There are multiple ways you can get an ad banner placed online.  Here are three:

Direct Banner Buys

The most common form of banner advertising is doing a direct buy.  You find a site where you think your offerings can do well and you pay said site to appear there.  There are many pay models for this type of buy, including flat fee, cpm (cost per 1,000 impressions), pay per click, and pay per acquisition (the most super duper awesome kind, but also the scarcest).  This type of buy is definitely not paid search.

Affiliate Marketing

Another way is through affiliate marketing – also not paid search.

Display Networks through Paid Search Providers

Yet another way – and one we actually offer as a service – is buying remnant space through services such as the Google AdWords Display Network.  Google called this their content network until very recently so you may hear both terms bandied about.  With the Display Network you have the option of paying on a per click basis.

For this type of banner advertising, it would be correct to classify it as “pay per click.”  And it is offered through a paid search provider.  However, since the ad displays in most instances on non-search result pages*, I wouldn’t call it paid search.  If you’re using contextual advertising – where you’re trying to match up your ad to pages with similar content based on keywords you can put in the ad group – it would have a relationship to keywords, but still not really paid search.

* Your ad could appear on the results page of a site search or an arbitrage site purporting to show users relevant information, but these don’t really count.

If you’re new to internet marketing and find information like this post helpful, you may also want to check out our Internet Marketing Terms Glossary – all plain spoken English with definitions of over 100 terms.  Happy advertising!

Dear Ambassador,

As a result of Yahoo!’s upcoming transition to Microsoft Advertising adCenter’s search platform, we will be discontinuing the Yahoo! Ambassador Program effective September 30, 2010.

Based on our current plans, after September 30, 2010, we will no longer accept new advertisers for Yahoo! Sponsored Search.

Yahoo! ended the program back in 2008 for all intents and purposes by not accepting new Ambassadors, so I guess this shouldn’t give me any pause, but it’s just kind of depressing that there is no longer any link to the very first pay per click provider.  I remember working on GoTo.com campaigns back in 2001 before it was rebranded as Overture, before that was bought by YSM.  It’s kind of amazing if you think about how Yahoo! devalued their search so completely through an amazing series of incompetent missteps.

For advertisers, your life gets somewhat easier.  If you weren’t with YSM before, you’re not going to be able to open an account after this month.  Really, there’s  not much point in doing it now any way since that doesn’t leave you a lot of time to get a robust campaign started and running.  Starting October 1, you’ll be able to reach more than 9 out of 10 US searchers with paid search advertising by just using Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.

As my final tribute to those salad days before Jerry Yang acted as though his only goal in life was to tank Yahoo!’s stock, I once again provide a link to my favorite and the only set of music videos featuring the personification of the three largest U.S. paid search providers, Search Engine Rap Battle.  I’ve always felt a little guilty that perhaps I played a role in Yahoo! not winning the vote tally against Google, which I thought it deserved to do.  When voting was still open I forwarded the site to my reps at Google who had not yet seen it and later told me it spread through their offices like wildfire.  Perhaps Googlers came out en masse to ensure a win for their team?

Anyway, RIP, Yahoo! Search Marketing.  I shall step outside and pour some of my diet mountain dew on the ground.

If I had a penny for every time I mentioned to somebody that they ought to respond to reviews or comments wherever they may appear I reckon I’d have close to 76p. I’d probably have another 73p every time they said they don’t want to.

I have some sympathy with business owners and their pained expressions when you tell them they have no control over what is said about them online and that they must involve themselves in conversations – good or bad – mentioning them.

That’s just the nature of the beast.

Ignoring addressing comments or reviews online is your choice, but to not have that choice to respond as said reviews accumulate under your business listing is a bit rum.

So it’s nice to hear Google are allowing business owners to reply to Google reviews that collect under local listings. From last week’s announcement on Google’s LatLong Blog:

Starting today, if you’re a verified Google Places business owner, you can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the Place Page for your business. Engaging with the people who have shared their thoughts about your business is a great way to get to know your customers and find out more. Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). By responding, you can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers.

Yes, it’s only for reviews written exclusively through Google, so other reviews pulled from the likes of Yelp, etc. you can’t reply to.

But, it’s more than a welcome step in the right direction, and you can read Google’s recommendations as to how to reply properly here.

….about the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Yes, the time is nearly upon us as pointed out by the following email:

Organic Search Transition:

To date, we’ve focused most of our communications to you on the paid search transition to adCenter. However, another key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search results (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.

If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change:
• Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, to help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales
• Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
• Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Bing crawler, as Bing results will be displayed for approximately 30%* of overall search query market share after this change

For more specifics on the organic search transition, please refer to the Self-service Advertiser FAQs on the Yahoo! Transition Center.

And it looks like that testing is well underway. Rustybrick has taken a snapshot of two not too dissimilar sets of SERPs from both Yahoo! and Bing.

But Bing themselves have gone a step further by actually stepping back and asking you not to blame them should your Yahoo! SERPs take a dive once they start running the show properly:

During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results. In particular, now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition.

In other words, start optimizing for Bing while not ignoring Yahoo! even though they’re about to be redundant in all but name from a search standpoint.

Just think yourself lucky you’re not on either PR department.

That whole LeBronathon last night had it all: the egocentric sporting superstar talking of himself in the third person; cities (well bars (ok, a bar) within various cities) waiting for his decision; the superstar’s hometown humiliated; residents of hometown burning superstar’s jersey; owner of superstar’s team going ballistic via emails written in Comic Sans – and this is just the start of it.

I’m obviously just a limey import that happens to reside in a Cleveland suburb, and couldn’t really give a hoot about hoops, but as a sports fan this was/is one sorry episode to witness.

LeBron in tears over Dan Gilbert's use of Comic Sans

The other school of thought suggests waiting to hit the send button to avoid coming across like a deranged, classless clown who’s just seen his team’s worth plummet 50% in 50 minutes.

However, all you need to know is who this letter is written to and who it’s for – Cleveland Cavalier fans who are holding LeBron jersey burning parties the length and breadth of North East Ohio.

They may have loved it.

It was also a great bit of theater to have supplemented by twitter and facebook – some of the snark was top class.

It’s also pretty amazing Twitter managed to hold itself together under the weight of the global announcement otherwise known as ‘The Decision’. Twitter has failed during the most innocuous of games in the World Cup. I wonder how much of a coincidence it is API calls were halved sometime near the beginning of the tournament.

Also, Twitter recently proclaimed itself to be the second largest search engine all of a sudden with 25 billion searches a month to Google’s 88 billion.

And yes, those twitter numbers are nearly as inflated as King James’ ego. You can read as to why here in the WSJ.

The only credit I’m handing out is to MSFT for having the sense to advertise bing on ESPN last night during LeBron’s humbling of himself.

After all, it is ‘The Decision Engine’.

May you have a great bbq-ing, star ball-shooting, corn hole-playing*, rip-roaring good time this weekend.  Just be sure to come back with all your fingers.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

* Or ladder ball or horseshoes, or croquet, or lawn darts, or bocce, or badminton, or whatever your favorite lawn game happens to be.  If you’ve got a favorite, put it in the comments.

You Only Advertise in Microsoft adCenter

Really?  Well, you’re set.  Move on – nothing to see here.

You Advertise in Both Microsoft and Yahoo!

We’ve heard different strategies, but really the biggest thing for most medium-sized advertisers is just to make sure you have your Microsoft adCenter account as up to date as possible.  Check it against your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to see where there’s disconnect and make sure you’re adding all terms as appropriate.  Then just get ready to make adjustments like crazy when the switch happens as things like cpc’s and ad positions could go haywire.

Note – this advice is primarily for search networks.  If you’re running content match, you’re going to have a lot more work to do.  Check back later for more on this.

You Only Advertise in Yahoo! Search Marketing

Here’s where things get a little bit tricky. We’ve compiled a list of some of the most important things you’ll want to do:

1. Check those ads.  If you’ve been running 40-character titles on Yahoo!, chop them up.  Ad titles are limited to 25 characters just like Google AdWords.   Likewise, you actually get 71 characters for ads in Yahoo! (and need to use a period), but will only get 70 in Microsoft. That means your last word could be cut off.  And everybody loves to make fun of grammar and spelling mistakes.
2. Keywords.  Wow will this be fun.  You can actually advertise on virtually any keyword you want now, unlike being stuck with choosing one keyword choice that Yahoo! maps out to many different phrases.  That makes management a little more time consuming, but well worth it.
3. Bids. he minimum bid in Yahoo! is one penny, but a nickel with MSN.  I had actually I had forgotten about this one until an email from our friends at YSM as the minimum bid is actually higher for many keywords and virtually all the ones you’ll care about.  However, you’re likely going to have more competition on your keywords after the switch, so you’re going to need to up them anyway.
4. Country Targeting.  You’ll have a few more options here, sort of.  Whereas with Yahoo! you needed to create a separate account for anything outside the US and Canada, Microsoft will also let you do France and the UK (and sort of Singapore) within the same account if you’d like.
5. Set up an account now with adCenter.  Kind of a big ticket one here.  They’ll have tutorials and will do what they can to make the transition easy, but it won’t be.  Get used to running the accounts now even if you only put a small budget towards it.

As we go along and note some other biggies, we’ll either update this list or do a new post if warranted.  If you want to learn more and don’t mind looking through rose-colored glasses, check out the official YSM-adCenter transition site.

Remember, they are pushing for a transition ahead of the heavy holiday shopping period.  However, according to our reps, there’s the possibility it will get pushed back.  They recognize the importance of this period for many advertisers and aren’t going to push ahead if they’re not confident of a smooth transition.  So if you’re setting up new accounts now, we’d do one in both.

Finally – what the heck – just for kicks:

A pretty huge corporation ate up a quasi-competitor.  They put out a press release and got pretty decent coverage among blogs and more traditional news organizations.  They wanted to show up on searches by people who had heard the news and wanted to learn more.  No sweat sayeth we, but we posed a question:

“How would you like to show up on the same pages as the posts,  news articles, and press releases themselves?”

It took them nanoseconds to decide they were in.  So, using some contextual search campaigns through Google’s display nee content network, we got them up and running.  Within a couple hours for message and campaign development, they were up and running next to these places.  It’s exciting to be so reactive that you can run new ads (search or display networks) within minutes or hours of breaking news that can be used to your advantage*.

So the moral of the story is to take a look around your industry for news – especially if you feel like you’re getting in a rut with your paid search campaigns.  Is someone out there already doing the heavy lifting of generating buzz that you can capitalize on?  There is no faster, better, less expensive ways to test new ideas than paid search.

* This is also the reason we tell businesses when we speak about search engine marketing that they should always have an account open even if not active just for response in online reputation management emergencies. And the company that did a textbook case of this recently?  BP.  Just a brilliant job that generated a draft post that never saw the light of the DOM Blog.

Since we’re now starting to build out our new WordPress site on a test server, we wanted to give you our Rule #1 out here.  Never put up a test (or dev) site without blocking it off from the search engines.  I know what you’re thinking – how would anyone ever find it – we’re not sending out an email to our newsletter list with the url.

However, I can count three separate times off the top of my head that future clients got their dev sites indexed in the search engines.  Unless you have the test site set up on a machine in your attic and it’s not wired to the internet, just please, block it off from the spiders via robots files or whatever method you prefer.  You probably want to block off access to unauthorized individuals as well, but that’s beyond our core interests.

If you do end up getting it indexed, you can get it removed – you’ll just want to submit the appropriate requests through Google Webmaster Tools, et al.

Happy testing!

Update: USA! USA! USA!

Update 2: England advances, putting both official DOM rooting interests through to the next round.

Since the television down here in Wheeling is on the USA game and the one in Cleveland is focused on the Three Lions*, I couldn’t resist making a World Cup reference in today’s post.  Get to throw a hackneyed joke about Les Bleus* – approximately the 495,000th one on the internet since last night – and winner winner chicken dinner.

The point of the post, however, is not to rip on the French for – among many, many other indiscretions – refused to practice ahead of their final World Cup game, which I just can’t wrap my brain around.  No, instead it is to tell you about two recently released features in Google Analytics that you absolutely need to know and how you can take advantage of it to improve your AdWords campaigns.

Before we get into the new features, let’s start out with Goals.  If you’re using Google Analytics for your, umm, analytics, you need to set them up.  Period.  Having conversion tracking set up in AdWords and your other paid search accounts is not enough.  And it’s not just so you can track conversions of important events for all traffic sources although that should be enough motivation.  You need it to take advantage of these two new features from within the Traffic Sources >> AdWords section of Google Analytics:

2 New Google Analytics Features Every AdWords User Should Know

1. Ad positions.  Ever wonder whether that top spot is really worth it or not?  Wonder no more.    Now you can get stats on how your keywords are performing in each of the first page result positions.  It’s not quite as straightforward as we’d like at the moment.  For example, GA doesn’t allow you to easily aggregate keyword performance data at even an ad group level, and the positions show you where it does well on the page, but not necessarily what bid level (e.g. a #1 position could be top center or top right – and these are broken out separately).

2. Dayparting.  Dayparting has a few slightly different meanings, but all revolve around looking at different parts of the day – usually hourly – and how campaigns perform differently during those times.  There was a way to get this information before in GA, but they’ve made it a heck of a lot easier now, right in the revised AdWords section.  Speaking of which, when is that going to be out of beta?  Knowing Google, it might keep that label for another 2 years.

So now you know about these new analytics features, which GI Joe will tell you is half the battle.  The other half is using them, so get crackalackin!

* So why is it that the Americans don’t have a nickname.  Paul says it’s Team USA, but surely we can do better than that.  Look around – Bafana Bafana, All Whites (to go with New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team; not some breakaway white supremacist nation) – all the nations have something interesting except us.  Can’t we at least get a Bald Eagles going?