Archive for October, 2009
Sanford Wallace a.k.a “Spamford” is already well-known for his illegal spamming practices from last year when MySpace was awarded $234 million against him. Spamford and business partner Walter Rines infiltrated MySpace, stealing passwords and enticing users to visit websites and buy products in order to generate revenue. MySpace wasn’t Spamford’s only target though, and Facebook also took him to court.
Today that lawsuit looks to have been concluded and Facebook awarded $711.2 million in damages. The case was also in response to Spamford sending mails and posting messages on the site in a similar way to his actions on MySpace. The California court ruled in favor of Facebook and found Wallace guilty of breaking the Can-Spam Act.
Facebook is realistic about actually ever seeing the money, though, with spokesperson Sam O’Rourke stating:
While we don’t expect to quickly collect the full amount, we’ll work hard to get everything we can. We’re confident that today’s ruling will act as a powerful deterrent against those who would abuse Facebook and its users. The ruling is the result of tireless effort by our security and legal teams, which work to find, expose, and prosecute the sources of spam attacks These efforts complement the sophisticated technical systems we continue to develop to limit the impact of these attacks, and where possible, block them altogether.
Wallace’s problems dont stop at finding millions to pay the fines. The judge also ruled he committed criminal contempt and now could face imprisonment. Facebook on the other hand is doing very well out of these spam lawsuits and this is the second massive payout it has been awarded. The first was for the slightly larger amount of $873 million last year from Adam Guerbuez and Atlantic Blue Capital.
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Managing small-budget pay-per-click campaigns (under $3,000 per month) is typically more difficult than managing campaigns with higher spend levels. Lack of “workable” data in smaller accounts often pushes campaign managers to make decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. Below is a checklist of seven items you can do today to improve performance of your smaller PPC campaign.
1. Use Negative Keywords to Block Irrelevant Traffic
Negative keywords allow you to filter out irrelevant traffic. There is no reason to pay for clicks that were generated by search queries such as “(your product) defect”, “(your product) manual”, “broken (your product)”, and so forth. Read “Negative Keywords for Your PPC Campaign” to help understand this.
2. Research Long-tail Keywords
Clicks generated from keywords reflecting purchase intent are more likely to turn into actual buyers. Examples of such keywords include “buy widget” and “get widgets” Some useful tools to research keywords are listed at “Keyword Research Tools”.
3. Separate Search Network from Content Network
Google, Yahoo! and Bing, the primary search engines, offer both search distribution and content distribution. Traffic generated via the content channel is inherently different quality from that of search. More information about developing a solid content strategy is found at “Advertising On The Google Content Network”.
4. Split Keywords into Tightly Organized Ad Groups
Make sure your keywords are organized in the most logical order. For example, keywords describing one product should not be mixed with keywords describing other products. Imagine that you’re retailer selling socks and wine. It would be illogical to place both keywords (“socks” and “wine”) into the same Ad Group. The same rule applies to less obvious examples. “Green widget” and “blue widget cover” should be placed in separate Ad Groups, for example.
5. Include Different Match Types
“Match types” allow you to improve the quality of the traffic by more closely matching users’ search queries with your keyword choices. Additionally, having all three match types (Broad match, Phrase match, Exact match) in Google and MSN might help you get more clicks for the same overall price due to the quality score discount (which occurs due to ads being ordered based on multiple relevancy factors and not solely on the per-click bid price). In Yahoo!, running multiple match types simultaneously is not permitted. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to see if “standard match” would generate better return on investment than “advanced match.”
6. Re-configure Campaigns/Account Settings
Here is a list of standard settings that will typically optimize a smaller budget campaign.
Google (Campaign Level):
- Targeting: United States only
- Language: English
- Network & Devices: Google Search; Desktop and laptop computers
- Bidding: Manual bidding – Max CPC
- Position preference: Off
- Delivery method: Standard
- Ad rotation: Optimize
Yahoo! (Account Level):
- Sponsored Search: On
- Content Match: Off
- Match Type: Advanced
- Blocked Continents: Check off all
- Campaign Level Targeting: Block 0-18, Select U.S. only
Bing (Campaign Level):
- Tracking conversions: Checked
- Target by Location: United States
7. Use Free Pay-per-click Tools
Use free pay-per-click tools to work on your campaigns. Don’t waste time going through slow account interfaces. Use these account tools to help you navigate through Google and MSN:
ROHNERT PARK, CA –I just couldn’t help but post this once I saw it over at Fail Blog. This did happen basically in my back yard. Rohnert Park is about 5-10 minutes away. Up close you can’t really see what all those soda cases make but once you take a step back you will see who is about to eat the super mushroom! Thanks to InAdaWords for the write up below.
“A Pepsi representative (and Super Mario fanatic it seems) tasked with creating an eye-catching display for the recent Labor Day weekend sale at the Rohnert Park Safeway in northern California constructed this giant Super Mario-themed installation piece made out of 12-Pack soda containers!
According to the fellow who spearheaded the Nintendo-themed display (his name is Ryan; his YouTube page can be found here), the entire project took him and two other workers four hours to complete!
In the end, a thousand 12-Packs of soda were used to create the giant-sized Mario and 1-Up Mushroom.”
YouTube Video:
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Tourists holidaying in the Australian state of Queensland have been warned to stay out of the water by authorities who fear a giant six meter-long shark might be prowling the coast.
Concerns were raised after a 3m great white shark was found dead with two huge bites taken out of its body. Experts believe the bites were made by an even larger predatory fish.
Swimmers have been warned to stay out of the waters off Stradbroke Island, north of Brisbane.
“It certainly opened up my eyes. I mean the shark that was caught is a substantial shark in itself,” Jeff Krause of Queensland Fisheries told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
Surfers have reacted to the news of the shark attack with shock.
“Whatever attacked and took chunks out of this big shark must be massive,” said Ashton Smith, 19. “I’ve heard about the big one that’s lurking out there somewhere.
“We’re all being very, very cautious.”
Australia is entering summer, a period of the year when shark attacks on humans increase because of the higher number of swimmers in the ocean.
The country’s most popular beaches are protected by nets and what are known as drumlines – a series of baited hooks that hang from buoys placed in a line about 500 yards from the shore. However, neither guarantee that sharks cannot get through.
Since the net and drumline programme was introduced in Queensland there has been only one fatal attack on a protected beach.
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Google is launching a new product today that will allow users to find recently updated public online postings by a person’s network of friends, colleagues or media sources.
The goal of “Social Search,” available starting this afternoon at www.google.com/experimental, is to find relevant postings on Twitter, in blogs or other public web content published by a user’s circle of online colleagues.
Social Search would highlight content posted by those people every time a user does a Google search.
“We want to return a lot more relevant results to users, results that are either offered or linked by their social circle,” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
A Social Search query for “Bridge School Benefit,” Neil Young’s annual acoustic fundraiser in Mountain View, wouldn’t just produce the home page for the concert. It would also highlight any tweets, blog postings or newspaper reviews produced by a user’s designated network of friends or media souces.
Google considers today’s launch an experiment and is asking users for feedback. But the company says the results it had using Social Search internally were “exciting” because they allow web users to save time by finding content posted by the people or sources they are most interested in.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, demonstrated a version of Social Search at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco last week. “I think it demonstrates our commitment to innovating in search,” Mayer said last week.The new product, executives said, is “completely separate” from the agreement Google announced last week to make available up-to-the-minute search results of Twitter postings. However, content available through that Twitter deal could be used to improve Social Search down the road.
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To promote the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft has teamed up with Burger King in Japan, who are selling the Windows 7 Whopper for the next 7 days.
In line with the Windows 7 theme, the Windows 7 Whopper comes with seven patties, and measures 5.1 inches tall, check out the full sized photo below.
The Windows 7 Whopper is available in Japan for 777 yen which is about $8.53, typical they get all the cool stuff in Japan, I think they should have released it in the US and UK as well, I would have definitely popped down to our local Burger King for one of these.
Online marketers looking to improve their digital advertising strategies should ensure that they have high quality landing pages for their pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.
This is the opinion of Graham Charlton, who said on the Econsultancy blog that consumers searching online will often do so with the intention of purchasing goods.
He explained that conversion rates could be made higher if firms take
AdsSpy: 15 sites by this AdSense ID
the time to set up effective landing pages.
Web pages that are brought up when internet users click on a link need to include a reasonable amount of information to persuade the potential customer to proceed to the checkout.
Mr Charlton said marketers could improve their click-through rate by linking the paid search advertisement to the landing page.
“A good landing page is one that reinforces ‘conversion intent’,” the expert explained.
He noted that online shoppers who click on a PPC advert and are brought to a generic page that requires them to search again might not bother to continue using the site.
This, he said, could reduce the effectiveness of this form of online marketing.
Earlier this month, Simon Mansell, managing director of TBG, said spending on advertising on the internet
is likely to grow in proportion to the amount of time consumers spend online.
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NOVATO, CA — A bomb squad was called to Novato over the weekend to remove an intact grenade found buried in a resident’s backyard. Novato police were contacted shortly after 5 p.m. Saturday by a homeowner on Wallace Court who, while digging in his backyard, found what officials described as a heavily corroded, completely intact fragmentation grenade.
“As soon as he found it he called for help,” Novato police Lt. John McCarthy. “God knows how long it had been there.”
McCarthy said the bomb squad from the University of California at Berkeley took the grenade to a nearby remote field and defused it.
He said it wasn’t clear how old the device was or how it ended up in that residential area. The homeowner had lived at the property for the past decade, McCarthy said.
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In an announcement making some waves in the SEO world last week, Yahoo announced that they would be ending their paid inclusion program. SearchEngineLand.com points out access to Yahoo’s paid inclusion sales page has been redirected to their advertising.yahoo.com.
“Both the “Search Submit Basic” program that charged an annual fee per URL and the “Search Submit Pro” cost-per-click program will end as of Dec. 31, 2009.”
Yahoo’s paid inclusion has faced some criticism from those who believe including paid ads in an organic search makes the results biased. At the press conference announcing the Yahoo/Microsoft deal in July the company said “we’ll decide on that later”. Well it looks like they decided.
This may turn out to be a good thing for PPC on Yahoo. With paid inclusion gone advertisers will be looking for that same traffic and those ad dollars could shift to PPC. Any kind of uptick in PPC would be a benefit to domain owners parking with Yahoo. We’ll see.
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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective marketing tools on the internet. It’s cost-efficient, because you only pay for ads which are clicked on; and it’s a great way to promote your site.
However, there are pitfalls in the world of PPC advertising. Believe it or not, even big companies tend to run a PPC campaign wrong.
One of the biggest mistakes a PPC campaign can have, is designing an ad that navigates to a home site. To strengthen an offer’s value message, a PPC ad should direct browsers to a page that is dedicated to a specific special offer or promotion.
Some experts even prefer that there should be no links out of the page, except to the order forms. As asserted by Katherine Andes of Furniture World: “The idea is not to have the visitor surf your website, but to be motivated to purchase your product or to contact you for more information.”
Andes says that one can provide a link back to the home page, if it just sells one basic item. However, she emphasizes that the home page should be appealing to the browser, prompting him/her to take action.
A properly crafted PPC ad can generate lots of added revenue for a Website. You just need to avoid its pitfalls to experience its benefits.
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ABOUT
My name is Kyle Kazak and I am the CEO and President of Kazak Media, a local Internet marketing firm that specializes in web design, local SEO, and pay per click management. We are located in Petaluma, CA, USA.