the search engine results. The paper provides the following key information:

An easy technique you can use today to improve your accounting firm's search engine rankings
An overview of how search engines work
An explanation of the key components of Search: Local Search, Paid Search, and Organic Search and how each can help you accounting business
How to cost effectively allocate your online marketing budget

The paper is completely free and should be a great help to accountants - especially those who are new to the world of online marketing. For more detailed information about the white paper and how to effectively market your accounting business online, please visit our Denver CPA Marketing page.

If you aren't an accountant and would like a guide that relates specifically to your industry, be sure to take a look at our Internet marketing white papers page.

Does Google Even Know My Website Exists?

FrankSalvatore — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:11:00 -0600

One of the most frequent questions I get when I give presentations in the Denver metro area is "Does Google even know that my website exists?".

There are a lot of frustrated small business owners who type in search terms related to their business. But unfortunately, their business website doesn't appear in the search results.

Fortunately, there is a fairly easy way to find out if Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft do in fact know that your website exists. All search engines have unique indexes. A search engine index is where search engines store all of the information that they collect when they crawl the web. In order for your site to appear on a search engine results page, your website must first be within the search engine index for a given search engine. By performing an advanced web search, you can find out whether or not the search engines know that your small business website is out there.

For Google and Yahoo, the advanced operator to use is "site:"

For Microsoft, the command is "url:"

The screencast for this blogpost is titled "Does Google Even Know My Website Exists?". It provides step by step instructions on how to use these advanced search commands, and how to interpret the results.

Welcome to the Denver Online Marketing Blog

FrankSalvatore — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:51:00 -0600

This blog is designed to provide great tips for new and small businesses in the Denver area to help more effectively market their business.

The blog will feature a lot of step by step video tutorials - screencasts - that will show exactly what you need to do to more effectively promote your business on the Internet.