I had a chance to speak with folks from both Marchex (who runs Enhance) and Yahoo at the SEMX conference here in Seattle on Monday to clarify what was meant by the Enhance press release on Monday. My original thoughts when I first read the release are below - this is a correction post. What is going on is that advertisers can now buy some Yahoo text placements through Enhance. Yahoo has backfilled some places that they can’t or won’t fill with their own text ads, with ads from Enhance. So, what does this mean:
- Depending on your business and keyword sets, you can get into areas of Yahoo that you have been unable to before.
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We use geo-targeting quite a bit on Google with our higher volume campaigns. If you have the volume, tracking and technical ability to manage a highly decentralized campaign, you can achieve better results through discrete geo targeting, improved positioning and lower CPCs (I’ll cover this in-depth in a future Internet Marketing Review Newsletter).

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I just posted the Search Marketing Fact Pack from Advertising Age and eMarketer here. The PDF is chock full of stats, facts, insights, tips and lists. It also includes lots of ads from search engine marketers to pay for the publication. I highly recommend saving it as a resource for pitches and insights.

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Received a question from a marketing friend who wanted to have some options for tracking across domains and sub-domains. Depending on how experienced your tech team is and which analytics package you have there are some options. Generally the following is true:

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Google announced it’s Website Optimizer at the eMetrics Summit in Washington DC this week and I immediately received calls and emails from nervouce/concerned testing and optimization companies wanting to get my take. I personally think it is great to have a free tool in the market for introducing the concept of multivariate testing however limited. If Google can actively promote the tool to get site owners thinking about conversion improvement in this manner, it will be a big step forward in raising the awareness of testing and thus improving the demand for all companies involved in testing (including Brand Digital).

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The Marketing Sherpa just released a report that highlights an issue that I have been focused on since the launch of Brand Digital almost 4 years ago (wow!). Small Businesses are getting squeezed out of the internet as a communication vehicle due to the fact that things are getting more complex not easier. The report is titled Special Report: State of the Search Marketing Agency Industry 2006 and focuses on search which is the primary driver for small business marketing dollars online. SEM agencies are requiring minimum monthly spend of $3,000 or more (in service fees) and of the 62 agencies interviewed - only 1 actually goes after the economy-value part of the market (small businesses). The focus is on mid-sized and larger firms that can support larger service fees.

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Interesting article on a study by Canadian Researchers posted at wired online. The study was published in the Behaviour & Technology Information Journal (I had no idea there was such a thing!) and shows that design drives the first impression reaction in terms of trust within the first 1/20th of a second. As the internet speeds up (broadband adoption is over 50% in the home and higher in businesses), the need for a page to load quickly, be clean and be trustworthy in even more important.

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